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American history, Andrew Sinclair, biographies, book reviews, Francis Russell, John W. Dean, presidential biographies, Presidents, Robert Murray, Samuel H. Adams, Warren Harding
[Updated]
Biographically speaking, it seems Warren Harding comes in just two flavors: depressingly dull…or positively fascinating.
And the right choice of Harding biographies for you seems to depend on whether someone’s personal life – or his politics – are your thing.
After reading four biographies on Harding I was not surprised by how bad his presidency was (historians have generally condemned it as near-awful) but by how bad it was not. Perhaps I simply expected worse than I found – or maybe I’ve just been de-sensitized by the deficiencies of our modern day heroes?
In many respects Harding was ill-equipped for the demands of the presidency. Spectacularly salacious documentation also confirms that his personal life was a mess. And although he appears to have played no role in their evolution, several scandals emerged from within his administration which haunt his legacy. His presidential patina is deservedly tarnished.
But having vicariously survived the presidencies of political paragons such as Pierce, Buchanan, Johnson, Fillmore and Tyler (among others) I don’t see Harding as setting the Gold Standard for abysmal. For me, Harding merely defines the essence of “bottom quartile.”
And if he had possessed the public relations savvy of Ulysses S. Grant (whose administration was no stranger to scandal) or Bill Clinton (whose personal foibles are legend), Harding might today even be considered almost average…
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* My first Harding biography was Francis Russell’s 1968 “The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times.” Russell was one of five enthusiastic biographers who pounced on Harding’s papers when they were released by the Ohio Historical Society in 1964.
Russell’s book was not first to market; that distinction belongs to Andrew Sinclair. But Russell possessed one potential advantage over the rest of the field- he had previously stumbled upon a cache of colorful letters between Harding and one of his alleged mistresses. But while he was able to inject the “spirit” of those letters into his biography, the actual content had to be redacted due to a lawsuit brought by Harding’s descendants.
Despite this legal constraint, Russell’s biography was by a huge margin the most sensational – and one of the least scholarly – of the Harding biographies I read. Fans of slightly tawdry but captivating tales of infidelity will appreciate this book. But if a tabloidesque exposé is what you’re after, surely there must be a better subject than Warren Harding? (Full review here)
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* Next I read John W. Dean’s 2004 “Warren G. Harding.” As a member of The American Presidents series this book delivers exactly what you would expect: a clear, concise and competent analysis of Harding’s life, including his presidency.
Among the four Harding biographers I encountered, Dean was Harding’s most enthusiastic supporter. Dean’s biography seemed designed not only to inform…but also to rehabilitate Harding’s reputation. And he was reasonably convincing.
In the end, however, Dean was too forgiving of Harding’s failings – for the worst of his political appointments, in particular. But for readers committed to reading one biography on each president, Dean’s biography of Harding is probably the best among a fairly mediocre lot. (Full review here)
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* My third Harding biography was Andrew Sinclair’s “The Available Man: The Life Behind the Masks of Warren Gamaliel Harding.” Published in 1965, this was the first Harding biography published after the release of Harding’s papers in 1964.
Unfortunately, the haste with which Sinclair pushed this biography to press is demonstrated not only by its brevity (it is by far the shortest of the scholarly biographies) but also its overwhelming meaningful insight.
Sinclair substituted clever deduction for penetrating research and relied on platitudes and generalities to paint Harding with an excessively broad brush. But perhaps to his credit, Sinclair resisted the temptation to focus on the sensational stories of Harding’s personal life. Or perhaps he simply lacked the time? (Full review here)
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* The last Harding biography I read was Robert Murray’s “The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration.” Published in 1969, this proved to be the most sober and scholarly of the Harding biographies. It was also fairly well-balanced, neither unfairly castigating Harding nor endlessly praising him. But it was far from ideal.
Murray devoted little attention to Harding’s childhood, his formative career as a newspaper publisher or his burgeoning political career. The first 54 years of Harding’s life were documented in less than 10% of the book’s pages.
