The Nation's Pulse/Warren Remembrance

...For that his reputation became a punching bag for White, just as it did for the attention-seeking Adams and Allen, the scoundrel Means, and dozens of Democratic party orators and pseudo-intellectuals in the decades since...

...Soon after Fall was sentenced in 1929, a book appeared that had the effect of blackening Harding's reputation...

...Harding's achievement at the Naval Conference also escaped notice...

...It is balder and dash...

...Private developers, among them Doheny and Harry Sinclair, wanted to pump oil from these and adjacent areas, and sought permission to do so from Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall who, in turn, got an okay from the Secretary of the Navy...

...Consider the following: ¡¤ What had been a closed and secretive White House, Harding threw wide open to the press and public...

...Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, Harding sponsored tax-cuts that fueled a national economic recovery and expansion that lasted nearly a decade, a decade known by its detractors as the Roaring Twenties...

...That came as a shock to his white listeners, but it was wildly received by the blacks...

...And consider the oft-told tax story in which Harding supposedly delivered this dictum on fiscal policy: "I know somewhere there is a book that will give me the truth, but, hell, I couldn't read the book...

...Adams recycles, for example, White's second-hand story with never a doubt about its authenticity...

...With his...

...A trio of hostile journalists was responsible for the myth of a Harding failure...

...it reminds me of tattered washing on the line...

...That Harding was a lifelong anti-hightariff man could not be expected to get in the way of Allen's stereotype...

...Allen was too busy, among other things, flaying Harding's rhetorical style (a favorite target of all the man's detractors...

...Doheny was found not guilty...

...Why does "everyone know" this to be true...

...Keeping these reserves locked up made little economic sense even in wartime...

...Then there are the things Harding didn't do...

...His progressive detractors were not above bigotry of their own: recurrent rumors that Harding himself was part black followed him all his life...

...Allen, Adams, and White were not professional historians, but their work went unchallenged until Francis Russell's 1968 biography The Shadow of Blooming Grove, by which time the damage had been done...

...A journalist himself, he enjoyed a good press...

...White had more money, which he inherited...

...Even now Adams's one-sided version of the issue has become the accepted one, although most people have no idea where the Teapot Dome canon originated...

...L. Mencken, always on the lookout for a straw man, aimed his own undisciplined prose at the President after his 1921 inaugural: It reminds me of a string of wet sponges...

...And he was right...

...Sinclair six months (for contempt of court and Congress...

...Despite restlessness within his own party and a group of businessmen promoting Henry Ford for the presidency, Harding told Welliver he would run for a second term in 1924 and would tell the people how his administration had been betrayed...

...True, already there were men in the Harding Administration (such as Jesse Smith and Charles Forbes) whose betrayal of trust was weighing heavily on Harding when The Superb pulled out of Union Station...

...On leaving the bureau, Means engaged inextortion, fraud, and bootlegging...

...But Allen dealt Harding only a glancing blow, compared to Samuel Hopkins Adams, whose The Incredible Era came out in 1939...

...On the other side were those who wanted as much land as possible locked up and left untouched forever...

...But for Adams, it was a matter of guilt by association, a pattern that will be familiar to students of Iran-contra...

...F ew of these accomplishments are mentioned by the myth-makers, but Harding was a popular President, virtually assured of re-election had he lived...

...Harding saw the two-month trip as a way to demonstrate his leadership, to give energy to the Republican party, and to mix with ordinary Americans far from his troubles in Washington...

...What he and other Teapot mavens overlooked was that the issue was, at bottom, a policy dispute, not a scandal...

...It is rumble and bumble...

...He stood on the rear platform of The Superb, his private car, and waved smilingly at the crowd, but his heart must have been heavy...

...He stopped work every weekday at noon to have an impromptu handshaking reception with ordinary citizens visiting the presidential mansion...

...The policy dispute sailed right over Adams's head, or he chose to ignore it in his one-dimensional portrait of the Teapot Dome affair...

...Harding persuaded financial wizard Charles Dawes to head the new bureau...

...A sample: Harding looked back with longing eyes to the good old days when the government didn't bother businessmen with unnecessary regulations, but provided them with fat tariffs and instructed the Department of Justice not to have them on its mind...

...He was a member of the National Security Council staff during the Reagan Administration...

...CI...

...Harding, in fact, was so leery of that kind of government abuse that he pointedly pardoned the Socialist Eugene Debs, whom Wilson had thrown into prison as a dangerous pacifist...

...White embodied the liberal notion of what a small-town editor should be like, principally because he embraced the liberal views of the day but put them in the Gazette rather than the New Republic...

...It's hard to say if Allen's opinion of Harding would have improved if the President had taken his mistress to the Waldorf...

...He also cites Bruce Bliven's nonsensical quote ascribed to Harding, namely, that the President wished to raise American tariffs "to protect the struggling industries of Europe...

...Adams knew little about oil, naval politics, or strategic misjudgments...

