Why Every President Sucked

No. 29 · The Presidents

Warren G. Harding’s Biggest Failures

1921–1923

He picked his friends for the biggest jobs in government. Then he died, and the bills came due.

Who was Warren G. Harding?

Warren G. Harding was the 29th president of the United States, serving from March 4, 1921 until his death on August 2, 1923. A newspaper publisher from Marion, Ohio, he rose through the Ohio Senate and the lieutenant governorship to the U.S. Senate, and won the 1920 election in a landslide: 404 electoral votes to 127 for Democrat James Cox, with about 60 percent of the popular vote.

His campaign promised a “return to normalcy” after the First World War and Woodrow Wilson’s years in office. The phrase came from a May 1920 speech in Boston: “not nostrums, but normalcy.” He died in San Francisco at 57, most likely of a heart attack, in the middle of his third year. His wife refused an autopsy, which fed rumors for decades. Most of the scandals that now define his presidency surfaced after he was gone.

Why is Warren Harding considered one of the worst presidents?

Harding is the one president in this group whose reputation is softening. C-SPAN’s survey of historians moved him from 40th in 2017 to 37th in 2021, but Siena’s 2022 survey of presidential scholars still ranked him 42nd of 45. Siena also noted that Johnson, Buchanan, Harding and Pierce have been in the bottom five in each of its seven surveys. The Miller Center’s essay by historian Eugene Trani opens by saying most historians rank Harding among the worst of all, and argues his own lack of vision, more than the scandals, is what sank him.

In short: he gave powerful jobs to his friends, the friends cashed in, and the president never had much of a plan for the office. In my book, Harding’s entry is about the biggest of the scandals, Teapot Dome. What follows is the rest of the record, with the song I wrote for him threaded through.

Chords: Capo 3 · A, C, G, D/F♯

name's warren g
like the rapper
I'm a gangsta
Underneath this tweed and the powder in my hair

1. He staffed the government with friends

Harding’s most criticized appointment was Harry M. Daugherty, his campaign manager, as Attorney General. The allies who gathered around Daugherty became known as the “Ohio Gang.” He made Albert B. Fall, a Senate crony, his Secretary of the Interior, and Edwin Denby, a former Michigan congressman, Secretary of the Navy. Trani says Harding frequently confided to friends that the job was beyond him. The scandals that followed involved the Ohio Gang and other appointees, and they overshadowed whatever else the administration accomplished.

Talking about low friends
In high places
Talking about me and my home-slices

2. Teapot Dome: the black bag

The Navy had set aside oil-rich reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming and Elk Hills in California so its ships would have fuel in wartime. In May 1921, Harding signed an executive order moving them from the Navy to Fall’s Interior Department. In 1922, Fall leased Teapot Dome to Harry Sinclair’s Mammoth Oil and Elk Hills to Edward Doheny’s Pan American Petroleum, without competitive bidding.

The money trail is what made it a scandal. In November 1921, Doheny lent Fall $100,000, interest-free, in cash. His son Ned and Ned’s friend Hugh Plunkett reportedly carried it to Fall in a black bag, in five stacks of $20,000. Sinclair gave Fall roughly another $300,000 in bonds and cash, according to History.com’s account of the case.

Secretary of the interior, Albert Fall
Was my homey, my boy, and the worst one of all
He took a 100 g's on the side

Wyoming oil operators complained, and Montana Senator Thomas Walsh pursued it through Senate Public Lands Committee hearings that opened in October 1923, after Harding was dead. In 1927 the Supreme Court voided both leases as corruptly obtained, and the reserves went back to the Navy.

The criminal outcomes are almost comic. Fall was convicted on October 25, 1929 of taking the bribe, the first former cabinet officer convicted of a crime committed in office. He lost his appeal and entered prison in July 1931, arriving by ambulance, and served just under ten months. Doheny, the man who paid the bribe, was acquitted in 1930. Sinclair, who had hired detectives to shadow jurors, served about six months for contempt of court and the Senate, not for bribery.

Leasing out our oil reserves in Wyoming
Something he couldn't hide

The scandal also left a legal legacy. McGrain v. Daugherty (1927) upheld Congress’s power to compel testimony, and Congress passed new campaign-finance and tax-disclosure laws in 1924 and 1925. It left a human toll too. In February 1929, Hugh Plunkett shot Ned Doheny at the family’s Beverly Hills mansion, then killed himself. They were the two men who had carried the cash.

3. The Veterans Bureau

Charles R. Forbes, the director of the new Veterans Bureau, took kickbacks on hospital construction and sold off government supplies. Harding eventually demanded his resignation. A 1924 Senate investigation concluded that fraud and waste under Forbes cost the government more than $200 million, according to History.com’s summary; the number is an estimate of losses to the Bureau, not money Forbes pocketed himself. Forbes was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government and entered Leavenworth in 1926. Historian Rosemary Stevens has asked whether he was a criminal or a scapegoat.

4. The Justice Department and the body count

Impeachment charges against Daugherty were filed in 1922 but went nowhere. In March 1923, Charles Cramer, the Veterans Bureau’s general counsel, killed himself as the Forbes case broke. In May 1923, Jess Smith, Daugherty’s aide and roommate, was found dead of a gunshot wound at a Washington hotel, and the death was ruled a suicide. Murder theories exist, partly because there was no formal inquest, but they are speculation. Daugherty resigned on March 28, 1924. He was tried twice for conspiracy and never convicted.

That is the “several suicides” in my book: at least two in 1923, plus the 1929 murder-suicide that closed the Doheny story.

5. A presidency without direction

Trani’s judgment is that Harding never understood where he wanted to take the nation and had no message to communicate, because he had none. He spoke of “normalcy” but had little idea what it meant. Harding also followed Woodrow Wilson, which did him no favors in comparison.

In fairness, he signed the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, hosted the Washington Naval Conference, commuted Eugene Debs’s sentence, and gave a 1921 speech in Birmingham supporting political equality for Black Americans. Revisionists like Robert K. Murray, John Dean and Ryan Walters argue he has been judged too harshly. His climb in the rankings shows that case is gaining ground, though not fast enough to get him out of the bottom tier.

After his death

Harding was widely mourned at first, and early biographies praised him. Then the scandals emerged one after another. In 1927, Nan Britton published a book about her affair with him, and in 2015 DNA testing was widely reported to have confirmed Harding was the father of her daughter. His earlier affair with Carrie Phillips ran for more than fifteen years. The Library of Congress opened their roughly 1,000 pages of letters to the public in July 2014, as a donor had required, fifty years after an Ohio judge sealed them. In one 1913 letter he begged her to destroy them: “They are too inflammable to keep.”

Harding himself was never accused of profiting from Teapot Dome. The people he put in charge did enough on their own.

this temptation led to litigation a great great stain upon this great nation

Hear the song

Read the full lyrics, browse all 43 songs, read more articles, or head to the book.

Sources

By Eric Olsen · Published