Ninety-five years ago Warren G. Harding was elected president, by a 26 percent popular vote margin, 60 to 34 percent, a margin not matched since the unopposed re-election of James Monroe a century further back. He has been in the news lately, because of genetic findings (1) that he did not have, as his Democratic opponents claimed at the time, African ancestry and (2) that he fathered a daughter with his lover Nan Britton.
Harding has been rated by historians as one of America’s worst presidents, but in a New York Times opinion piece Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh, who are working on a biography of Harding, make a persuasive case that he was a far better president than that.
Let me add a few points. Harding has been lampooned as a bumbling fool, but the evidence is that he was a reasonably smart man. He graduated from Ohio Central College, founded at the same time and by the same kind of New England Yankee reformers as Oberlin and Hillsdale; it admitted women and blacks from the pre-Civil War beginning. He was a successful journalist (which should not be held too heavily against him) whose “normalcy” speech was actually quite an intelligent bit of political advocacy in the chaotic circumstances of the last days of the Wilson administration. Wilson left the nation in a mess; Harding did much to clean it up.
He was not afraid to nominate Cabinet members of high intellectual caliber and integrity — Charles Evans Hughes at State, Andrew Mellon at Treasury, Herbert Hoover at Commerce. He also appointed the intellectually formidable William Howard Taft as Chief Justice. Harding got Congress to pass the budget process and appointed Charles Dawes as the first director of the Bureau of the Budget. Between Dawes and Mellon, they stopped inflation, sparked economic recovery, pushed through huge tax rate cuts and vastly cut government spending. For more details, see the first chapter of my American Enterprise Institute e-book Can Big Government Be Rolled Back? Not a perfect record, but an impressive one.
In contrast to Wilson’s prosecution of war dissenters, Harding released Eugene Debs from prison and invited him to the White House where, Debs said, they had a friendly chat. Harding also pardoned or commuted the sentences of 23 others who had been imprisoned for opposing U.S. participation in World War I.
The chattering classes both Republican and Democratic tarred Harding, like Grant, as incompetent and corrupt. But the corruption highlighted by the historians was committed by others and in some cases by those not in the Executive Branch during the president’s time in office. The leftish litterateurs of the 1920s like Sinclair Lewis who, as Fred Siegel has pointed out, soured on Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives despised Harding as a Midwestern Main Streeter. The critic H.L. Mencken, a Jeffersonian Democrat who approved of his home state of Maryland’s policies tolerating both segregation and the saloon, disliked Harding for his support of racial equality and Prohibition. The New Deal historians, who liked to dismiss the prosperity and rapidly rising living standards of the 1920s as an illusion, dwelt on scandals they connected to Harding rather than on his genuine achievements.
All of which is not to say that Harding was some kind of philosopher king. But he was a reasonably effective and highly popular president and not a buffoon. And it seems just a bit odd for so many of Bill Clinton’s fans to criticize an earlier president for having an extramarital affair.
