“Standing in this presence, mindful of the solemnity of this occasion, feeling the emotions which no one may know until he senses the great weight of responsibility for himself, I must utter my belief in the divine inspiration of the founding fathers. Surely there must have been God’s intent in the making of this new-world Republic.”
—President Harding, Inaugural Address, 1921
Harding chewed tobacco, and served whiskey in the White House during Prohibition at his twice-a-week poker games
We get our image of party bosses making secret decisions in a “smoke-filled room” from the brokered Republican convention that nominated Harding for president
He literally “saved the Constitution.” The deteriorating document had been improperly stored at the State Department. Harding ordered it restored and placed in a protective glass case.
Warren Harding is routinely judged America’s worst modern president, and maybe the worst in the nation’s entire history. He is portrayed as negligent, corrupt or tolerant of corruption, and ill-equipped for the modern presidency. Journalist Nathan Miller, author of a book on the ten worst presidents, expresses the conventional wisdom: “Harding is a prime example of incompetence, sloth, and feeble good nature in the White House.” Alice Roosevelt Longworth pronounced him “a slob.” Harding has been widely ridiculed, from his own day into the twenty-first century, for having called for a return to “normalcy”—which amateur linguists wrongly believe is an incorrect word like George W. Bush’s “strategery.”
Yet at the time of Harding’s death in 1923, he was beloved by the American public. In fact, the most recent revisionist look at Harding says that “he was kind, decent, handsome, a man of eminent reason. He also had a rare political attribute: courage.” James David Robenhalt, the author of this account, goes on to point out an obvious contrast before posing the key question:
John Kennedy (the only other senator until President Obama to ascend directly from the Senate to the White House) was president for almost the same length of time as Warren Harding, but his record was decidedly mixed: Disasters such as the Bay of Pigs and involvement in Vietnam weigh against successes such as the handling of the Cuban missile crisis and the nuclear test ban treaty. Yet history could not have treated these two men more differently. Kennedy became an icon; Harding was deemed a failure.
What happened?
This question is not difficult to answer. The harsh summary judgment of Harding reflects the massive ideological and historical bias of the mid-twentieth century, when this image of Harding took root as a result of a relentless onslaught of partisan and sensational criticism. The course of Harding’s reputation is an object lesson in the contingency of historical reflection. Contemporary research has cast a more favorable light on Harding, but his poor reputation lingers—a lesson in how images, positive or negative, are hard to shake once they are lodged in the public mind. A dispassionate review of Harding’s record in office will support the conclusion that he was the kind of president the Founders would have approved.
Paul Johnson, one of the first modern historians to stick up for Harding, has written, “The deconstruction of the real Harding and his reconstruction as a crook, philanderer, and sleazy no-good was an exemplary exercise in false historiography.” And according to Jeremy Rabkin of George Mason Law School, who compares him favorably to Andrew Johnson, Harry Truman, and Bill Clinton, “Harding must be considered the most successful postwar president in American history.” Johnson and Rabkin are both conservatives who might be expected to swim against the prevailing liberal current. But Harding has started to get better treatment even from some liberals.
Harding’s most recent biographer is John Dean, made infamous by Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal. Dean has moved sharply to the left in recent years, even suggesting that George W. Bush should be impeached. Yet his judgment on Harding is surprisingly fair and balanced. “Warren Harding is best known as America’s worst president,” Dean writes in the first sentence of his biography. But then he adds, “A compelling case can be made, however, that to reach such a judgment one must ignore much of the relevant information about Harding and his presidency. . . . [W]hen assembling my narrative, I found myself often addressing, and flagging, the distorted and false Harding history. . . .” Elsewhere Dean has written, “There was much to be revealed that showed what a fine man, and able president, Harding had been, a far better president than history has ranked him.” James Robenhalt, author of another recent book on our twenty-ninth president, agrees: “Harding was a breath of fresh air to a war-weary nation, a pillar of steadiness in a world staggering from economic and political instability.”
