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Warren G. Harding

1865–1923 · 58 years Tier III

The only president who made his living running a daily newspaper

Portrait of Warren G. Harding — Harris &amp — Ewing, photographer — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

He was setting type at 11 for his father's weekly in Caledonia, Ohio, and never really left the trade. Tryon Harding farmed, taught school, then studied his way into a small medical practice. Phoebe Harding was a licensed midwife. At 18 their eldest son scraped together 300 dollars with two partners and bought the Marion Star, weakest of the three papers in a town of 4,000 — then lost it to the sheriff while he was off at a Republican convention and got it back with his father's money. He built it by bluffing, stalling and borrowing back his own wages. Florence Kling, five years older and divorced, took over the circulation desk and made it pay. They married on July 8, 1891 and had no children together.

Twenty-nine months. He signed the Budget and Accounting Act, which gave the country its first federal budget and the office that audits it, signed the emergency quota law that cut immigration to 3 percent of each nationality already resident, hosted the conference that produced the first modern treaty limiting warships, and stood in Birmingham in October 1921 to tell a segregated crowd of 30,000 that Black Americans must have political and economic equality. BriefHistory takes the administration and the scandals that outlived it. This page is about a small-town man handling a national reputation.

His skill was managing appearances in a town of 12,000, and it did not scale. For roughly 15 years he wrote to Carrie Phillips, wife of a Marion merchant and a friend of his own wife — about 1,000 pages of letters between 1910 and 1920, sealed by a court until 2014. In 1920 the Republican Party bought her silence with a tour of Asia and an annual payment, which makes her the first woman known to have blackmailed an American president. Nan Britton, a Marion doctor's daughter, said Harding had fathered her daughter Elizabeth Ann in 1919. She published the claim in 1927, lost her lawsuit, was mocked in print for decades, and was proved right by DNA testing in 2015.

He died mid-sentence in a San Francisco hotel room while Florence read him a flattering magazine profile. The doctors called it a cerebral hemorrhage because they did not yet recognize cardiac arrest, and Florence refused an autopsy. Nine million people stood along the tracks as the train carried him home. Then Teapot Dome broke and the estimate reversed. Coolidge would not dedicate his tomb, and Hoover finally did it in 1931, by which point Hoover was nearly as discredited. A con man named Gaston Means published a book in 1930 claiming Florence had poisoned him, which no historian credits. Schlesinger's 1948 poll of scholars put him last of 29, and he has stayed near the bottom.

Lifespan

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Warren G. Harding's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

The Marion Star company
Bought for 300 dollars at 18 and sold the year he died 1884
Budget and Accounting Act law
Created the federal budget process and the General Accounting Office 1921
Emergency Quota Act law
Capped immigration by nationality for the first time 1921
Birmingham address on race speech
Told a segregated Alabama crowd that Black citizens must have equality 1921
Washington Naval Treaty other
The first modern agreement limiting the size of navies 1922

Life in brief

with age at each point

1884 aged ~19 Buys the Marion Star at 18 for 300 dollars The sheriff repossessed it once before his father helped him get it back.
July 8, 1891 aged 25 Marries Florence Kling, whose father had tried to ruin him
1901 aged ~36 Makes the last of five stays at the Battle Creek Sanitarium He went there for fatigue and nervous illness between 1889 and 1901.
March 4, 1915 aged 49 Enters the United States Senate
June 12, 1920 aged 54 Nominated on the 10th ballot in Chicago
October 26, 1921 aged 55 Argues for Black political and economic equality in Birmingham, Alabama The white half of the crowd listened in silence.
June 1923 aged 57 Sets out on the cross-country Voyage of Understanding He had just sold the Star and written a new will.
August 2, 1923 aged 57 Dies at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco at 57
1931 aged ~66 Hoover dedicates the Harding Tomb, eight years after the funeral Coolidge had refused to do it.