Nowhere else have I seen a more detailed, well-researched or thoughtful (if unexciting) study of Harding’s presidency. But in order to truly understand Harding the man one must study far more than Harding the president. And in this respect, among a few others, Murray’s biography of Harding fell short. (Full review here)
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[Added November 2022]
* I’ve now read Ryan S. Walters’s just-released “The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding.” In many respects, the title says it all – this is a passionate defense of Harding’s presidential legacy; it is not a comprehensive or weighty biography. The narrative focuses primarily on the between Harding’s presidential campaign and his death just 29 months after his presidential term began. And while many readers are likely to find it interesting and thought-provoking, its best and worst arguments for Harding’s reappraisal are conveyed through a distracting partisan lens. (Full review here)
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I have added Samuel H. Adams “Incredible Era: The Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding” to my follow-up list. Published in 1939, this is one of the earliest and best-known of the Harding biographies. It seems deeply flawed in several respects, but might prove interesting due to the early, central role it played in tarnishing Harding’s legacy.
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Best Biography of Warren Harding: John W. Dean’s “Warren G. Harding”
Most Scholarly Biography of Harding: Robert Murray’s “The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration”
Most Captivating Read of Harding: Francis Russell’s “The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times”
My Journey Through the Best Presidential Biographies 
Love the insights here Stephen.
I am now reading Downes’ The Rise of Warren Gamaliel Harding: 1865-1920. It did not get high ratings on Goodreads but I found a pdf file of it.
Enjoy Amity Shales’ Coolidge work. I will be interested in your thoughts on it. Also, read Coolidge’s bio, it is in the public domain.
Regards
Jim
I almost added Downes’ bio to my follow-up list but it seems to focus on everything but Harding’s presidency (and vice presidency). I’ll be keen to hear what you think of when once you’ve finished it. Perhaps it and the Murray biography would be perfect together?
Could be. Will let you know!
Harding earns my respect for one action: pardoning Eugene Debs.
Harding is certainly underrated as a president — far from great, but the notion that he ranks dead last (in many academic surveys) is laughable. And I say that as an academic! But given the progressive biases in academia, he pales next to his immediate predecessor (Wilson) as well as FDR. But while acknowledging his personal faults and the corruption that existed in certain parts of his administration, he was actually rather successful in his brief tenure. And compared to the extremely negative consequences of the Pierce, Buchanan, and Andrew Johnson presidencies….. And given the erratic nature of many aspects of Wilson’s presidency, it’s not hard to make an argument that Harding is preferable. I think I would be quite comfortable ranking a dozen president’s lower than Harding, based purely on accomplishments.
I couldn’t have said it better myself!
My take-away of Harding came from 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza.
Disarmament treaties; taxes lowered; national debt reduced by $26 billion; reduced unemployment from 12 to 3%; abolished 12-hour workday in steel industry; established Bureau of the Budget; first federal conference on unemployment; first federal social welfare law; first federal highway program. Southern Democrats in Senate blocked an anti-lynching bill passed by House.
Keep in mind that this economic success followed the devastating aftermath of the Great War.
In December 1921, Harding did what Wilson never would, commuting Gene Debs’s sentence, effective that Christmas Day. “I want him to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife,’ he ordered Daugherty. . . Harding insisted that Debs visit him at the White House on the way home to Terre Haute. ‘Well,’ boomed Harding, ‘I have heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now glad to meet you personally.”
Harding turned out to be more independent-minded in thought and action than people had predicted or than history has generally recorded.
When Harding wanted something for himself, he certainly tried to get it. He allowed others to go their own way over matters that did not interest him in order to gain their support for what he wanted.
Howdy, and I dig your blog. Have you heard of a book called The Ohio Gang by Charles L. Mee, Jr.? It’s a fairly concise biography of Warren Harding, written to be both entertaining and informative. Probably not the four star bio you’re looking for, but given the dearth of well-reviewed Harding biographies, it might warrant a visit your second time through.
Thanks – ironically a friend of mine got me that book somewhat as a “gag” gift for my birthday (thinking that since it was about Warren Harding it couldn’t possibly be meaningful in any way). But despite mediocre reviews, I’m probably going to read it as part of my follow-up. There just isn’t much on the Harding presidency so it’s worth a look!
My wife found me a copy of “The Strange Death of President Harding from the diaries of Gaston B. Means, a Department of Justice Investigator” as told to Max Dixon Thacker. New York: Guild, 1930. Means was quite a shady character – I think he might have been mentioned in “The Shadow of Blooming Grove” – I read that a bit too long ago. Means was in prison over swindling money from a lady regarding the search for the Lindbergh baby.
I don’t remember Gaston Means (it is a memorable name…how did I miss him!?!?) but I’m intrigued by the book your wife uncovered. I’ll have to look into it and see if it’s something I need to go back and read – the “Harding” section of my bookshelf isn’t exactly overflowing!
