Official White House Portrait
Inauguration of Warren G. Harding, March 4, 1921
President Harding's original Cabinet, 1921
c.1919
Harding, c. 1882
Harding memorial issue, issued September 1, 1923
Official White House Portrait
Inauguration of Warren G. Harding, March 4, 1921
President Harding's original Cabinet, 1921
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politician president statesman
Warren Gamaliel Harding was born on November 2, 1865, in Blooming Grove, Ohio. He was the eldest of eight children born to George Tryon Harding, Sr. and Phoebe Elizabeth. His father, originally a farmer and a teacher eventually went to medical school and became a doctor. His mother was a midwife.
Warren enrolled at Ohio Central College in Iberia in 1879 and graduated in 1882.
Active in local Republican politics, Harding was elected in 1899 to the Ohio Senate, where he served two terms and became Republican floor leader. In 1903 he was elected lieutenant governor but retired in 1905. Although a born harmonizer who remained personally on good terms with all elements in the faction-ridden Ohio Republican party, he belonged to the Old Guard wing of the party. He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1910. But in the Republican comeback in 1914 Harding was elected to the U.S. Senate. As a senator, Harding strongly supported business, pushing for high tariffs, favoring the return of the railroads to private hands, and denouncing radicals. He was a "strong reservationist" on the League of Nations, and he followed Ohio public opinion by voting for the prohibition amendment.
In 1919 Harding announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination; he won the nomination on the tenth ballot. Legend has pictured Harding as a puppet in the hands of his wife or his campaign manager. But Harding was no one's puppet: he was an ambitious and calculating politician. Nor was he the handpicked nominee of a group of Old Guard senators. The convention was unbossed, and Harding, with his reputation as a loyal party man, his amiable personality, and his avoidance of controversial stands, was the second choice of the majority of the rank-and-file delegates. When the two front-runners deadlocked, the convention had swung to the handsome Ohioan.
In the election Harding successfully straddled the explosive League of Nations issue. By capitalizing on the public's yearning for a return to "normalcy" after World War I, Harding won by the largest popular majority yet recorded.
Despite the country's postwar position as a creditor nation, Harding gave his blessing to protective farm tariffs. Devoted to governmental economy, he supported establishment of the Bureau of the Budget, sharply cut government expenditures despite depressed economic conditions, and vetoed the World War I veterans' bonus passed by Congress. He backed Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon's program for repealing the excess-profits tax and lowering the income tax on the wealthy; he gave Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover a free hand in his efforts to promote business cooperation and efficiency; he favored turning over government-owned plants to private enterprise; he packed regulatory commissions and the Supreme Court with conservative appointees; and he strongly favored immigration restriction.
Harding wished to remain neutral in labor disputes and worked behind the scenes for conciliation, but when his hand was forced, he took management's side. Thus, after his attempted mediation in the 1922 railroad shopmen's strike failed, he approved a sweeping injunction against the strikers—this won him the bitter enmity of organized labor.
By 1923 Harding was increasingly disturbed by the rumors of corruption involving high administration officials and hangers-on. But he failed to act decisively, partly because he believed the attacks were politically motivated, partly because of a misplaced loyalty to old friends. Perhaps his worst mistake was in appointing his senatorial crony Albert B. Fall as secretary of the interior. Fall persuaded Harding to transfer naval oil reserves from the Navy Department to the Department of the Interior. Then, after Fall had corruptly leased the reserves at Elk Hills, Calif., and Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to oilmen, he induced Harding to defend these transactions when questions were raised in the Senate.
Although the Republicans had suffered sharp losses in the 1922 congressional elections, Harding personally remained tremendously popular. However, his health was affected by overwork and anxiety over his wife's health and the multiplying evidences of corruption in his administration. He suffered a heart attack followed by bronchopneumonia while on his cross-country tour in the summer of 1923. He died on August 2, 1923, probably from a cerebral hemorrhage. The posthumous exposure of the scandals in Harding's administration—including Fall's conviction for bribery, the attorney general's forced resignation and narrow escape from jail, and prison sentences for the head of two government bureaus—and the charges that Harding had fathered an illegitimate daughter and that he drank excessively all led to his decline in public esteem.
Warren G. Harding was the 29th President of the United States, often counted among the worst in historical rankings of the U.S. presidents. Ironically, he was a popular president during his administration which lasted from March 4, 1921 until his death on August 2, 1923, but his image eroded considerably following the exposure of several scandals that took place under him.
Yet Harding was not the affable, weak, and even stupid figure of popular legend. Most contemporaries praised his success in leading the country through the painful transition from the difficulties of the postwar years, and his administration did lay foundations for later prosperity. But he showed indecisiveness and lack of leadership when faced with conflict; his mind was untrained and undisciplined; and most important, the values of small-town America which he embodied were inadequate for dealing with the problems of the postwar world.
