{"id":15064,"date":"2018-06-07T09:00:18","date_gmt":"2018-06-07T13:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/museumhack.com\/?p=15064"},"modified":"2022-11-20T00:38:49","modified_gmt":"2022-11-20T05:38:49","slug":"warren-harding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/museumhack.com\/warren-harding\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Heck Did Warren Harding Do?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What the heck did Warren Harding<\/strong> do? Man, that\u2019s a good question, and there are different answers, depending on what we\u2019re after. Are we talking about what he did to win the presidency? His legislative achievements while in office? Or are we asking what he did to deserve his reputation as the worst president in American history?<\/p>\n

Yeah, it\u2019s probably that last one. Even here, there\u2019s no one answer. See, Warren Harding, America\u2019s 29th president who served from 1921 to 1923, was arguably our sh*ttiest president for a bunch of reasons ranging from corruption to weird sex stuff. Perhaps most egregious of all: his own ineptitude. Harding was, ultimately, a rube who \u201clooked like\u201d a statesman\u2014a man who dressed not for the job he had, but for the job his crooked friends wanted him to have.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Warren Harding: A history of \u201cmeh\u201d<\/h3>\n

Harding had the archetypal American upbringing: he was born on a farm in Ohio in 1865, went to a one-room schoolhouse for his early education, and to college when he was 14, which was apparently normal back then. At Ohio Central College, he edited his campus newspaper and developed a keen voice for public speaking.<\/p>\n

After he got all his schooling, Harding tried a few other jobs, teaching in a country school and selling insurance. But his career turn would come shortly after, when he and a couple of his buds pooled their money and bought the Marion Daily Star<\/i>\u2014a dying newspaper, back when newspapers weren\u2019t >all<\/i>dying.<\/p>\n

Harding controlled the paper, but he wasn\u2019t any kind of entrepreneurial genius. The paper struggled for a while, but eventually Harding\u2019s better qualities helped right the ship\u2014the guy was good-natured, had a strong sense of community, and he had those public speaking and editorial skills he\u2019d learned in his youth.<\/p>\n

Now, I\u2019m not trying to dump on Warren Harding here. The guy tried his best and, lack of business acumen aside, he seems to have had a good heart. He avoided publishing stories criticizing people, and when the paper turned a profit, he shared it with his employees.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t up to him. Florence had other ideas. For some reason, she urged Harding to get into politics. I suppose it\u2019s possible she really believed in her husband and thought he could do a lot of good for the state of Ohio. More likely, I think, she knew her husband was a smooth talker and made fast friends, and figured he could make it far in politics based on those qualities alone.<\/p>\n

As always, Florence was right. Harding got a seat in the Ohio legislature on the back of his stately voice, and his unwavering conservatism and quid pro quo arrangements with city bosses helped him climb the ladder. In 1903, he became a lieutenant governor before getting back into the newspaper business.<\/p>\n

He later jumped back into politics, eventually becoming a senator. His voting record while a senator, however, was dog sh*t: the dude missed two-thirds of the votes during his tenure. It\u2019s not that he didn\u2019t have political convictions\u2014he was a staunch conservative\u2014he just didn\u2019t actually do anything about them. He even skipped the vote on women\u2019s suffrage, which he claimed to strongly support.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Warren Harding\u2019s presidential bid: \u201cA Return to Normalcy [sic]\u201d<\/h3>\n

Look, it\u2019s no surprise to anyone who pays attention that you can both be a senator and not work too hard. Missing legislative votes? Hey, who doesn’t do that in Congress, right? Portraying oneself as a person of convictions, but then not following through on the actual work required to make things happen? A tale as old as time itself.<\/p>\n

But most bullsh*t senators with weak voting records don\u2019t become president. I\u2019m not saying you have to be a great legislator to be president, of course. But you typically need to have some kind of vision, and a level of self-confidence and belief that borders on delusion.<\/p>\n

Warren Harding, meanwhile, strikes me as an affable guy who had some opinions about stuff and knew how to talk, but generally just did what he was told to do by the people around him. He was a good pick to play a president in a movie, but he wasn\u2019t the real deal.<\/p>\n

None of that mattered, though. Perception isn\u2019t reality, but it\u2019s often more important than reality. So, in 1920, a friend of Harding\u2019s started promoting Warren for the Republican presidential nomination. That man, Harry Daugherty, had political sway, and his favorite thing about Warren Harding was that he \u201clooked like a president.\u201d<\/p>\n

