Dead Presidents

Chris White is touring the gravesites, birthplaces and homes of the U.S. presidents. Here are his notes from those visits, which he probably means to be funny. Eh.

29. Warren G. Harding

Harding home and the Harding Tomb, Marion, Ohio

The Beer Vote (September 22, 2008)

Americans, in choosing the leader of the free world, usually pick the person they want to have a beer with, even when that person is a recovering alcoholic. That fun-loving attitude is why the terrorists hate us! In 2008, we're looking at happy hours with either crazy POW stories or rip-roaring tales of community organzing, and drinking budies who love basketball and hunting or whatever Joe Biden loves (tax-free shopping?). Tough call.

Cough, cough.

In 1920, though, it was a no-brainer: the country wanted to throw down with Warren Gamaliel Harding, who won in a landslide. You might think the country would have a beer with ANYONE in the middle of Prohibition, but not so -- after a visit to the Harding home, in Marion, Ohio, you can see that the guy was Mr. Personality.

Or at least what passed for a personality in 1920. He was part of just about every club in Marion: the Freemasons, Elk's lodges, or anything else that involved wearing a fez. He loved baseball and golf; he played coronet and led the local brass band (which, like today, is considered the coolest thing possible). He owned the local newspaper, played poker, helped pump up the town's economy and gave a pretty good speech, while never really pissing anybody off -- he knew how to straddle the fence, never really committing to any one viewpoint. And supposedly he was handsome! A lot of people say he had "movie-star" looks, which some speculate is the reason he captured the women's vote (their first under the 19th Amendment). Of course, this is consdescending and insulting, because any sensible person knows that no woman has ever chosen one man over another because he was good looking. No, they always go for the guy with a stable personality and a great sense of humor. Always.

Cough, cough.

He wasn't all peaches and cream: he cheated on his sick wife with at least one woman, possibly two, and maybe had an illegitimate child. But you'd still have a beer with the guy, right? He'd definitely know the bartender, so you'd drink for free; he'd probably have all the hookups for football tickets; if you were a guy he'd be attracting enough heat from the ladies that you'd definitely have a shot at his leftovers. Bam, 60 percent of the vote. Cake.

The Marion house is about as authentic as you could hope for; he bought it for his wife Florence as a wedding present, and they lived there (or in D.C.) until they were both dead. It turned into a museum right after. The whole thing is pretty modest -- he was a journalist, and even owning the local paper he wasn't going to be loaded. His wife's dad owned the local bank, but her father disowned her when she married Harding, supposedly because Harding might have had black blood in his family tree. Or because the dad was just a jerk. One of those.

The inside has some definite personality, since it's decked out with the furniture from their marriage and the momentos he was able to pile up from his political years. Harding collected elephant statues, and Florence was apparently a superstitious nut case, so if you ask they'll point out all the supernatural elements: an owl pattern carved into the bannister, a four-leaf clover from the White House lawn and a funky wooden chair for the mediums that would have visted during the seances (remember, no television in the 1920s). There's also a "haunted clock" that supposedly stopped at the exact time of Harding's death, but this is clearly a load of garbage, because no self-respecting spirits would be happy with stopping a clock. If the house imploded and got sucked into a pinpoint, then yeah, haunted. Stopped clock, not so much.

But the place isn't a mansion -- it's like my parent's house, but with a smaller kitchen and less closet space, and also my parents don't live there. The Hardings actually leased it out when they were living in D.C., meaning the people had the president as a landlord. This must have been awkward: "Yeah, I know you're busy negotiating global naval disarmament and all, but the kitchen faucet is leaking." Heh.

Historically speaking, the most important thing is the front porch, site of the last front porch campaign this country will ever see. People would walk four miles from the train station to hear Harding, wearing white pants, a straw hat and a dark jacket, yell things from his steps. Harding bought a kit house from the Sears catalog for $1,000, put it up in his backyard and let reporters use it as a pressroom, and as a journalist he would hang out with them. It was like a Straight Talk Express without wheels (now it's the gift shop/museum). Compare that with Ohio governor James Cox, who toured more than 30 states, was the first candidate to use a microphone at public rallies, and got his ass kicked. Hands down.

