The Tragedy of Warren G. Harding
By Michael J. Devine
Director, Harry S. Truman Library
“He caught the ear of a war-tired world.”
President Calvin Coolidge (1923)
“Warren G. Harding gave his life for his country…He exhausted himself in service, a martyr in fidelity to the interests of the people for whom he labored with a passionate devotion.”
Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes (1924)
“He was not a man with either the experience or the intellectual quality that the position [of president] needed.”
President Herbert Hoover
“My God, this is a hell of a job! I have no trouble with my enemies… but my damn friends, they’re the ones that keep me walking the floor nights.”
President Warren G. Harding, 1923
“Harding was not a bad man. He was just a slob.”
Alice Roosevelt Longworth, (daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt)
In the presidential election of 1920, the Republican candidate advocated a return to “normalcy” ( a word he invented) and promised to take America back to a time when society was governed by solid, small-town values and the nation was safe, secure and isolated from the international turmoil that affected the world outside the North American continent. He won with 60.4% of the popular vote, in the first election in which women, newly enfranchised by the 19th Amendment, were allowed to participate. His victory over the Democratic ticket of James Middleton Cox, a reform-minded, Progressive Governor of Ohio and the publisher of a Dayton, Ohio newspaper, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, former Under Secretary of the Navy and a rising star in New York state politics, was a Republican landslide of 404 electoral votes. In addition, an enormous Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives of 303-131, and a 24 seat margin in the U.S. Senate assured the new administration of Congressional support. Clearly, the American public saw in the handsome, affable and largely unknown Warren G. Harding, U.S. Senator from Ohio, a leader who would turn the nation inward, attend to matters of business and prosperity, and abandon the reformist and Progressive agendas that had characterized the presidencies of his predecessors, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft and, especially, Woodrow Wilson.
Unfortunately for the simplistic and genial new president, the small-town values he spoke of never existed, and his vague hopes for an American future disconnected to the rest of the world were completely unrealistic. In the 1920s, the nation’s population was already shifting from rural to urban settings. Meanwhile, writers like Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio) and Sinclair Lewis (Main Street and Babbitt), were ripping to shreds the myth of small town virtues with stories stressing the hollowness of middlebrow ambitions, the frequent hypocrisy of middle class respectability, and the anti-intellectualism, bigotry and prejudice that often stifled life in the countryside.* At the same time, the trauma of World War I (The Great War, as it was referred to prior to World War II) had created a far more dangerous and unsettled international order. During the war, great empires had fallen and been replaced by struggling democracies or volatile revolutionary regimes. Billions of people held in the bondage of colonial
systems and ruled by weakened European states were striving for freedom, and technological advances had significantly advanced international communication, commerce, travel and warfare. There would be no turning back the clock to a more simple time.
* Interestingly, the presidents who were most fond of referring to their small-town origins and values usually got out of rural America as quickly as they could and never returned (Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan), or never lived in a small town for very long (George W. Bush).
Harding’s new Republican administration included an unusual mixture of men with genuine ability and vision along with an odd collection of inexperienced and unethical cronies who soon gained notoriety as the “Ohio Gang.” Herbert Hoover (Commerce), Charles Evans Hughes (Secretary of State) and Andrew Mellon (Treasury) were superb choices, as was Henry C. Wallace (Agriculture). These well qualified cabinet members all understood the need for massive organizations to address the complex issues of the modern world and they seemed comfortable with the notion that government policy would be required to coordinate economic activity and address international issues. However, many in Harding’s inner circle were not at all interested in government or policy. Led by Attorney General Harry Daugherty, Harding’s crafty campaign manager, the “Ohio Gang” concentrated on securing the spoils that came with having a friend in the White House.
In general, President Harding was content to let the conservative Congress set the political agenda. On the domestic front, this meant enacting legislation (the Johnson Immigration Bill) to severely restrict immigration, and vigorously enforcing Prohibition to cut off the existing immigrant and working class from beer and wine. In foreign relations, the rush to isolationism resulted in the Fordney-McCumber tariff, which limited imports and protected narrow American business interests. Only the dynamic leadership of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes deviated from the new isolationism. His successful conclusion of the Naval Disarmament Conference of 1922-23, led to a Five Power treaty (between the U.S., Great Britain, Japan, France and Italy) that capped capital ship construction, calmed tensions in the Pacific and showed a glimmer of hope that the U.S. might eventually engage actively on the world stage.
