Harding, Warren Gamaliel (November 2, 1865 – August 2, 1923), 29th president of the United States. He was elected president in 1920 by an overwhelming vote in a postwar reaction against President Wilson's international policies. The first American president to take office after World War I, Harding was also the first president to be born after the Civil War.
Harding himself felt that his administration would be remembered in history for the treaties negotiated following the Washington Conference he had called in 1921; at the conference the governments of the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan had agreed to limit naval construction for 10 years and to scrap many existing ships. In fact, his 21/2 years in office are remembered mainly for the scandals that clouded his administration. Personally honest, with the best of intentions, Harding has come to seem the least of American presidents.
Warren Harding was born on Nov. 2, 1865, in the hamlet of Blooming Grove, Ohio, the son and first child of George Tryon Harding II, a Civil War veteran, farmer, horse trader, and later marginally successful rural doctor. The Hardings were of pioneer stock, descended from the English Puritan Richard Harding, who went to New England in 1623. His mother, Phoebe Dickerson Harding, who practiced midwifery to supplement her husband's erratic earnings, was of a markedly religious bent.
As a child in Blooming Grove's one-room school, Harding showed an early instinct for the sonorities of declamation. When he was 10, his father moved to a farm on the outskirts of nearby Caledonia, a small town. Here the boy learned to play the cornet and spent some time as a printer's devil for the rickety local paper that his father had taken over in one of his spells of trading.
Although he was robust and large for his age, Warren showed no marked enthusiasm for routine farm chores. At the age of 14 he entered Ohio Central College in Iberia—a backwater academy with several dozen students and a faculty of three. After two years he graduated with the degree of bachelor of science.
Shortly before his son's graduation, Tryon had moved to Marion in the unrealistic hope of building up a respectable town medical practice. Warren, following his family belatedly from Caledonia astride his father's mule, arrived on a July evening in 1882 at the county seat that was to be his lifelong home.
Once settled in Marion, Harding helped organize the Marion People's Band, in which he played the helicon; his band won first place in a state tournament. After passing the county school board examination he taught in a one-room school several miles from Marion but felt one term was enough. For a time the ex-schoolteacher tried reading law in a lawyer's office but soon found the texts of Blackstone too much for him. A spell of selling insurance ended in disaster when he miscalculated the rates. Briefly he became an odd-job reporter for the Democratic weekly Mirror, only to lose that job because of his overenthusiasm for the 1884 Republican presidential candidate, James G. Blaine.
In November 1884 the 19-year-old Harding and two friends, whom he later bought out, raised $300 to acquire the Marion Star, a small daily paper that was scarcely more than a flyer; its chief assets were a makeshift hand-operated press, a few fonts of type, and several hundred, mostly nonpaying, subscribers. Within a year the unlikely venture showed signs of succeeding, partly through the editor-publisher's affable energy and partly because of increased retail advertising. Within five years the Star had become the foremost paper in Marion county and one of Ohio's most successful small-town papers. By 1914, when Harding was elected to the U. S. Senate, the Star was earning him an income of $20,000 a year.
Not so robust as he seemed, Harding as a young man had several nervous breakdowns. In 1891 he married the divorced Florence Kling DeWolfe, five years his senior, the daughter of Marion's leading banker. Neurasthenic, formidably domineering, the Duchess—as Harding called his wife—brought him little domestic happiness, and he established liaisons with other women. His most permanent affair was with Carrie Phillips, the wife of a Marion merchant, with whom he maintained a liaison from 1905 to 1920.
In 1917, Harding formed a connection with Nan Britton, an impetuous young woman, 31 years his junior, formerly of Marion. She visited him from time to time in Washington when he was a senator and even in the White House. Their daughter Elizabeth Ann was born in 1919.
Harding's early bent for declamation developed into a knack for public speaking. He found he could captivate the rhetoric-minded audiences of his day with his mellow delivery of high-sounding phrases and alliterative generalities. As an orator he early came to the attention of the Ohio lobbyist and political manipulator Harry M. Daughtery.
After an early defeat for county auditor, Harding was elected as a Republican to the state Senate in 1899. Inconsequential as a legislator, he rapidly became one of the most popular senators in Columbus, a friendly and obliging colleague, a harmonizer of the state's two Republican factions led by U. S. Senators Joseph B. Foraker and Mark Hanna. In his second term he was chosen Republican floor leader, and at its conclusion he was elected in 1902 to the figurehead post of lieutenant governor.
When in 1910 his party began to split into William H. Taft conservatives and Theodore Roosevelt progressives, Harding accepted the conservative nomination for governor. With his overwhelming defeat in the election his political career seemed over, but in the final Taft-Roosevelt split of 1912 he emerged from his Marion retirement to present Taft's name to the Republican National Convention. Two years later, in Ohio's Republican revival, he was chosen as the harmony candidate for the U. S. Senate to oppose the Irish-Catholic Democratic attorney general, Timothy S. Hogan. Although Harding himself refused to exploit Hogan's religion, his followers played up the issue of popery so successfully in rural Ohio that Harding won easily.
