Warren Harding: The Least Appreciated President
Warren Harding is not regarded as one of our most successful presidents. He’s more likely to be remembered for his scandals than his accomplishments. But given the problems he had to confront — massive war debt, high unemployment, and skyrocketing inflation — is this harsh appraisal fair? Renowned historian Amity Shlaes takes a fresh look at our 29th president.
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Script:
Sometimes a president who appears pathetic is actually just plain tragic. And because he is a president, his tragedy is also the nation’s.
That was the case of Warren Harding, the 29th president of the United States.
Harding was perhaps the most misunderstood and least appreciated of all America’s chief executives.
Born in 1865 in a small Ohio town halfway between Cleveland and Columbus, Harding was a brave and unusual politician.
He didn’t start as a politician. He spent most of his life as the editor and publisher of an Ohio newspaper, the Marion Star. Harding ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1910 and then successfully for senator in 1914.
In the presidential election year of 1920, Harding was considered a dark horse at best. but he emerged after 10 ballots as the Republicans’ choice. He certainly looked and even acted the part. tall, with thick white hair and deep, penetrating eyes, Harding was as genial as he was handsome. To know him was to like him.
And Americans did like him. He won the 1920 election in a landslide, garnering an astonishing 60% of the popular vote.
The country that Warren Harding and his running mate Calvin Coolidge inherited faced multiple crises.
To win World War I, the government had taken over large sectors of the economy.
But what works in war, doesn’t always work in peace.
There was an inflation crisis:
Prices for basic necessities like milk and butter rose at alarming rates. Prices that businesses paid for materials doubled.
There was a tax crisis: Corporate taxes were so heavy that businesses couldn’t expand.
There was a labor crisis: Tens of thousands of Americans, many disabled, returned from Europe to find a stagnant economy short of jobs.
Angry workers mounted violent strikes.
And, there was a government debt crisis, a result of war spending.
By 1920, it seemed that life in crisis was the new normal.
Absolutely not, said Harding.
Harding vowed to end the war laws and rules, to let the country go back to the way things were before the war.
He wanted commonsense life, the kind that had enabled Henry Ford to start his auto business.
“America’s present need,” Harding said, “is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy…”
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