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Warren G. Harding
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Warren Gamaliel Harding (November 2, 1865 August 2, 1923) was the 29th President of the United States, serving from 1921 until his death from a heart attack or stroke, in 1923. A Republican from Ohio, Harding was an influential newspaper publisher. He served in the Ohio Senate (1899–1903) and later as Lieutenant Governor of Ohio (1903–1905) and as a U.S. Senator (1915–1921).
His political leanings were conservative, which enabled him to become the compromise choice at the 1920 Republican National Convention.
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Warren Gamaliel Harding (November 2, 1865 August 2, 1923) was the 29th President of the United States, serving from 1921 until his death from a heart attack or stroke, in 1923. A Republican from Ohio, Harding was an influential newspaper publisher. He served in the Ohio Senate (1899–1903) and later as Lieutenant Governor of Ohio (1903–1905) and as a U.S. Senator (1915–1921).
His political leanings were conservative, which enabled him to become the compromise choice at the 1920 Republican National Convention. During his presidential campaign, held in the aftermath of World War I, he promised a return to "normalcy". In the 1920 election, he defeated his Democratic opponent, fellow Ohioan James M. Cox, in the largest presidential popular vote landslide in American history since the popular vote tally began to be recorded in 1824: 60.36% to 34.19%.
Harding headed a cabinet of notable men such as Charles Evans Hughes, Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover and Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, who was jailed for his involvement in the Teapot Dome scandal. In foreign affairs, Harding signed peace treaties that built on the Treaty of Versailles (which formally ended World War I). He also led the way to world Naval disarmament at the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22. Harding has been consistently ranked by scholars as one of the worst U.S. Presidents.
Early life
Warren G. Harding was born November 2, 1865, near Marion, Ohio (in a town now called Blooming Grove, Ohio). Harding was the eldest of eight children born to Dr. George Tryon Harding, Sr. and Phoebe Elizabeth (Dickerson) Harding. His mother was a midwife and later obtained her medical license, and his father taught at a rural school north of Mount Gilead, Ohio. One of Harding's great-grandmothers may have been African American. When Harding was a teenager, the family moved to Caledonia, Ohio in neighboring Marion County, when Harding's father acquired The Argus, a local weekly newspaper there. It was at The Argus that Harding learned the basics of the journalism business. He continued studying the printing and newspaper trade as a college student at Ohio Central College in Iberia, during which time he also worked at the Union Register in Mount Gilead.
After graduating, Harding moved to Marion, Ohio, where he and two friends raised $300 with which to purchase the failing Marion Daily Star, the weakest of the growing city's three newspapers. Harding revamped the paper's editorial platform to support the Republican Party, and enjoyed a moderate degree of success. However, his political stance put him at odds with those who controlled Marion's local politics. Thus when Harding moved to unseat the Marion Independent as the official paper of daily record, he met with vocal resistance from local figures, such as Amos Hall Kling, one of Marion's wealthiest real estate speculators.
While Harding won the war of words and made the Marion Daily Star one of the most popular newspapers in the county, the battle took a toll on his health. In 1889, when Harding was 24, he suffered from exhaustion and nervous fatigue. He spent several weeks at the Battle Creek Sanitarium to regain his strength, ultimately making five visits over fourteen years. Harding later returned to Marion to continue operating the paper. He spent his days boosting the community on the editorial pages, and his evenings "bloviating" (Harding's term for "informally conversing") with his friends over games of poker.
On July 8, 1891, Harding married Florence Kling DeWolfe, the daughter of his nemesis, Amos Hall Kling. Florence Kling DeWolfe was a divorcée, five years Harding's senior, and the mother of a young son, Marshall Eugene DeWolfe. She had pursued Harding persistently until he reluctantly proposed. Florence's father was furious with his daughter's decision to marry Harding, forbidding his wife from attending the wedding and not speaking to his daughter or son-in-law for eight years.
The couple complemented one another, with Harding's affable personality balancing his wife's no-nonsense approach to life. Florence Harding, exhibiting her father's determination and business sense, turned the Marion Daily Star into a profitable business. She has been credited with helping Harding achieve more than he might have alone; some have speculated that she later pushed him all the way to the White House.
Harding was a Freemason, raised to the Sublime Degree of a Master Mason on August 27, 1920, in Marion Lodge #70, F.& A.M., in Marion, Ohio.
Political career
As an influential newspaper publisher with a flair for public speaking, Harding was elected to the Ohio State Senate in 1899. He served four years before being elected Lieutenant Governor of Ohio, a post he occupied from 1903 to 1905. His leanings were conservative, and his record in both offices was relatively undistinguished. He received the Republican nomination for Governor of Ohio in 1910, but lost to incumbent Judson Harmon.
U.S. Senator
In 1912, Harding gave the nominating speech for incumbent President William Howard Taft at the Republican National Convention and in 1914 he was elected to the United States Senate, becoming Ohio's first senator elected by popular vote. He served in the Senate from 1915 until his inauguration as President on March 4, 1921, becoming the first sitting Senator to be elected President of the United States. Harding, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama are the only three men to have been elected president while serving as a United States Senator.