I know that sounds insane, but we still do it every four years. Whether or not a candidate \u201clooks like a president\u201d or is otherwise \u201cpresidential\u201d is consistently within, like, the top five things we talk about during each campaign season. So it shouldn\u2019t feel too alien to modern minds that Harding was favored for his all-American upbringing, his name recognition, his \u201cstately\u201d appearance, his having the \u201cright\u201d stance on all the issues. We call these things \u201coptics\u201d now, to make it sound like a science, but it\u2019s the same thing.<\/p>\n

Those optics proved good enough for the Republican leaders. After some deadlocking at the convention, Harding won the presidential nomination, with Calvin Coolidge as his running mate.<\/p>\n

The Harding campaign followed a solid game plan: keep things vague. His campaign slogan was \u201cReturn to Normalcy.\u201d What does that mean, exactly? Well, broadly it meant returning the United States to the way things were before World War I, and rolling back Woodrow Wilson\u2019s progressive efforts as the 28th president.<\/p>\n

More specifically, it didn\u2019t mean anything. It was an appeal to voters\u2019 nostalgia, promising that they could go back to the old days, before the Great War. It was a weak campaign platform better served by lofty promises and platitudes\u2014which Harding excelled at delivering\u2014than by specifics. And it worked, damn it: Harding easily won the election\u2014despite having a slogan that was grammatically incorrect (\u201cnormalcy\u201d was a mathematics term; Harding should have used \u201cnormality\u201d).<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Harding was so vague that he received support from both sides of the debate over the United States\u2019 entry into the League of Nations. It was the biggest issue at the time, yet Harding was amorphous enough in his language that both sides on the issue claimed him as their ally.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Little Jerry Harding<\/h4>\n

Here\u2019s where we get to Jerry Harding. \u201cWho\u2019s that?\u201d you ask. \u201cDid Warren and Florence Harding have a son?\u201d No, no they did not.<\/p>\n

See, Jerry was the name of Warren Harding\u2019s d*ck. Who named it that? Why, Warren Harding, 29th president of the United States, of course.<\/p>\n

Also, I want to be clear: Warren and Florence never had children, but Warren did. There\u2019d been rumors of Harding\u2019s extramarital affairs while he was still alive, but after his death everything became public. Harding had a slew of lovers. One of them, Nan Britton, claimed in her 1927 book that Harding had fathered her daughter. With no way to prove it, Britton suffered character assassination, and her whole family was publicly vilified for the claim. It led to a century-long feud between the Hardings and Brittons, until genetic testing in 2015 proved that Harding was, indeed, the father of Britton\u2019s daughter.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Carrie Fulton Phillips, one of Harding\u2019s mistresses while he was an Ohio statesman. She was Jerry\u2019s muse, if you will. Harding wrote loads of super embarrassing, meant-for-private sex letters to Phillips that were all published for mass consumption back in 2014. You can find them online, if you like, but here\u2019s one to whet your appetite:<\/p>\n

\u201cJerry\u2014you recall Jerry . . .\u2014came in while I was pondering your notes in glad reflection, and we talked about it. . . . He told me to say that you are the best and darlingest in the world, and if he could have but one wish, it would be to be held in your darling embrace and be thrilled by your pink lips that convey the surpassing rapture of human touch and the unspeakable joy of love\u2019s surpassing embrace.\u201d<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

So, there\u2019s that.<\/p>\n

Does Warren Harding deserve his reputation as our worst president?<\/h3>\n

Warren Harding was a big boy, and he deserves criticism for allowing himself to be made president, despite his obvious shortcomings. But he was also a tragically self-aware figure, and I think he deserves a little credit for that.<\/p>\n

Historians may not like Harding today, but he was a famously likable guy in the early 1900s. He was loved by men and women alike\u2014particularly women, as he was apparently very handsome\u2014and he had a weakness for people. His biggest problem, it seems, is that he trusted them too much. Harding once opined on the reason behind the corruption in his administration: \u201cI have no trouble with my enemies . . . [it is my friends who] keep me walking the floor nights.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harding once said of himself, \u201cI am not fit for this office and should never have been here.\u201d That\u2019s not what you want to hear your president say, but I\u2019ll give him this: he was more honest than most, if only in private.<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The worst president in history that you probably know nothing about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":19801,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[333,274],"tags":[],"acf":{"show_faq":false,"faq_title":"","faq_description":"","faq_list_item":null},"yoast_head":"\nWhat the Heck Did Warren Harding Do?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Warren Harding: The worst president in history that you probably know nothing about.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/museumhack.com\/warren-harding\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What the Heck Did Warren Harding Do?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Warren Harding: 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