Warren G. Harding: Conservative Hero

Warren Harding as a Maligned President and Conservative Alternative

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. I just recently read this book called The Jazz Age President about Warren Harding. Now I know many of you probably are thinking, wait a minute, who's Warren Harding?

You know, he was a president, I know that, but what did he do exactly? And you probably don't have any thoughts come into your mind about what he accomplished because even in my general history books that I read growing up, it basically, they usually say that he didn't really do anything.

And so there's nothing memorable that many of us have when we think of Warren Harding, but that couldn't be further from the truth. And I have with me, Ryan S. Walters to explain, he's the author of The Jazz Age President to explain what I find to be not just the significance, but the admirable qualities that Warren Harding had.

So Ryan, thank you so much for joining me and being willing to discuss this. Thank you so much. It's good to be back. Yeah, we've, we've done, I think our third interview, if I'm not mistaken. Second or third.

And I know we, the last one we did was on the Apollo One. And now it's Warren Harding. And I've noticed there's a pattern with you with some of the books that you publish. You're not doing the big, you're not doing like Abraham Lincoln's, you know, 1700th biography.

You're picking places that haven't really been focused on so much. Is there a reason for that?

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I did the same thing with Grover Cleveland. Grover Cleveland. That's right. That's the other one I was thinking of. Yep. Grover Cleveland. Yeah. A lot of these guys have been maligned.

I call Harding the most maligned president in American history. And the reason for that, aside from the fact that he is, I mean, when you read the stuff historians have said about Harding, it's pretty terrible.

They've been doing it for 100 years, but he's finished last in more presidential rankings than any other president, even Buchanan. I think Buchanan is going to pass him eventually. Harding's actually come up a few notches in recent years, but he's still in the bottom 10 and he's still considered a failed presidency.

But when you pull back and you look at his whole record and look at the man and look at what he actually accomplished and look at what was going on when he became president, the record's actually really good.

He actually had a really good record. But again, most historians are left-wing progressives and they like Wilson and they like FDR and they like Lincoln and presidents like that, that are activists. They don't like Warren Harding.

They don't like America First policies. They don't like laissez-faire economics. They don't like capitalism.

So are they going to hate Warren Harding? To pique people's interest a little here, because I know that's not a common name here, but I was surprised about a few things. He did remind me of Ronald Reagan, but honestly, he reminded me more of Donald Trump.

And I didn't realize the America First, which I associate with Donald Trump, I mean, Harding was the one that actually used this phrase quite a bit and the return to normalcy. But America First policies were definitely part and parcel to his cabinet and everything he did from foreign policy to domestic policy and fiscal policy and all of it seems to be America First stuff.

So could you talk about that a little bit? The comparison between Warren Harding and Donald Trump?

America First, Return to Normalcy, and Noninterventionism

Yeah, it's actually interesting. Robert Spencer gave me a good blurb for the back and he called Harding Trump before Trump, which is something I've thought as well. Again, Trump basically ran on a Harding platform.

Remember Harding, we've got to put Harding in his context. Now, Wilson ran for re-election in 1916 and he used the America First slogan. But obviously, he won re-election in a close fight with Charles Evans Hughes, inaugurated on March the 4th, 1917 and a month later, we're in World War I.

So obviously, he didn't really mean it. I mean, we know a lot about Wilson, he didn't mean a lot of things. Harding was true to his word. I mean, coming out of World War I, that was basically an internationalist crusade that we got into.

And then, of course, remember the flu pandemic that came out of that and all those things were going on, other things were going on in the country and people were just fed up with it. And Harding came in with his signature slogan was return to normalcy, but he used America First throughout his campaign, said, we've got to prosper America for you, take care of America first.

And when his inaugural address, he said the same thing. We've got to disentangle from the old world. We don't want to get involved in their entanglements anymore. When he was talking about Europe, so he had an America First policy on foreign affairs, on trade policy and really economic policy because he wanted to prosper the American people first.

And of course, we end up with the boom and the roar of the 20s.

Well, so let's take a situation if we could today, one that's very prevalent right now. And I know this this podcast is going to drop a few days after the time period we're in right this second with Russia.

But something like this, the situation going on with Russia. How do you think hypothetically, how would Warren Harding navigate something like that, you think? What principles? He would stay out of it.

I found it interesting. I just was scrolling through Twitter yesterday and looking at people's comments about it, particularly left wingers. And of course, they're trying to blame it on Trump. But the other thing is, I was shocked at how many people thought we ought to go get involved in it and rescue Ukraine.