...Charles Evans Hughes as Secretary of State, Herbert Hoover at Commerce, and Andrew Mellon at Treasury were leaders of substance and achievement, as was Albert Lasker, who cleaned up the previous administration's Shipping Board scandal...

...All of them revered Harding's predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, and resented Harding as a vulgar usurper...

...Instead, he focused on "corporate greed" that led to the unforgivable sin of people making money developing oil resources on sacred "government" land...

...The Washington Naval Conference of 1922, the fast genuinely successful arms reduction conference in history (although several of the parties fudged on its formula later), was initiated by and presided over by Harding...

...The picture of a machine-tainted, small-town cards-and-whiskey politico could equally describe Harry S Truman, but Truman had the advantage of living long after leaving office and thus was able to participate in his rehabilitation...

...Adams also forgets to mention that McAdoo, a wealthy lawyer, was in the pay of oilman Edward Doheny of Teapot Dome fame...

...4 4 eT apot Dome" involved leases on oil-rich property owned ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡by the U.S...

...These "reservoirs" were the strategic reserve of the day, thought to be essential to a navy converting from coal to faster oil-burning warships...

...Samuel Hopkins Adams, whose initial fame was won by muckraking the patent medicine business (Adams believed in carpet-bombing soft targets...

...They never heard it from his lips, for forty-three days later Harding died in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco...

...Unlike Wilson, Harding did not violate the Constitution by touching off a Red Scare...

...But, instead of a Democratic scandal, Adams turned Teapot Dome into l'affaire Harding...

...and William Allen White, editor of the Emporia, Kansas Gazette...

...The easy arrows directed at Harding's admittedly overstuffed rhetoric were meant to suggest that he wasn't very bright...

...He also recruited a strong cabinet because, like Lincoln, he did not fear being surrounded by able men...

...Even thirty years later, White failed to grasp what the supposedly simple-minded Harding was doing at the time...

...The scandal was no Watergate...

...He gave a courageous speech in Birmingham, Alabama, before a black and white audience, something no other President had dared do since the Civil War...

...Yet William Allen White also embraced the late-blooming orthodoxy, with one advantage over the other detractors: he had actually known Harding...

...On one side were the "develop-mentalists" who wanted to exploit the nation's reserves at a time of perceived petroleum scarcity (the U.S...

...Fall served a year in jail...

...As for Harding, their received wisdom came to this: the twenty-ninth President was a small-town pol content to play poker and swill bourbon while the country skated heedlessly into self-indulgence at home and isolationism in foreign affairs...

...That prosperity ended with the exorbitant Smoot-Hawley Tariff hike and the grossly deflationary liquidity squeeze dictated by an inept Federal Reserve Board after the 1929 stock market crash...

...Harding, alas, had no court historians to gild his presidency...

...Despite the erosion that began shortly after his death, Harding's reputation remained more or less intact for almost a decade...

...So, while this Kansas patrician and his family took regular trips to Europe, the poltroon from Ohio was lucky to make it to Florida for a round of golf...

...With Harding long dead, Adams could use real names, and he was out for blood: We the sovereign people had chosen for leader by an unprecedented majority . [a] third-rate Babbitt with the equipment of a small-town, semi-educated journalist, the standards of a handshaking joiner and all-around good guy, the instincts and habits of a corner sport, and the traditions of a party hack...

...The people will believe me when they hear that story," he said...

...That part, at least, was accurate...

...Harding created the Bureau of the Budget (today the Office of Management and Budget), which established an orderly means of collecting, analyzing, and adjusting spending requests from the various units of government, then presenting them to Capitol Hill in one package...

...Roger Fontaine is a Washington-based writer...

...To White, Harding's era was all "corruption, vulgarity, scandal, ineptitude in English and an addiction to trash...

...The Western itinerary of the "Voyage of Understanding" was crafted to demonstrate this commitment (including a first-ever presidential visit to Alaska...

...Negroes," in Adams's account are invariably "bug-eyed," and the author gratuitously quotes a "darkie" joke approvingly (at Harding's expense...

...Adams neglects to mention that McAdoo was a Democrat and son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson...

...N ow, enter the trio: Frederick Lewis Allen, whose book Only Yesterday, first published in 1931, is still in print...

...This is not to mention the suspicious death of a rich woman he had befriended...

...He refused to deny them...

...Not surprisingly, Harding's bold speech in Birmingham goes without notice...

...For him, Harding was a "poor dub," a mediocrity...

...These talks were propelled by Harding's own sense of the tragedy and futility of "The Great War," which he expressed eloquently at the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier...

...The Strange Death of President Harding purported to be from the diaries of one Gaston Means, a notorious scoundrel who had briefly worked as an investigator for William J. Burns, head of the Bureau of Investigation (predecessor to the FBI...

...And, no one ever said Nan fooled around with gangsters...

...Before leaving the White House, he told his private secretary, Judson Welliver, that he had been betrayed by people he thought were his friends...

