ExclusiveWarren G. Harding: Promise and Popularity

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannan. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories. But here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous, and some are obscure. But each person deserves to be discovered, because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans in our daily lives. In the relatively short period of time that the United States of America has been in existence, this nation has gone through so many different periods, such great change, particularly because of the vast advancements in technology and culture and society which have taken place during those few short centuries. As we get closer to modern times, it's fascinating to see how the U.S. presidents began to face challenges and difficulties which are similar to those present today. Today we're going to talk about a president who was in office just over a hundred years ago and who had one of the most controversial and scandal-ridden terms of office. The 1920s are one of the most popular decades in terms of style. It's so easy to almost do a caricature of that look, because there are certain stereotypical ideas that go along with the look of that decade. And it all really began with two major amendments to the Constitution, which both were ratified in the year 1920. The 18th, which began Prohibition, and the 19th, which gave women the right to vote. At the same time, in the year 1920, there was a very important presidential election. After two terms of office for Woodrow Wilson, the country had now come out of World War I, and it was looking for something new. After two terms of a Democratic president, the tide was perhaps turning back to having a Republican in office. This set the stage for Warren G. Harding. This Republican candidate had just the message that people wanted. The slogan for his campaign was a return to normalcy. That slogan really struck me as sounding extremely modern. It sounds like something that would have been said in 2020, not 1920, like after the pandemic everyone wanted a return to normalcy. It was similar then, as the nation had just finished being in the Great War and the Spanish flu epidemic. So it was a time of great unrest and social change, and what people wanted more than anything was a return to something normal, something on which they could rely. In a speech before the Home Market Club in Boston on May 14, 1920, Harding gave one of the most conclusive quotes to sum up his whole return to normalcy policy. America's present need is not heroics, but healing. Not nostrums, but normalcy. Not revolutions, but restoration. Not agitation, but adjustment. Not surgery, but serenity. Not the dramatic, but the dispassionate. Not experiment, but equipose. Not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality. With that very appealing promise, Harding went on to win by a great majority in the Electoral College and to gain over 60% of the popular vote, making him only the second person to do so. The 1920 election was also noteworthy for the fact that it was the first time women had the right to vote. Harding, throughout his life, was noted for being very handsome, very strikingly good looking with strong features and a very dignified bearing. Many people felt that it was these good looks that attracted female voters, and the idea of a candidate's gaining popularity based on his looks has since been called the Harding Effect. Throughout his presidency, Harding remained very popular, and he had a high approval rate for a sitting president, but trouble was brewing beneath the surface. Now before we get more into Harding's real presidency, it's interesting to look at what brought him to that point. He was born in 1865 in Ohio, and that state would shape his whole political career, really. For his whole life, when he wasn't in Washington, D.C., he mainly lived in Marion, Ohio, which was a rural community. At that point, the majority of the U.S. population lived in rural areas, many people on farms, so they could relate to Harding's small-town farm background. His father had many professions when Harding was a young boy, including being a farmer, a teacher, and eventually he trained to become a doctor. When Harding was only five years old, the family moved to a different town and his father bought a small newspaper named The Argus. Thus, when Harding was a small boy, he began working alongside his father at the newspaper, and this would begin a lifelong love for and interest in the press, which would serve to be very important in Harding's career. After graduating from high school, Warren Harding went to college, his father's alma And there, he briefly considered studying law, and for a while, in a year or so, he pursued being a schoolteacher or a tax collector like his father, sort of going back and forth on different professions. But while he was at college, he and a friend started a newspaper, and they ran that paper for the college and for the neighboring town. After he graduated from college, he moved to Marion, where his parents were now living, and before long, when he was only 20 years old, he purchased a failing newspaper, The Marion Star, for only $300. But that was a lot of money then, it's about $10,000 now. He raised it with a couple of friends, and the first thing he did was use the railroad pass that came with the newspaper to go to