And I feel for the Ukrainian people. I feel for what's going on over there. We should pray for them every day. But I just kept thinking, do we want to get into an entanglement with a nuclear on Russia over Ukraine?

Do you want to sacrifice your country for Ukraine? I mean, if it turned nuclear, Harding would be again, we're going to disentangle ourselves from the old world. In other words, their squabbles are their squabbles.

And we want to sacrifice American lives and spill American blood for somebody else. Now, understand he was in the Senate. Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare that pushed a lot of people to support the war.

He voted for the war and supported the war. But when it was over, his position was we need to return to a more traditional, non interventionist foreign policy. And that's what he that's what he pushed as president.

Civil Unrest, the Red Summer, and Harding’s Response to Disorder

Now, one of the things that you talk about, another situation I want to bring up as a parallel in some ways, it's not perfect, but you had I didn't realize this because BLM doesn't focus on this today in their narrative as much.

But you had you had race riots. And of course, the socialist terrorism attacks kind of at the same time. And Warren Harding, as a conservative Republican president, really brought an end to some of this.

And he doesn't get that credit, I think probably because today that would punch a hole in the narrative that 16, 19 BLM are trying to tell. But but that I see some parallels, the civil unrest that Warren Harding was focusing on and then the civil unrest of the past two or three years.

Do you see those parallels as well? Oh, yeah. That was one of the things I wanted to do was put Harding in his proper context. There was one scholar who tried to say that a couple of them actually that tried to say that Harding was not a great president because he didn't really accomplish anything while he was in office and that he didn't have any great problems to overcome.

You know, these these scholars like presidents who overcome crisis and come into a crisis presidency. That's not true at all. I mean, when you look at there's a lot going on in the country and most things people didn't know was happening today.

And not only coming out of World War One and the flu pandemic, but in beginning in late 1918 into 1919. And 1919 was an awful year. I mean, 1918, you had all that you had to fight over the League of Nations in the 19 in 1919.

Wilson had a stroke and he was incapacitated for about nine months and people didn't know it. They kept it secret. We didn't have a president. We had his wife was running the presidency. But we effectively didn't have a president for about nine months while he was recovering from a stroke.

Of course, the Senate voted the league down twice. Harding was involved in that fight. But 1990, a lot of terrorism, these anarchists and Bolshevik groups were setting off bombs. One place they bombed was the home of the attorney general of the United States.

They targeted a lot of people during that year. Labor strikes, thousands and thousands of workers around the country went on strike. But the racial violence in the summer was so bad. They call it the Red Summer of 1919.

There were dozens of black Americans that were lynched. And I don't mean in the South. I mean, the worst racial violence was in Chicago that year. Really? Rioting. Oh, yeah, it was it was terrible. All of that kind of stuff was going on.

It was just a year of upheaval is what I call it. And of course, when you roll into 1920, the first thing that happens in January 1920, the economy goes into a depression. So it was just one thing after another.

So when Harding runs on return to normalcy, people were really ready to hear that.

Harding’s Conservative Temperament and Limited Progressive Measures

Well, he was a kind of a blue collar guy, right? In a way, he's a newspaper man, but from rural Ohio. And he brought those values to the White House when he came. And very populist, for the most part, conservative.

And I do know he has you mentioned in the book he had some progressive tendencies as well. What were those?

He had a few progressive tendencies, I guess everybody does to some degree. I mean, he did he did support helping famine victims in Russia. We sent a lot of supplies to Russia. He signed a bill to help to create maternity wards and and things like that.

There were a few little things that he did. Overall, his overall philosophy was very conservative, very much America first.

Well, let's go. Can we go through some of these issues that parallel today's issues? I think this would be fun. And just how did Warren Harding solve a similar incident? So let's start if we could. Or what were the accomplishments of Warren Harding?

The Forgotten Depression and Harding’s Laissez-Faire Recovery

The economy. What was the situation? What did Warren Harding do and what did it work out?

It's called the Forgotten Depression in American history. And there's a really good book by James Grant on that called The Forgotten. Most people don't know we had a depression in 1920. They know about 1929.

They might right before that. But they said 19. We had one in 1920. Yeah, we had one in 1920, hit in January of 1920, coming out of that awful year, 1919, and it lasted until July of 1921. And it was pretty bad.

I mean, unemployment went from four percent to 12. And part of that was because the army was coming back from France and being mustered out of service. But industrial production fell by a third. Corporate profits fell 90 percent.

You got inflation. All of the things that you see in a depression hit and it was getting worse. So it was it was getting worse by the day for average American people. So Harding comes into office and does not have a stimulus plan.