The best-known and most complete biography of Harding is Francis Russell’s The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times (McGraw-Hill, 1968), and although it exonerates Harding from many of the most familiar criticisms, it amplifies others that are poorly founded.
A more surprising positive evaluation of Harding comes from an unlikely contemporary author, John Dean, who wrote a positive assessment of Harding for a book series conceived by liberals and intended to reinforce the liberal narrative about the evolution of the presidency: Warren G. Harding (The American Presidents Series) (Times Books, 2004).
Ronald Radosh, author of The Rosenberg File, is currently writing a revisionist biography of Harding that will surely become the definitive corrective to a century of misinformation and distortion.
Harding won the election of 1920 with a then-record landslide vote of 60.2 percent of the popular vote, taking every state outside the solidly Democratic South. Critics then and since have portrayed Harding as ill-prepared for the presidency, though he had considerably more experience than our current president—or the president he succeeded, for that matter. By 1920, Harding had been in politics for twenty-one years, having begun as an Ohio state senator in 1899, served as Ohio’s lieutenant governor from 1904 to 1905, and been a U.S. senator starting in 1915. During the ten-year gap in his political resume, Harding was a newspaper proprietor in Marion, Ohio (one of his paperboys was Norman Thomas, later the perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate), and took an active role in Republican Party affairs in the Buckeye state.
To be sure, the Republican Party’s nomination of Harding in 1920 was an unlikely one; it came about only because of the political vacuum created by the untimely death of Theodore Roosevelt in 1919. Following Roosevelt’s death, the party leadership fragmented, supporting several different candidates, with the front-runners being Army General Leonard Wood (TR’s personal favorite) and Illinois Governor Frank Lowden. Harding was occasionally mentioned as a potential candidate, partly because he was from the electorally crucial state of Ohio; but he was regarded as strictly second-tier. Harding did poorly in the Midwestern states that held popular primaries, losing not only Indiana but even his own home state of Ohio. His prospects for the nomination seemed very poor heading into the GOP’s national convention in Chicago in mid-June. Harding biographer Francis Russell quotes a reporter writing on the eve of the convention, “Nobody is talking Harding, not even considered as among the promising dark horses.”
But the convention was badly deadlocked, with Wood and Lowden jockeying for the lead in the early ballots. When neither man could prove himself acceptable to a majority of delegates, it became clear to party leaders that the nominee would have to come from the ranks of the second-tier candidates. The subsequent process of brokering the nomination gave to American politics the famous image of the “smoke-filled room,” as the party bosses, amidst thick clouds of cigar smoke, worked through the night to settle on a compromise candidate from among the crowded field. “However many times the political cards were shuffled and dealt and discarded,” Russell writes, “somehow the Harding card always remained.” Gradually opinion began to gel that Harding would be the strongest candidate the party could field, and the next day the tenth ballot of the convention awarded Harding the nomination. Harding, a little bit stunned himself, described his nomination in terms of a weak-hand bluff in poker: “We drew to a pair of aces and filled.”
Harding was in every respect the anti-Wilsonian president. One of the traits that recommends Harding in our hyper-politicized age of self-selecting and relentlessly self-aggrandizing politicians is his becoming modesty about his own political abilities and his bounded view of the political world. Paul Johnson observed of Harding that “he did not believe that politics were very important or that people should get excited about them or allow them to penetrate too far into their everyday lives.” In marked contrast to Woodrow Wilson, Harding had a modest view of the presidency, much closer to the intentions of the Founders. He told his chief campaign strategist that “greatness in the presidential chair is largely an illusion of the people.” In his inaugural address Harding sensibly warned, “Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government.”
To this healthy attitude Harding added a sense of his own limitations. In the summer of his first year in the White House, Harding wrote a friend: “Frankly, being President is rather an unattractive business unless one relishes the exercise of power. That is a thing which has never greatly appealed to me.” On another occasion he told a golf partner, “I don’t think I’m big enough for the Presidency.” But like Ronald Reagan, Harding understood that there was value in being underestimated by opponents and rivals. In a letter to a friend in 1921, Harding wrote, “I think perhaps it has been of some advantage to start into office so poorly appraised, because one does not need to accomplish very much to find himself somewhat marked up in value.”