Joseph Nathan Kane's book, Facts About the Presidents, stated that Harding was "the second President elected while a Senator." This becomes a matter of semantics. On January 13, 1880, the Ohio legislature appointed James A. Garfield, who was then a Congressman from Ohio, to the U.S. Senate for the term beginning March 4, 1881 (at that time, Senators were elected by state legislatures rather than directly by the citizens). He won the Presidential election on November 2, so on that date he was at once Congressman, Senator-elect, and President-elect. Garfield accepted the Presidential election and soon relinquished the other offices. He never actually sat in the Senate seat, as his term was not to begin for another four months.
Because of the technicality, Harding continues to be generally considered the first "truly" sitting Senator to become President, Kennedy being the second. For example, George Will referred to Harding that way in his Newsweek commentary in the issue of June 16, 2008, p.60, in pointing out that the two presumptive candidates in the 2008 race were both sitting Senators.
In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell became the latest of a long string of political pundits and ordinary voters who suggested that Warren Harding's electoral success was based on his appearance, essentially that he "looked like a president." Gladwell argues that people's first impression of Harding tended to be so highly favorable that it gave them a fixed and very high opinion of Harding, which could not be shaken unless his intellectual and other deficiencies became glaring. Gladwell even refers to the flawed process by which people make decisions as 'Warren Harding Error.' Appearance is certainly one of the ways in which people judge others.
Election of 1920
Relatively unknown outside his own state, Harding was a true "dark horse" candidate, winning the Republican Party nomination due to the political machinations of his friends after the nominating convention had become deadlocked. Republican leaders met in a smoke-filled room at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago to end the deadlock. Before receiving the nomination, he was asked whether there were any embarrassing episodes in his past that might be used against him. His formal education was limited, he had a longstanding affair with the wife of an old friend, and he was a social drinker in the time of Prohibition. However, Harding answered "No" and the Party moved to nominate him, only to discover later his relationship with Carrie Fulton Phillips.
In the 1920 election, Harding ran against Democratic Ohio Governor James M. Cox, whose running-mate was Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. The election was seen in part as a referendum on whether to continue with the "progressive" work of the Woodrow Wilson Administration or to revert to the "laissez-faire" approach of the William McKinley era.
Harding ran on a promise to "Return to Normalcy", a seldom-used term he popularized. The slogan called an end to the abnormal era of the Great War, along with a call to reflect three trends of his time: a renewed isolationism in reaction to the War, a resurgence of nativism, and a turning away from the government activism of the reform era.
Harding's "front porch campaign" during the late summer and fall of 1920 captured the imagination of the country. Not only was it the first campaign to be heavily covered by the press and to receive widespread newsreel coverage, but it was also the first modern campaign to use the power of Hollywood and Broadway stars, who travelled to Marion for photo opportunities with Harding and his wife. Al Jolson, Lillian Russell, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford were among the conservative-minded luminaries to make the pilgrimage to central Ohio. Business icons Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone also lent their cachet to the campaign. From the onset of the campaign until the November election, over 600,000 people travelled to Marion to participate.
The campaign owed a great deal to Florence Harding, who played perhaps a more active role than any previous candidate's wife in a presidential race. She cultivated the relationship between the campaign and the press. As the business manager of the Star, she understood reporters and their industry and played to their needs by making herself freely available to answer questions, pose for pictures, or deliver food prepared in her kitchen to the press office, which was a bungalow she had constructed at the rear of their property in Marion. Mrs. Harding even went so far as to coach her husband on the proper way to wave to newsreel cameras to make the most of coverage.
The campaign also drew upon Harding's popularity with women. Considered handsome, Harding photographed well compared to Cox. However, it was mainly Harding's support for women's suffrage in the Senate that made him more popular with that demographic: the ratification of the 19th Amendment in August 1920 brought huge crowds of women to Marion, Ohio to hear Harding. Immigrant groups who had made up an important part of the Democratic coalition such as the Germans and Irish also voted for Harding in the election in reaction to their perceived persecution by the Wilson administration during the war.
During the campaign, rumors spread that Harding's great-great-grandfather was a West Indian black person and that other blacks might be found in his family tree. In an era when the one-drop rule meant any black blood made a person black, and participation of black people in politics in the South was effectively prohibited, Harding's campaign manager responded, "No family in the state (of Ohio) has a clearer, a more honorable record than the Harding's, a blue-eyed stock from New England and Pennsylvania, the finest pioneer blood." The rumors, based perhaps on no more than local gossip, were circulated by historian William Estabrook Chancellor. The rumors may have been sustained by a statement Harding allegedly made to newspaperman James W. Faulkner on the subject, perhaps meaning to be dismissive: "How do I know, Jim? One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence."
The election of 1920 was the first in which women could vote nationwide. It was also the first presidential election to be covered on the radio, thanks to the nation's first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Harding received 60% of the national vote and 404 electoral votes, an unprecedented margin of victory. Cox received 34% of the national vote and 127 electoral votes. Socialist Eugene V. Debs, campaigning from a federal prison, received 3% of the national vote.
Presidency 1921–1923
The administration of Warren G. Harding followed the Republican platform approved at the 1920 Republican National Convention, which was held in Chicago.
Harding calmed the 1919-1920 spy scare and released his election opponent, Socialist leader Eugene Debs, from prison; Debs had been put there by the Wilson administration for his opposition to Wilson's draft. Despite the many political differences between the two candidates, Harding pardoned Debs.Harding pushed for the establishment of the Bureau of Veterans Affairs (later organized as the Department of Veterans Affairs), the first permanent attempt at answering the needs of those who had served the nation in time of war. He created the Bureau of the Budget, becoming the first president to take a role in federal expenditures.
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