It was his conviction that the fundamental trouble with the people of the United States was that they had gotten too far away from Almighty God. He said: "In the experiences of a year of the Presidency, there has come to me no other such unwelcome impression as the manifest religious intolerance which exists among many of our citizens. I hold it to be a menace to the very liberties we boast and cherish."
He supported the Sheppard-Towner Act (1921), extending federal aid to the states to reduce infant mortality. He unsuccessfully proposed establishing a department of public welfare to coordinate and expand Federal programs in education, public health, child welfare, and recreation. He was instrumental in ending the 12-hour day in the steel industry. He promoted increased federal spending on highways. He commuted the sentences of most of the wartime political prisoners, including Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. While balking at government subsidies or price-fixing to assist farmers hard hit by postwar falling prices, he approved legislation for extending credit to farmers, for stricter federal supervision of the meat industry, for regulating speculation on the grain exchanges, and for exempting farm marketing cooperatives from the antitrust laws.
In foreign policy Harding was largely guided by his prointernationalist secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes. Although Harding regarded the 1920 election as a popular mandate against American membership in the League of Nations, his administration cooperated with the nonpolitical activities of the League, and in 1923 he came out in favor of American membership on the World Court. Adamant in demanding full repayment of Allied war debts, he was flexible in arranging terms.
Efforts were made to restore good relations with Mexico and Cuba and to terminate military intervention in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Colombia was indemnified for the loss of Panama. The Harding administration's most important diplomatic achievement was the Washington Conference. Meeting in November 1921, the conferees formulated a series of treaties, which secured Senate ratification, fixing ratios of warships for the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy, guaranteeing the territorial status quo in the Pacific, and reaffirming the independence and territorial integrity of China and the open-door principle of commercial equality.
Quotations:
"We need citizens who are less concerned about what their government can do for them, and more concerned about what they can do for the nation."
"I am not fit for this office and should never have been here."
"I knew that this job would be too much for me."
"America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration."
"I don't know much about Americanism, but it's a damn good word with which to carry an election."
He was a Freemason.
Harding genuinely like people. His relaxed managerial style in running his newspaper in Marion, Ohio, made for good labor relations. In his more than three decades as publisher he never fired a single employee. As a legislator, he was well liked by members of both parties and although he voted the Republican line, his aversion to confrontation kept him above brute political infighting. In campaigning he always took the high road, pointing out the positive aspects of his candidacy rather than resorting to personal attacks on his opponent. Harding was truly humble, a humility that sprang from a candid awareness of his own limitations. “Harding desperately sought approval all his life,” wrote biographer Andrew Sinclair. “He hated to be forced to decide on matters that might antagonize people. At any given moment of his career, he was prepared to trim his sails in order to please.” Harding himself acknowledged his pliable nature in a revealing anecdote he recounted before the National Press Club in 1922: His father said to him ruefully one day, “Warren, it’s a good thing you wasn’t born a gal.” When the boy asked why, Mr. Harding responded, “Because you’d be in the family way all the time. You can’t say No.”
Physical Characteristics: Six feet tall, large-boned, and full-chested, he was darkly handsome with a thick head of gleaming white hair, bushy black eyebrows above soft, gray eyes, a classic Roman nose, and a rich, pleasant voice. He dressed impeccably. His health generally was poor. At 24 he suffered a nervous breakdown and spent several weeks in a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, run by Dr. J.P. Kellogg of the breakfast-cereal Kelloggs. Four years later, and sporadically thereafter, he returned to Battle Creek for rest. Besides frazzled nerves, Harding also suffered frequently from heartburn and indigestion.
Quotes from others about the person
"The Teapot Dome Scandal involved a plot of federal land in Wyoming that derives its unusual name from the fact that, if viewed from a certain angle, it appears to be shaped like a scandal. The government had placed a large amount of oil under this land for safekeeping, but in 1921 it was stolen. The mystery was solved later that same evening when an alert customs inspector noticed former Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall attempting to board an oceanliner with a suitcase containing 3.256 trillion barrels of petroleum products, which he claimed had been a "gift" from a "friend." At this point, President Harding, showing the kind of class that Richard Nixon can only dream about, died."
Dave Barry, Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States (1989), p. 104-105
"Not until the administration of President Warren Harding would the U.S. Constitution guarantee a woman's right to vote."
Michael Zak, "Congratulating the Republican Party for according women the right to vote" (15 March 2016), Grand Old Partisan
Warren Harding married Florence Kling, a divorcee five years his senior, in 1891. The couple had no children of their own though Florence’s son from her previous marriage lived with them sometimes.
Harding was known to be a womanizer and had been involved in several extramarital affairs. One of his well-known affairs was with Carrie Phillips, a friend of his wife. Another one of his mistresses was Nan Britton, a woman who publicly claimed that Harding was the father of her daughter. Considered scandalous during that time, this claim was verified by DNA testing in 2015.
