Underrated Harding gets his due

WARREN G. HARDING

By John W. Dean

Times Books, $20, 202 pages

REVIEWED BY MARTIN SIEFF

Warren Harding is the Rodney Dangerfield of American presidents: More than 80 years after his death he still can’t get no respect.

Liberals hate Harding for burying their beloved League of Nations and succeeding their sainted Woodrow Wilson. They regard his presidency from 1920 to 1923 as the start of a dark age of repression and reaction when ordinary Americans were ground into the dust.

Prudish conservatives turn up their noses at his Clintonesque philandering ways in the White House and the corruption scandals that engulfed his administration. Neoconservatives and liberals alike regard him as the epitome of isolationism and national selfishness.

It took a British conservative historian, Paul Johnson, to start the long-overdue rehabilitation of poor Harding in his influential work of two decades ago, “Modern Times.” Now along comes another unlikely champion, John W. Dean, Richard Nixon’s chief counsel through the Watergate scandal, to continue the job.

“Warren G. Harding” is a volume in “The American Presidents” series edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and in its style and structure it is as unfashionable as its subject. It is slim, coming in at only 174 pages, but it is elegantly written, rigorously documented and refreshingly, impressively argued from first principles.

The figure it celebrates had a remarkable number of achievements to his credit, while surprisingly few of the accusations routinely heaped upon him for more than 70 years survive even the most cursory examination.

Harding ranks alongside Ronald Reagan as the 20th-century president who most successfully and rapidly cured a serious recession or depression during his term of office. And unlike Reagan — or Franklin Roosevelt during World War II — he did so without modern macroeconomic tools or the artificial stimuli of deficit spending that ran the federal budget catastrophically into the red.

Indeed, the ferocity of the 1920 Depression that Harding inherited from Woodrow Wilson has been played down by liberal historians and missed by almost everyone else. From the pre-slump Wall Street high and top levels of employment to the most severe rates of unemployment and stock market depths, its indicators plunged farther and faster than they did after the Wall Street crash during the Great Depression.

Harding and his Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon stabilized the economy, slashed government spending and restored business confidence in rapid time. They laid the basis for what became the longest period of sustained economic growth and widely spread prosperity in U.S. history.

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