What do I know about Warren Gamaliel Harding? Mm….he’s the “return to normalcy” president, he pardoned Eugene Debs whom Wilson had put in jail for daring to criticize him, there was a huge scandal in his administration, and he died in office and made Calvin Coolidge the answer to an obscure trivia question. (What president was sworn in by his father?). So, with that ignorance in mind, let’s read John Dean’s biography.

Wait. John Dean? The John Dean? Well, I suppose he’d know a thing or two about presidents falling from grace because of scurrilous subordinates. Warren Harding is the total opposite of that contemptible schmuck who did the Millard Fillmore biography: whereas they wanted to assassinate Fillmore’s character posthumously, Dean wants to appraise Harding and argue that he’s been very much abused by history. Harding appears from the start to be a good man, marrying a woman who had had a child out of wedlock despite how out-of-bounds that would have been at the time. This is an odd biography to read because its subject is so very undramatic: he’s no severe idealist like Wilson, or a bounding adventurer like Teddy Roosevelt; he’s Mr. Warren, sittin’ on the porch, and why don’t you come sit a spell? The lemonade is nice and cool. That’s not being facetious: when Harding was campaigning for presidency, he did a front-porch campaign in which journalists lived in a little cottage in the backyard. The main thrust of this book is that Harding was an ordinary, strikingly decent man who made some poor staffing decisions and found himself libeled for decades because of it. We find him constantly striking to lower the temperature in the United States — not an easy thing to do given the labor unrest in the US as the economy tried to adjust back after Wilson’s war. His presidency, save for the scandal, was not shaping up to be dramatic: Dean believes Harding saw himself as a steward with a charge to keep, one who did his best to organize government operations for more efficiency( like creating a budget office) and hiring competent specialists to manage things. That did not mean he was a tender-heart: he vetoed the Bonus Bill which would have engorged the debt by giving returning veterans large bonuses on top of the benefits (insurance, occupational training) they were already getting, and he took action to break a coal strike as winter approached when the two sides could not come to an agreement.

One thing I learned from this book (beyond Harding buying a newspaper when he was 19 for $300) was that Harding did not fall from grace until he’d already fallen away — he died just two years into his presidency. His health had been failing since a bad bout with the flu, made worse by his insane work ethic and stress from finding out that the head of the Veterans Bureau was selling government goods on the cheap and falsifying records to cover it up. A train trip west appeared to be restoring him to health despite excitement like being sung to by young ladies. Dean paints a picture of a nation heartbroken by the sudden death of a good man growing in his administrative skills, whose character was assassinated after his death because of a scandal that emerged only in the Coolidge years. Harding had signed off on giving the Navy permission to lease some of its oilfields to a commercial interest, and the nation soon learned that a lot more was being leased out than authorized, with chicanery across the board. Dean does not believe Harding was culpable in any of this. Personally, I expect to read more about the Teapot Dome scandal in a Coolidge biography, so for now I will withhold judgement.

This was a truly enjoyable biography; I admire decent men like Ford and Carter who did their best in an overmighty office, and I think Harding is among their number. I must say, I’m glad to have met Mr. Harding. Perhaps I’ll visit his front porch again. (I’m afraid Mssrs. Debs and Bryan are calling for my attention, and Alice Roosevelt is demanding it, but we shall see. Truman and Eisenhower are glaring at one another in another part of the room, and then LBJ waits in the shadows, smug in the knowledge that I will find him far more interesting than I’d like.)

Quotations

 Harris says his roommate would “sit down with his face to the wall, head in hands and soak [a subject] up. Then when he was through, he would jump up with a yell and shout, ‘Now, darn it, I’ve got you,’ and slam the book against the wall.”

The idea of owning and running the newspaper appealed greatly to the nineteen-year-old looking for work. But even with the help of his friend Jack Warwick, who was interested in joining him, they didn’t have the $300 necessary to make the acquisition.

In the three decades that Harding edited the daily and weekly Star, he wrote thousands of editorials. Seldom heavy-handed or malevolent, his editorials were often witty, provocative, and thoughtful. But there was one subject—more specifically, one man—whom Harding attacked relentlessly in his early years at the Star: the rent-gouging, real estate grabbing, hard-nosed, and heartless money-lending Amos H. Kling, Marion’s richest citizen, and, as it turned out, Harding’s future father-in-law.

Those who knew Florence Kling believe that her affair, and pregnancy, with Henry Atherton “Pete” De Wolfe was an act of defiance toward her father. Pete De Wolfe, a sandy-haired, hell-raising neighborhood boy from one of Marion’s oldest families, lived across the street and was one year her senior. His only distinction was Marion’s youngest drunk.

“[We must] make sure our own house is in perfect order before we attempt the miracle of Old World stabilization. Call it selfishness or nationality if you will, I think it an inspiration to patriotic devotion—to safeguard America first, to stabilize America first, to prosper America first, to think of America first, to exalt America first, to live for and revere America first.” – Warren G. Harding

Harding gave newsmen special attention when they came to Marion for his front-porch campaign. To accommodate them, he had a special bungalow built near the rear of his property on Mount Vernon Avenue. Reportedly, once or twice a day Harding visited the press quarters to “greet them personally by name, borrow a plug of tobacco or a stogie, and … answer all [their] questions in a friendly way, without evasion … . He was ready to pitch horseshoes or exchange stories off the cuff with almost all reporters; and by relying on their discretion and that of their editors, he kept an intimacy with them that made them friendly to him.”

“Mr. President, that’s no way to answer us,” she announced. “We demand a yes-or-no answer now!” William Allen White, no fan of Harding’s (as he later made clear), recorded the event: “We were shocked … . But the President straightened himself up. The stoop seemed to come out of his shoulders. A certain dignity enveloped him. He said: ‘My dear woman, you may demand anything you please out of Warren Harding. He will not resent it. But the President of the United States has the right to keep his own counsel, and the office I occupy forbids me to reply to you as I should like to do if I were elsewhere!’”

In September 13, the newspapers were told the crisis had passed and soon Dr. Mayo went home. Later, Florence Harding described her near-death experience. She had seen her father Amos and other dead relatives, and walked through the “valley of death,” as she described it. “There is one thing that counts when you are down in the Valley,” she had decided, and that was: “What have you done for human beings? … How much have you done for … those you love?”

By the time the party reached Yellowstone National Park, Harding was in fine spirits. He was feeling too good for Florence, who gave the public a glimpse into their marriage when she publicly scolded him. The presidential party was departing from Yellowstone when a flock of attractive females stopped the president’s car so they could give him flowers and a serenade. Secret Service agents tried to pry the young women from the running boards of the open car, but the president ordered that the women could sing another song. When the party started to leave, the president suggested they return later, which pushed the matter too far for the Duchess. Florence lit into her husband: “Warren, I watched you while those girls were here! It took you just as long to say good-bye to those girls as it did for you to run through three thousand tourists yesterday at Old Faithful.