“Harding will not try to be an autocrat but will do his best to carry on the government in the old and accepted Constitutional ways.”
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Senator Henry Cabot Lodge
But Harding lacked neither confidence nor the ability to lead. He appointed a distinguished Cabinet that included a future president (Herbert Hoover), a future chief justice of the Supreme Court who had also been a presidential candidate (Charles Evans Hughes), and the only Treasury secretary to serve three consecutive presidents (Andrew Mellon). The Atlantic Monthly opined, “No presidential cabinet during the last half-century has been better balanced, or has included within its membership a wider range of political experience.” (Other Cabinet appointments were less successful, about which more in a moment.) In addition, Harding included Vice President Calvin Coolidge in Cabinet meetings, which was unprecedented. The inclusion of Coolidge made for a smooth and easy transition following Harding’s death in 1923. To promote candor in Cabinet meetings, Harding prohibited staff and sub-cabinet officers from attending, and purposely omitted having a secretary make notes. A lesser man would not have chosen so many leading figures for his inner circle, nor charged the Cabinet to give him their candid advice and counsel on all matters. Harding eventually settled into the presidency, remarking once to a friend that “being president is an easy job”—though this remark obscures the fact that Harding had consistent work habits, with distinct periods of the day for reviewing correspondence and documents and taking phone calls. He typically worked up to fifteen hours a day, yet somehow was later called a “lazy” president. White House usher Ike Hoover, who served under ten presidents, later said he could not recall a president who spent more time at his desk than Harding.
Harding reinstituted weekly meetings with reporters (Wilson had called off all personal meetings with the press), and journalists liked Harding, praising his openness and transparency. John Dean observes, “With the exception of the early years of FDR, no president has ever had the open and comfortable relationship with reporters that Harding did. . . . Reporters liked his frankness in confessing his limitations and his refreshing candor about presidential problems. The press was taken behind the scenes and shown the inner workings of the presidency to an extent never allowed before.” After Woodrow Wilson’s starchy and aloof demeanor, Harding brought a “folksy” style back to the White House, even opening the White House once a week to casual visitors, with whom the president would converse and shake hands.
On policy matters, Harding’s legacy is substantial. Harding inherited an economic situation that should rightly be described as a depression. Between 1914 and 1920 the national debt had grown from $1 billion to $24 billion. Runaway wartime inflation had more than doubled industrial wages, and retail prices continued to skyrocket after the war. There were no official government inflation gauges as there are today, but the value of the dollar depreciated by at least 50 percent. As the United States was still on the gold standard in 1920, a deep recession was inevitable. By the end of 1920, as Harding was preparing to take office, GDP had contracted by one-quarter, wages had fallen 20 percent or more, and 100,000 businesses had gone bankrupt.
Several leading figures, including Herbert Hoover, Harding’s choice to serve as his secretary of commerce, were urging aggressive government programs to stimulate the economy. Harding had different ideas. His inaugural address is remarkable for its forthright recognition that the nation had to take its medicine if it was to recover. The war, he observed, had caught up the United States “in the delirium of expenditure, in expanded currency and credits, in unbalanced industry, in unspeakable waste, and disturbed relationships.”
“Abroad, particularly in Russia, there has grown up the idea that by some impossible magic a government can give out a bounty by the mere fact of having liberty and equality written over its door, and that citizenship need make no deposit in the bank of the common weal in order to write checks upon the bank. Here at home we have had too much encouragement given to the idea that a government is a something for nothing institution.”
