29. Warren Harding

Harding is consistently ranked as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history. He was a very successful self-made newspaper publisher from Ohio. Once he entered politics he served in the Ohio senate, as Lieutenant Governor of Ohio and as a U.S. Senator from Ohio. In spite of whatever preparation he had for the office of the president even in his day he was not well thought of. His one shortened term in office was overtaken by multiple scandals involving some of his closest advisors and friends.

I would bet that if you ask an average American what they know about Warren Harding you would get one of four responses.

1. “Who?”
2. “Didn’t he die in office”
3. “Wasn’t there a scandal involving teapot’s”
4. “Wasn’t he the president with the middle name Gamaliel”

When Harding was almost ten years old his father, George, bought a small newspaper. By the time he was in his teens Harding had learned how to handle simple printing jobs and could run a small printing press. After college Harding returned to Marion, Ohio and with two other partners bought the smallest of the towns newspapers, the Marion Star. By the time he was twenty-one he had made enough money to buy out his partners. Eventually his paper became so popular that the other papers couldn’t keep up and went out of business. Harding became active in many aspects of the town and his reputation grew:

• Member of the Chamber of Commerce
• A 33-degree Mason
• An Elk
• A Rotarian
• Played Coronet in the town band
• Managed the town baseball team (also playing 1st base)

While he popular with most of the people in Marion, he had repeated run-ins with one of the wealthiest men in town; Amos Hall Kling. Many of Harding’s political views that he published put him at odds with some of the political establishment including Kling. The relationship with Kling was not improved when in 1891 Harding married Kling’s daughter Florence. Kling started up a rival newspaper to try in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat Harding’s newspaper. In 1900 Kling secretly bought up all of Harding’s debts and called them due. Harding was able to raise the funds from other sources and paid the debts. The two were eventually able to get passed their differences.

Using the editorial pages of his newspaper to support various Republicans around the state brought Harding appreciation within the party. In 1887 Harding became a delegate to the Ohio State Republican Party Convention. Finally in 1900 he won his first political office by being elected to the Ohio State Senate. He served two terms in the State Senate and went on to become Lieutenant Governor. Losing a bid for Governor Harding returned to Marion and the work of the newspaper.

In 1914 Harding won a U.S. Senate election and spent six fairly undistinguished years in the Senate. For the most part he voted lock-step with the Republicans and didn’t introduce any important legislation. He voted for prohibition even though he was against it, he believed that the people of Ohio were in favor of the amendment. Not believing that the time was right for woman to vote, he still voted for the bill. He was definitely with the Republicans in their opposition to the League of Nations, especially a provision that seemed to commit American forces to support any other League member that was attacked.

Harding was convinced to run for president in 1920 by Harry Daugherty. Daugherty would goon to be Harding’s campaign manager and eventually his Attorney General. Once Harding was convinced, Daugherty went to work trying to secure the Republican nomination. Harding came in fourth on the first ballot at the convention. General Leonard Wood was the favorite, but couldn’t secure the required majority of votes. Republican leaders locked themselves away in a “smoke-filled room” (Room 404 of the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago) to decide who was the best compromise candidate. After an all-night session the tentative decision was made to nominate Harding. Harding was approached the next day and told about the decision, but was asked if there was anything in his past that could be a problem. In spite of rumors of adultery, Harding replied that there was nothing he could think of that could cause problems.

Harding won the general election with over 60% of the popular vote promising a “return to normalcy” after WWI, an economic downturn and eight years of a Democrat in the White House. When he started filling his cabinet he made some selections based on merit and some based on personal friendships. The three selections based on friendship would end up defining his administration and his legacy. Unfortunately not for the positive.

Before I get into the scandals, there were major positive thing that Harding accomplished. He signed into law the Budget and Accounting Act which, in part, requires the president to submit a budget to congress. It created much stricter accounting rules and made the presidential budget director accountable to the president and not the Secretary of the Treasury. The second was the creation of the Bureau of Veteran Affairs.

Harding did not agree to the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations and so he negotiated a separate peace with Germany and Austria finally bringing an official end to WWI. After the war he supported a broad reduction in naval power globally.

His old friend Harry Daugherty (the same man that convinced him to run for president) was made the Attorney General. In his position at the Justice Department Daugherty accepted bribes to grant immunity to people that illegally sold alcohol. He also accepted bribes from wealthy federal prisoners to grant them paroles. When this all came to light Daugherty tried to put the blame on his personal assistant, Jess Smith. Smith ended up committing suicide. Daugherty was ultimately acquitted after two trials.

