Reconsidering the Harding presidency 100 years later

CLOSE

Author James Robenalt (Photo: Submitted)

I know Warren Harding better than most. I spent five years intensely studying and footnoting 900 hundred pages of his private letters to Carrie Phillips, his most enduring mistress. In my research for The Harding Affair, I uncovered striking facts–like a Bureau of Inspection file that showed Carrie, her husband, and their daughter Isabelle being followed as suspected German spies during the First World War.

Harding’s story is part of my own family chronicle. My grandmother grew up in Marion in a massive brick house on North Prospect Street, just across the street from St. Mary’s Church and the school that she and her ten siblings attended. In 1892, when her 48-year-old Irish father died suddenly, likely from a serious Civil War gunshot head wound, Warren Harding, then twenty-seven, wrote an elegant and comforting obituary in the newspaper he owned and edited, the Marion Star.

More: Marion County at 200: Hardings cast their votes for president in 1920

More: Harding vs. Cox: Two Ohio newspapermen vied for presidency in 1920

More: Marion County at 200: Florence Harding played a pivotal role in husband’s success

On this the one-hundredth anniversary of Harding’s election to the presidency, there is so much to say, so many urgent lessons we need today.

In June 1920, members of the Notification Committee of the Republican Party brought the official message of his nomination for president to Marion, and Harding said to them: “Popular government has been an inspiration of liberty since the dawn of civilizations. Republics have risen and fallen, and a transition from party to personal government has preceded every failure since the world began.”

He was referring then to the doctrinaire and haughty Woodrow Wilson, but his message rings true a hundred years later, like a clarion call for us to remember that our great Republic is a common government of the people, not a playground for the wealthy or elites. Harding scorned those who would pretend to be a monarch or king.

Saying our nation’s 29th president is misunderstood is a vast understatement. Warren Harding is perhaps the most maligned and unappreciated figure in American history.

He assumed the presidency when a worldwide pandemic was only then beginning to ebb away. His nation had been leaderless for over 18 long months after a truly catastrophic world war, as a sick and incapacitated Woodrow Wilson stubbornly held onto power following a series of devastating strokes in September and October of 1919.

The rudderless nation saw its economy super-heated during the first year after the war, and then things collapsed in 1920. Prices dropped precipitously, and unemployment grew to proportions that would not be seen until the Great Depression.

Political prisoners stocked our prisons, the most famous being the grand old Socialist and labor leader Eugene V. Debs. He had been sentenced to ten years in prison for simply exercising his First Amendment right of dissent against what he perceived to be a capitalist war.

The world’s economies were in mortal danger. Fear that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia would spread created a national, if not international hysteria. Race riots bedeviled our nation’s cities, as images of returning Black veterans fueled the ever-present American hatred, terror really, of seeing fully emancipated African-Americans.

What a job he faced, and how little do we see him as the sorely needed reconstruction president, one who restored order and prosperity, decency and justice.

He called an emergency session of Congress weeks after his inauguration to set an incredibly aggressive agenda. He would reduce swollen government spending, establish a budget for the first time, reduce war taxes, set limits on immigration, establish tariff protections, promote highway construction, support the merchant marine and the nascent aviation and radio industries, create a bureau to care for and rehabilitate wounded veterans, advance public health and welfare, and finally attempt to address the unfinished business of passing a federal anti-lynching law.

While he opposed joining the League of Nations as an unnecessary and unwanted loss of national sovereignty, he called for greater cooperation among nations, a world court, and would steer the world’s first arm’s limitation treaty, the Washington Naval Conference (for which he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize; one for which he was nominated but that went unawarded in 1923 as Nobel does not award the prize posthumously).

After formally ending the war with the Central Powers, he commuted Eugene Debs’ sentence and released him from a grim Atlanta prison; hundreds of others followed. President Wilson had steadfastly denied any attempts at pardons for Debs and others, and the Supreme Court, through an opinion authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, had affirmed Debs’ sentence.