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Harding in a 1920 campaign speech
Harding didn’t sugarcoat the rough adjustment that was necessary to get the country back on a sound economic footing, or invoke liberal bromides about “fairness” or “shared sacrifice.” Instead he warned,
Perhaps we never shall know the old levels of wages again, because war invariably readjusts compensations, and the necessaries of life will show their inseparable relationship, but we must strive for normalcy to reach stability. All the penalties will not be light, nor evenly distributed. There is no way of making them so. There is no instant step from disorder to order. We must face a condition of grim reality, charge off our losses and start afresh. It is the oldest lesson of civilization. I would like government to do all it can to mitigate; then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved. No altered system will work a miracle. Any wild experiment will only add to the confusion. . . .
Yet Harding was no stand-pat, do-nothing president. Upon taking office he called Congress into special session to move quickly on his agenda of budget cuts, tax cuts, and tariff reform—this last issue being one of the most intractable political issues of the time. One of the first modern revisionist biographies of Harding, Robert K. Murray’s 1969 The Harding Era, notes that Harding’s 1921 special message to Congress “showed that he possessed an awareness of every major problem confronting the nation even though he did not have a solution for each one.” Harding signed tariff reform legislation and instituted a special commission to review and adjust tariff rates. In retrospect Harding may be said to be the person who began the long, slow transition of the Republican Party from protectionism to free trade.
“There is not a menace in the world today like that of growing public indebtedness and mounting public expenditure.”
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Harding on runaway government spending
His most important reform, however, was his modernizing the government’s budget process, without which no president could hope to control spending. Harding’s most significant achievement in this area was his advocacy, in the teeth of considerable congressional resistance, of the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which established a Bureau of the Budget, and a unitary budget process, for the first time in American history. (The Bureau of the Budget is today the Office of Management and Budget.) If ever there was a reform that expert administrative-minded “Progressives” should have enacted, it was this. Prior to Harding the nation’s budget was a chaotic mess, made worse by the run-up in government spending in World War I under Wilson. Harding knew that achieving a reduction in federal spending—one of his main objectives—required better managerial tools for the president. John Dean points out, “No presidential action by Harding was more discerning nor longer-lasting than his imposition of business practices on government.”
Between 1920 and 1922, federal spending fell almost by half, from $6.3 billion in 1920 to $3.2 billion in 1922. Harding cut top income tax rates from 73 percent in 1920 to 46 percent by 1924 (Coolidge would lower them further). The $24 billion national debt started falling. Harding blocked or vetoed several attempts to enact politically popular bonus pensions for World War I veterans, which would have cost billions. Passing such benevolent measures, Harding said in casting a veto only a few weeks before the mid-term election of 1922, would “establish a precedent of distributing public funds whenever the proposal and numbers affected made it seem politically appealing to do so.”
Harding’s traditional approach to the country’s economic problems prevented the depression of 1920–21 from becoming a Great Depression, and in fact set the stage for the roaring twenties. Harding’s administration, Paul Johnson observed, “was the last time a major industrial power treated a recession by classic laissez-faire methods, allowing wages to fall to their natural level. . . . By July 1921 it was all over and the economy was booming again.”
While Harding was popular with the public, he was no slave to public opinion and conformed to no ideological stereotype, as is perhaps best seen in his pardons of political dissenters Woodrow Wilson had jailed during World War I, especially the socialist firebrand Eugene Debs. Harding also proposed civil rights protection for blacks in a speech in Birmingham, Alabama, that John Dean has called “the most daring and controversial speech of Harding’s political career”: “I want to see the time come when black men will regard themselves as full participants in the benefits and duties of American citizens,” Harding said in the speech. “We cannot go on, as we have gone on for more than half a century, with one great section of our population . . . set off from real contribution to solving national issues, because of a division on race lines.” Harding also urged Congress “to wipe out the stain of barbaric lynching from the banners of a free and orderly, representative democracy,” but Southern Democrats made sure this suggestion died swiftly in Congress. Harding’s support for advancing the interests of black Americans went beyond mere words. He appointed blacks to senior positions in the Departments of Labor and Interior, and over 100 blacks to lower-ranked administration posts—a high number for the time, especially after Wilson had purged blacks from government jobs and bestowed permanent civil service status on their white replacements a few years before—and also lobbied his entire Cabinet for more appointments of blacks. Harding also proposed federal child labor legislation and attempted, with less success, to mediate labor disputes as an honest and neutral broker between business and labor unions.
