He spoke about a "return to normalcy," but he had no idea what this slogan meant. Lacking the moral compass of a Reagan, Harding had no guide to follow. He was lucky to have had a few good men in his cabinet who generally ran fiscal and foreign affairs well.
In the end, it was not his corrupt friends that tarnished his legacy and undermined his historical impact. Rather, it was his own lack of vision and his poor sense of priorities that positioned him so low in the ranking of U. Then, too, it was Harding's sad fate to have followed in office the most visionary of all our Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, the man whom historians generally rank among the top five or six Presidents in the nation's history.
Grant Rutherford B. Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S. Harding is inaugurated as the twenty-ninth President of the United States. The Thompson-Urrutia Treaty with Colombia is ratified.
Harding signs the Emergency Quota Act into law, limiting the number of immigrants from any given country to 3 percent of that nationality already in the United States by The temporary act lasts three years and serves as the precursor to the harsher and permanent act. The law represents the growing nativism of the s, motivated, in part, by the massive influx of south and east European immigrants into the United States following the end of World War I.
Raising tariffs, especially on farm products, the temporary bill will be replaced one year later by the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act, a permanent bill with even higher tariff rates.
Designed to protect American products and end the post-war recession, such protectionist legislation ultimately destabilizes international commerce by heightening economic nationalism.
In a relatively unnoticed move, Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby transfers control of the naval oil reserves in California and Wyoming to the Department of the Interior, headed by Albert B. The reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, will later figure prominently in the scandals that stain the Harding administration.
Harding signs the Budget and Accounting Act in order to better organize the federal government's accounts. Alice Robertson of Oklahoma becomes the first woman to preside over the House of Representatives. Her session lasts thirty minutes. Harding signs a joint congressional resolution declaring the official end of war with Germany.
The question of reparations will continue to be debated over the next few years. In addition, the nation witnesses a wave of violence by a revitalized Ku Klux Klan. Blacks, returning from the war, are not as ready to return to their previous condition of subservience and are met by whippings, brandings, and lynchings by the KKK.
Along with major naval powers Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, the United States signs a treaty limiting capital ship tonnage. The conference will also produce a larger agreement that also includes China, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal which recognizes America's Open Door Policy toward China as international policy.
In response to reports indicating that fully 80 percent of American women do not receive adequate prenatal care, Harding signs the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act, granting matching federal funds to states for maternal and child care. The legislation also recognizes the emergent political power of women, a constituency which gained the right to vote during the previous year.
On November 23, , President Warren Harding signed the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, which contributed matching federal funds to states to establish and run prenatal and child health care centers. Although it was not a strong act, it was still a significant move by the federal government toward providing public health care to mothers and infants.
Reformers had sought similar legislation since , but it was not until that a number of factors combined to push it through. In , President William Taft established the Children's Bureau, which began a nationwide investigation of maternal and infant mortality rates.
The agency soon discovered that nearly 80 percent of U. Indeed, while the Bureau found a correlation between economic level and mortality rates, the mortality rates at all income levels were much higher in the United States than in other industrialized nations. While the Bureau's findings clearly demonstrated the existence of a severe problem, there was little agreement on how to solve it.
The few existing state-run child welfare clinics had proven effective at reducing infant mortality and bettering overall health, and many groups sought to duplicate this model on a national scale.
Others, most notably the American Medical Association AMA , were hesitant to accept a widening of federal involvement in medical care. The AMA was wary of government encroachment on their autonomy as medical professionals and criticized the act as neo-socialist. These reservations succeeded in blocking the passage of such legislation as early as With the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment in granting women the right to vote, however, political power shifted dramatically.
Women had long been the leading voices of reform in various areas of social welfare, especially in regards to child and maternal health care. President Harding responded to this newly created constituency by actively supporting the passage of Sheppard-Towner as well as appointing women to high posts within his administration. The legislation itself proved to be temporary, however. Underfinanced from the beginning, the AMA-led campaign against Sheppard-Towner finally succeeded in when Congress did not renew its funding.
Harding graduated from Ohio Central College now defunct in and moved to Marion, Ohio, where he eventually found work as a newspaper reporter. In , he and several partners purchased a small, struggling newspaper, the Marion Star. In , Harding married Florence Kling De Wolfe , a Marion native with one son from a previous relationship.
Warren Harding, a Republican, began his political career in by winning election to the Ohio senate, where he served until Two years later, he stepped into the national spotlight at the Republican National Convention when he gave a speech nominating President William Taft for a second term. In , Harding was elected to the U. Senate , where he remained until his presidential inauguration. The congenial Harding had an undistinguished career in the Senate.
At the Republican National Convention, delegates deadlocked over their choice for a presidential nominee and eventually chose Harding as a compromise candidate. Calvin Coolidge , the governor of Massachusetts , was selected as his vice presidential running mate. The Democrats named James Cox , the governor of Ohio, as their presidential candidate; Franklin Roosevelt , the former assistant secretary of the Navy and future 32nd U.
In the general election, the Harding-Coolidge ticket defeated the Democrats in the largest landslide up to that time, capturing some 60 percent of the popular vote and an electoral margin of It was the first presidential election in which women across the United States could vote, having gained the right with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in August Once in office, Warren Harding followed a predominantly pro-business, conservative Republican agenda.
Taxes were reduced, particularly for corporations and wealthy individuals; high protective tariffs were enacted; and immigration was limited. Harding signed the Budget and Accounting Act of , which streamlined the federal budget system and established the General Accounting Office to audit government expenditures. Harding also nominated ex-president Taft as the chief justice of the U. By , rumors of corruption in Harding's administration had begun to surface, and many of his friends were implicated, which greatly disappointed the president.
He once commented, "They're the ones that keep me walking the floors at night. On his return from Alaska, Harding fell ill. His train rushed him to San Francisco, California, where his condition worsened. On August 2, , Harding suffered a massive heart attack and died immediately. In some circles, rumors spread that his wife had poisoned him to prevent him from facing charges of corruption. Her refusal to allow an autopsy only fed the rumors. Though rumors circulated while he was in office, it wasn't until after Harding's death that news of his extramarital affairs became public.
One of his lovers, Nan Britton, published a book in , claiming that Harding had fathered her daughter while he was a senator. The allegation was a media sensation, and the Britton family was vilified and humiliated in public.
Unfortunately for Britton, she had a difficult time proving the affair since she had destroyed Harding's love letters at his request. In August , new genetic testing revealed that Britton was in fact telling the truth: her daughter, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was the biological child of Harding, ending an almost century-old family feud between the Brittons and the Hardings.
This is the definitive answer. In , explicit love letters between Harding and a woman named Carrie Phillips were discovered and revealed that Phillips, a family friend, had engaged in a year long affair with Harding. Most historians consider Harding to be one of America's worst presidents. He is believed to have seen the role of president as mainly ceremonial, leaving government work to subordinates.
Revisionists have re-examined his role as an important transition between the Progressive Era and the years of prosperity in the s. Harding is also credited for his broad-minded views on race and civil rights. Historians agree that his negative legacy is not so much attributed to his corrupt friends, but his own lack of vision and poor sense of where he wanted to take the country.
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