President Warren G. Harding’s Reputation Smeared by Progressive Mythmakers

One 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.

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Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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One 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.