Warren G. Harding

Some historians consider Harding to have been the worst President in American history, mostly due to widespread corruption in his Administration.

Early life

Harding was born in Corsica, now Blooming Grove, Morrow County, Ohio on November 2 1865 to Dr George Harding and Phoebe Dickerson. He graduated from Ohio Central College at Iberia. Harding was the oldest of six children; his boyhood heroes were Alexander Hamilton and Napoleon. His mother was a midwife who later obtained her medical license.

In 1889 (when he was 24) Harding suffered a nervous breakdown and spent several weeks in a sanitarium. Two years later he married Florence Mabel Kling DeWolfe, a divorcee and mother of one son. Florence inherited her father's determination and business sense. Five years older than he, she had pursued him persistently, until he reluctantly gave in. Her father opposed the marriage vigorously and would not speak to his daughter or her husband for many years.

While the marriage wasn't one of full-blown passions, the couple complemented one another. Much to Florence Kling Harding's dismay, Harding conducted a number of affairs behind her back. But it has been said that it was Florence's drive that helped him achieve greater things than he could alone.

Political rise

An influential newspaper publisher, Harding was elected to the Ohio State Senate in 1899, serving four years before being elected Lieutenant Governor of Ohio, a post where he served from 1903 to 1905. In both cases his service was relatively indistinguished, and at the conclusion of his term as Lieutenant Governor Harding returned to private life.

Senator

As was the case during his first tenure as a Senator, Harding was relatively indistinguished, missing over two-thirds of the roll-call votes - among them the vote to send the 19th amendment (granting Women's Suffrage) to the states for ratification.

Election of 1920

A relative 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. Before receiving the nomination, he was asked whether there were any embarrassing episodes in his past that might be used against him. He had a very limited formal education, suffered from depression, had spent several years in a sanitarium, had a rocky relationship with his wife (whom he referred to as "the Duchess"), had a longstanding affair with the wife of an old friend, and was a heavy drinker despite Prohibition. Although he answered "no," each of these issues was raised by his opponents during his presidency.

Harding ran on a promise to "return to normalcy," which reflected three trends of his time: a renewed isolationism, a resurgence of nativism, and a turning away from the government activism of the progressive era.

During the campaign, rumors were printed that Harding's great-great-grandfather was a West Indian black and that other blacks lurked in his family tree. In response, Harding's campaign manager said "No family in the state [of Ohio] has a clearer, a more honorable record than the Hardings, a blue-eyed stock from New England and Pennsylvania, the finest pioneer blood." To a friend, however, Harding confided that maybe one of his ancestors "jumped the fence."

Harding received 61% of the national vote and 404 electoral votes. Cox received 36% of the national vote and 127 electoral votes. Eugene V. Debs, campaigning from Federal prison, received 3% of the national vote.

Presidency

As President, Harding played both golf and poker twice a week. Although as a U.S. senator from Ohio, he had voted for Prohibition, Harding kept the White House well-stocked with bootleg liquor. He attended baseball games regularly.

Scandals

Upon winning the election, he placed many of his old allies and cronies in prominent political positions. Known as the "Ohio Gang," (A term used by Charles Mee Jr. for his book of the same name) some of the appointees used their new powers to rob the government. Corruption was rampant throughout Harding's administration, though it is uncertain how much Harding actually knew about his friends' illicit activities. One of the most famous scandals of the time was the Teapot Dome scandal, which shook the nation for many years after Harding's death. The scandal involved Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, who was eventually convicted of renting public oil fields to private concerns in exchange for personal loans. In 1931 Fall became the first member of Cabinet to be sent to prison.

Thomas Miller, head of the Office of Alien Property, was convicted of accepting bribes. Jess Smith, personal aide to the Attorney General destroyed papers and then committed suicide. Charles Forbes, Director of the Veterans Bureau, skimmed profits, earned fat kickbacks, and ran alcohol and drugs. He was convicted of fraud and bribery, and drew a two-year sentence. Charles Cramer, an aide to Charles Forbes, committed suicide.

No evidence to date suggests that Harding personally profited from these crimes, but he seemed unable to stop them. "My God, this is a hell of a job!" Harding said. "I have no trouble with my enemies, but my damn friends, they're the ones that keep me walking the floor nights."

Throughout his administration, Harding adopted a laissez-faire attitude, and there are few lasting achievements to his name. One important event, however, was the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922, which at Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes' instigation limited the size of navies and reduced tension between the US, the UK and Japan in the Pacific. Also notable was the establishment of the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget), which increased the powers of the president by directing departmental spending plans to him rather than to Congress.

Cabinet

Supreme Court appointments

Death

In June of 1923, Harding set out on a cross-country "Voyage of Understanding," planning to meet regular people and explain his policies. During this trip, he became the first President to visit Alaska. At the end of July, while traveling south from Alaska, Harding developed what was thought to be a severe case of food poisoning. Arriving at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, he developed pneumonia. Harding died early in the morning on August 2, 1923 at age 57. Naval physicians surmised that he had suffered a heart attack; however, this diagnosis was not made by Dr. Charles Sawyer, the Surgeon General, who was traveling with the presidential party. Mrs. Harding refused permission for an autopsy upon Sawyer's recommendation, which soon led to speculation that the President had been the victim of a plot. Sawyer's medical qualifications were also called into question. Harding was succeeded by his Vice President, Calvin Coolidge, who was sworn in by his father, a notary public, in Plymouth Notch, Vermont.