The next scandal involved a friend named Charles Forbes at the Veteran’s Bureau. Forbes was convicted of selling off government medical supplies and taking kick-backs for approving new VA hospitals. When Harding confronted him Forbes fled to Europe. He ultimately returned to the U.S. and was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison, becoming the first former cabinet member to go to prison.

The biggest scandal did not fully come to light until after Harding died. This scandal involved Albert Fall at the Department of the Interior. The Teapot Dome scandal, as it has become known, involved the illegal leasing of federal oil deposits. The oil reserve had been set aside for use by the navy in case of an emergency. There were two locations involved, one in California and one in Wyoming. The one in Wyoming was covered by a rock formation that looked like a teapot, giving it the name Teapot Dome. Fall was convicted of defrauding the government and sentenced to jail time.

Harding once said “I have no trouble with my enemies, but my damn friends, they’re the ones keeping me walking the floors as night.” The scandals were clearly taking a toll on Harding. A western trip was planned and Harding became the first president to visit Alaska (at that time a territory). On the trip home Harding fell ill in Seattle. His personal doctor determined that it was food poisoning and would not let any other doctor examine him. Several other doctors were convinced that Harding had suffered a heart attack. Harding died in San Francisco on August 2nd, 1923. His term in office was the shortest of any 20th century president.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t discuss the extra-marital affairs. Harding carried on at least two long affairs and it’s rumored there were two more. The longest one involved a young girl named Nan Britton that Harding met back in Marion when she was a teenager. When Harding moved to Washington he helped find her a job. There is a story about an encounter with Nan in a closet off the Oval Office with the Secret Service standing by to keep Harding’s wife out. Four years after Harding’s death Nan wrote a book claiming that Harding was the father of her child. The other affair went on for fifteen years with the wife of a good friend.

Talking about a president’s legacy is always subjective, but Harding’s term can’t be discussed with the scandals. While there was never any indication that Harding was complicit in any of the scandals (there were more than the big three) he did create an environment where he trusted his cabinet members to manage their departments without any oversight. When rumors about the scandals started Harding was slow to react.

Trivia:

• First sitting United States Senator to be elected president
• First (maybe only) newspaper editor to be elected president
• He was obsessed with playing poker and once bet (and lost) a complete set of priceless White House china
• First president to give a speech over the radio
• First president to own a radio
• First president to ride to his inauguration in a car
• He was the first president for whom woman could vote
• His mother held a medical license
• It’s rumored that his great-grandmother was African-American (this was brought up several times during his political career)
• He literally worked to preserve the Constitution by having it removed from the files of the State Dept., where it had been rotting, and had it placed in a protective glass case
• Harding won in 1920, a year that saw six past or future presidents running for either president or vice president; Harding, Wilson, Coolidge, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Hoover.
• The election of 1920 was the first to be carried live on the radio
• First president born after the Civil War

Vital Stats:

• Wife: Florence Mabel Kling (1860-1924, m. 1891)
• Children: None legitimate, one or two rumored illegitimate.  Florence had a son from a previous marriage. 
• Party affiliation: Republican Party
• Presidency: 1921-1923
• Born: November 2nd, 1865 (Blooming Grove, Ohio)
• Died: August 2nd, 1923 (San Francisco, California)

28. Woodrow Wilson

By many measures, Wilson was our most intellectual president.  In his time he was widely admired, in part for his writings on the role of government, the power of the presidency and the workings of government.  His most famous book is Congressional Government.  Published in 1885, it argued for a stronger presidency.  Wilson earned a PhD in History and Political Science from John’s Hopkins University in 1886 and eventually became the president of Princeton University. 

Wilson’s tenure as president of Princeton serves as a glimpse at what his tenure as president of the United States would look like a few years later.  Serving from 1902 – 1910, Wilson set to work quickly in the beginning to make changes that he felt would improve the success of Princeton.  He hired younger scholars and had them form discussions groups which increased the interaction between teachers and students.  Changing the curriculum to standardize some courses that every student would be required was his next step.  These and other changes made a noticeable difference in the academic standards in just four years. As he continued to try and make changes he eventually ran into opinion differences with the wealthy alumni and board members.  Wilson had wanted to centralize the university functions, creating Quads, or a series of four buildings with an interior square, and to move the graduate school closer. The concept of the Quad has become popular on college campuses today with its centralization of dining, housing and study areas.  He lost the fight for this centralization concept, in part because a wealthy donor had given money to build a graduate school away from the main campus.  After serving about eight years, Wilson left Princeton to run for Governor of New Jersey.

After winning the Democratic nomination, Wilson outlined his progressive platform for reforms in the state.  His ideas for reducing the power of party bosses and other forms of political influence made him very popular and he won the election in a landslide.  True to his word, in the first six months of his two year term he brought public utilities under state regulation, reorganized and improved the state school system and enacted antitrust legislation.

