Warren G. Harding’s short presidency was a monumental success. So progressive mythmakers set out to smear him.
Warren G. Harding’s short presidency was a monumental success. So progressive mythmakers set out to smear him.
O ne hundred years ago this month, one of our greatest presidents took office. In a moment of national crisis, Warren G. Harding restored the economic health of the United States. Harding was also, for a man of his time, atypically enlightened about the perniciousness of racism, and, contrary to legend, honest. That none of this is generally acknowledged is due to a posthumous series of smears by left-wing journalists and historians, which started with a hatchet job in The New Republic. Harding’s legacy is perhaps modern America’s first example of how an ideologically motivated media and academic establishment can set about dismantling politically inconvenient truths and installing a false narrative in their place.
America in 1921 was in a state of crisis, reeling from the worst recession in half a century, the most severe deflationary spiral on record, and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed 675,000 people in a nation of a little more than 100 million. Unemployment, it is now estimated, stood somewhere between 8.7 and 11.7 percent as returning soldiers inflated the size of the working-age population. Between 1919 and August of 1921 the Dow Jones average plummeted 47 percent.
Harding’s response to this emergency was largely to let the cycle play out. It was, James Grant wrote in The Forgotten Depression, 1921, “the last governmentally unmediated business cycle downturn.” The recession ended in mid-year, and boom times followed. Harding and Congress cut federal spending nearly in half, from 6.5 percent of GDP to 3.5 percent. The top tax rate came down from 73 percent to 25, and the tax base broadened. Unemployment came down to an estimated 2 to 4 percent.
White racism, in part motivated by the recent return of newly empowered black soldiers from the European theater, was at a high-water mark. The Ku Klux Klan, reborn during the Woodrow Wilson years, was flourishing, having received a mammoth boost from the blockbuster film The Birth of a Nation, which Wilson famously screened at the White House and which contained a quotation from Wilson’s best-known book, A History of the American People, praising the “great Ku Klux Klan.” Wilson had also resegregated the military and the federal workforce.
Wilson was a Southern Democrat and descendant of Confederate soldiers; Harding came from a family of Ohio abolitionists. Accepting his party’s nomination in 1920, the self-made Harding — he earned his fortune by turning around a third-rate newspaper he bought as a teenager, and is still the only journalist ever to become president — made a stirring plea for the rights of black Americans: “I believe the Negro citizens of America should be guaranteed the enjoyment of all their rights, that they have earned their full measure of citizenship bestowed, that their sacrifices in blood on the battlefields of the republic have entitled them to all of freedom and opportunity, all of sympathy and aid that the American spirit of fairness and justice demands.”
Harding supported an anti-lynching bill that was filibustered by Southern Democrats. In early June 1921, three days after a racist mob massacred black Americans in Tulsa, Harding went to the nation’s first degree-granting all-black university (Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University) to denounce the slaughter, praise the contribution of black soldiers in World War I, and shake hands with every graduate. In October of 1921 he became the first president since Lincoln to visit the Deep South when he went to Birmingham to make a speech that Alabamans expected to honor the city’s semicentennial. Instead, in the heart of Klan country, he made the most impassioned civil-rights speech that had ever been delivered by any American president, Lincoln included, when he said that “Democracy is a lie” if blacks are deprived of their rights. Stunned whites in the segregated audience booed, but blacks cheered. An incensed Mississippi congressman said Harding had struck “a blow to the white civilization of America.”
In his first year in office, Harding reversed Wilson’s illiberal moves, freeing hundreds of political prisoners, most famously Eugene V. Debs, the socialist presidential candidate whom Wilson’s administration had jailed for making an anti-war speech. Like George Washington, Harding came into a highly precarious situation that could have gone either way, and steered it back onto the right path. We might be living in a very different country if Debs and the others locked up for their beliefs had remained in prison for another presidential term, and yet the revolting authoritarianism that placed them there was widely supported, including by a unanimous Supreme Court. (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously described handing out anti-war leaflets as “shouting fire in a crowded theater,” and thus deserving of imprisonment.)
When Harding died of a heart attack at age 57 after two and a half years in office, he was among history’s most popular presidents. Today, he’s regularly ranked among the worst. Why? Three charges are routinely made. One is that he was a “mediocrity.” This is a hard charge to sustain, given that he correctly pegged the American economy as working from the bottom up rather than the top down, consciously rejecting Wilson’s statism. He made the bold, courageous moves detailed above in executing a much needed “return to normalcy,” righting the ship of state and leaving the country in the hands of a man who would carry on with his excellent work — Calvin Coolidge, who was also mocked for being insufficiently grandiose. Grandiosity is the opposite of what we should seek in a president; American government is meant to protect individual rights and create the conditions for the pursuit of happiness, not to mold us or steer us. A colorful personality should hardly be considered an important metric of presidential success.
