Warren Harding: A Sinner in the Hands of Angry Progressives

Mainstream historical “memory”—profoundly influenced by post-New Deal progressive interpretation—treats Warren G. Harding as corrupt and negligent, inactive, primitive, lucky, or irrelevant relative to the economic recovery during his presidency. In reality, Harding’s policy during the “forgotten depression” of 1920-21 is arguably the closest the US ever came to an Austrian correction of a wartime-distorted economy. Similar to Hoover, Warren Harding is another example of a president falsely and retroactively turned into an anti-Roosevelt foil by progressive historians in order to contrast him against FDR’s supposed greatness.

When considering the treatment of Harding and Hoover in the historical “memory,” the supreme irony is that Harding’s “inaction” against the depression led to successful recovery and Hoover’s unsuccessful interventions were recast as inaction. In the historical memory shaped by Progressive and New Deal historians, Harding and Hoover became mirror images of their actual policies. Harding’s refusal to intervene in the 1920-21 depression—an approach that produced one of the swiftest recoveries in US economic history—was recast as naïve inaction, while Hoover’s aggressive interventions during the early 1930s were mythologized as “do-nothing” passivity. This inversion was not accidental; it was necessary to vindicate the expanding state and justify the New Deal revolution and FDR.

Mythologizing Harding—Debunking the “Debunkers”

In The Harding Era (1969) by Robert K. Murray—a work that demonstrates how historians exaggerated or invented Harding’s incompetence and corruption—makes the following stunning statement, “Except for Washington and Lincoln, no American president has been surrounded by as many myths, as much misunderstanding, and as many inaccuracies as Harding.”

We can probably easily understand the mythologies surrounding Washington and Lincoln. Washington and Lincoln are perhaps the most famous American presidents and two of the most famous Americans in general. Though it does not serve the truth or historical accuracy, we can probably see why positive, but inaccurate, folklore surrounded Washington and Lincoln and why much of it came to be misunderstood as fact. But who would have thought that the next most mythologized president would be Warren Harding? In fact, Murray cited an ironic August 1923 epitaph about Harding from the Outlook, “Among American Presidents Harding will be one of the least misunderstood. No myth will obscure his personality.”

Prior to Richard Nixon, Harding was one of the most demonized presidents. Whereas Washington and Lincoln were positively mythologized, Harding was negatively mythologized. In the Amazon description of Phillip G. Payne’s Dead Last: The Public Memory of Warren G. Harding (2008), which challenges the typical narrative, we read, “If George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are the saints in America’s civil religion, then the twenty-ninth president, Warren G. Harding, is our sinner.” While perhaps not sufficient to explain the unique tarnishing of Harding’s reputation in public memory, he serves as a potent example of a “sinner” in the hands of angry progressives. Just as much as FDR, Harding serves as a key part of progressive historical interpretation—a negative morality tale of the pre-New Deal days and an anti-FDR foil.

Further reinforcing contributors to Harding’s post-death reputation included sensationalized journalism that involved political opponents, disgruntled insiders, gossip columnists, and early tabloids, along with academic gate-keeping that cemented the narratives in training of historians, writing of history books, textbooks, and schools. Historian Paul Johnson, in his A History of the American People, wrote, “The deconstruction of the real Harding and his reconstruction as a crook, a philanderer, and a sleazy no-good was an exemplary exercise in false historiography.”

Part of this was due to the tradition of so-called “debunking.” In US history and political tradition, following the bold and often-inaccurate claims of politicians, especially presidents, many writers engaged in “debunking.” This basically entailed humorously demonstrating some of the absurd claims of politicians after the fact, however, according to Robert H. Ferrell in The Strange Death of President Harding (1996), this practice took a more nasty turn,

But in the 1920s debunking turned away from humor and became almost savage—inspired by the end of the Progressive Era, of which so much had been expected during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, and by the revulsion against the world war that came suddenly with the war’s end and then the defeat of the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles by the largely Republican members of the Senate and by, for he was himself the coarchitect of his creation’s defeat, Woodrow Wilson.

Ironically, in Harding’s case, debunking—exposure of the falsity of a myth, idea, or belief, or to reduce an inflated reputation, especially by ridicule—actually replaced truth with myths. In other words, in the name of correcting the record, a new false record was being created. Perhaps this should be called bunking or rebunking. In terms of the early historical analyses of Harding from the 1920s, Ferrell wrote, “Theirs clearly were preliminary analyses. But for years after 1923 they were the only analyses.” This meant that much of the early and only history concerning Harding for decades was exaggerated and fabricated “with no real effort to search out the truth.”