Wilson’s success as Governor of New Jersey made him a popular candidate for president in 1912.  He won the nomination at the Democratic convention in Baltimore in part because William Jennings Bryan threw his support behind him.  The presidential election was a closely contested race between Wilson, incumbent president Taft and ex-president Teddy Roosevelt.  Roosevelt had split from the Republican Party and formed a third party; the Bull Moose Party.  In the end Wilson pulled out an electoral college landslide (435 out of 531 electoral votes).  The election was much closer in the popular vote with Wilson getting 42%.

In characteristic Wilson fashion he hit the ground running by calling a special session of congress and announcing his plans.  The first issue he took on was high tariffs.  When the issue got bogged down in Congress, Wilson called a press conference and made an appeal directly to the people (the first time a president had used the press in this manner).  He pointed out that special interest groups were pressuring Congress to keep the high tariffs.  When huge amounts of letters started to arrive on congressmen’s desks, they folded and passed the legislation.  The Underwood Tariff returned tariffs to the levels of seventy years prior.  The revenue that was lost by lowering tariffs was recovered by the collection of the first individual income taxes that were allowed after the passage of the 16th amendment. 

Also in his first year he supported the creation of the Federal Reserve System to regulate banking.  This system of twelve regionally distributed banks was designed to help regulate banks.  The three main objectives given to the Fed (as it is informally known) were maximum employment, stable prices and moderate long term interest rates.  The main tool that the Fed has to accomplish these goals is to increase or decrease the amount of money in circulation.

Continuing on with his predecessor’s policies of antitrust legislation Wilson secured the creation of the Federal Trade Commission with the power to investigate unfair business practices.  He also secured passage of laws that made certain business practices illegal (price fixing, child labor, etc.) and a law that created a forty-hour maximum work week. 

In spite of the obvious success of Wilson’s first year in office, his second would prove to be much more difficult.  Several revolutions in Mexico had created an unstable government.  In April 1914 tensions between Mexico and the United States increased when American sailors were arrested in Mexico.  Wilson ordered a naval blockade to prevent German ships from delivering munitions.  A battle broke out in the city of Veracruz leaving about 500 people dead.  The countries of Columbia and Argentina offered to mediate peace terms, but fighting broke out again.  When Francisco “Pancho” Villa was ordered to start making raids into the United States in March 1916 (including sacking the town of Columbus, New Mexico) the fighting escalated.  Wilson ordered John “Black Jack” Pershing to lead an expedition into Mexico to capture Pancho Villa.  The expedition lasted almost a year and is largely considered a failure.  Finally in January 1917 both sides agreed to mediation and Pershing was recalled.  Pershing would eventually reach the rank of General of the Armies, only one of two ever to be given that rank and the only one to receive it in his lifetime (Washington was given the promotion by an act of Congress in 1976).

During the tensions with Mexico in 1914, Wilson’s first wife, Ellen, died from Bright’s disease.  They had been married almost 30 years.  In 1915, Wilson met and married his second wife Edith.

Much of the rest of his first term was taken up with World War I, which started in August 1914 (at the time referred to as either the World War or the Great War).  A great book to understand the origins of the First World War is The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.  It is a bit difficult to understand how the assassination of someone in line to be head of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Archduke Franz Ferdinand) by a Serbian would cause Germany to declare war on Russia and invade France, but it did. 

Wilson was successful in keeping the U.S. out of the war for the duration of his first term.  This was in spite of a lot of pressure from Republicans to build up the military in anticipation of war.  Wilson even attempted to mediate a peace between the warring parties.  In 1915 a German U-Boat sunk the Lusitania, a British ocean liner that the Germans claimed was transporting weapons.  Over 1000 passengers died, including 128 Americans.  After the outcry the Germans agreed to limit their aggression to clear military targets.  It is still not clear today if the Lusitania was carrying munitions.  Attempts have been unsuccessful to dive down to the final resting place and retrieve information to understand exactly what happened to the Lusitania.

Narrowly winning reelection in 1916, Wilson continued his peace initiatives.  The Central Powers  (Germany, etc) believed that victory was inevitable and the Allies would only agree to peace if the empires of their enemies fell.  Neither side wanted to budge.

Finally in April of 1917 with the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare by the Germans and the discovery of the Zimmerman Telegram (in which Germany was trying to convince Mexico to attack the US), Wilson went to Congress to gain a declaration of war.  Germany was offering to help Mexico reclaim the territory they had lost during the Mexican-American War.  In his address to Congress, Wilson pointed to the telegram and submarine warfare as evidence that Germany was provoking war.  In his address he called it the “war to end war”, clearly already thinking ahead to his fourteen points and the League of Nations.  Wilson received a standing ovation for his speech, which was much more unusual than today.  He responded that “My message today was a message of death for your young men.  How strange it is to applaud that”.

