Harding Reconsidered
By Garland S. Tucker III
This review appears in the Winter 2024 issue of the Coolidge Review.
Harding: The Jazz Age President by Ryan S. Walters (Regnery History, 2023)
At last, President Warren Harding gets a second look. Harding’s image and place in history have suffered unfairly at the hands of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, H. L. Mencken, William Allen White, and other sharp-tongued partisans. Historian Ryan Walters offers a much-needed reappraisal of America’s twenty-ninth president.
While candidly admitting the enormity of his task, Walters presents a convincing case for Harding’s rehabilitation. He examines—and debunks—various myths surrounding Harding’s record, explaining how these myths have gained widespread acceptance. This book will cause any serious student of history to reexamine his views on Warren Harding.
The Worst President? Hardly
Warren Harding does not fare well in presidential rankings. Some rankings, in fact, have named him the worst president in American history.
Why?
Perhaps the starting point should be a recognition that Harding’s conservative philosophy does not square with that of most modern historians who are responsible for ranking our presidents. There is a strong predilection among these historians for presidents who embodied bold action and expansion of government. The presidential model of restraint and scrupulous constitutionality, as exemplified by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Cleveland, McKinley, Harding, and Coolidge, does not resonate with most historians, who revere the more activist presidents.
But why should Harding rank so poorly even within a group of out-of-favor conservative presidents?
One reason: the context of Harding’s presidency has been largely lost to modern readers. Harding’s election in 1920 came after twenty years of progressive ascendancy, Woodrow Wilson’s increasingly abrasive hectoring, the exhaustion of World War I and the ensuing fight over the League of Nations, unprecedented labor unrest, the very real fear of anarchy and domestic Bolshevism, and a paralyzing recession.
Republicans sensed the public mood toward stability, constitutional law and order, and common sense. The party responded by nominating Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. The record of both men and their campaign in 1920 fit the times, as did their call for a “return to normalcy.” They won a resounding electoral victory.
As William Allen White wrote, “Harding was the complete antithesis of Wilson, and the currents of that day were anti-Wilson.” The public was “tired of [progressive] issues, sick at heart of ideals and weary of being noble.” H. L. Mencken, no friend of Harding, realized voters were “weary of hearing highfalutin and meaningless words; they sicken of an idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious.” But more than just a vote against Wilson, the 1920 election was a vote for the conservative policies that Harding and Coolidge put forth.
The Truth About Scandals
In appraising what Harding actually did as president, look first at his appointments. The popular image of his administration is one of rampant corruption and incompetency. But Harding’s core cabinet was first-rate: Charles Evans Hughes as secretary of state, Andrew Mellon at Treasury, and Herbert Hoover as commerce secretary.
Walters demolishes the myth that an unspecified group of political hacks dubbed the “Ohio Gang” somehow ran the government. The rumors of unseemly activities defining the Harding White House were also unfounded. While Harding was guilty of at least two instances of marital infidelity, there is no evidence of his having any affairs while president (unlike any number of his successors). Similarly, the stories of high-stakes poker games and heavy drinking are overstated. Walters reports that in 1923, Harding “stopped those poker games and even quit drinking.”
The major scandals that have come to define the Harding presidency were three: Charles Forbes and the Veterans Bureau, Jess Smith and Harry Daugherty and influence peddling at the Justice Department, and Albert Fall and Teapot Dome. All involved appointees betraying the president’s trust. As Walters shows, Harding was never implicated in any of these corrupt activities and did not benefit, financially or otherwise. Most important, Harding took swift action when he discovered corruption in his administration.
Take Forbes, the Veterans Bureau director who received kickbacks and illegally sold off government medical supplies. When Harding learned the facts about Forbes’s corruption, he acted immediately. The New York Times reported that Harding cornered Forbes in the White House, grabbed him by the throat, and, “shaking him like a dog would a rat,” blasted him as “you double-crossing bastard.” The president called on Forbes to resign.
Similarly, when Harding learned that Smith was selling access, the president summoned the Justice official to the White House. Harding confronted Smith with the facts and told him he would be arrested in the morning. As Herbert Hoover later recounted, Smith “went home, burned all his papers, and committed suicide.”
The extent of Daugherty’s corruption was just beginning to come to light when Harding died in 1923, and the Teapot Dome scandal emerged in the year following his death. There is no reason to believe Harding would have failed to act decisively in these two cases had he lived.
Real Accomplishments
Walters also tackles the myth that Harding had no great achievements. In only two years and a few months, Harding accomplished much.
His policies revived the economy and set the stage for a decade of unprecedented growth and prosperity. He reduced taxes and government spending—policies that Coolidge and Mellon continued. He created the Budget Bureau, which Coolidge used to reduce spending throughout the decade. He restored domestic tranquility, ending the “Red Scare” and reducing labor unrest.
Harding also reversed Wilson’s segregation policies and urged equal rights for Black Americans. He summoned the Washington Disarmament Conference, achieved unprecedented reductions in deadly weapons, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He improved relations with Mexico and other Latin American countries and established the commission to oversee World War I debt.
As Walters observes, Harding accomplished all this in a presidential term that was shorter than John F. Kennedy’s.
Most readers, upon reading Walters’s book, would agree with historian Paul Johnson’s conclusion: “The deconstruction of the real Harding and his reconstruction as a crook, philanderer, and sleazy no-good was an exemplary exercise in false historiography.” Instead, there is a real case to be made that Warren Harding was a good president, if not a great man. By his own admission, “I am unfit for this office,” but Harding was honest enough to admit no man is truly qualified to be president.
As his successor, Coolidge, later observed, “It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man.”
Such humility as Harding’s and Coolidge’s is in short supply today.
Garland S. Tucker III, the retired chairman and CEO Triangle Capital Corporation, is the author of Conservative Heroes and 1924, a look at the “high tide of American conservatism.”