In Robert Murray’s “The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration” (1969) he writes about Gaston B. Means.
On page 477, reference 38. A recent biography of Means which strives to separate truth from fiction is Edwin P. Hoyt. “Spectacular Rogue: Gaston B. Means” (Indianapolis, 1963).
On page 490, reference 53. Gaston B. Means, “The Strange Death of President Harding (as told to May Dixon Thacker)” (New York, 1930). The following narrative, including quotations, is from the book.
And an excerpt from Murray’s book, pp. 490-1
The Harding reputation, already sufficiently battered by Nan Britton’s disclosures, was further damaged by the publication in 1930 of another book – this one by Gaston Means, entitled The Strange Death of President Harding.[53] Ghostwritten for Means by Mrs. May Dixon Thacker, this work was a compendium of Means’s alleged relationship with Harding and the Harding administration. Mrs. Thacker, who was the sister of Thomas Dixon, the famous author of The Klansman, gathered the material from Means while he was an inmate in Atlanta Penitentiary. The result was a runaway best seller.
Undocumented and nonspecific, the book was both libelous and ridiculous. Yet the gullible were willing to believe it. Means told of secret spying missions for Mrs. Harding, of amorous trysts and love letters to strange women by General Sawyer, and of gross sexual infidelities by the president. He described frequent meetings with Jess Smith at Daugherty’s H Street address where drunken orgies were attended by Harding at which chorus girls were sometimes injured by flying glass. Means claimed that he had handled as much as $500,000 at one time for the Ohio Gang, that Daugherty was the evil mastermind behind it all, and that Daugherty got to be attorney general by blackmailing Harding through his knowledge of Nan Britton. He further claimed that he had investigated the Britton affair for Mrs. Harding, stole Nan’s diaries and letters, and gave them to Mrs. Harding who after reading them murmured: “I ought to kill them both. . . . That’s what I ought to do. . . . They deserve it. . . They are not fit to live.” Thereafter, said Means, Mrs. Harding used the Britton letters to terrorize her own husband in a vicious struggle with Daugherty to dominate him. Jess Smith, who was the “weak link” in the Ohio Gang, was murdered because he knew too much. Mrs. Harding’s illness in the early fall of 1922 was triggered, stated Means, by her sudden discovery of the Britton affair, and her adoration of Warren Harding gradually turned to hate. In her fear that her husband would be either exposed or impeached, and with “her brain on fire” from both the prattlings of soothsayers and the knowledge that she was a discarded wife, Mrs. Harding planned the Alaskan trip along with General Sawyer, her chief accomplice. By implication, Means established the conditions for Sawyer and Mrs. Harding to slip the president poison rather than medicine on the return journey down the west coast. The lack of an autopsy, Means said, represented prima facie evidence of foul play.
The Means book delivered a final blow to the Harding image. The seeds of suspicion that Harry Daugherty had inadvertently planted by not testifying in 1926 now came to bitter fruition. It apparently mattered little that President Harding had never met Means or that Means was a perjurer, a thief, a convict, and a swindler. Submerged by sensationalism was the fact that Means did not know Mrs. Harding, that he had never been in the White House, that he had not been present at the places and on the dates he mentioned. Not surprisingly, on November 7, 1931, in Liberty Magazine in an article entitled “Debunking the Strange Death of President Harding” May Dixon Thacker wrote “with humiliation ….. and in justice to the dead” that she now believed she had been duped by Means and that the book was nothing more than a “colossal hoax – a tissue of falsehood from beginning to end.”[54] Unfortunately, in the publishing world repudiations seldom rate the same publicity as original accusations and Mrs. Thacker’s article did not counteract the effect of the Means book. The damage had been done.
IN REVIEWING The Strange Death of President Harding for the Nation in 1930, Oswald G. Vilard made a telling point. Admitting that the work was vicious and libelous, Villard nevertheless claimed that until such men as Hoover and Hughes came forward to challenge the charges, “Mr. Means and his book will hold the field; he will profit by its phenomenal and unchecked sale; and the volume will spread throughout the country the belief that his allegations are in the main correct.”[55]
Just snagged a copy of “Dead Last: The Public Memory of Warren G. Harding’s Scandalous Legacy.” I haven’t read it yet, but am curious to read the analysis. It’s not a biography, so wouldn’t make this list, but is an analysis of factors surrounding his legacy, such as the role of various biographers in shaping his early image and the tension between public memory and academic history. With it’s analysis of biographers role on his image, this may be of interest to you, simply because you have developed a 6th sense for sniffing out good biographers, and an analysis that the role of biography plays in shaping image may be interesting.
