American History Hit
President Warren G. Harding: Scandals, Affairs & Cabinet Selections
21 Nov 2024
Despite dying as one of the most popular presidents in history, the 29th Commander-in-Chief has been consistently ranked one of the worst of the American Presidents.What caused this fall from grace? From the Teapot Dome Scandal to the Veterans Bureau Scandal, to the several extramarital affairs that Harding had, much has muddied Harding's name. But what of women's, civil and worker's rights?Don is joined by Jason Roberts, Professor of History at Quincy College in Massachusetts. Jason is an expert in politics of the 1920s and is currently working on the foreign policies of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, in particular their handling of Lenin’s Russia.Produced by Freddy Chick. Edited by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 Media.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
Full Episode
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.
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