American History Hit
President Warren G. Harding: Scandals, Affairs & Cabinet Selections
Thu, 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.
Chapter 1: What significant events marked Warren G. Harding's presidency?
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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Chapter 2: How did Warren G. Harding's personal affairs influence public perception?
I mean, there seems to be a sort of tragic tone to his presidency. Do you agree? There's many dimensions to this conversation, aren't there?
Yes, definitely in many dimensions. I do think he's more complicated than people realize. And while I think the scandals are relevant and the scandals did happen, I think they overshadow other aspects of Warren G. Harding's presidency. And while I would not put him on Mount Rushmore by any means, I think he did have his fair share of accomplishments.
that I think don't always get the coverage they deserve.
This is one of these conversations, I think, that a podcast like this was made for because there really is a lot of stuff that people don't really understand where there's a lot of headlines as well that sort of make it, you know, filter down through history as the things that happened, and indeed they did.
I mean, this is a White House full of cronyism, cabinet corruption, scandal we will soon discuss, people go to prison. Then there's his personal life, which is a crazy mess. So before we dive in, give me your take on who this man was psychologically.
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Chapter 3: What were the major scandals during Harding's administration?
Psychologically, I mean, I'd say in terms of like his personality, this is actually someone I think who was really perfectly designed for American politics. If you were going to pick someone and say who would make the perfect politician, who would make the perfect candidate, I think Harding would be near the top of the list.
I think as far as politicians go, he is one of the most skilled politicians we've ever had as president. And really one of the keys to his success was his personality. This was someone who was, if you met him, he was very warm. He was very likable. He was extroverted. people liked him because they knew he liked him. So men would meet him and they'd say like, this is a great guy. He's cool.
I can golf with him. I can drink with him. I can smoke cigars with him. And women would meet him and like, wow, this guy, he's so good looking and he's so charming. So on a personal level, I mean, he was very successful at relating to people, getting people to like him. I think that's one thing that stood out about him. And he was also a very caring person, a very humane person.
So he was known for helping others, giving money to charity. When he ran his newspaper, the Marion Star, he never fired any of his employees. He paid them well. And the newsboys, as they were called, you know, when they're interviewed later. They all loved Warren G. Harding.
Yeah, well, he is a newspaper man. That's a big key point in his resume. Before politics comes along, right out of the gate, as a young man, he gets a hold of a newspaper in his hometown, right? The Marion newspaper there. And he begins this career, which becomes quite successful as a newspaper publisher in Ohio.
And he has that natural affinity, of course, as you're saying, psychologically, just he's a glad-handing kind of guy there. But he also has a feeling for the news. And this is a very important aspect of this period of time in America, as media has been for the last 50 years before, pretty much taking hold in this country as a defining element of the culture, never mind politics.
We're doing it already. We're falling into this, which is you start to project onto Harding the psychological analysis because so much of his administration goes counter to how he was perceived and maybe how he really was. But they're undeniable, the facts of his time in office. But so much of it has to do with how he put together his cabinet, isn't it?
He was so hands off in the way that he staffed his cabinet, his administration, that these people felt very empowered to do whatever they wanted to do.
Well, I think the cabinet is, I think it's a little more complicated than people realize. So I think too often historians and others focus on, you know, the bad appointments he made in the cabinet. So that, you know, Albert Fall at the Interior Department, Harry Daugherty at the Justice Department, and then you have Charles Forbes.
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Chapter 4: What role did Florence Harding play in Warren G. Harding's life?
He's very explicit about their sex life, their sexual activities. He had a nickname for his private part. He called it Jerry. So that gets a lot of play. But I think maybe those graphic accounts get too much play, Because I do think that most likely she was the love of his life, that it wasn't just some like tawdry one night stand for him.
There's obviously the physical attraction, but I think he really did fall in love with her.
Yeah. I mean, let's be honest. Hopefully we felt these feelings, you know, but he is quite high up on the spectrum. Here's a quote from one of the many letters. Wouldn't you like to get sopping wet out on Superior, not the lake? for the joy of fevered fondling and melting kisses. Wouldn't you like to make the suspected occupant of the next room jealous of the joys?
Oh, I'm just getting embarrassed even reading this. But you get the flavor. You know, he's really out there, very expressive, which might have been his, frankly, his attractiveness to many women who found this guy very emotionally available. And yet, of course, this was all being done behind the scenes. You know, this was 15 years behind his wife's back.