...It is virtually unknown today that Harding had at least a half-dozen accomplishments to his credit, each of which belied the picture of a passive glad-hander...

...Fall's mistake was in accept ing personal loans from Doheny and Sinclair, whom he had known for years...

...When his record in office¡ªnot quite twenty-eight months' worth¡ªis considered calmly, Harding turns out to have been one of our better Presidents...

...Dawes promptly saved the nation $2 billion by trimming swollen budget requests...

...Although he was widely known in Washington as an out-and-out liar, his book hit the bestseller lists with its wild assertions, including the claim that Florence Harding had poisoned her husband...

...These looked like bribes, especially since bidding on the leases was not open (a procedure that was legal under the circumstances...

...By the time he wrote his Autobiography in the early forties (it would be completed posthumously, by his son in 1946), the Gazette editor had no use for Harding...

...Mooser, was an ardent Bull Mooser, and never forgave Harding's loyalty to Taft in the 1912 election...

...Allen's book was styled "an informal history...

...It played no part in the 1924 election, which Calvin Coolidge won handily...

...W hat are Harding's forgotten accomplishments...

...however, the stockpiling mentality prevailed among the Navy brass...

...Allen, who was no stranger to that book, also attacked Harding for his sexual liaison with Nan Brinton, calling it a series of "cheap sex episodes" and "clandestine meetings in disreputable hotels...

...Harding understood well that the Republican party remained deeply split even after Roosevelt's death and Taft's appointment (by Harding) to the Supreme Court...

...It is flap and doodle...

...As we come to the end of this century, however, it should be obvious that all Presidents have this problem and are equally reluctant to confront it...

...Harding was not informed of this arrangement, nor did he benefit from it...

...Bureau of Mines projected in 1919 that oil produc tion would decline in two to five years...

...In Washington, Harding hired blacks for government duty, replacing Wilson's policy of firing them solely on the basis of race...

...Worse, Harding's favorite breakfast was chipped beef on toast...

...In contrast to the last mournful years of the Wilson Administration, which left the fate of the country in the hands of the invalid President's wife, Harding ran a transparent and accessible presidency...

...Yet today one of those things that everyone knows is that Warren Harding was the worst President in the nation's history...

...Hundreds of thousands turned out to pay their respects as the train bearing his body made its way back to Washington, and even more lined the route...

...The President told his audience that American democracy would be a sham until blacks were granted political and economic equality...

...They saw Big Business, Wall Street, and the military as the crowning ills of free-rein capitalism, and government¡ªlots of it¡ªas the antidote...

...Adams used the professor's genealogical "research" to affect amusement that Harding had African blood...

...While Harding saw the need to heal the 1912 wounds within the party, drawing from both elements, White never did...

...One reason: he never lied to his fellow journalists, unlike his notoriously devious and sanctimonious predecessor...

...As leader of his party, Harding saw he would have to carry out a balancing act if the GOP were to survive as an effective counterweight to the Democrats, who in some parts of the country (and not just in the South) were owned lock, stock, and cross by the Ku Klux Klan...

...Peter Hannaford is a public affairs consultant, author of Talking Back to the Media, and coauthor of the forthcoming Remembering Reagan...

...it reminds me of stale-bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights...

...Navy in Wyoming and California...

...The dub nevertheless helped keep the party from self-destruction by naive and unforgiving factionalists such as, White...

...It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacles of posh...

...He even uses William Estabrook Chancellor, an academic racist at Wooster College whose particular mania was proving Harding's African ancestry...

...Fall then denied, in a letter to Senate investigators, that he had ever received a cent from either Doheny or Sinclair...

...Harding took a genuine interest in improved race relations and civil rights...

...Is it any surprise that there have been few challenges to the legend that years of Republican complacency, insensitivity, and greed (Harding through Hoover) brought on an economic depression that was nearly the ruin of the nation...

...Harding made a major commitment to increasing mixed use (recreation and development) of federal lands in the West, virtually creating the model that prudent Presidents have followed ever since...

...White thought Harding was simply not in his class...

...Adams borrowed freely from other Harding floggers, such as Senator William McAdoo, who compared the President's rhetoric to "an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea...

...A t 2 o'clock on the afternoon of June 20, 1923, President Warren Gamaliel Harding, his wife, and a traveling party of sixty-three guests, officials, aides, and reporters boarded the train that would take them across the continent on a "Voyage of Understanding...

...Harding's reputation began to erode during the Teapot Dome investigation and trials (1923-30), although there is no evidence that Harding was aware of the infamous loan from oilman Edward Doheny to Harding's Interior Secretary Albert Fall...

...Sycophants they were not...

...But if any President can be said to have grown in office, it was Harding, despite his brief tenure (shorter even than John F. Kennedy's Thousand Days...

...That was to change with the Gaston Means book and then Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday...

...an expert on partisan mechanics, a sophomore in legislation, a tyro in economics and government, an ignoram in world movements and trends...