In the U.S. Senate, where Harding served on the Foreign Relations Committee, he had been among the critics of Wilson’s internationalism and the League of Nations. Harding was most skeptical about Wilson’s crusade to spread democracy around the world, saying that it was “none of our business what type of government any nation on this earth may choose to have. . . . I have not thought it helpful to magnify the American purpose to force democracy upon the world.” In his inaugural address, Harding sounded a distinct echo of George Washington’s Farewell Address:
The recorded progress of our Republic, materially and spiritually, in itself proves the wisdom of the inherited policy of noninvolvement in Old World affairs. Confident of our ability to work out our own destiny, and jealously guarding our right to do so, we seek no part in directing the destinies of the Old World. We do not mean to be entangled.
But Harding was no narrow or inward-looking isolationist. He went on to say,
We are ready to associate ourselves with the nations of the world, great and small, for conference, for counsel; to seek the expressed views of world opinion; to recommend a way to approximate disarmament and relieve the crushing burdens of military and naval establishments. We elect to participate in suggesting plans for mediation, conciliation, and arbitration, and would gladly join in that expressed conscience of progress, which seeks to clarify and write the laws of international relationship, and establish a world court for the disposition of such justiciable questions as nations are agreed to submit thereto.
Noting that the American public had decisively rejected Wilson’s League of Nations and the Versailles Treaty, Harding quickly signed a separate peace treaty with Germany and Austria—setting the stage for Harding’s most significant foreign policy achievement, the Washington Naval Conference of 1921. This was the conference at which the U.S., Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy agreed to limit the future growth of their navies—the first successful arms control agreement of modern times. Harding worked assiduously behind the scenes both to negotiate the treaty and to get a reluctant Senate to ratify it, succeeding where Wilson had failed. But Harding also tried to rescue what he considered the reasonable parts of Wilson’s agenda by having the United States participate in the League of Nations’ Permanent Court of International Justice (like today’s World Court), but the League would not agree to Harding’s proposed reservations.
In sum, as Jeremy Rabkin argues, “The Harding [foreign] policy was not one of isolation, but of independence.” And Rabkin adds: “Those who fault Harding for boycotting the League of Nations imagine that the League would have been more successful if only the United States had added its prestige to it—forgetting that even with American participation, the United Nations has not been much help to the world or much of an asset to American policy.”
Harding, who lacked a college degree, did not have a deeply developed constitutional philosophy like either Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D., or the self-taught Abraham Lincoln. As he prepared his second message to Congress at the end of 1921, Harding considered recommending a constitutional amendment calling for a single six-year term for presidents, an idea that has recurred periodically in American politics, usually at times when the president seems to be in distress. The idea appealed to Harding because he disliked the rough and tumble of partisan politics and dreaded the 1924 re-election campaign ahead of him. Harding withdrew the idea only after the strenuous objections of his wife, though he told an aide he planned to revive the proposal before the end of his first term.
Harding is the person most responsible for popularizing the now commonplace phrase “Founding Fathers.” He is thought to have used the phrase first in a speech in 1918.
While Harding was no deep theorist of the Constitution like his predecessor (and his successor, as we shall see), he revered the Constitution. In his inaugural address Harding fully embraced the presidential theme typical of nineteenth-century presidents’ speeches but increasingly rarely touched on by twentieth-century presidents: “I must utter my belief in the divine inspiration of the founding fathers. Surely there must have been God’s intent in the making of this new-world Republic.”
