There’s been loose talk about Bill Clinton’s allegedly scandalous presidency. Bill bashers, chill out. He doesn’t come close to the ever-curious Warren G. Harding, as the July-August American Heritage reminds.
Inevitably, the Ohioan shows up at or near the bottom of most polls of U.S. presidents. One inevitably reads about his Ohio cronies who plundered the government (his Veterans Bureau chief, for one, got ample kickbacks from hospital building contracts), his pursuit of various mistresses and the Teapot Dome debacle, all of which justifiably contribute to an awful reputation.
But the magazine’s Harding dissection, by Carl Sferrazza Anthony, is downright sympathetic to the 29th president. Having researched and written a book on Harding’s wife, Florence, Anthony moved far past an initial interest in why so many Americans were grief-stricken upon his death, concluding that he has actually gotten a bum rap.
Was he really more than the amiable fool?
“As I delved further into the Harding archives, I kept finding evidence of a more positive side to this administration,” Anthony writes. He realized that Harding did make certain stellar appointments, convened the first global peace summit, created the Bureau of the Budget and made a “strikingly progressive attempt to change mainstream white America’s attitude toward minorities.”
To that latter end, Harding made the first high-profile presidential appointment of a Jew, Albert Lasker, to run the Shipping Board, and candidly discussed civil rights in an Oct. 26, 1921 speech in Birmingham, Ala., “stating that democracy would always be a sham until African-Americans received full equality in education, employment, and political life.”
He chagrined Southern white Republicans by proposing an anti-lynching bill, though he bowed to his party by not appointing blacks to significant federal posts (Democratic filibusters killed off both his plans for an anti-lynching statute and an interracial commission to improve race relations).
And “no president until FDR welcomed women more strongly into politics–or more firmly defended their interests.” In 1921 he rebuffed the medical lobby, states’ rights advocates and congressional conservatives by signing an act which provided funding and federal oversight for infant mortality and other state health care programs for women and children.
In this era in which many Republicans tend to target unions for special abuse, Harding supported the right to bargain collectively and argued for ending the 12-hour workday and six-day workweek.
Anthony concludes with the admission that, yes, Harding is seen as a dismal failure. But he wonders if his 29-month tenure was really and truly worse than that of some others, such as Calvin Coolidge.
In what you still see as inadvertently damning with faint praise, he writes, “Harding seems at least as competent as Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, John Tyler, Martin Van Buren, and William and Benjamin Harrison, all of whom historians ranks above him.”
“Warren Harding doesn’t deserve to be rated America’s worst President–even if he was our most scandalous.”
Quickly: An at times lively debate in June 23 Advocate turns on the question of whether monogamous gay and lesbian couples are “slavishly imitating the customs of straight marriage,” or just wonderfully romantic or, maybe, certifiably nuts. . . . August Mother Jones continues its provocative reporting on a coalition of Big Business and religious groups that have effectively weakened legislation to impose trade sanctions on any country that oppresses religious minorities. “What may appear as `persecution’ may in fact be the wish to preserve authentic religious and cultural traditions,” says a National Council of Churches official.