The Germans surrendered in the November of 1918.  In the end, the United States lost 177,000 killed and 206,000 wounded.  This compared to the United Kingdom with 996,000 killed, France with 1.7 million killed and Russia with 3.3 million killed.  Among the Central Powers, Germany had 2.5 million killed, Austro-Hungary with 1.6 million killed and the Ottoman Empire with 2.9 million killed (13.7% of the population!).  The end of the war also saw the end of the Autro-Hungarion Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the German Empire and the Russian Empires (October Revolution and the rise of Communism).

Wilson went to work rolling out his Fourteen Points, which included the creation of the League of Nations.  The peace negotiations took place in Paris at the Palace of Versailles.  A great book on the topic of the negotiations is Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan.  Wilson was ultimately successful in the creation of the League of Nations with one major country opting out; the United States.  Historians are generally critical of Wilson because he drove forward with his Fourteen Points and the League of Nations without consulting leaders in Congress.  The end result was that he didn’t have the support in Congress and it failed to pass.  The Treaty of Versailles was never ratified by the U.S. Congress; it wasn’t until 1921 that there was a formal end to the hostilities between the U.S. and the Central Powers.

Campaigning tirelessly to get support for passage of the League of Nations, Wilson suffered a series of strokes, with the one of October 2nd, 1919 incapacitating him, leaving him paralyzed on his left side and blind in his left eye.  The public was never told the extent of his health.  He was essentially kept away from congressional leaders and the vice president for the remainder of his term.  This is the most serious case of a sitting president being incapacitated and was cited in the arguments for the 25th amendment.

Wilson retired from public office after the election of 1920 and lived until February 3rd, 1924.  His legacy is vast.  He was, arguably, the first U.S. President to be seen as a world leader.  His attempts at peace negotiations, his Fourteen Points and the League of Nations made him the most recognized global leader of his day.

Many modern politicians refer to Wilsonian diplomacy when they feel that the United States needs to get involved in a global issue; Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Somalia, Iraq, etc.  It is the belief, right or wrong, that the United States has the power, prestige and responsibility to make a difference in all of these areas and to stand up to people that would abuse the power of their office.

Trivia to impress random people on the street:

• Wilson would paint his golf balls black so that he could continue playing through the winter.
• Wilson was the first president to show a film in the White House: The Birth of Nation
• Wilson is the only president that earned a PhD; History and Political Science from Johns Hopkins University
• Wilson’s father served in the Confederate Army as a chaplain, caring for Confederate soldiers in his church in Richmond.
• As a young man Wilson saw Robert E. Lee in Richmond soon after the civil war
• Wilson was the first man associated with the South to be elected since Taylor
• He was only second Democrat to be elected since between 1860 and 1932 (Cleveland)
• He was the first president since John Adams to personally deliver his State of the Union Address to Congress
• His first name was Thomas, he chose to go by Woodrow instead of Thomas or Tom, that says a lot I think.
• Wilson only won 41.9% of the popular vote in 1912.  However low that seems it only ranks third lowest.  Lincoln only won 39.8% in 1860 and John Quincy Adams won the election with only 30.5% of the popular vote.
• It should be noted that while Wilson only received 41.9% of the popular vote his win was a landslide in the electoral college receiving 435 votes compared to Roosevelt with 88 votes and Taft with 8 votes.
• The federal highway system was also started during Wilson’s first term.
• Wilson is one of three presidents to be widowed while in office; Tyler, B. Harrison.  Jackson’s wife died after he was elected, but before he was inaugurated
• Wilson is one of three presidents to get married while in office; Tyler, Cleveland.
• In the 1916 election, if 1,500 more people in California had voted for his opponent (Charles Evan Hughes) Wilson would not have won re-election.
• When Wilson traveled to Europe to settle the peace terms, he visited Pope Benedict XV in Rome, making Wilson the first American President to visit the Pope while in office.
• In spite of his poor health at the end of his second term Wilson lived long enough to attend the funeral of his successor, Warren Harding.

Vital Stats:

• Wife: Ellen Louise Axson (1860-1914, m. 1885), Edith Bolling Galt (1872-1961, m. 1915) 
• Children: Margaret Woodrow (1886-1944), Jessie Woodrow (1887-1933), Eleanor Randolph (1889-1967) 
• Party affiliation: Democratic Party
• Presidency: 1913-1921
• Born: December 28th, 1856 (Staunton, Virginia) 
• Died: February 3rd, 1924 (Washington D.C.)