He also had another affair with a woman named Nan Britton, a woman who is 30 years younger than him. This comes after Kerry, and with whom it was rumored that she'd produced a daughter out of wedlock. And in 1927, Britton published a memoir called The President's Daughter, outing the affair and his support of the child.
She claimed the affair had continued scandalously right into the White House, rather previewing another president to come many, many years later. For a long time, people did not believe in this woman, which is so often the case, Nan Britton, and whether she was telling the truth about her child and Warren Harding's paternity of that. How did that all resolve itself?
Yes. So she comes out with her book, The President's Daughter in 1927. And, you know, it's very sensationalistic. You know, there's a 30 year age gap. And She alleges that she would have these rendezvous with Harding in the White House closet and the Secret Service were used to pay child support. But there were historians over the decades who questioned her account.
And in fairness to those historians, what they focused on was we don't have hard, solid evidence, at least in the Carrie Phillips case, you have those letters. So there, you know, there was no doubt of an affair. So people said, you know, you basically have Nan Britton's word. You know, where's the letters? Though there's evidence that Hardy may have told her to destroy letters.
So some people said maybe she made it up. Maybe she knew about the Carrie Phillips affair. And then she took that and kind of ran with it and said, oh, I had an affair. So that was one of the allegations against her to say that it wasn't true. And you did have Secret Service agents who said, we never met Nan Britton. She was never in the White House. We never paid child support to her.
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Chapter 5: How did Harding's cabinet selections impact his presidency?
And so people who knew her said, like, from the time she was a little girl, she had this, like, obsession with Warren G. Harding. So I'm sure it must have been flattering to him. Like, you know, wow, like, this girl, like, she loves me. You know, she's obsessed with me.
We have mentioned, of course, Florence Harding, a complicated person of her own in her own right. But how did she feel about the was there any proof of how she felt about these affairs?
So I think there's some circumstantial evidence that eventually she did find out about. Warren G. Harding and Carrie Phillips. And I think there's some accounts that even talk about a confrontation or an argument between Carrie Phillips and Florence Harding. And I think there was like a diary that she kept where there's allusions to basically her talking about the infidelity of husbands.
So she's not, I think she's not directly saying, oh, you know, my husband, Warren G. Harding, had an affair, but basically talking about how like, oh, you know, men aren't perfect and men do have these affairs. But, yeah, the relationship, I think, between Warren G. Harding and Florence Harding is very interesting.
And I think historians try to wrap their heads around it because, you know, he's this, like, charming, good-looking guy. And, you know, she's five years older, and she looks much older than that. And so I think there's people who say, like, what's the attraction? What's the chemistry? Sure. And I think at some level... They did share a common bond. They did share a love of politics.
Florence Harding, I think for her time, was very much a political activist. She supported women's rights, prisoners' rights, animal rights. She championed disabled veterans. So I think in many ways, She is kind of the precursor to Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. You know, he sees her as a valued political partner.
And I think Harding, on some level, he cared about her. He was very fond of her. And I think it is telling that he doesn't leave Florence Harding for Carrie Phillips, even though she's repeatedly demanding, like, I want you to leave her. And he doesn't. So...
You know, is it political calculation like, oh, you know, if I end this relationship and I marry my mistress, that's the end of my political career? Or is it just at some level? It's like he really did care for Florence Harding.
And, you know, maybe emotionally and psychologically, she provided him with a level of stability that Carrie Phillips, as much as I think he did love her, she could not provide.
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Chapter 6: What was the social and political climate in America during Harding's election?
Now, this was the 1920s we're talking about. We're coming out of World War I, post-war moment. Return to normalcy is really what Americans want for real. That's not just a campaign slogan. Is he the right man for the times? Is that why he's so popular?
I think in many ways he was the right man for the time, or at least he was the right man that I think people were looking for. at that time, after eight years of Wilson, after the First World War. And I think what people forget is just how much of a mess the country was in going into the 1920 election.
So, you know, you go back 1918, 1919, you know, 1918, you know, the end of the war, you have a flu epidemic that kills over 700,000 Americans, I think 100 million or so people worldwide. You have Woodrow Wilson not prepared for the end of the war. So he really had no plans for converting the economy back to a peacetime economy.
And then when all these like wartime contracts are, you know, canceled, you know, it's chaos. We have a post-war depression. I mean, at one point, like inflation is through the roof. We have labor strikes all over the country. We have anarchists setting off bombs.
And then kind of the most historians would say the excessive counter reaction, you know, was a Mitchell Palmer's Red Scare where we're just going to round up people and arrest them with little or no evidence. And it turns out most of the people he arrested died. weren't terrorists, weren't anarchists. You have race riots throughout the country in 1918, 1919.
