A hard look at Warren G.
ISSUE NO. 21 // A HARD LOOK AT WARREN G.
I received a request for “MORE WARREN HARDING” so naturally I must accommodate.
Unfortunately, I committed too soon because I just heard about a new Harding book I’m dying to read.* No time to back out now.
At first glance, Harding looks like a cheerless curmudgeon. Far from it. I promised a short(er) issue this time, which is not easy with a guy this interesting. (And let’s face it… like Harding, I bloviate.)
In the interest of quasi-brevity, I won’t be getting into his filthy poetry, hush money paid 100 years ago, affair with a possible German spy, or any other scandals.
John W. Dean,* author of the boringly-titled but interesting Warren G. Harding, wrote “It was not the headlines or news accounts that hurt Harding, rather, the cultural tastemakers and political writers who later played up these stories and set the stage for Harding’s descent into history’s dustbin.”
Let’s back up a bit … before Harding landed in the dustbin.
Presidential Doodler
*Crooked: The Roaring '20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, a Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scan, by Nathan Masters
**It’s worth nothing that John Dean was Richard Nixon’s lawyer and was all tied up in the Watergate coverup.
Lightening round!
Let’s zip through a handful of trivia to keep this moving. Just hold down on the animation to linger longer.
Amos Kling was Harding’s nemesis.
Also, his future father-in-law.Harding was no fan Theodore Roosevelt.
He talked of his “lust of power”, being a “limelighter”… and called him “an insufferable boss… intolerant unheeding dictator… his prototype in history was Aaron Burr, the same towering ambitions; the same ruthlessness in regarding the ties of friendship, gratitude and reverence; the same tendency to bully and browbeat.. the same egotism and greed for power.” Yikes.While campaigning, he considered Woodrow Wilson’s health off-limits.
“I guess you have nominated the wrong candidate … for I will never go to the White House over the broken body of Woodrow Wilson.”
Though at Harding’s inauguration, the difference between his vigor and Wilson’s frailty was striking, Wilson outlived him by half a year.He took a stand against lynching.
“Congress ought to wipe the stain of barbaric lynching from the banners of a free and orderly, representative democracy.”
… and he took a stand for equality.
“Whether you like it or not unless our democracy is a lie you must stand for equality.”
___________
Rambling speeches
According to a friend, his speeches were “a rambling, high-sounding mixture of platitudes, patriotism, and pure nonsense.”
____
Journalist H. L. Mencken said of Harding’s speeches “it reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on a line; it reminds me of bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It’s so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of a dark abysm… of pish, and crawls insanely almost to the pinnacle of posh. It is ramble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
Cheers!
If you want to raise a glass to this Prohibition-era president who never stopped raising his, have I got the glass for you!
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