Really Cool Stuff about Warren Harding
1. Warren’s wife, Florence Kling, had a baby out of wedlock which was quite shocking back in that time period. “Six months after they [Florence and her baby daddy] eloped to Columbus in 1880 (they never married), their son was born” (p. 16).
2. One of the slurs against Harding was that he was of African descent. “Harding had been dealing with the false accusation of African ancestry since childhood. Such rumors would later be whispered during all his Ohio political campaigns, and they would surface nationally during his 1920 run for the White House” (p. 19).
3. The Republicans, in the Ohio Senate, abolished their one-term rule because they liked Harding so much. They decided that he must have a second term.
4. For the 1912 election it was Harding who put Taft’s name up for nomination at the convention.
5. In a bold political move, Harding hired an advertising agency to promote his presidential campaign in 1920. “Indeed, Lasker introduced many of the advertising and public relations techniques that have become the norm in political campaigns” (p. 69).
6. Al Jolson, a popular entertainer, wrote a song for Harding’s campaign. “Daily he met visitors to Marion: traveling salesmen, women’s groups, the Chicago Cubs, governors, congressmen, senators, and even a Hollywood contingent led by Al Jolson, who serenaded Harding with a song he’d written for the occasion” (p. 72).
7. Florence Harding voted in the 1920 election. “Senator Harding and his wife were driven to the polls, where Florence became the first wife to vote for her husband as president” (p. 76).
8. Harding won the largest landslide victory in Republican history in 1920.
9. This was the first time that an active member of the Senate was also the president-elect of the United States. “Lodge, noting that this was the first time an active member of the Senate had been elected president, requested that Harding be given permission to address his colleagues from the chair” (p. 80).
10. Harding was the first in history to broadcast his inaugural address. “His inaugural address was the first ever to electronically amplified for the assembled crowd, as well as broadcast via radio throughout the country and around the world” (p. 95).
11. Harding allowed his vice president, Coolidge, to join cabinet meetings. “Another precedent Harding set was the make his vice president a member of his cabinet. This decision later resulted in a nearly seamless transition of power following Harding’s death” (p. 98).
12. Harding was the first president to visit Alaska.
13. Albert Fall, indicted under the Teapot Dome scandal, was the first cabinet officer to go to prison. "Fall was convicted in 1931 and became the first former cabinet officer to go to prison, where he served some nine months” (p. 160).
“Warren G. Harding is best known as America’s worst president” (p. 1). Daaaammmnnn! This is the first sentence of the entire book and it made me extremely interested to continuing my reading on Warren Harding. And I was not disappointed. Dean, the author, takes several pages to record the various rumors still swirling around Marion, OH about the 29th president. Awesome! People still discus his wife’s scandalous behavior, his affairs, and his presidential scandals. I love this stuff.
Dean does a great job with presenting both the good and not-so-good sides of Harding’s character. Harding was a master networker but he also gave speeches that used over-the-top language which he called bloviating. In fact, Dean quotes H.L Mencken, a popular writer of the time. “H.L. Mencken cringed at Harding’s speechifying: ‘It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washings on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of a dark abysm…of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash’” (p. 73).
Dean also tackles the fact that Harding, who was so popular when he was elected, is now considered one of the worst presidents in history. “Few presidents have fallen from adulation to excoriation as fast as Harding did after his death in office on August 2, 1923…While in office, Harding had his critics, as do all presidents, but few presidents have experienced the unrequited attacks and reprisals visited on one of the most kindly men to every occupy the Oval Office. It hasn’t been pretty” (p. 3-4). Dean attributes this fall from grace to the posthumous information that people published about the Harding administration and this was directly related to the scandals of his presidency. “Harding’s reputation became inseparable from the bad apples in his administration. Their disgrace became his disgrace…It was not the headlines or news accounts that hurt Harding. Rather, the cultural tastemakers and political writers who later played up these stories set the stage for Harding’s descent into history’s dustbin” (p. 160-61).
With presidents that die in office there is always a ‘what-if’ scenario involved and it makes historians go bat-shit crazy over stuff like this. Getting into a game of what-ifs—if you’re a historian—can be dangerous because speculation like that has no end and is therefore very tantalizing. What-ifs are like catnip to historical authors. I swear. Well this author is no different. Dean falls into this trap as well. Classic. Except for the fact that he doesn’t even bother to speculate on whether Harding would have been a better president or not had he lived. No. He goes all the way back to Harding’s senate days to conjecture on what could have happened. “Had he stayed in the Senate, he might have both lived longer and had an illustrious Senate career” (p. 44). I wonder.
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