The “Rebunking” Process

As far as how this process took place, if an extended quote can be allowed, Paul Johnson’s explanation about Harding historiography is probably one of the simplest overviews. In four paragraphs he explains the following:

It began in 1924 with a series of articles in the New Republic by its imaginative and violently anti-business editor, Bruce Bliven. He created the myth that the Ohio Gang, run by Daugherty, had deliberately recruited Harding in 1912 as a front man as part of a long-term conspiracy to hand over America to Andrew Mellon and Big Business. It now seems there was no evidence whatsoever for this invention, and it is not surprising that Bliven went on, in the 1930s, to become a credulous propagandist for the Communist-run Popular Front. Then in 1926, a novel, Revelry, describes a guilty president who poisons himself to escape scandals and exposure. It took in the disapproving Hoover, who always thought he would have made a better president than Harding. He read it in manuscript and told a friend it described “many things which are not known.”

The novel’s success in turn prompted Nan Britton, an Ohio girl, daughter of a Marion doctor, to publish in 1927 The President’s Daughter, asserting she had had a baby girl by Harding in 1919 [which turned out to be probably true]. She claimed that she had been seduced in Harding’s then office in the Senate, and that their affair continued, Harding writing her many letters. Even at the time she failed to produce these incriminating letters. Recent research has established that she was the local “fast” girl, whose embarrassing crush on Harding had led to trouble for the unsuspecting man—including blackmail—though it is likely he was unable completely to resist his “stalker.” The child did exist, but the father may have been one of many men, and Britton’s descriptions of later hotel assignations with Harding have been disproved by research into hotel registers.

The attacks on Harding continued with the publication in 1928 of Masks in a Pageant by the inventive William Allen White, who repeated the conspiracy theory in this book and again, ten years later, in his “life” of Coolidge, A Puritan in Babylon. In 1930 a former FBI agent, Gaston Means, produced the bestselling The Strange Death of President Harding, portraying wholly imaginary drunken orgies with chorus girls at the K Street house, with Harding prominent in the “action.” The book has now been shown to be a catalog of ghostwritten lies. Equally damaging was the 1933 memoir by TR’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Crowded Hours, which presented Harding’s White House as a speakeasy: “The air heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey stood about, cards and poker chips ready at hand—a general atmosphere of waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on the desk and the spittoon alongside… Harding was not a bad man. He was just a slob.” It now emerges that Mrs. Longworth, notorious for her sharp tongue and amusing esprit d’escalier, bitterly resented the fact that Harding, rather than her bibulous husband, Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth, got to the White House.

To cap it all, an apparently careful work of research by a New York Post writer, Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Incredible Era: the Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding (1939), welded together all the inventions and myths, plus a few fibs of his own, into a solid orthodoxy. By this time, the notion of Harding as the demon king of the Golden Calf Era had become the received version of events not only in popular books like Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday but in standard academic history—though even in that category some reputable scholars, like Allan Nevins, have now been shown to have had personal scores to settle against Harding. When in 1964 the Harding Papers (which had not been burned, as alleged) were opened to scholars, no truth at all was found in any of the myths, though it emerged that Harding, a pathetically shy man with women, had had a sad and touching friendship with the wife of a Marion store-owner before his presidency. The Babylonian image was a fantasy, and in all essentials Harding had been an honest and shrewd president, prevented by his early death from overwork from becoming, perhaps, a great one. The experience should encourage the historian to look more closely at other accepted presidential myths.

Conclusion

Warren Harding was hardly a perfect president and there are legitimate areas of criticism against him. That said, he serves as an important reminder of the political nature of historical interpretation. With the existence of the political state, especially one that leans “democratic,” the political caste has a special need for propaganda through willing accomplices in education and other media. While Rothbard was speaking of war in the following quote, his words also apply to propagandistic history,

…the only real difference between a democracy and a dictatorship on making war is that in the former more propaganda must be beamed at one’s subjects to engineer their approval…. So in democratic States, the art of propagandizing their subjects must be a bit more sophisticated and refined. But this, as we have seen, is true of all governmental decisions, not just war or peace. For all governments—but especially democratic governments—must work hard at persuading their subjects that all of their deeds of oppression are really in their subjects’ best interests.

Warren Harding provides a case for how lies and myths—in the name of the truth—can be centralized and become the dominant narrative for generations, shaping views on policy.