Warren Harding

Warren Harding (1865-1923), 29th president of the United States (1921-1923), who came to office in the aftermath of World War I and voiced a national desire to forego further crusades and a return to “normalcy”. However, his administration is mainly remembered for its corruption, which was revealed after Harding's death.

Born in Corsica, Ohio, on November 2, 1865, Harding attended Ohio Central College, studied law, and became editor and publisher of the Marion Star, a country newspaper in Marion, Ohio. After his marriage (1891) to Florence Kling DeWolfe, who was considered a major force in his rise to national prominence, he entered politics as a protégé of Republican Senator Joseph Foraker and served in the Ohio Senate and as lieutenant-governor of the state. He was elected to the US Senate in 1914 but resigned from it in 1920 after winning a landslide election as the Republican candidate for president. At the time of his nomination, and for years afterwards, he was widely regarded as having been the compromise choice of the party machine bosses, but more recent scholarship has maintained that Harding simply was the party's most logical and available nominee.

Turning away from the powerful executive leadership style of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Harding as president delegated much authority to his Cabinet chiefs, whom he chose for their national or regional constituencies or their weight in party councils. Among the outstanding members of his Cabinet were Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, and Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace.

Harding's first presidential task was to move the government away from wartime emergency conditions, and in this his administration was successful. In certain areas it was innovative, stepping up federal hiring during an employment slump, proposing agricultural legislation, and creating a Bureau of the Budget. In 1922 Secretary of State Hughes, with Harding's active support, scored a diplomatic triumph at the Washington Conference on naval disarmament, when the Great Powers agreed to limit their capital ship tonnage in fixed ratios. Harding also acted forcefully in the movement to limit the long hours of labour that had previously prevailed in the American steel industry.

On August 2, 1923, as rumours began to circulate about corruption in his administration, Harding died in San Francisco. He was succeeded by his vice-president, Calvin Coolidge. In the months that followed, charges of misconduct in the Interior and Navy departments, the Veterans' Bureau, the Justice Department, and the Office of the Alien Property Custodian were disclosed in a series of congressional investigations and criminal trials. The scandals implicated both high officials and personal friends of Harding. Among those indicted were Attorney-General Harry M. Daugherty and Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall. Fall was eventually convicted of taking bribes and was sent to jail. Revelations of bribery, influence peddling, and outright theft overshadowed the positive achievements of the Harding administration. The president had spoken all too truly when he remarked that he could take care of his enemies but that he did not know how to cope with his friends.