Before
his nomination, Warren G. Harding declared, "America's
present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but
normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but
adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but
the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not
submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant
nationality...."
A
Democratic leader, William Gibbs McAdoo, called Harding's
speeches "an army of pompous phrases moving across the
landscape in search of an idea." Their very murkiness was
effective, since Harding's pronouncements remained unclear on
the League of Nations, in contrast to the impassioned crusade
of the Democratic candidates, Governor James M. Cox of Ohio
and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Thirty-one
distinguished Republicans had signed a manifesto assuring
voters that a vote for Harding was a vote for the League. But
Harding interpreted his election as a mandate to stay out of
the League of Nations.
Harding,
born near Marion, Ohio, in 1865, became the publisher of a
newspaper. He married a divorce, Mrs. Florence Kling De Wolfe.
He was a trustee of the Trinity Baptist Church, a director of
almost every important business, and a leader in fraternal
organizations and charitable enterprises.
He
organized the Citizen's Cornet Band, available for both
Republican and Democratic rallies; "I played every
instrument but the slide trombone and the E-flat cornet,"
he once remarked.
Harding's
undeviating Republicanism and vibrant speaking voice, plus his
willingness to let the machine bosses set policies, led him
far in Ohio politics. He served in the state Senate and as
Lieutenant Governor, and successfully ran for Governor. He
delivered the nominating address for President Taft at the
1912 Republican Convention. In 1914 he was elected to the
Senate, which he found "a very pleasant place."
An Ohio
admirer, Harry Daugherty, began to promote Harding for the
1920 Republican nomination because, he later explained,
"He looked like a President."
Thus a
group of Senators, taking control of the 1920 Republican
Convention when the principal candidates deadlocked, turned to
Harding. He won the Presidential election by an unprecedented
landslide of 60 percent of the popular vote.
Republicans
in Congress easily got the President's signature on their
bills. They eliminated wartime controls and slashed taxes,
established a Federal budget system, restored the high
protective tariff, and imposed tight limitations upon
immigration.
By 1923
the postwar depression seemed to be giving way to a new surge
of prosperity, and newspapers hailed Harding as a wise
statesman carrying out his campaign promise--"Less
government in business and more business in government."
Behind
the facade, not all of Harding's Administration was so
impressive. Word began to reach the President that some of his
friends were using their official positions for their own
enrichment. Alarmed, he complained,
"My...friends...they're the ones that keep me walking the
floors nights!"
Looking
wan and depressed, Harding journeyed westward in the summer of
1923, taking with him his upright Secretary of Commerce,
Herbert Hoover. "If you knew of a great scandal in our
administration," he asked Hoover, "would you for the
good of the country and the party expose it publicly or would
you bury it?" Hoover urged publishing it, but Harding
feared the political repercussions.
He did
not live to find out how the public would react to the
scandals of his administration. In August of 1923, he died in
San Francisco of a heart attack.
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Warren
Harding