Mark🔯 Twain said history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes. The life of Warren G. Harding rhymes with the presidential politics of our time.
Hardin💞g died a hundred years ago this week — Aug. 2, 1923.
Historians often rank him among America’s worst presidents. Yet this s🎉ays more about them than it does♐ about Harding.
He had mistresses, but so did John F. ෴Kennedy, and Harding didn’t perjure himself to cover his improprieties, like Bill Clint꧋on.
Harding did father a child 💫♔he refused to acknowledge💛, much as Joe Biden refused t🅘o acknowledge his son Hunter’s illegitimate daughter until last week.
In terms of sex scand🧸als, however, Harding today seems all too typical rat💧her than an egregious departure from the integrity of the presidential office.
Certainly historians don’t dwell on the infidelities of presidents they consider great, such as Franklin Roosevelt, and if they can’t ignore JF꧅💦K’s or Clinton’s philandering, they nonetheless don’t judge their presidencies on their sex lives.
Why do they treat Harding differently?
Harding was different — not in his ext😼racurricularꩲ misbehavior but in his politics and party affiliation.
🔜Harding was a conservative Republican and a ဣbeloved one, too.
He won the 1920 election with more than 60% of the popular vote, a record up to that time since surpassed only by FDR in 1936, Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Richard꧒ Nixon in 1972.
Unlike Johnson and Nixon, Harding m⭕aintained his popularity during his lifetime — his death a little more than three years into his term was an occasion of momentous national mourning.
He died while on a speaking tour of the West, and grieving Americans lined the railroad tracks as Harding’s body was⛎ taken from California to Washington, DC.
Hard𒐪ing was known for his ability to get along with everyone — his likability propelled him from relative obscurity to the Republican presidential nomination in 1920, when the party deadlocked between more prominent and pola𒈔rizing candidates at its national convention.
The backroom dealmaking that led to Harding’s selection by the party’s powerbrokers gave rise to a term that’s still part of American politics: “tཧhe smoke-filled room.”
But Harding’s popularity wasn’t all about ♏his demeanor — it was also because of his program and its contrast to that of the previous administration, Woodrow Wilson’s.
Harding campaigned on what he called “a return to normalcy” afte🍬r the upheaval🍃s of World War I.
Normalcy meant reining in federal spendin𓄧g, and Harding established what became the Office of Management and Budget in the White House.
Normalcy also meant a restoration of ci🐬vil liberties.
Wilson’s administration jailed critics of the war, including socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president in 1920 whi꧅le serving a 10-year prison term.
Harding commuted Debs’ sentence — and invited him to൩ the White House.
That same day Harding commuted the sentences of🧜 23 others Wilson jailed as well.
Academic hist💛orians have a bias toward Democrats and toward war presidents.
Thus, despite his role in prom💦oting segregation in the federal government, Woodrow Wilson continues to draw favorable ratings from presidential historians, who ranked him 13th in C-SPAN’s 2021 Survey of 𝓀Presidential Leadership.
Harding was down at 37, as little helped by his support for ꦦfederal anti-lynching legislation as Wilson was hurt by his segregationism.
Wilson’s war had been bitterly divisive — the Democrat campaigned in 1916 on a pledge to stay out꧋ of the conflict, only to enter it once he was re-elected.
The country was divided at the enဣd of the war as well, over whether to join the League of Nations and, ultimately, over whether America’s involvement in the conflagration had been a mistake in the first place.
Was a war that l𒀰ed the Bolsheviks to power in Russia — and very nearly Germany, where Communists did establish a Bavarian Soviet Republic for a time — a victory for the United States?
Harding’s achieve𒀰ments for peace are not as exciting to historians as Wilson’s leading theꦿ nation into war, however.
The Republican enjoyed diplomatic success, providing an easier repayment schedule for the debt allies owed to Amꩵe🍸rica after World War I and negotiating an official end to the legal state of war with Germany without signing onto the Versailles treaty.
He also organized multilateral talks that won agreement among the leading naval🐷 powers to limit their number of battleships.
There was corruption in Harding’s cabinet, a✱s the exposure of the Teapot Dome scandal after his death would show.
He can be faulted for some of h🌃💛is personnel choices — yet the president was never implicated in their misdeeds.
What ruined his reputation was his💯 mistress Nan Britton’s salacious memoir “The President’s Daughter,” published f🧸our years after he died.
But what keeps Harding from being recognized, a century later, as an above-average pꦕresident is the kind of president he was: an unpretentious conservative Republican who made America normal again.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
