Posted on 02/21/2005 12:50:03 AM PST by 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."
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
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> 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.
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.
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 happy President's day, America!
Samuel G. Blythe, Mexico: The Record of a Conversation with President Wilson, Saturday Evening Post 186 (May 25, 1914), 3-4, 71.
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