Warren Gamaliel Harding: the 29th US President judged too harshly by history

This Wednesday marks the centenary of the death of one of the United States’ least remembered and most reviled presidents.

There has been precious little comment about the anniversary in the American media. The few mentions have been disparaging, typified by the Seattle Times, where he spoke to a crowd of up to thirty thousand people, six days before he died:

“His Seattle speeches were the last for a president who — despite affability, enthusiasm and a statesman’s countenance — left professional and personal scandals in his wake. Today, historians rate him among America’s worst presidents.”

If he is remembered at all, Warren Gamaliel Harding, the twenty-ninth US President, is held in disrepute for the “Teapot Dome” corruption scandal and for extramarital affairs which resulted in at least one love child. 

There are obvious echoes of more recent Presidents such as Clinton, Trump, and, perhaps, depending on how the Hunter investigations go, the Bidens.

Harding’s reputation went rapidly downhill posthumously. When he died he was on course to be re-elected for a second term. Over three million people lined the tracks as the Presidential train “Superb” bore his body back from California via Washington DC to his home town in Ohio. The mourners at his funeral included Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, industrialists who drove America and the rest of the world into the modern era. By 1931 the next two presidents, Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge, who had both served in Harding’s cabinet, were reluctant to attend the dedication of his memorial. 

President Harding was a pivotal figure in American history. He was elected just as a majority of the population were living in an urban and suburban environment rather than the agrarian countryside. His home state of Ohio typified this shift. He was the last of eight presidents for what had become known as the “Presidential State”.

Harding was the first, and so far, only newspaper editor and proprietor to become President. He sold the Marion Star group, which he had built up with his wife, for a handy half a million dollars shortly before his death. He was a master of mass communication, ably assisted by Albert Lasker, an early spin doctor, and massive spending by the Republican chairman Will Hays, who would later lay down the moral code for the Hollywood movie industry. Harding was the first President to install a radio in the White House. He also made frequent radio broadcasts and appearances on film in newsreels and photo opportunities. 

He died in the middle of what he called his “Voyage of Understanding” – a planned 15,000 mile whistle stop tour by train, automobile and boat during which he was the first incumbent President to visit the state of Alaska, where he drove home the “golden spike” on the railroad to Anchorage. He took his duties seriously. His stopover in Utah included an estimated 3,000 handshakes a day, a broadcast from the Mormon tabernacle, a round of golf with the head of Church of Latter Saints and donning a cowboy hat, kerchief and chaps to ride up Zion canyon.

Harding owed his rise to the ballot box. He was in the first batch of US senators elected by popular suffrage. The first serving senator to be elected to the White House in a federal election in which women had equal suffrage, Under the slogans “a return to normalcy” and “No more wiggle and wobble” he won massively with a 60.3% share of the popular vote and 404 to 127 in the popular vote. 

The Senator for Ohio was not an obvious choice for the Republican Party nomination. He got his chance because two dominant figures failed to make the election year. Democratic President Woodrow Wilson ruled out a further run after a severe stroke in 1919. Earlier that year the runaway Republican favourite, and former President, Teddy Roosevelt also died unexpectedly.

Incredibly Harding ran against a Democratic nominee who was another newspaper owner from Ohio, Governor James A. Cox. He is even more forgotten than Harding, His vice presidential running mate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Teddy’s cousin, was one of six US Presidents involved in the 1920 race, along with Coolidge, Hoover, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson and Harding. 

The drawn out Republican National Convention in Chicago introduced the cliché “smoke filled rooms” to the political lexicon. After days and nights of bargaining, during which Harding was reportedly “a little drunk, his eyes bloodshot”, he secured the nomination on the ninth ballot. His qualifications were that he was “silver tongued”, “a handsome dog” and from Ohio. 

On politics, Harding wrote: “I incline towards the middle course”. Typically, he was a drinker who voted for prohibition. He was a conciliator for whom the term “to bloviate” was coined: “an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea.”  He appointed “great minds” to his cabinet instead of party hacks, and reached across the aisle to include Democrats in the successful Washington Disarmament Conference which led to cuts in American, British and Japanese naval fleets.

Harding was a conventional Republican who believed in business, low taxes and high tariffs. He failed to broker an early settlement to the Great Railroad Strike of 1922 and courted unpopularity opposing the bonus payouts to Great War veterans. The US economy was booming at the time of his death, but speeding towards the crash of 1929.

He was ahead of his time in identifying political opportunities in what was then “The Solid South” for the Democratic Party. During the presidential campaign he ignored attempted smears that he had black ancestry; this probably worked to his advantage, he won 40% of votes in the South. He went on to insist on the appointment of African Americans in some federal posts. He proposed legislation to criminalize lynching, unsuccessfully. In a speech to a mixed audience in Birmingham, Alabama he argued that “politically and economically there need be no occasion for great and permanent differentiation, for limitations of the individual’s opportunity, provided that on both sides there should be recognition of the absolute divergence in things social and racial”. Only the black section of the crowd applauded. 

Harding’s “America First” stance, belatedly against Wilson’s League of Nations, also appealed to non-WASP immigrants from Europe. He gave a presidential pardon and ordered the release from prison of communists including Eugene V. Debs, the founder of the “Wobblies”, (the Industrial Workers of the World). Debs had won 3% of the votes in the 1920 Presidential election. Harding invited him for tea in the White House.

What of the scandals? Teapot Dome came to a head after Harding’s death: a major corruption scandal during the Harding Administration involving the sale of leases for federally-owned petroleum rights without competition and at knock down prices. Albert Bacon Fall, the Secretary for the Interior responsible became the first ever US Cabinet Minister to be jailed, for bribery and conspiracy.

There is no evidence that President Harding benefitted personally from corruption. Long serving White House staff reported that he worked harder than his predecessors. But off duty, he enjoyed a louche lifestyle, facilitated by cronies linked to “the Ohio Gang”, who had helped him to the White House. Fall was not the only appointee to his administration to be disgraced.  

DNA tests in 2015 confirmed that Harding had fathered a daughter, Elizabeth, with Nan Britton, while he was a US Senator. The couple continued to enjoy trysts in a closet off the Oval Office while a functionary stood guard against the arrival of his wife Florence. In 1929, Nan published the first presidential kiss-and-tell memoir The President’s Daughter, in spite of receiving $20,000 hush funds from Republican sources during the 1920 campaign. 

Nan was by no means the only mistress of the man sometimes dubbed “America’s Horniest President”, who wooed with explicit poetry such as “I love the pose of your perfect thighs/  When they hold me in Paradise…/I love the rose that your garden grows Love seashell pink that over it glows.” Mrs Harding was certainly aware of his long affair with Carrie Phillips, wife of a department store owner back home in Marion, Ohio.

Subsequent presidents have done worse and been judged less harshly. Few of them had the self-doubt of Warren Harding who told a visitor: “I knew this job would be too much for me. I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” He may have been thinking in part of his health. Although she urged him on, his wife said she foresaw “Tragedy” when he won the nomination in Chicago. |His weak heart which did for him after he was taken ill with ptomaine poisoning from a crab salad on the way down from Alaska.

Those present at his final speech, including Herbert Hoover, reported that he was green with his cheeks set in pain. The once great bloviator hesitated, slurred, dropped his manuscript and confusedly said “Nebraska” instead of “Alaska” but he pressed on to the end and applause. 

Six days later, one hundred years ago, Warren Harding died, aged 57, in bed in San Francisco while his wife read to him from a newspaper. 

Considering the faults of other Presidents, Harding’s basic decency and the real achievements of his mere thirty months in office should merit more than the cursory local wreath laying and university seminar taking place in his memory in this centenary.