But it's tough to keep your reputation spotless when you're dead, and after Harding keeled over the wheels fell off. He had made about four awful cabinet appointments: his Attorney General took bribes, his Interior secretary took bribes (Teapot Dome) and his Veterans Bureau guy (who only had a job because Harding MADE the bureau) stole a few million dollars. It all came out in the wash after Harding's 1923 death, and by 1927, when this structure was ready to go ...

... no one wanted to touch it with a 10-foot pole. Coolidge wouldn't go anywhere near it, and Hoover didn't risk a dedication ceremony until 1931. Harding was a pariah just a few years after being one of the most popular presidents on record. There were documents more or less proving that Harding wasn't personally involved in any of the scandals, that he was just finding out about the situation at the time of his death ... but they were in the basement of the Marion house, and apparently no one got around to cleaning the basement for 40 years. If history tells us anything, it's that NO ONE WANTS TO CLEAN OUT A BASEMENT. Super-guide Beth at the Harding house puts it this way: Harding was the boss we all want, the guy who picks you for the job and then only pokes his nose in your office when there's a problem. It can work great, unless the people you pick happen to be despicable human beings. Then you're boned.

But at least he's making time with the ladies in heaven. So here's to you, Warren G ... you were a regular dude, reaching for the stars, but in over your head. And when things got ugly, you had the decency to step aside. By having a heart attack. Regulate.

FUN HARDING FACTS!

  • Harding's parents were homeopathic doctors, leading to the lifelong rumors that he was a homeo.
  • Borrowed $100 from his parents to buy a share of the local newspaper with two partners. He bought out one partner and won the other share in a poker game. As president he had regular poker games at the White House, and he actually lost Puerto Rico to the British prime minister for a few hours in 1922.
  • An avid consumer of tobacco, Harding would chew a cigarette in situations where it would be impolite to smoke, but somehow still polite to chew a cigarette. People got weird during Prohibition.
  • His wife Florence was a divorcee with a child; they met when Florence was giving piano lessons to Harding's sister. She pursued him at the skating rink, where his brass band would play, and pressured him into marriage. His bank-owning father-in-law threatened to foreclose on anyone who attended the wedding, and did so to his best friend. His wife had Bright's disease and was constantly ill. Why Harding got married is not entirely clear to me.
  • Endeared himself to the public by defying fashionistas and wearing white pants at front porch speeches -- EVEN AFTER LABOR DAY!
  • Harding attended Central College in Iberia, Ohio, which had 7 students and 3 teachers. He was the starting first baseman, starting second baseman and starting right fielder for the baseball team. He became a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse for one year, but as the student-teacher ratio was not 2.3 to 1, he found the conditions barbaric.
  • Harding was prone to nervous breakdowns and had spent time at a sanitarium in his 20s. His confirmed affair, with the wife of a friend, began when Harding recommended the stressed-out friend to that same sanitarium; Harding's wife was indisposed in the hospital (she had severe kidney problems), and so Harding and Caroline Phillips comforted each other, by having a lot of sex for more than a decade. The letters documenting their relationship have been sealed by court order until 2023. On the positive side, Harding did get a $100 referral bonus voucher toward future sanitarium trips.
  • Created the White House budget office, thereby establishing fiscal restraint and careful financial planning that have endured to this very day.
  • It is now widely believed that Harding had a heart attack, with his condition possibly worsened by the stress of the scandals he was learning about (he confided to his Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, that he was tremendously worried). But initially, it was thought that he had food poisoning from eating bad crabs in Alaska, which is why every year on the anniversary of Harding's death, all crab shacks use rolls of black butcher paper.

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