It was left to Warren Harding to clean up the mess.

After the race war flared in Tulsa just months after his inauguration, President Harding made a point to visit one of the nation’s first Black universities, Lincoln University (students would later include Thurgood Marshall and poet Langston Hughes), to celebrate its graduates and honor African American veterans for whom an arch had been constructed.

Four months later, he became the first president to visit the Deep South, where he lectured White citizens of Birmingham, Alabama, about the pressing need for political equality for African Americans.

His biographers could not have been crueler and flatly wrong about his legacy. They focused on relatively minor scandals in the grand scheme of things, including Teapot Dome. No one has ever linked Harding to these scandals; nor could they. He cared little about money, lived modestly, and had security from his successful publishing business and his wife’s inheritance.

Secretary Albert Fall, the man at the center of Teapot Dome, had been an important member of the Senate from New Mexico and his nomination is the only one in American history in which the Senate confirmed a Cabinet member by acclimation without hearings.

If Warren Harding misjudged Fall, so did every other senator of the time.

Instead of seeing the enormous accomplishments of Harding, the biographers played to the incorrect allegation, an unsavory charge in 1920, that Harding came from mixed blood. The 1968 book The Shadow of Blooming Grove—the title shows the absorption with bogus race rumors—did more to damage Harding’s reputation than almost anything, save Nan Britton’s 1927 book, The President’s Daughter.

There is no question Harding had a complicated private life. His marriage was likely loveless. His affair with Carrie Phillips, though, was no one-night stand. The two started a heated love affair in 1905, which continued for the next fifteen years. Only when the two broke temporarily over America’s involvement in the war did Harding recklessly take up with a much younger Nan Britton, whom he impregnated in 1919 and supported privately, though he failed to make arrangements for her and their daughter in the event of his untimely death—which is exactly what happened when he died suddenly in August 1923. There is significant evidence that Harding believed he would outlive his chronically ill spouse, First Lady Florence Harding, and that he could work out his personal entanglements.

If we judged most of our presidents by how they lived their private lives, we would find all wanting. FDR died with his most beloved mistress, Lucy Mercer Rutherford, with him in Warm Springs, Georgia. We need say nothing of JFK.

He played poker for recreation. So did Truman. He loved golf. So did Wilson. He occasionally had drinks in the White House. So did FDR. He read voraciously; Brentano’s, a fabulous New York City bookstore, was his haven. He ordered books by the score every month (sending many to Carrie Phillips). He loved animals, especially dogs, and deplored hunting. Teddy Roosevelt, by contrast, went on a massive hunting trip to Africa following his presidency and slaughtered, by all accounts, over 500 big game animals.

He admired and studied Napoleon and Alexander Hamilton. He encouraged women to vote, for the first time in a national election in 1920. “The womanhood of America, always its glory, its inspiration, and the potent uplifting force in it social and spiritual development,” he told the Notification Committee, “is about to be enfranchised. . . .  By party edict, by my recorded vote, by personal conviction, I am committed to this measure of justice.”

One hundred years later, America watches as women are likely to make the difference in a presidential contest.

When it is all said and done, Warren Harding must be seen in a new light. He helped heal a troubled nation, save a floundering world. He looked for compromise; he sought peace. As with many turning points in history, things could have gone on a much more destructive and chaotic path. And there is little doubt that the time after the Great War was one saturated with great contingency. His stabilizing influence, his unwavering commitment to American values, representative government and civilization cannot be understated. His common decency was exactly the elixir required in a trembling and unsteady world.

James Robenalt is the author of four nonfiction books, including The Harding Affair, Love and Espionage During the Great War. He lives in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

Read or Share this story: https://www.marionstar.com/story/news/2020/10/31/robenalt-reconsidering-harding-presidency-100-years-later/3680537001/

Credit: Source link

Next Post

Recent News