Following his death, Harding's body was returned to Washington, where it was placed in the Gold Room of the White House pending a State Funeral at the United States Capitol. White House employees at the time were quoted as saying that the night before the funeral, that they heard Mrs. Harding speak for more than an hour into the face of her dead husband. The most-commonly reported (but never verified) remark attributed to Mrs. Harding at this time was, "They can't hurt you now, Warren."

Harding was entombed in the receiving vault of the Marion Cemetery, Marion, Ohio, in August 1923. Following Mrs. Harding's death in November 1924, she too was temporarily buried next to her husband. Both bodies were moved in December 1927 to the newly completed Harding Memorial in Marion, which was dedicated by President Herbert Hoover in 1931. The lapse between the final internment and the dedication was due in part to the aftermath of the Teapot Dome scandal.

In 1930, a former private investigator named Gaston Means wrote the exploitive book, The Strange Death of President Harding, in which he suggested that there were many with motives to murder the President, including his wife. Means claimed that it was possible that Mrs. Harding poisoned the President, a rumor that has clouded the facts of Harding's death and heart condition. Means—who had been imprisioned for his activities while an FBI agent— has never had his arguments and theories proven; they remain as speculative as they were sensational.

Extramarital Affairs

Many self-appointed experts on Harding's infidelities base their authority on innuendo, speculation, and stories that swirled around the President following his death. What is known, and has been documented by primary documents, is that during his lifetime, Harding had an affair with Mrs. Carrie Fulton Phillips; he was also rumored to have had an affair with Miss Nan Britton, although information for this comes mostly from her book, written after his death.

Rumors of the Harding love letters circulated through Marion, Ohio for many years. However, their existence was not confirmed until author Francis Russell acquired access to them during his research for his book, The Shadow of Blooming Grove. The letters were in the possession of Harding's one true love, Carrie Fulton Phillips, who was of an advanced age. Phillips kept the letters in a box in a closet and was reluctant to share them. However she relented, and it deemed conclusive that Harding had a 15-year relationship with Mrs. Phillips, who was then the wife of his friend James Phillips, owner of the local department store the Uhler-Phillips Company. Mrs. Phillips was ten years younger than Harding. By 1915, she began trying to sway Harding to leave his wife. When he refused, she left her husband and moved to Berlin with her daughter Isabel. However, the United States was increasingly likely to be drawn into World War I, so Mrs. Phillips moved back to the U.S. and the affair reignited. Harding was now a Senator of Ohio, and a vote was coming up regarding a declaration of war against Germany.

Mrs. Phillips threatened to go public with their affair if the Senator voted for the declaration of war. Harding defied her and voted for the declaration of war, but Carrie did not reveal the scandal to the world. When Harding won the Republican presidential nomination in 1920, he did not disclose the relationship to party officials. Once they learned of the affair, it was too late to find another nominee. In order to reduce the likelihood of a scandal breaking, the Republican National Committee sent Carrie and her family on a trip to Japan and paid them over $50,000. Mrs. Phillips would also receive monthly payments thereafter, thus making her the first and only person known to have successfully extorted money from a major political party.

The letters written to Mrs. Phillips by Harding were confiscated at the request of the Harding heirs, who requested and received a court injunction prohibiting their inclusion in Francis Russell's book, The Shadow of Blooming Grove. Russell, in turn, left quoted passages from the letters as blank passages in protest of the Harding heirs' actions. The love letters between President Warren G. Harding and Carrie Fulton Phillips remain under an Ohio court protective order that expires in 2024, after which the content of the letters may be published and/or reviewed.

In addition to Mrs. Phillips, Harding also reportedly had an affair with Nan Britton, the daughter of Harding's late friend, a Dr. Britton of Marion. Nan's obsession with Harding began at an early age when she began pasting pictures of then-Senator Harding on her bedroom walls. According to Nan's kiss-and-tell book The President's Daughter, published after Harding's death, she and Sen. Harding conceived "their" daughter, Elizabeth Ann, in January 1919 in his Senate office. Harding never met Nan's daughter, but paid large amounts of child support. Harding and Britton, according to unsubstantiated reports, continued their affair while he was President, utilizing a closet adjacent to the Oval Office for privacy. Following Harding's death, Nan Britton sued the estate of Warren G. Harding unsuccessfully on behalf of Elizabeth Ann. Under cross-examination by the Harding heirs' attorney, Grant Mouser (a former member of Congress himself,) Britton's testimony was riddled with inconsistencies, and she lost her case. Britton married a Mr. Christian, who adopted Elizabeth Ann. Now Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, Nan Britton's daughter has been a resident of California for most of her life and was still living as of 2002.

Regardless of how many affairs Harding had or with whom, his place in history as one of the worst U.S. presidents appears secure.

The unflattering biographies of President Harding have been bellwethers for discovering historians who plagiarize rather than do their own research. The erroneous conclusion that Warren G. Harding is one of the worst presidents endures because the actual record of his presidency has been largely overlooked. It was long believed, incorrectly, that Mrs. Harding had destroyed all of her husband’s presidential papers. So the Harding history was largely written before it was learned that his papers were intact. He became a defenseless target of decades of false accusations and distortions. Those presidential papers have now been available for almost as long as they were not. Yet in the thirty-eight years that this information has been accessible, only a few published works have relied on Harding’s senatorial and presidential papers. Even then, many who have written about Harding have uncritically perpetuated specious and baseless stories. There are several books out now written by historians who have done their proper research and put this extremely popular and not below average President in his proper place in history. The newest to come out is "Warren G. Harding" by John W. Dean.

External links

Presidents of the United States of America

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Warren G Harding