Warren G. Harding

Warren G. Harding: Normalcy and Its Wreckage

Warren Harding once confessed, of his own weaknesses, "I can't say no" — and he wasn't only talking about women. He said no to almost nothing: not to old Ohio friends he made cabinet secretaries, not to a mistress paid off by his own party, not to the comfortable vagueness of a campaign built on the word "normalcy." He won the presidency by the largest popular margin in the nation's history to that point and left it, two and a half years later, as the namesake of one of the most corrupt administrations in American history.

From a $300 Newspaper to the Senate

Harding was born on November 2, 1865, near Corsica, Ohio, the eldest of eight children. He graduated from Ohio Central College in 1882 and drifted through teaching, insurance sales, and journalism before, in 1884, he and two partners bought the failing Marion Star for $300. He bought out his partners, built it into a successful daily, and became a leading citizen of Marion — the classic small-town path into Ohio Republican politics. He married Florence Kling DeWolfe in 1891, a divorced businesswoman five years his senior who ran the paper's circulation and, later, much of his political career. He rose through the Ohio state senate to lieutenant governor (1904–1906) and then the United States Senate (1914–1921), where he was known chiefly for avoiding strong positions on divisive issues.

Return to Normalcy

That caution suited a country exhausted by World War I and Woodrow Wilson's moralizing internationalism. Harding's 1920 campaign, run on "America First" and a promised "return to normalcy," won more than 60 percent of the popular vote, the largest margin recorded to that date. He told the country in his inaugural address that "our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government" and treated the presidency itself as a largely ceremonial office, delegating heavily to the men around him — a habit that would prove his undoing.

Real Achievements

Harding's record was not empty. He signed separate peace treaties formally ending the state of war with Germany, Austria, and Hungary after the Senate's rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, and in 1921–22 he hosted the Washington Naval Conference, in which the major world powers agreed to real, binding limits on their battleship fleets — a genuine diplomatic achievement in the era's disarmament efforts. Domestically he cut taxes and restored protective tariffs, steering the economy out of the sharp 1920–21 downturn, while also signing the immigration-quota legislation that sharply restricted entry to the United States. On December 23, 1921, having waited until the Senate had ratified the peace treaty with Germany, he commuted the sentence of the imprisoned socialist Eugene V. Debs and twenty-three other Espionage Act prisoners, releasing Debs from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta on Christmas Day. When the two men met at the White House the following day, Harding reportedly told him, "Well, I have heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now very glad to meet you personally"; Debs later called him "a kind gentleman."

The Ohio Gang

The trouble was the company Harding kept. He filled his administration with Ohio cronies who became known as the "Ohio Gang," and several of them turned the federal government into a source of personal enrichment. Charles Forbes, head of the Veterans Bureau, was found by a 1924 Senate investigation to have overseen the theft of more than $200 million in kickbacks and stolen medical supplies, and served two years in prison for fraud, conspiracy, and bribery. Attorney General Harry Daugherty was tried twice for selling government permits and pardons and was never convicted, though his personal secretary, Jess Smith, killed himself in May 1923 rather than face arrest.

Teapot Dome

The gravest scandal bore Harding's cabinet's name directly. Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall secretly leased the U.S. Navy's oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to friendly oilmen in exchange for roughly $400,000 in cash, bonds, and livestock, becoming the first cabinet officer imprisoned for a felony committed in office; oilman Henry Sinclair also served time, for jury tampering. Much of it surfaced only after Harding's death, but Harding's own hands-off style of governing — appointing loyal friends and asking few questions — had made it possible.

Personal Scandal

Harding's private life mirrored his political one. He carried on a fifteen-year affair with Carrie Phillips, whom the Republican National Committee reportedly paid $27,000 to remain in Asia during the 1920 campaign rather than expose the relationship. A second relationship, with Nan Britton, produced a daughter, Elizabeth Ann, born in 1919; Britton made the affair public in a 1927 memoir, and DNA testing confirmed Harding's paternity in 2015. He died suddenly of a heart attack on August 2, 1923, before the worst of the corruption in his administration had become public.

Why Harding Is Called a Genius

He isn't, by almost anyone's account, and the word belongs nowhere near his name. Harding possessed a real and specific skill — an instinct for affable, reassuring public communication that read to a war-weary electorate as trustworthy leadership, and enough diplomatic sense to deliver a genuine arms-control achievement at the Washington Naval Conference. But he was, by his own admission and by the verdict of virtually every historian who has ranked American presidents, a man who governed by delegation and personal loyalty rather than judgment, and who lacked either the discipline to vet the friends he empowered or the will to say no to temptations both financial and personal. His defenders point to the naval treaty and the restoration of a peacetime economy; his critics point to Teapot Dome, the Ohio Gang's theft of public funds, and a private life conducted with a recklessness that put him at the mercy of blackmail. Surveys of historians have consistently placed him among the worst-performing presidents in American history, a judgment rooted not in any lack of intelligence but in a near-total absence of the vigilance the office demands.

Legacy

Harding's death spared him the full public reckoning that followed; his successor Calvin Coolidge inherited both the naval treaty's credit and the scandals' cleanup. What remains of Harding's reputation is a cautionary case study — cited by historians ever since as the model of a genial, well-liked president undone not by malice but by the company he chose to trust.

Achievements

• Educated at Ohio Central College
• Worked as politician, newspaper editor and statesperson