[americanophile]

“There is no instant step from disorder to order. We must face a condition of a grim reality, charge off our losses and start afresh.”

A good reminder in a world of "too big to fail."

[Buckeye McFrog]

guess that’s why he is buried across the street from a shopping mall in Marion, Ohio?

[Hoodat]

The biggest irony of the Teapot Dome scandal was that it was actually implemented during the Clinton Administration, and not a single MSM outlet complained. The Elk Hills Petroleum Reserve was sold to a company in which Vice President Gore was heavily invested, yet Harding’s Teapot Dome is the one considered to be the bigger scandal.

[Snickering Hound]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Conference

Sank the Japanese Navy without firing a shot and created the Roaring Twenties in America when the rest of the world was mired in the postwar depression.

Yes, he’s badly underrated by liberal historians.

[hinckley buzzard]

Harding squelched a growing depression in its infancy by cutting government spending and cutting taxes--by half each. It worked and the Depression of 1920 was over by 1922. He was tarred as corrupt by Democrats for the Teapot Dome scandal, which by present day standards under obama was a true tempest in a teapot.

The article is right, all in all he was quite a creditable president-- and he gave us Calvin Coolidge, another highly underrated republican president.

[haroldeveryman]

The depression that followed in the wake of Woodrow Wilson ended quickly under Harding, who lowered taxes. In addition to stimulating economy, decreasing taxes actually increased govt revenues due to higher economic activity that followed. This was the earliest basis for supply side economics.

Teapot dome was child’s play compared to what has gone on over the last 20 years.

[RedMDer]

Here is the only photo that I know of that shows the infamous Flag Pole at Harding School. (It is on the very far right of the photo). It verifies that the flag pole mentioned in Jean Shepherd's The Christmas Story, was a real flagpole! It does not appear in the newer photo at the very top of the page perhaps suggesting that it was removed because it came to be a hazard to kids.

http://www.hhs59.com/harding.htm

[justiceseeker93]

...the most despised chief exec...

Well, perhaps Harding is "the most despised chief exec" only in the minds of the left-leaning academics who are the usual folks rating the presidents.

But he certainly wasn't despised by the American people whom he served in the White House. When he died in office (from natural causes) in 1923, there was a massive and spontaneous outpouring of grief around the country.

Harding's administration, applying what is now known as "supply side economics," pushed a large tax cut through Congress which helped to revitalize the economy after a severe recession in 1920. You could argue that his Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, was the father of the "supply side" theory, which unfortunately fell out of vogue from then until it was revived during the Reagan years.

As for the Harding administration's scandals, there is no historical evidence linking the President directly to any of them. The worst that can be said about Harding ethically is that he didn't properly vet a couple of his Cabinet members who turned out to be corrupt.