A president who presided over a famously corrupt administration often judged to be among the worst in US history, is the subject of today’s #stampoftheday, a 2-cent stamp issued in 1923 to honor President Warren G. Harding, who died unexpectedly on August 2, 1923.
A well -liked politician who seems to have been best known for his ability to articulate well-worn platitudes in especially appealing ways, Harding was a newspaper owner from Ohio, who turned to politics, rose through the ranks, and was elected senator in 1914. A long-shot candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 1920, he emerged as a compromise candidate after the convention deadlocked and power brokers gathered, almost certainly in smoke-filled rooms. Their choice was accepted in part by the fact that many delegates knew and liked him and in part because (according to an account in The Boston Globe) weary delegates “would not listen to remaining in Chicago over Sunday” particularly because they lacked clean shirts and didn’t want to pay for another night of lodging. “On such things…turns the destiny of nations.”
Harding’s appeal turned in large measure for a return to normalcy after the turmoil of World War I and the economic downturn that followed the war. As he famously noted in a May 1920 speech: “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”
This was typical verbiage for Harding whose soaring but vague oratory inspired some delightfully harsh criticism. William McAdoo, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination in 1920, described a typical Harding speech as “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and over work.” Famed critic H. L. Mencken concurred, noting that Harding’s style ” reminds me of a string of wet sponges…of tattered washing on the line…of stale bean soup, of college yells, [and] of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a kind of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm…of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of tosh. It is rumble and bumble. It is balder and dash.” And yet, as The New York Times noted, it worked because a majority of people could find “a reflection of their own indeterminate thoughts” in his speeches.
Despite such criticism, Harding was easily elected, winning just over 60 percent of the vote – more, at the time, than any presidential candidate since the emergence of the two-party system. Since then, only three people (none of them named Donald Trump) have gotten a larger share of the popular vote: Lyndon Johnson (61.1% in 1964), Franklin Roosevelt (60.8% in 1936), and Richard Nixon (60.7% in 1972). As President, Harding assembled a Cabinet that included some leading Republicans (e.g. former Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes), major businessmen (e.g. billionaire Andrew Mellon), a few able administrators (e.g. Herbert Hoover, who had led World War I relief efforts), and several old friends and acquaintances. In general, his administration generally pursued a variety of conservative, pro-business policies. He approved a tax cut that primarily reduced taxes on the wealthy, as well as greatly increased tariffs on foreign goods and the first of a series of measures greatly limiting immigration from eastern and southern Europe. He also appointed four conservative Supreme Court justices, who, a decade later, provided many of the votes overturning key aspects of FDR’s New Deal.
By 1923 there were rumblings about a variety of possible scandals involving longtime allies and campaign contributors who had received appointments that gave them control of vast amounts of money and resources. These allegations led Harding, to tell journalist William Allen White: “I have no trouble with my enemies. But my damn friends, they’re the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!”
Harding wanted to run for a second term but his health was failing. In June 1923, as part of an effort to both shore up his reelection campaign and get away from Washington’s oppressive summer heat, he undertook a “Voyage of Understanding” that crossed the country and went north to the Alaska Territory and Canada. On July 27, after he had spoken to to over 30,000 Boy Scouts at a jamboree in Seattle, then addressed 25,000 people at the University of Washington’s Husky Stadium, and then spoken to the Seattle Press Club, Harding was near collapse. The next day, the presidential entourage proceeded directly to San Francisco (having cancelled all planned intermediate stops). Doctors who examined Harding in that city found he not only had heart problems but also had a serious case of pneumonia. All public engagements were cancelled. He recovered somewhat, and by the afternoon of August 2, doctors allowed him to sit up in bed. That evening, around 7:30 pm, while his wife was reading a flattering article to him he had convulsions and then collapsed. Doctors were unable to revive him and he died at the age of 57.
Harding’s death shocked the nation. An estimated 9 million people lined the tracks as Harding’s body was taken from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., and then home to Marion, Ohio, where he is buried. The post office ultimately printed and sold almost 100 million copies of the stamp memorializing Harding, much more than any previous “special-issue” stamp.
But Harding’s good reputation did not last because several long-rumored scandals came to light after he died. The most well-known involved leases allowing drilling at the Teapot Dome, a federal oil reserve in Wyoming. This scandal led to the conviction of Albert Fall, who, in 1931 became the first US cabinet member to be imprisoned for crimes committed while in office. Others scandals involved influence peddling and corruption at the Justice Department and the Veteran’s Bureau. Moreover, a woman who claimed to have been the president’s mistress before and after he was elected claimed that their trysts – which, she claimed, sometimes took place in a White House closet – had produced an out-of-wedlock child (born when he was still a senator).
Though Harding’s family, long denied this, in 2015 DNA tests that it was true.
While some scholars have argued that Harding should be lauded for some of his administration’s successes, in general scholars have consistently rated him among the worst of American presidents. In the words of Samuel Hopkins Adams, author of a 1939 book about Harding, he was “an amiable, well-meaning third-rate Mr. Babbitt, with the equipment of a small-town semi-educated journalist…It could not work. It did not work.”
Fortunately, though, Harding’s presidency wasn’t testing by a global health crisis or a global economic crisis. Because who know how someone who lacked skills and leadership abilities, and relied on cronies might have responded to such a challenge…
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.