He doesn't have a new deal. He doesn't have he's not we're not sending checks to everybody. We don't have any of that. He's really Paul Johnson actually called Harding and Coolidge the last presidents to handle an economic depression with laissez faire methods.

So their method was cut spending, cut taxes, cut regulations. Those kind of things is what he did. He cut taxes. The top rate in taxes, the income tax had gone up above 70 percent during World War One.

They cut that down. Harding and Coolidge cut that down to 25 percent. Spending was cut 50 percent across the board. I mean, that would be like today as walking in and cutting spending by half, just just gutting it by half in one year.

So spending was cut in half. Regulations set aside things like that to free up the economy and business were happy about that. They were happy when Harding was elected and Coolidge came in. You can see the headlines.

I have some of them in the book. Business was really happy because because Wilson had really strangled them throughout his entire presidency, particularly during World War One. So they were ready to bust loose.

And they did in the 1920s. We almost get another another industrial revolution. I mean, and the thing about it is when you look at the statistics, people say, well, I'm sure it was trickle down economics and the rich got rich and the poor got poor.

Not true. Look at the wages. Wages grew for every single class of American and they grew the most at the bottom as people were getting jobs in Ford plants, building cars and cars and all these kind of things exploded.

Industrial production. So people were getting very good jobs. What helped everybody in the economy boom during the 1920s. We've never seen a decade like that. We've never seen a decade where we average seven percent growth.

Well, he he made in the roaring 20s. Yeah. Yeah. We get happy with three percent. Hey, well, we got three percent. They average seven percent growth a year, had a surplus every year, cut income taxes four time and paid down a third of the national debt.

And I want to be ever seen anything like that.

Yeah. No, we never pay down the national debt. I actually cringe. Biden, as we're recording this, this speech was yesterday in the reaction to the Ukraine situation, said, I'm going to use every tool at my disposal to keep gas prices low.

And I thought, oh, please don't, you know, if you because, you know, if you were like Harding, you would have cut taxes. You probably would have let him drill in Alaska, but that's not what he's talking about.

And so anyway, that I was fascinated by that. That's probably one of his greatest accomplishments. The economy doesn't get credit for.

He does not get credit for it. Yeah. A lot of times you read these books or see these documentaries, they'll talk about the war in 20s and you'll be shocked at how many times they don't even mention Harding and Coolidge.

Oh, it's just like they were sort of innocent bystanders while this was going on. Now they put in the right policies and the economy took off because they just backed off and let people go. And that's that was the that's the result.

Harding’s Personal Scandals and the Smear Campaign Against Him

Now, why does Harding get a bad. I want to come back to his accomplishments, but he gets kind of a bad rap in the popular media when he is mentioned for being this immoral kind of playboy character who bucked prohibition and someone you couldn't really kind of a seedy character.

Why is that? Well, he did have a few. He was not perfect in his personal life. He was married to a woman named Florence. Florence Clean, she had had a common law marriage to a guy named Pete DeWolf when she was younger and they had a they had a son and of course, her father didn't like Pete DeWolf and and she was estranged from her dad and Pete DeWolf was that was an alcoholic.

He ran off on her and she met Harding and Harding on the Marion Star there and Marion Ohio's businessman. And she met Harding and they got married. I think their marriage was more of a partnership. They never had any children together.

And of course, the success of the newspaper is largely attributed to her. She had a very good business mind and it was a very big success financially for the Hardings. Harding did have a couple of extramarital affairs earlier in his life, one with a woman named Carrie Phillips and then another one with Nan Britton.

That's the most infamous one. We do know now that Nan Britton had a daughter and she said it was Harding's at the time. We do know now through DNA that it was Harding's. Again, what was going on between Mr. and Miss Harding, I don't know the issues, but not while he was president.

The way they trash him is he was a he was a rowdy, you know, like you say, playboy, drunk, had all these wild parties in the White House and all this kind of stuff. And you see this in films and things.

None of that's true. Harding had knocked a lot of that off, even quit drinking alcohol when he was president. There was none of that kind of stuff. And I have three primary sources of people that worked in the White House who testified of that, that there was none of that kind of stuff going on.

One of them was Secret Service agent.

Was this a recycled news smear from his enemies then?

A lot of it was political attacks. You see the same thing with Grover Cleveland, other conservative presidents. There's a lot of stuff that the politicians and all throw at each other. We see that every year now.

And historians just picked it up as it was true, you know, people that didn't like him and they never really checked into it. And you read these books and they'll say all this kind of stuff. And without any type of source attribution at all.