Harding’s good constitutional judgment can be seen in his four appointments to the Supreme Court: William Howard Taft (the former president), George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, and Edward T. Sanford. John Dean says, “By any historical criteria, Harding’s selections to the U.S. Supreme Court were quite strong.” While Taft is the best known of Harding’s appointments, Sutherland was arguably the best, as he was a stalwart champion of the Founders’ constitutional philosophy and defender of individual economic rights against arbitrary government regulation. Sutherland together with Butler were two of the four consistent votes (the “Four Horsemen,” as their critics called them) against Franklin Roosevelt’s most egregious New Deal measures a decade later. Sanford was the author of the Court’s important majority opinion in Gitlow v. New York (1926), which articulated the doctrine that the Fourteenth Amendment “incorporated” the Bill of Rights into state law. Harding also disliked Oliver Wendell Holmes—a sign of good judgment—and expressed hopes that Holmes would retire from the Court. “The bench would be well rid of him,” Harding said.
Harding died in San Francisco in August 1923, at the age of fifty-eight, of an undiagnosed heart condition. Harding was extremely popular at the time of his death, and the nation mourned. His secretary of state, the former and future Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes, offered the best one-sentence summary of Harding’s virtue: “He belonged to the aristocracy of the plain people of this country.”
The reason Harry Daugherty claimed he began boosting Harding for the Republican nomination? “He looked like a president.”
Why was Harding so popular? He was ruggedly handsome, and he spoke well, though his rhetoric harkened back to the classic nineteenth-century style rather than the conversational tone we are used to now. Harding’s rhetoric, and especially his call for a “return to normalcy”—a supposed neologism—has long been an object of criticism. Critics read “normalcy” as a mistake for “normality.” A comment by British historian G. N. Clark is typical of the condescension directed at Harding: “If ‘normalcy’ is ever to become an accepted word, it will presumably be because the late President Harding did not know any better.” But, as Harding pointed out, he got the word from the dictionary: “normalcy” had appeared in three editions of the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary between 1864 and 1909.
Beyond the linguistic argument is a more serious political issue: what, exactly, is wrong with either “normalcy” or “normality”? Gene Healy writes,
And if either Harding or his successor ever found themselves transfixed by “great visions” that set their souls afire, they had the good sense to keep quiet about it and rest until it passed. Perhaps there’s a lesson here: where there is no vision, the people . . . do just fine, actually.
So why did Harding’s reputation suffer so grievously in the years and decades that followed his presidency? There was, to borrow the overused cliché, a perfect storm of misinformation and ancillary scandal that became attached to Harding’s name and legacy—much of it inaccurate, completely untrue, or in dispute.
There were two major scandals associated with members of Harding’s Cabinet. Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall was thought to have accepted bribes (in the infamous “Teapot Dome scandal”), and Attorney General Harry Daugherty, who had been Harding’s chief political aide in Ohio, was believed to be complicit in bribery and in self-dealing transactions by friends. Fall had been a senator from New Mexico, and regarded so highly that he was the first Cabinet officer the Senate ever confirmed by acclamation—which belies the canard that Harding chose second-rate “cronies” for his administration.
The Justice Department investigated both Fall and Daugherty, and both men eventually faced criminal prosecution several years after Harding’s death. While neither man behaved well in office, the full circumstances—especially in Fall’s case—remain unclear. Fall was belatedly convicted of wrongdoing in 1931 and became the first former Cabinet official to be sent to prison. Daugherty was acquitted, but didn’t help his public reputation by invoking the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at his trial. And the suicides of several collateral figures add to the cloud of suspicion over the motives and actions of these two figures.
But there was never any evidence that Harding was complicit in their dubious decisions. To the contrary, Harding expressed dismay when the first rumors of wrongdoing reached his ears, saying to one friend, “My God, this is a hell of a job. I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of them, all right. But my damn friends. . . . They’re the ones that keep me walking the floors nights.” There is also a famous story of Harding slamming Charles Forbes, a corrupt head of the Veterans Administration, against a wall at the White House, grabbing Forbes by the throat “as a dog would a rat,” and yelling, “You double-crossing bastard.”