the Republican convention, because he was very eager to get in on the political scene and hobnob with everyone, talk to the other reporters and get in on the ground floor of what was happening with the presidential election and politics. While he was gone, the sheriff seized the newspaper, but he worked to get enough funds to really, with his father's help, reclaim the newspaper and make it his own, and start working on it. Now during that time, from the year 1880 to then 1890 and 1900, the population of Marion went from 4,000 to then 8,000 and eventually 12,000 citizens, and as the population was growing, The Marion Star was able to grow as well. Although it was very fledgling and struggling, it was one of three publications there at the time, and the least successful, but it was a daily, and the only daily. So Harding at this point was already a strong Republican, but he saw benefit in making the daily non-partisan, because although the state of Ohio was basically Republican, as was the city, the county of Marion County was more Democratic, and he didn't want to alienate those people from being readers and supporters. So he made the daily non-partisan, but he published a weekly that was more Republican-leaning, and this allowed him to force the other Republican weekly out of business. Right from the start, Harding used the newspaper to get involved with local politics and to start trading favors. Some things he did, like trading advertising for railroads for free passes for all his family, seems very fair. That's common journalistic practice and the power of the press. But some other things he did as he began to be involved in politics, such as getting his blind sister to be a teacher at a school for the blind when there were more qualified people was more like lobbying, pressure, and nepotism. He quickly got involved in the state's politics and began making inroads with the Republican Party. He became good friends with the prominent senators and the party leaders, the people who never really held offices themselves or hadn't in several years, but who were important in guiding who was elected and what really happened in that party. There was a lot of machine politics at this time. I want to say more in the Republican Party than in the Democratic Party. I'm not sure why that is exactly, but from that first time that 20-year-old Harding used that newspaper railroad pass to get to the convention, he became a delegate for Marion, so he was getting involved in choosing who would be the Republican candidate. One of the most important contacts that Harding made was Harry Daugherty. He had been an elected official himself in earlier years, but by the year 1900 or so, he was mainly a lobbyist, and his main job was to direct the party's affairs. He was immediately impressed by Harding, and he saw that he could be an important candidate at some point, and he commented on seeing him, gee, he would make a fine-looking president. As Harding used the growing population of Marion to build his newspaper, he also helped build the town and the community with his publication while building and bolstering his own political career. He tried to run for governor of Ohio and was never successful in that attempt, but he did end up becoming the lieutenant governor, which was sort of the assistant to the governor, which elevated him to important positions. One of his most powerful traits or moves, you could say, would be that he never did any mudslinging or direct attacking on his opponents. If somebody else was getting a little upset that he was running for a position, he'd step back. He maintained friendships with people who were his opponents, even Democrats. He saw that the two-party system was necessary for the type of government we have, so he didn't have too much of a problem with Democrats, but the one group which he really disagreed politically were Republicans who left the party to join a third party, like when Theodore Roosevelt later did that and opposed William Howard Taft to be in the progressive Bull Moose party. He was very much a party player, and he stuck very close to the party lines, allowing the party and the people in it to dictate his political beliefs rather than strong personal motivations. Eventually, he made his way to the Senate, and he had a successful run there for a while. At this point, by the early 20th century, the Republican Party was becoming quite divided, particularly because of the split between William Howard Taft, who represented conservative Republicans, and Theodore Roosevelt, who tried to run for a third term with his progressive Bull Moose party, and he represented the much more progressive side of the Republican Party. Because of the split, Harding himself could predict, that left it wide open for the Democrats to win at the Ohio state level and at the national level, with President Woodrow Wilson winning the election for president in the year 1912. But at the same time, Harding continued being very involved in politics, and finally, it came around to the 1920 election. He was not in the first choice of Republican candidates, as a matter of fact, it was quite a surprise when he ended up being nominated. There wasn't strong enough support for any of the leaders of the Republican Party, so it was Harry Dougherty, old party machine mover and supporter of Warren Harding, who saw that he could be sort of a tiebreaker, a bit