In his six years in the Senate, Harding remained an amiable nonentity—convivial, a noted poker player, and much in demand as a Chautauqua speaker. No bill of any consequence bore his name, nor did he champion any measure worth recalling. Nevertheless, he had stood by his party during the 1912 schism, and he was made chairman of the Republican National Convention that nominated Charles Evans Hughes in 1916. After Hughes' defeat and the U. S. war declaration in April 1917, Harding introduced an amendment to the draft bill that would have allowed Theodore Roosevelt to raise and command volunteers as he had done in the Spanish-American War. Although Wilson refused to countenance any such amateur soldiering, Roosevelt remained permanently grateful to Harding.
If Roosevelt had lived, he would unquestionably have been nominated and elected president in 1920, and he had already fixed on the innocuous Harding as his running mate. His death in January 1919 left two leading contenders for the Republican nomination: Roosevelt's friend Gen. Leonard Wood, the Army's former chief of staff, and Frank O. Lowden, the reform governor of Illinois.
Wood's convention chances seemed the brighter, but long before the convention Harding's mentor, Daughterty, sensed that neither the general nor Lowden would be able to command a majority and that the choice would eventually fall on a personable, relatively unknown candidate who might well be Harding. After persuading the reluctant senator to announce his candidacy and to appoint him political manager, Daugherty scoured the country to secure the support of Republican leaders for Harding as an alternative candidate.
Daugherty's prediction of a Wood-Lowden stalemate at the Chicago convention came true. On the night before Harding's nomination a group of senators met in the famous "smoke-filled room" to discuss alternatives. Contrary to legend, they did not pick Harding but merely ratified him as the most available candidate. Actually his nomination had been determined months before by Daugherty's countrywide collecting of second- and third-choice delegate votes. Harding was nominated on the 10th ballot and Calvin Coolidge was selected as his running mate.
Harding then waged a "front porch" campaign in imitation of William McKinley, straddling the chief issue of the League of Nations with vague rhetoric. He won 404 electoral votes to 127 for his Democratic opponent, James M. Cox, and 16,153,785 popular votes to Cox's 9,147,353. His election sweep was more negative than positive, a repudiation of Wilson and a protest against postwar frustrations, a longing—in Harding's own phrase—for a "return to normalcy."
Harding's cabinet included several distinguished figures—Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, and Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace—and he appointed ex-President Taft as chief justice of the United States. But he also insisted on appointing Daugherty as his attorney general and a convivial crony, Charles R. Forbes, as director of the newly created Veterans' Bureau. The appointment that would prove most disastrous for his reputation, although it caused no great comment at the time, was that of the anticonservationist senator from New Mexico, Albert B. Fall, as secretary of the interior.
In a special session of Congress shortly after his inauguration Harding called for retrenchment in government, lowering of taxes and repeal of the wartime excess profits tax, a reduction of railroad rates and the promotion of agricultural interests, a national budget system, a great merchant marine, and a department of public welfare. But he was reluctant to assert the power of his office and got little cooperation from Congress. His most permanent domestic accomplishment was the creation of the Bureau of the Budget, with McKinley's former comptroller of the currency, Charles G. Dawes, as its director.
Pledged to deflation and economy, Harding vetoed an American Legion–sponsored soldiers' bonus bill. He praised the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922, which raised rates on manufactured goods to their highest level to that date, as the greatest work in tariff history. In the field of civil rights he reversed Wilson's practice of excluding from federal posts, and in Birmingham, Ala., in a speech of extraordinary boldness, he called for political, economic, and educational equality for the races.
Under Harding's tenure the White House took on the lax atmosphere of his frequent poker evenings. Among his subordinates corruption grew blatant—in Daugherty's Department of Justice and within the (later Federal) Bureau of Investigation, in the Prohibition Bureau of the Treasury Department, and in Forbes' Veterans' Bureau. With the collapse of the war boom, with wage cuts, unemployment, growing farm distress, and urban resentment of prohibition, Harding by midterm found that much of his popularity had slipped away. The 1922 congressional elections were a startling rebuke to the Republicans.
Sobered by the election setback and troubled by evidences of venality among trusted subordinates, Harding in his last months seemed to be developing unsuspected qualities of leadership. Despite his earlier anti-League of Nations stand he now advocated joining the League's World Court, and when Congress balked, he determined to take the issue to the people. In June 1923 he set out on a "Voyage of Understanding" that took him to the west coast and as far as Alaska. Already suffering from a heart condition, he collapsed on his way back and died suddenly of a thrombosis, in San Francisco, on Aug. 2, 1923.
Harding's reputation did not long survive his death, as scandal after scandal came to light. After it was discovered that Secretary Fall had received several hundred thousand dollars from oilmen Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny, to whom he had leased naval oil reserves in California and at Teapot Dome, Wyo., the name Teapot Dome was linked with Harding's as a symbol of corruption. Fall, finally convicted of bribery, went to jail, as did Forbes and others. Daugherty, dismissed by Coolidge, barely escaped their fate. Harding's name was further blackened by a book by Nan Britton and by unfounded rumors that he had committed suicide or been murdered.
Harding's announced ambition was to be his country's "best-loved" president. Upright, limited, and overtrusting, he had the misfortune to be thrust into a position beyond his capacities.