Sounds interesting. Will be curious to see what you think when you finish it. The title seems to pre-judge the outcome, no? 🙂
Well my one book per president approach was working well until I got to Harding. I’ve used the American President’s Series as a fallback. It worked well for Tyler, Taylor and Pierce. Plus, I had the advantage of your recommendation on Dean’s book.
Unfortunately, if anything you understated the extent to which Dean is enthusiastic in his efforts to rehabilitate Harding. Fawning over every positive aspect and decrying any negativity is how it came across to me.
So it looks like I will have to do a followup book on Harding when I get done. Not a bad outcome, I’ve already got Chernow’s book on Grant, as well as Shelby Foote’s Civil War series to do – and who knows how many others.
I’ll probably go with Murray or Russell.
I picked up “The Life and Times of Warren G. Harding: Our After War President” by Joe Mitchell Chapple, 1924. Anyone have thoughts on this one?
Have we heard anything further regarding Ronald Radosh’s book? (I enjoyed his other books and am eagerly awaiting this one.)
I’ve tried to keep my ear to the ground on this one but haven’t seen anything notable since their NYT op/ed piece a few years ago. I’ve heard bits and pieces of rumors since then (along the lines of “don’t hold your breath”) but I don’t have any hard insight at this point.
I’ve been on my own journey of trying to read at least one biography per President. I started back with Washington in maybe 2017? I’m up to Warren Harding. I’ve been using your website to find recommendations (and linking to it on each of my own looks at the Presidents).
Warren Harding seems like he’s going to be another one that’s difficult to find a good biography for. I am surprised by how often there’s not even a single biography of a specific President at the largest (bigger city) library I’m near. Anyway, I think I may make Harding a two-fer and read a couple just to try to get some balance.
1. Congrats on your journey! Even though there are a couple semi-rough patches along the way, it’s well worth the effort! I’ll be interested to hear what you decide to read on FDR 🙂 Lots to choose from…
2. Harding is a bit difficult and I think reading two on him will provide balance but also round him out for you. Multiple biographies *always* seems to give me a multi-faceted perspective of someone, no matter how great the first biography is that I decided to read. Good luck!
Like many others, I’ve been reading one biography for each president, and Steve, your blog has been unbelievably helpful. I’m not sure I’d have even attempted the journey without it!
A few thoughts about Warren G. Harding. First, I agree that his presidency was certainly not the mess that some have made it out to be, and he had several predecessors who were far worse. That said, Harding wasn’t the best man for the job. He was nominated because several stronger candidates canceled each other out, not to mention the fact that he looked the part and he came from Ohio (an important swing state then, as now). After his untimely death, he was mourned as a beloved hero. That image rapidly tarnished after a tell-all book by one of his mistresses, and the revelations of several scandals within his administration (Teapot Dome being the most famous).
In 2015, DNA tests proved that he really did father a child out of wedlock. And interestingly, the same tests also proved that he did not have any Black ancestors, which was a source of innuendo at that time.
I think that you might have been a little hard on “The Shadow of Blooming Grove” by Francis Russell. It covered his love life thoroughly, to be sure, but given Harding’s reputation, it would have been wrong to downplay that part of his life. Lest anyone think that’s all the book entails, it’s worth noting that Russell goes into quite a bit of detail about his life, his administration, and even beyond Harding himself. There’s a long chapter about Ohio politics that barely mentions Harding, but helps introduce important characters in his story and helps set the scene for his nomination. There’s another long chapter after Harding’s death that tells how Teapot Dome and other scandals played out. It would have been easier, I’m sure, to end the book with his death, but that would have left us hanging to find out what happened with all the issues that were taking place. I thought the book gave a good sense of Harding as a person. It was, for sure, a fun read.
Thanks for your note. It also reminds me there are a few rumored biographies of Harding which promise to take a look at his life and legacy through the fresh lens provided by some of the revelations you cite. My fingers are crossed they are eventually published and that Harding will be better – and objectively – understood in a time when most people probably wouldn’t even recognize his name.
Reading Dean’s bio of Harding now and coincidentally came across a photo collection of President Harding’s Voyage of Understanding that the White House Historical Society has posted here https://library.whitehousehistory.org/fotoweb/albums/XukBjaRdhfNyE6QxYfQW1xWJXhdGHtqh5VgM7Q/ These may be of interest to those who follow your postings.