President Warren G. Harding: Scandals, Affairs & Cabinet Selections
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What significant events marked Warren G. Harding's presidency?
It's Christmas Day 1921. At a federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, a burst of cheers rises from the inmates. Convict number 9653 is being released just three years into his 10-year sentence. The 64-year-old Eugene V. Debs raises his hat and cane in response to the ovation. Then he turns, setting off through the prison gates, towards a gaggle of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameras, and the freedom, he says, to continue a fight for his principles, conviction, and ideals. But before all that can start, he'll need to stop off in Washington, D.C. He's been summoned to the White House. Having won 3.5% of the vote in the recent election, Debs, who ran a presidential campaign from his prison cell, has been invited to the Capitol to greet his victorious opponent, a man who has commuted not just Debs' sentence, but those as well of 23 other prisoners convicted under the Sedition Act.
So begins his journey from prison to the Oval Office to meet a man Debs will later call a kind gentleman with humane impulses. Warren G. Hardy, the 28th President of the United States. The Oval Office Hello there. This is American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman, and thanks for joining us. It has been a while since we've revisited our sequential series on the American presidents. We took a pause for election histories this last month with a certain presidential contest hanging in our balance. But today we're back with a tale of our 29th chief executive, President Warren G. Harding of Ohio. In the election of 1920, Harding would be the man to return the American people to normalcy, or so his slogan proclaimed.
Harding was a pro-business, conservative values Republican who had a winning demeanor and refined good looks that presented well. He was also, by most accounts, very concerned with his own popularity. He liked to be liked. Nonetheless, historians generally view his administration poorly, rife with scandal and corruption, and featuring a loss of public trust that prompted the president to hit the road in a doomed endeavor to try to win back the people's goodwill. But as we learn on every episode on this podcast, about presidents or otherwise, history is never as simple as we may choose to believe. There is much about Harding's abbreviated term in the White House that deserves reconsideration, if not revision. Indeed, he was a man beloved by those around him. That much worked out for him, at least. He was mourned by millions when he died in office. Spoiler alert.
And importantly, Harding demonstrated and publicly expressed profound and meaningful values that challenged norms and had a real impact on a modernizing American society. So let's understand this complicated man, this president, guided by Professor Jason Roberts. who teaches history at Quincy College in Massachusetts. An expert in U.S. politics of the 1920s, he is currently working on the foreign policies of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, as pertains especially to Lenin's Russia. Great stuff. Hello, Jason. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. The rankings typically put Warren Harding at bottom, scathing reviews, worst chief executive in U.S. history, New York Times. But for me, it's not so simple.
How did Warren G. Harding's personal affairs influence public perception?
I mean, there seems to be a sort of tragic tone to his presidency. Do you agree? There's many dimensions to this conversation, aren't there?
Yes, definitely in many dimensions. I do think he's more complicated than people realize. And while I think the scandals are relevant and the scandals did happen, I think they overshadow other aspects of Warren G. Harding's presidency. And while I would not put him on Mount Rushmore by any means, I think he did have his fair share of accomplishments. that I think don't always get the coverage they deserve.
This is one of these conversations, I think, that a podcast like this was made for because there really is a lot of stuff that people don't really understand where there's a lot of headlines as well that sort of make it, you know, filter down through history as the things that happened, and indeed they did.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What significant events marked Warren G. Harding's presidency?
0:01–3:44
2
How did Warren G. Harding's personal affairs influence public perception?
3:44–4:55
3
What were the major scandals during Harding's administration?
4:55–9:52
4
What role did Florence Harding play in Warren G. Harding's life?
9:52–14:51
5
How did Harding's cabinet selections impact his presidency?
14:51–19:21
6
What was the social and political climate in America during Harding's election?
19:21–25:51
7
How did Harding's administration address civil and workers' rights?
25:51–31:53
8
What legacy did Warren G. Harding leave behind?
31:53–44:16