Jason Roberts
speaker
73 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 15 Jun
Jason Roberts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And so people who knew her said, like, from the time she was a little girl, she had this, like, obsession with Warren G. Harding. So I'm sure it must have been flattering to him. Like, you know, wow, like, this girl, like, she loves me. You know, she's obsessed with me.
So I think there's some circumstantial evidence that eventually she did find out about. Warren G. Harding and Carrie Phillips. And I think there's some accounts that even talk about a confrontation or an argument between Carrie Phillips and Florence Harding. And I think there was like a diary that she kept where there's allusions to basically her talking about the infidelity of husbands.
So she's not, I think she's not directly saying, oh, you know, my husband, Warren G. Harding, had an affair, but basically talking about how like, oh, you know, men aren't perfect and men do have these affairs. But, yeah, the relationship, I think, between Warren G. Harding and Florence Harding is very interesting.
And I think historians try to wrap their heads around it because, you know, he's this, like, charming, good-looking guy. And, you know, she's five years older, and she looks much older than that. And so I think there's people who say, like, what's the attraction? What's the chemistry? Sure. And I think at some level... They did share a common bond. They did share a love of politics.
Florence Harding, I think for her time, was very much a political activist. She supported women's rights, prisoners' rights, animal rights. She championed disabled veterans. So I think in many ways, She is kind of the precursor to Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. You know, he sees her as a valued political partner.
And I think Harding, on some level, he cared about her. He was very fond of her. And I think it is telling that he doesn't leave Florence Harding for Carrie Phillips, even though she's repeatedly demanding, like, I want you to leave her. And he doesn't. So...
You know, is it political calculation like, oh, you know, if I end this relationship and I marry my mistress, that's the end of my political career? Or is it just at some level? It's like he really did care for Florence Harding.
And, you know, maybe emotionally and psychologically, she provided him with a level of stability that Carrie Phillips, as much as I think he did love her, she could not provide.
So she lives another year and she'd always had these kidney issues. I think she had a kidney removed and the other kidney was like often getting infected. And she almost actually died in the White House at one point. She was bedridden for months with a kidney infection and pulled through. So she lived another year and two months and then I think ultimately died from Lowe's. kidney problems.
So it's unfortunate because it would have been interesting to see how she would have responded, you know, to the NAM Britain allegations and the other scandals.
I think in many ways he was the right man for the time, or at least he was the right man that I think people were looking for. at that time, after eight years of Wilson, after the First World War. And I think what people forget is just how much of a mess the country was in going into the 1920 election.
So, you know, you go back 1918, 1919, you know, 1918, you know, the end of the war, you have a flu epidemic that kills over 700,000 Americans, I think 100 million or so people worldwide. You have Woodrow Wilson not prepared for the end of the war. So he really had no plans for converting the economy back to a peacetime economy.
And then when all these like wartime contracts are, you know, canceled, you know, it's chaos. We have a post-war depression. I mean, at one point, like inflation is through the roof. We have labor strikes all over the country. We have anarchists setting off bombs.
And then kind of the most historians would say the excessive counter reaction, you know, was a Mitchell Palmer's Red Scare where we're just going to round up people and arrest them with little or no evidence. And it turns out most of the people he arrested died. weren't terrorists, weren't anarchists. You have race riots throughout the country in 1918, 1919.
And this is the period where, you know, you're seeing the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings are on the rise. So it was, I mean, it was a really unstable, chaotic period. Business people weren't happy. Workers weren't happy. Farmers weren't happy. No one's really, you know, happy. And also you have Woodrow Wilson for... the last year and a half of his presidency, he's basically AWOL.
I mean, he has a series of strokes and he's incapacitated. I mean, he's president in name only. So the government, I mean, basically grounds to a halt.
Yeah. I mean, Harding was, you know, he's basically trying to win an election and he knows people are upset over these issues. So he's trying to say, I'm going to take you back to a better time before Wilson, before the Great War. But I think the appeal of Harding was, you know, he wasn't a rabble rouser. He wasn't a demagogue. Interestingly enough, he never attacked Woodrow Wilson personally.
And people around him said, go after him. go after the fact that he's AWOL, he's an invalid, attack him personally. And at one point, Harding says to the people around him, if you think I'm going to become president stepping over the broken body of Woodrow Wilson, you've got the wrong man. I will disagree with him on policy, but I will not attack him personally.
And I think people really like that about Harding. And it is kind of appealing today that
So Teapot Dome, it happens during his presidency. So Teapot Dome was an oil reserve in Wyoming controlled by the federal government. Originally, the Navy Department controlled it. And then Albert Fall, the Secretary of Interior controlled. convinces Edwin Denby, the Navy Secretary, to basically transfer authority over to the Interior Department. And Harding signs off on this.
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