of a dark horse. And after several unsuccessful ballots, there was an all-night smoke-filled room dealing. Now, that's a term that mainly comes from around this time when Warren Harding used the smoke-filled room to make an appointment, and it's referring to the fact that a lot of these men smoked cigars, and they would spend all night in a dimly-lighted room, often doing rather shady deals, deciding who would be the candidate. And it seems shady because at this point, it really became obvious, especially in dealings like this, that it wasn't necessarily a reflection of what the people wanted, or properly elected delegates, it's what certain powerful men wanted to happen for their own causes to advance. It was in Chicago that the Republican convention took place, at the Blackstone Hotel. But after an all-night session in the smoke-filled room, Harding was nominated, and he went on to win the election. He used a front porch campaign, which was still popular at the time, meaning that he would receive callers and guests at his home in Marion, and only invite certain people inside the house for meals or meetings, but instead he would give speeches from the porch. People were very happy with the idea of the return to normalcy that he was going to provide, but behind the scenes, his administration was riddled with corruption. In his cabinet appointments, he made some good ones, such as Herbert Hoover and Charles Evan Hughes, who proved to be upstanding men and good appointments. However, he also made many appointments which were returns for favors for people who had not only helped him get elected in the 1920 election, but had helped him when he was in the Senate, and had helped him when he was Lieutenant Governor, and had been involved with his newspaper. In fact, there were so many of these shady Republican politicians from Ohio that they became known as the Ohio Gang, or sometimes the Harding Gang. The biggest mistake of all was appointing Harry Daugherty as the Attorney General. He gave Daugherty a house in which to run his affairs and house some of his friends, and Daugherty and several other politicians began using this house to run basically every kind of illegal business that they could find. They had a drug ring, they were doing gambling, they were bootlegging, because by this point prohibition was in effect, and a lot of people didn't want to abide by that law, or they saw it as a good opportunity to make money, because people weren't going to just give up drinking. Harding may have been unaware of some of these dealings, nevertheless, they would begin to cause problems for him. Meanwhile, his personal life was also riddled with scandal, because he was currently carrying on an affair with the much younger Nan Britton, who claimed that he fathered her daughter, Elizabeth Ann, and although that daughter refused any kind of DNA testing until her death, it's widely believed that she was indeed his daughter, and the mother, Nan, wrote a very scandalous book called The President's Daughter, which detailed her six-year affair with Harding, but it wasn't published until after his death. That affair continued while he was in the White House, and that was not his first affair. For years, he'd carried on an affair with one of his wife's friends, a married woman, and to keep her quiet, he was paying her and her husband a monthly allowance, at the time he was president, to keep her from spreading stories about them, and he even sent them to Japan to try to keep the stories out of headlines, but while he was running for president, she was attempting to extort him. So people knew about it, to a degree. The biggest scandal of his presidency is the Teapot Dome Scandal. The name is rather ironic, because it sounds like perhaps a tempest in a teapot, but it was in fact named after a natural formation in Wyoming, where there was oil, which was said to resemble a teapot. This oil reserve was national public lands, it was not for private use, yet Albert Fall, who was one of his cabinet members, began selling this oil to private businessmen, to private oil companies, and making a good deal of profit himself. Albert Fall ended up being the only person from the corrupt cabinet who actually went to jail, although he wasn't the only one who was tried. Harry Daugherty did end up being tried. He was tried twice, actually, and it was both times he was a hung jury. They never could quite pinpoint that he had done it, partly because he had lots of people to take the blame for him, including Jess Smith, who was his right-hand man, one of his closest associates. Smith ended up committing suicide in 1923, just as the scandal was beginning to emerge. It was apparently a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but like so many important political figures who have committed suicide recently, many people at the time felt it was not suicide, but murder. Another cabinet member also committed suicide because he was involved in the scandal. To get away from all that scandal, Harding and his wife went on a very ambitious public speaking tour. He was to make 70 speeches all throughout the country and to go to Alaska, which was a territory at the time. This was a long-time desire of Mrs. Harding, who was very eager to see how the resources in Alaska could be sourced. It seemed like a good idea to get out of town and go as far away as possible to Alaska with all these