Yeah, just because it's become common knowledge that Harding was a was a wild party guy and didn't do anything for the country. He was just there to have a good time and brought his friends and they stole everything.

And it's just ridiculous. But when you look at the sources, look at primary sources, look at people that knew him, you get a totally different story.

Well, he worked, I think you've said in the book, sometimes 18 hours a day. So he didn't have time for partying. And that reminds me of Trump again with, you know, just energy, endless energy.

Yeah. And of course, that's what they always want to say, that conservative presidents were lazy and didn't do anything. And they did this, that and the other. And you find the opposite. Grover Cleveland was the same way.

We worked about 18 hours a day. Harding. And you find people in the work in the White House that will testify to that. Of course, other other women, Lyndon Johnson took a nap in the middle of the day and all that kind of stuff.

Harding was a hardworking president and people that were around him said that.

Harding on Race, Civil Rights, and Pardons for Political Prisoners

What about domestic issues? You know, like, I don't know, cultural issues, things like that, like the riots that happened. How did Harding address some of these things?

This is an area, again, that he doesn't get a lot of credit for any at all. You don't ever see this in books or in documentaries or anything. But his views on race. Harding came up. He was picked on a lot.

The rumor was around Marion, Ohio, was that he had Black blood and they called him the N-word, which he didn't like, obviously. So I think it was kind of interesting because he kind of could at least understand what Blacks were going through, at least in some kind of way.

Even his own father-in-law, Amos Clean, would call him that word. Didn't like him. We know now through DNA that's not true. But again, I think he was a little bit dark, complected in those days. Even in the North, if you were like that, people would throw that at you.

So he had some sympathy for Black Americans. We came in. He wanted to do something about it. And he had a very good record on that. He called for a civil rights law. He called for a federal law to ban lynching, to make lynching a federal crime.

He went to Birmingham, Alabama. I talk about courage. He goes to Birmingham, Alabama in October 1921, speaks to a large segregated audience, and his speech is on why Blacks need to be given equal rights inside the country.

They ought to have equal opportunities in politics, in education, and in economics. And you talk about the heart of the old Confederacy. Show me a president that would go do something like that. He spoke at an all-Black college in Pennsylvania to their graduating ceremony, shook hands with every one of the graduates.

There were about 400 of them. So he has a very good record. Again, some of those bills didn't get passed. But again, at least the presidency used the bully pulpit to do that, to try to do something for Black Americans.

Now, you compare him with Wilson and FDR. Wilson's a notorious racist. So was FDR. FDR didn't do anything for Black Americans. Nothing at all.

And they're progressive heroes. And yet Harding gets the shaft.

And all that kind of stuff. FDR's record on race is deplorable. Absolutely deplorable. His wife, Eleanor, the first lady, tried to get him to support anti-lynching legislation and things like that, integrate the military.

He would not do it because he didn't want to anger Southern senators that he needed to pass the New Deal. So he put politics over the plight of African-Americans.

Well, there's the whole internment camps, too, and that kind of thing.

Yeah, not to mention a lot of people, 140 ,000, right? But yeah, Harding... Those people were considered political enemies. And just actual enemies. And FDR did that by executive order. The Supreme Court 1944 Korematsu case upheld that to keep them in internment camps.

Remember, in Wilson, the same thing was going on. Anybody that opposed the war under Woodrow Wilson, World War I, they threw them in jail, including Eugene Debs, who was a socialist, got a 10-year sentence because he gave one speech denouncing the war.

There were other people. Upton Sinclair was arrested because he read the Bill of Rights out loud on a street corner. Harding came in and pardoned all those people. He pardoned Eugene Debs. He commuted his sentence and actually asked Debs to come to the White House to meet with him.

I mean, the leading socialist in the country diametrically opposed to Harding, but Harding's idea was this is the right thing to do. He didn't see him as an enemy. He didn't hate Eugene Debs the way Woodrow Wilson did.

And I think that's a testament to his character. Eugene Debs said after the meeting with Harding, he said he's a good man with humane impulses.

Well, and that reminded me, again, a lot of Trump because he was very trusting. I know you talk about and some people took advantage of this, but he loved animals, he loved humans, and he assumed the best oftentimes.

And that got him in a little bit of hot water towards the end there, which I see the same thing with Trump. The people he trusted kind of at the end didn't really help him that much. But let's talk about some other accomplishments.

What about on the diplomatic stage? I mean, what did Warren Harding accomplish in diplomacy?

Harding’s Foreign Policy, the Washington Disarmament Conference, and Repairing Relations Abroad

His foreign policy, again, is another area where he gets no credit at all. But when you look at what he accomplished in foreign policy, and remember, Harding served 882 days in office. He died in 1923.