Harding did have a personal scandal: Four years after his death, his mistress, Nan Britton, 30 years his junior, published a then-scandalous account of their six-year love affair, which had produced a daughter — the only child Harding ever fathered. This had not been known when Harding died, but was confirmed via DNA testing in 2015. Harding also had a long-term mistress back in Ohio, before he ran for president.
These days historians tend to downplay the extramarital affairs of elected officials as largely irrelevant to their political legacies. You certainly won’t find many historians arguing that FDR was a failure because of his philandering. But the Britton revelations were earth-shattering to a 1920s sensibility, and they reinforced the scandalous aura that already existed around Harding thanks to the only two words the average person might remember about his presidency: Teapot Dome.
The Teapot Dome scandal was indeed a shocking and important affair, but while it has stuck to Harding as persistently as the “mediocrity” charge, it was not of his doing. Harding’s secretary of the interior, Albert Fall, pocketed payoffs from oil barons in exchange for drilling rights on federal land. The Senate, acting on a tip from a constituent, launched an investigation that was underway when Harding died. All presidents have to deal with scandalous acts by underlings; they can either cover the malfeasance up and make excuses (as Barack Obama did for his IRS commissioner after she was caught using the full force of her office to harass ideological opponents) or they can allow the truth to come out and proceed accordingly. Fall was forced out of office and jailed for a year, but no one has ever shown that Harding knew about his acts.
When Harding found out that Charles Forbes, the director of the Veterans Bureau, had also been engaged in corruption, he shook Forbes “as a dog would a rat,” and called him “you double-crossing bastard.” Forbes, like Fall, resigned, and his counsel, Charles Cramer, committed suicide. When Harding confronted a Justice Department official, Jess Smith, for selling government favors, and informed him that he would be arrested in the morning, Smith also committed suicide. The two suicides are somehow thrown into the case against Harding, as if anyone who enforces high standards should be held culpable for how guilty people react when their misdeeds become known.
In short, Harding opposed corruption at every turn and yet was himself smeared as corrupt, as part of an “Ohio gang.” That epithet took hold a year after Harding’s death, coined in a scurrilous piece in The New Republic written by its viciously anti-business editor, Bruce Bliven, who concocted a narrative around Harding’s attorney general, Harry Daugherty, as the supposed ringleader of the “gang.” Daugherty was suspected of knowing about the Teapot Dome kickbacks, but a bipartisan team of special prosecutors cleared him of any involvement. Harding’s successor, Coolidge, eventually demanded Daugherty’s resignation anyway, in part because of the urging of Harding/Coolidge commerce secretary Herbert Hoover, who harbored a dislike for Daugherty and other cabinet members who had played poker with Harding at the White House, as he held gambling to be immoral.
In a forerunner of the many silly stories about Donald Trump supposedly being an agent of Vladimir Putin, Bliven concocted an elaborate conspiracy theory about how Daugherty, an undercover operative for Capitalism, Inc., had chosen Harding to be his puppet way back in 1912. The Bliven piece, combined with the Britton book, amounted to a declaration of open season on Harding’s legacy, with no tale too lurid to be published: In 1930, an FBI agent published a completely made-up tale of drunken orgies at the White House titled The Strange Death of President Harding.
As Paul Johnson explains in his magisterial work Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, all of the anti-Harding gossip coalesced into one supposedly authoritative narrative in academic Samuel Hopkins Adams’s 1939 book Incredible Era: The Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding. Historians, and the nation’s eighth-grade teachers, have simply parroted this narrative ever since.
There was even a rumor, quickly accepted as fact, that Harding’s widow had burnt all his papers to cover up the truth. Yet as Johnson writes, devastatingly, “when in 1964 the Harding Papers (which had not been burnt) were opened to scholars, no truth at all was found in any of the myths. . . . In all essentials, Harding had been an honest and exceptionally shrewd president.”
Harding was a smashing success in a historically important role as the anti-Wilson: He restored a classically liberal, rights-focused, limited government, and deserves immense credit for the economic boom that kicked off in his first year and continued throughout the rest of the 1920s (though his agricultural tariffs were misguided). His legacy is a useful example of how left-wing journalists and academics will, when they can’t argue with success, instead set about destroying the reputation of any Republican who might have engineered it. As Johnson concludes, “the treatment of Harding is worth dwelling on because, taken in conjunction with a similar denigration of his vice-president and successor Calvin Coolidge, a man of totally different temperament, it amounts to the systematic misrepresentation of public policy over a whole era.”