Like their constituents (and the President), most members of Congress were uneasy with the social, intellectual and cultural shifts that were taking place in American life, and they hoped that the imposition of the values of rural society (traditional, White and Protestant) would somehow slow the frightening pace of change.
Harding remained uninvolved in the details of his office, although he must have been aware of the shenanigans of his Ohio Gang. An attractive, confident-looking figurehead, the President played lots of golf with wealthy business leaders, delivered pious, bombastic speeches urging Americans to enjoy themselves and spent as much time as he could with various mistresses, including Nan Britton, a young woman from Harding’s hometown, who frequently visited the Oval Office. The President knew his limitations, and probably wished he had never left his quiet, mundane life as publisher of the Marion Star, where his domineering wife Florence (“Flosse”) ran the business side of things – even hiring the paper boys. As a United States Senator, he merely followed party leadership. Now, he was completely overwhelmed by national issues. “I don’t know what to do or where to turn on this taxation matter,” Harding once confessed. “Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it…But I don’t know where the book is, and maybe I couldn’t read it if I found it.”
During his brief presidency, Harding enjoyed great public approval, and the nation was shocked and saddened by his sudden death on August 2, 1923. However, the outpouring of genuine sympathy soon turned to disbelief and outrage as reports of various scandals involving high government officials became known.
Among the most notorious was the Teapot Dome Affair, in which Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, accepted bribes in return for allowing powerful oil barons Henry Sinclair and Edward Doheny to lease at bargain prices the vast petroleum reserves set aside for the U.S. Navy in Elk Hills, California and Teapot Dome, Wyoming.* The tales of corruption in government were soon followed by revelations about extramarital affairs and a possible illegitimate daughter. There were even rumors that the President’s death in San Francisco, while returning from a voyage to Alaska, was the result of a suicide or possibly even murder. Furthermore, the isolationist, protectionist and pro-business policies set in place during Harding’s presidency were discredited in the 1930s after the Stock Market crashed (1929), the economics of European nations tanked when they could no longer sell goods in the U.S. market and aggressive militaristic regimes in Germany, Italy and Japan emerged without any American check on their expansionism.
Warren G. Harding is almost always listed as one of the worst presidents in United States history, and rightly so. The real tragedy of the Harding administration was not the depth of corruption, (there have been far worse; Nixon and Reagan had many more high officials indicted, convicted and pardoned), or the sex scandals which came to the attention of the public only after the president died. (There has been illicit sexual activity in the White House before and after Harding’s administration-Jefferson, FDR, JFK and Clinton, among the most notorious.) Harding’s failure was his appalling lack of political leadership and vision. Paying more attention to his golf scores than the issues facing the country, Harding and his administration pandered to powerful business interests and the worst instincts of the American public. As president,
* The plan Sinclair and Loheny presented to Fall was actually wise policy: Drill for the oil, refine it and transport it to Navy bases in San Diego, CA and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The fuel at these bases proved crucial for the allied victory against Japan in World War II. The problem was the low-ball lease payment Fall accepted in return for bribes.
Harding maintained a naïve faith in the wealthy and powerful, believing that great business tycoons and the lords of Wall Street knew what was best for the country and would selflessly place the welfare of the nation above their own financial interests.
Likewise, his belief in the virtue of the White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant leadership controlling rural American led him to ignore the rising racism, bigotry and xenophobia evidenced by the dramatic rise in Ku Klux Klan membership throughout the American heartland during his presidency. Finally, his refusal to engage meaningfully in world affairs, even as Americans looked abroad for business opportunities, markets, raw materials and souls for conversion to Christianity, contributed to the ultimate failure of the League of Nations, the breakdown of national economics in much of the world, and the rise of Fascist and militarist regimes in Europe and the Far East.
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