scandals beginning to brew. They made it to Alaska. He was making a lot of speeches, sort of drawing attention away, but the pressure was mounting and he was under a lot of stress at this time. Plus, he had had a heart condition for many years. In fact, Harding had always been a rather sensitive man. During his earlier newspaper career, he was committed to a sanitarium five separate times, the first time being when he was only 23, for nervous breakdowns, stress, and nervous conditions, which could at the time have been some kind of actually a physical problem, like a heart murmur or mini strokes, or it could have just been a psychological or nervous strain. Be that as it may, when they ended up in San Francisco, Harding became very ill. At first, it was considered food poisoning, but he did not recover and he soon died. Some historians believe it was a stroke, others say it was a heart attack. But Mrs. Harding had him buried very quickly without an autopsy, which led many people to say that she had had him killed or had killed him herself. This theory was described first in great detail in a book written by Gaston Means, who interestingly had been hired earlier by Mrs. Harding herself to keep an eye on the affair between her husband and one of his numerous mistresses. This book was published after they both died, though. Thus, Warren Harding died in 1923, only two years into his presidency. Perhaps he could have accomplished a lot more, but perhaps he avoided having to live up to a lot of the problems he had begun through his shoddy and very scandalous appointments. He may have even faced impeachment had he not died. So in a way, it was a bit of a strange blessing for him to die when he was still popular, when people still liked him. Since his death, he's been regarded very unfavorably by historians and often regarded as one of the worst presidents because of his corruption, both politically and personally. Harding bears the distinction of being the only president to be elected when he was a sitting senator. It's very easy to see a lot of fault with some of the things that Harding did while he was in office. But he did make some important contributions to the national welfare, and he also began a period of prosperity economically for the United States. He helped the country as it was recovering from World War I, and he also demonstrated some very fair views. He was the first president to give a speech on racial equality in the South since the Civil War, when he made a speech in Alabama after he was awarded an honorary doctorate from a university there. This was a big step forward in terms of racial equality. Ultimately, I think that Warren Harding was one of several presidents who never would have made it to the White House without the support and, dare I say, pushing of his wife and other political masterminds like Harry Dougherty. Without their support and prodding, he didn't quite have the initiative to make as much of his newspaper or his political career as he did. And I think that's why he really was, deep down, a bit of a weak man. And he probably struggled with feelings of inadequacy and not really being up to the job, and so he turned to vices like corruption in affairs, drinking, gambling. He certainly has the bad reputation of running the White House like a speakeasy, since he would have poker games fueled with gallons of illegal alcohol in which he would make deals. And according to one story, which hasn't been proven, he may have lost the White House China in a poker game. But be that as it may, he was a very popular president, which is more than you can say for a lot of other presidents. Many quotes from Warren Harding are either a bit self-deprecating or reflective of the fact that he didn't have that strong of political views. He knew how to say good rhetoric, and thus to be popular. But he did say a few things that are worth remembering. For instance, he said, 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. He also said, the success of our popular government rests wholly upon the correct interpretation of the deliberate, intelligent, dependable popular will of America. Finally, he said, treat your friend as if he will one day be your enemy, and your enemy as if he will one day be your friend. That's a rather cynical, conspiratorial quote, which again I think reflects how he built his whole career on favors and favoritism and how, sort of like, keep your friends closer and your enemies closer. But he did end up trying to stay friends with everyone, which shows that he really wasn't a man of high convictions. The presidents who were men of very high convictions made enemies right and left, because if you really try to stand true to your beliefs and fight for them, especially in politics, you're going to make a lot of enemies. Some have said that what McKinley did in terms of making the United States a very powerful international body, Harding undid by focusing on nationality, and he wasn't as friendly with other nations. But any study of the Roaring Twenties and politics of this era, particularly about Prohibition, are incomplete without reading more about Warren Harding and the interesting role he played in ushering in a very controversial, exciting, and wild time in American history. Whether good or bad, he played an important role. Thank you for watching, and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.