When you look at his accomplishments, it's pretty impressive in every aspect what he was able to do in that length of time. He was about 150 days less than JFK was in office. And he accomplished a lot more than Kennedy did.

And I look a lot at his foreign policy because it's quite impressive. He formally ended World War I. We still had troops in the Rhineland in Germany. He withdrew those troops. He called a World War IV debt commission because debts were through the roof.

These governments had so many debts. We were owed $10 billion by Europe. Of course, Germany's reparations, they tried to straighten a lot of that out. His biggest accomplishment was the Washington Disarmament Conference that he called, that met in November 1921 until February 1922.

Because the big, powerful, feared weapons of the day were naval weapons. This was before air power was fully developed, certainly long before nuclear weapons. So people feared the Navy. And that was at least part of the reason for World War I, the great German-Britain naval race that led up to World War I.

So they called this conference. And the idea was to put limits on naval weapons. And they were able to do that. They also banned poison gas for use on the battlefield. There were also some treaties, particularly in the Pacific realm.

There was some agitation and things with Japan. Japan wasn't happy. We've been antagonizing Japan. And they've been antagonizing us since we took the Philippines. Actually, before that, there were a lot of little issues.

One scholar said the treaties that came out of the Washington Conference helped ease tensions and probably delayed war in the Pacific for at least a decade. So there were a lot of accomplishments he had.

Caribbean. Wilson had messed up a lot of our relationships with Mexico and a lot of countries in the Caribbean and Latin America. Harding started repairing those relations. He reached out to President Nixon, who was really upset at Wilson.

Remember the whole Pancho Villa expedition down there. The Mexican president called Wilson a terrible enemy of Mexico. But when Harding came in, he said, this is a day of deliverance. And Harding reached out to him, repaired those relations.

There were some troops in the Caribbean that he withdrew. So he had that kind of foreign policy. It wasn't offense and let's occupy things and throw our weight around. No, he was pulling back and withdrawing troops from around in different places in the world and repairing our relations.

So he should get a lot more credit for that. I got a couple of pieces coming out in the next few weeks on his foreign policy and various publications. Maybe people can see that that foreign policy works.

It's not activist. It's not interventionist. It's not internationalist. It's a more traditional American foreign policy.

And that's what we need now more than ever. I would just encourage people go check this out. Where's the best place that they can get the Jazz Age president?

Where to Get the Book and Why Harding Matters Today

Well, you can get it on Amazon. That's a good place to get it. You can also get it at Barnes Noble. I think they're in some of the Barnes Noble stores. At least people have told me they were. Probably Amazon's a good place.

Again, you can go to Regnery's website, but they got links to Amazon and Barnes Noble and Books A Million and some other places that you can get it. A lot of people say, well, I don't want to get it on Amazon.

Well, I mean, there's other places to get it as well.

And if you want the Audible audio version, you go to Audible and you can get that as well and listen to it. I listened to it. I started reading it and then I got busy and I was on a long drive and I downloaded the Audible.

It was very well read. So I would just encourage people because this is not only something you can impress your friends with that you know about Warren Harding when they don't, but it's certainly in my mind at the end, I thought I have a new hero here in some ways, a political hero.

And I didn't expect to have one in Warren Harding. But this is a guy, I mean, I can really I feel like I agree with so much of what he says on just about every issue. And, you know, conservatives are constantly looking for heroes.

And, you know, it's like Reagan is the one that we still and he's a great man, but we still go back to Reagan. Right. And there's so many other heroes in that pantheon of conservative statesmen that America has produced.

And Warren Harding is probably at the top of that list. So yeah, check it out. And yeah, appreciate you writing this. And let me know when you write something else, because I always like your material.

Well, I'm working on a lot of stuff. You know, we talked about earlier, I'm working on a book on Vietnam. So a political history of Vietnam. So I'll be diving into Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Nixon in a book because and I'm calling it an unnecessary war because I think it's looking at it now.

It's completely unnecessary. Certainly different than Warren Harding's foreign policy, because, you know, Warren Harding was a member of what we call the old right. He would be a paleo conservative today.

Differences in the conservative movement. You know, Harding would not be a neocon at all. He would. He's very much a paleo conservative. And I think a lot of people would. Well, if you like Trump, you like Harding, you like FDR, you probably want.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, thanks, Ryan. I appreciate you stopping by sharing that with us. I encourage people to get the book. Anytime. I appreciate it. Yeah. God bless. God bless you.