From hero to zero: the lessons of President Warren G. Harding (President's Day Tribute)

Post Gazette ^ | 5.18.03 | Dennis Roddy

[ambrose]

From hero to zero: the lessons of President Warren G. Harding

Sunday, May 18, 2003

-snip-

Harding's disrepair is a lesson on the extent to which history and image become interchangeable and ill serve one another. His predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, allowed a nationwide Red hunt and oversaw the segregation of federal offices. Harding pardoned Eugene V. Debs, the socialist leader Wilson imprisoned, and he gave a speech in Birmingham, Ala., on the need for racial tolerance.

Wilson was publicly despised by the time he departed for Valhalla. He now stands astride the history of the last century as a colossus of liberty and statesmanship. Harding, whose funeral train ran the length of the continent with people lining the tracks, roosts in history's attic, a presidential schnook.

Within two years of dying in a San Francisco hotel as his wife read to him from The Saturday Evening Post, Harding's legacy became the Teapot Dome Scandal and a swirl of stories, some even true, about drinking, skirt-chasing and losing the White House china in a poker game.

Harding's tomb, two miles away, is a marvel of neoclassical columns. Warren and Florence Harding lie entombed beneath 17 feet of solid concrete -- perhaps safe from exhumation by DNA sleuths. But it almost seems as if, upon his passing, the nation wanted to bury the hell out of Warren Gamaliel Harding.

"People are proud to have had a front porch campaign in Marion, proud to have had someone who was elected from Marion," Gilpin said. "They're certainly proud of that. What is unfortunate is that so many people are so underinformed. There were some really, really wonderful things that came out of the Harding administration."

[ambrose]

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[bilhosty]

I certainly do not think Harding was among the front rank of American Presidents by any means. But, I do think he got the shaft from historians. Woodrow Wilson is however losing luster. Deservedly, I think he was the most over rated President in American history. More so even then Kennedy. People also don't know that Florence Harding was in many ways a prototype for the modern first lady more so than Eleanore Roosevelt. She was very active and very liked with many achievements in her own right.

[cloud8]

> But, I do think [Harding] got the shaft from historians. Woodrow Wilson is however losing luster.

Wilson and Harding are as different as clinton and President Bush. Someday this war on terror will be over, and we will have the return to normalcy we yearn for.

[Austin Willard Wright]

Who of the two does Bush most resemble? I think that the answer is clear: Wilson. Harding, on the other hand, was more than a few cuts above both Bush and Clinton.

[cloud8]

Well, Wilson won the election of 1912 in the electoral college with about a million popular votes less than his opponents, but I'm not sure about other parallels with the Bush presidency. Domestically he put through bills that gave labor an edge. "He kept us out of war" until we had to go and save Europe's ass, and then bet the farm on the League of Nations. How does that compare with W?

[an italian]

An happy President's day, America!

[Austin Willard Wright]

Look at the Dubya's recent speech to "promote Liberty throughout the world." Read one of Wilson's foreign policy speeches. Change a few names and details and it is almost impossible to tell them apart. If have time to look it up, read this and you will see what I mean. The parallels with Bush are striking:

Samuel G. Blythe, “Mexico: The Record of a Conversation with President Wilson,” Saturday Evening Post 186 (May 25, 1914), 3-4, 71.