And this is the period where, you know, you're seeing the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings are on the rise. So it was, I mean, it was a really unstable, chaotic period. Business people weren't happy. Workers weren't happy. Farmers weren't happy. No one's really, you know, happy. And also you have Woodrow Wilson for... the last year and a half of his presidency, he's basically AWOL.
I mean, he has a series of strokes and he's incapacitated. I mean, he's president in name only. So the government, I mean, basically grounds to a halt.
Yeah, we don't really understand that coming out of World War I, this place was a hotbed of social unrest, really, especially in the labor world, as a result of all of these different contracts being canceled and emerging unions and so forth.
America was really a hotbed of all sorts of problems, really, that were now being voiced quite openly in the press, which was much more widespread in those days. So it might have been the obvious thing for Harding to say, Let me put you back in order here. But it was also a calculated move, wasn't it?
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Chapter 7: How did Harding's administration address civil and workers' rights?
All right. So he's purveying leases, basically. Albert Fall, Secretary of the Interior. There's a lot of machinations. When you read about it, it's very complicated. There's a lot of little backroom dealings going on. This was not necessarily his purview as the Secretary of Interior. He had to have this sort of taken over into his role. So it shows great intent.
Everything that they kind of track that this man knew what he was doing. And then he's accepting these bribes from two sources for these oil leases and then just collecting on the revenues for a long time. Makes a lot of money doing it, right?
Yeah. And we do know that at one point, I mean, before he's taking these bribes, he's heavily in debt. I think he's behind on his mortgage payments on his ranch. And then all of a sudden, like, wow, he's got all this money. Where did this money come from? I would note about Teapot Dome, for all the attention that historians devote to it, it didn't really resonate with the people.
Basically, what happens when they hold hearings is... We also find there were prominent Democrats that worked for some of these oil companies that were involved in Teapot Dome. So they hold these hearings and ultimately it flames out. You know, Calvin Coolidge is president and people don't blame him.
So I don't think it resonates with the public the way, say, Watergate would resonate with the public in the 1970s.
Right. It's a different kind of corruption. It's old fashioned corruption is what it is. It's like, how do I get, you know, take a little money on the side here in order to do something good for the American people? They may see it as such. The Veterans Bureau scandal is a little creepier, in my opinion.
This is involving Charles Forbes, who is the head of a new organization, which is the Veterans Bureau. Again, to put in context, we're at the end of this terrible period where so many American soldiers have come back from World War I, many of them in need of treatment. And there's really not the system to service them at this point. We've never been in a war like this.
And so the Veterans Bureau is created. It eventually becomes the Veterans Administration that we have today. And Charles Forbes is head of that bureau. The bureau's chief counsel is Charles Kramer. And then there's a guy named Charles Hurley who was in construction. There's three Charleses in this story.
And this is all about a complex scheme to inflate costs and then skim profits to the different parties, but in different areas, in hospital construction, in land and in supplies. All of this created these cash streams that were distributed. How does this come out and when does that happen?
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Chapter 8: What legacy did Warren G. Harding leave behind?
He goes down south to Birmingham, Alabama, of all places, and gives a powerful speech in support of civil rights, especially criticizing voter suppression in the South, which is just, I mean, remarkable for that time, and I think took great courage for Harding to do that.
Yeah. And, you know, for being a pro-business president, he was also wanting to improve labor rights. He tried to become that president, sort of embrace this new reality in America that you're going to have these unions are really very influential. But all of this is sort of crumbles against all of that scandal and corruption.
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Meanwhile, you have a booming economy. And this is a big deal, of course, as we know, even in our old times, we judge presidents, you know, day by day by the economy when it, in fact, is a much bigger picture. But in his case, that really happens. And it goes on for a long time beyond him. He is really the one that unleashes the roaring 20s, isn't he?
Yeah, I mean, in many ways, yeah, economically, under him, you will go from an economic downturn to an economic boom. And I actually think even more impressive economically, especially fiscally, is he takes a national debt... And he is able to reduce that national debt and he takes budget deficits and he turns them into budget surpluses by the end of his presidency.
So the government is taking in more money than he's spending. So it looks especially impressive today where whoever's president, you don't see that.
Yeah, exactly.
At least not since Bill Clinton.
And there's one really interesting episode that stands out for me in terms of, you know, his sort of healing quality. Which was that one of the people he ran against was Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate who was at that time imprisoned for his protest movement. And he was running for president from prison where he got a considerable amount of votes. And he was in prison for a 10 year sentence.
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