Harding might have escaped some of the reputational damage from the corruption of his appointees if not for a cascade of rumors—about his death, about his love life, about his ancestry. Rumors that Harding’s death stemmed from a suspicious cause, even that his wife might have poisoned him, began to spread and eventually became a book. His political enemies in Ohio had long stoked rumors that one of Harding’s ancestors was black, and this, too, became the centerpiece of an anti-Harding book. (Neither of these claims has any factual foundation.)
The picture of Harding’s personal life is murkier. There is no doubt that the ruggedly handsome Harding was something of a “chick magnet” in his day. Frederick Lewis Allen—a doubtful witness of overblown reputation—helped fix Harding’s reputation as “one of cheap sex episodes.” It is well established that as a rising Ohio politician and during his Senate term he carried on an affair with Carrie Phillips, the wife of a merchant in Harding’s home town of Marion, Ohio. Although the affair ended during Harding’s Senate term, at which time her pro-German sympathies aroused suspicions in Washington of possible connections to a German spy ring, Phillips blackmailed Harding into his presidency. The extensive correspondence between Harding and Phillips was hidden away for decades and subject to protracted litigation and intrigue, but finally was made public in 2009, confirming the depth of their relationship but dispelling some of the tawdry rumors about what their letters contained.
More dubious is Harding’s alleged relationship with Nan Britton, a woman thirty-one years younger than he, who claimed in a sensational book four years after Harding’s death that they had carried on a long-running affair that involved trysts in a White House closet and culminated in Harding fathering a child with Britton. Britton’s tale is rich with detail, but there is reason to doubt that it is true. A number of modern researchers have reviewed the Britton story carefully and concluded that, in the words of John Dean, “There is much evidence that Britton’s claims are not possible.” Yet the image of Harding’s escapades in the White House closet has persisted, acquiring a second life during the Clinton scandals in the 1990s.
Then, too, there was the supposed fact that Harding’s widow, Florence, had destroyed all of Harding’s papers shortly after his death—which seemed circumstantial evidence of his complicity in wrongdoing, and which also had the effect of dampening interest in Harding among professional historians. “Believing no records existed,” John Dean writes, “writers felt free to write the Harding history as they wished, and they did.” Most historians simply ignored Harding, or lumped him in with Coolidge and Hoover when they made sweeping denunciations of the Republican “mismanagement” of the 1920s that purportedly culminated in the Great Depression. By the time the Harding papers were opened up in the 1960s, after decades of languishing in the basement of the Harding home in Marion, Ohio, the Harding myth had taken firm hold in the American mind.
“Revisionist” histories typically downgrade the person being discussed. The opposite is starting to happen with Harding. Historian Ron Radosh, author of a forthcoming revisionist biography of Harding, writes: “Warren G. Harding has come to be thought of as one of the worst presidents America has ever had. Yet the truth about his presidency is quite the opposite. He achieved a good deal more in the two and a half years he served before his sudden death than many presidents accomplish in a full term. . . . He succeeded in healing a divided country by combining fiscal conservatism with some socially progressive attitudes. His efforts to end lynching and his belief in racial equality showed him to be more enlightened than many of his countrymen. They entitle him to be regarded as one of the first modern civil-rights presidents.”
An unbiased assessment of Harding would conclude that, all in all, he was the kind of president the Founders had in mind—unassuming, not out to remake the nation or the world according to some fanciful “vision,” working hard at administering the laws while showing Congress the proper deference when he recommended measures for their attention. The nation should be so lucky as to have another steady man such as Harding in the White House.
For the excellence of his Supreme Court nominations and the respect for the Constitution demonstrated by his conduct in office, Harding deserves a high grade as president. Countervailing factors—his lack of a deep constitutional philosophy, his proposal to amend the Constitution to create a six-year presidential term, the boost he gave Herbert Hoover’s career—knock his overall grade down to a B+.
The newspaper Harding founded and ran, the Marion Star, carried on its masthead the motto: “Remember there are two sides to every question. Get them both. Be truthful. Get the facts. Be decent, be fair, be generous.” It is long past time that American historical memory lives up to this admonition and judges the man who wrote it more fairly.