Warren Gamaliel Harding

Samuel Hopkins Adams:  Incredible Era:  The Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding

Warren Gamaliel Harding:  29th President (1921-1923); b. 1865; d. 1923

Warren Harding--best remembered as the name of Ralph's school in Christmas Story.  And I can certainly understand why people would rather forget.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is that Adams is unabashedly critical in his assessment of Harding and his administration.  Adams was a journalist who was active during Harding’s administration, and this book was published only a few years after Harding’s death.  The books is not, therefore, a purely scholarly and detached assessment of Harding’s career.  The book’s focus is on the incredible scandals that occurred during Harding’s watch and the way in which these scandals ruined his legacy and affected the nation.

Harding himself is an interesting character.  He was truly out of his league as president.  His background was humble—as was that of many presidents—and he married a divorcee, a la Andrew Jackson.  What’s interesting is that he entered politics in part because it was enjoyable and in part because of his wife’s prodding (and his own desire to show his father-in-law that he was worthy of marrying the man’s daughter).  He was an able campaigner, and was a genuinely likable guy—he thus appears to have got along well in legislative politics.  

But Harding had no principled stances and no agenda.  He didn’t stand for anything.  He appears to have had no interests in major domestic issues or foreign policy.  He didn’t have any favored interest groups.  It appears that he rose to the senate because he was popular with Ohio Republicans and had no controversial positions (because he had none).  He did some good things--his arms control conference was much heralded internationally, he helped keep the budget under control, and tried to improve tariff policy.  But this appears to be ad hoc policy making in response to issues more than proactive attempt at change.

His nomination was a display of the real power of the Republican machine.  While there were other unlikely presidents from unlikely nominations (Garfield; Cleveland), this guy really did kind of come out of nowhere.  You could see this as an indictment of the then-existing nomination process, but do we do much better now?

The books is really about the scandals, and those were incredible.  If a sitting cabinet member now accepted a literal bag filled with cash in exchange for allowing a corporation to pump oil from government reserves, it would be a bonanza—this would be a scandal of unprecedented importance.  If it so happened that the sitting attorney general actively hindered investigations into these and other activities and FBI officers harassed US Senators investigating such activities, it would be even bigger.  And if a high-ranking government official, and personal friend of the president, was getting generous kick-backs for selling medical supplies to corporate interests for pennies on the dollars while wounded soldiers went without, he might be assassinated.  But this was how it went under Harding.  I think about some of the more recent governmental scandals under Nixon and Clinton and the industry capture of executive agencies under Bush II, but nothing approaches the audacity of selling the people’s property for personal gain.

Harding's cabinet had some powerhouses in it--Charles Evans Hughes, Hoover, and Andrew Mellon--but he never seems to have harnessed them for any great purpose.

And let’s not forget Harding’s extended affair with a much younger woman and resulting love child.  This certainly makes him a more human and interesting character.  But it does seem to speak to his lack of moral fortitude, especially when he continued on with the affair knowing that his wife was aware of what was going on.  Perhaps the best result of this was that it fueled speculation that Harding's wife poisoned him.