Ryan Cole and Amity Shlaes: Reassessing Warren G. Harding
[Ryan Cole served as speechwriter in the administration of George W. Bush. Amity Shlaes, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is author of a forthcoming biography of Calvin Coolidge.]
Change isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. That’s what most of us have come to realize in recent years, whether the change proposed came from Pres. Barack Obama or the Tea Party movement. Still, most haven’t quite reached the point where we oppose change and fight for stability.
Maybe we ought to: Maybe sometimes it is the time for no change. That, at least, was the position of Warren Harding. Warren who? On the presidential roster, Harding is POTUS 43. No, that doesn’t mean he’s replaced George W. Bush: Harding’s “43” is his aggregate rank among presidents. Since there’s a tie somewhere in there, this means Harding is the worst-ranked president in the history of our land.
Still, the most despised chief exec had something to say about the issue that’s preoccupying the country. Nowhere did Harding put the case against change, and the case for realism, better than in his inaugural address, delivered 90 years ago today....
Why haven’t we heard more about the 1920s, and Harding’s role? In part because Harding died midterm, and because some in his cabinet were indeed corrupt. Nonetheless there is little evidence that Harding himself broke the law; rather he was guilty of naïvété. As Harding once said, “I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of my enemies in a fight. But my friends, my goddamned friends, they’re the ones who keep me walking the floor at nights.”
The other reason we don’t know about Harding is that many observers couldn’t stand the possibility of the success of such a humdrum philosophy as “normalcy.” Normalcy after all precluded progressivism, which is all about change; it also somehow threatened intellectuals, who thought that they, and not everyman, must set the nation’s political direction. So they sought to drown Harding out with strong criticism. The attacks started with H. L. Mencken, hardly a progressive, but still eager to present Harding as an ignoramus. Harding’s writing, Mencken claimed, was “the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.” Coolidge scarcely fared better. He was trashed throughout his presidency for a policy of inaction that critics chose to deem laziness....
Read entire article at National Review
Change isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. That’s what most of us have come to realize in recent years, whether the change proposed came from Pres. Barack Obama or the Tea Party movement. Still, most haven’t quite reached the point where we oppose change and fight for stability.
Maybe we ought to: Maybe sometimes it is the time for no change. That, at least, was the position of Warren Harding. Warren who? On the presidential roster, Harding is POTUS 43. No, that doesn’t mean he’s replaced George W. Bush: Harding’s “43” is his aggregate rank among presidents. Since there’s a tie somewhere in there, this means Harding is the worst-ranked president in the history of our land.
Still, the most despised chief exec had something to say about the issue that’s preoccupying the country. Nowhere did Harding put the case against change, and the case for realism, better than in his inaugural address, delivered 90 years ago today....
Why haven’t we heard more about the 1920s, and Harding’s role? In part because Harding died midterm, and because some in his cabinet were indeed corrupt. Nonetheless there is little evidence that Harding himself broke the law; rather he was guilty of naïvété. As Harding once said, “I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of my enemies in a fight. But my friends, my goddamned friends, they’re the ones who keep me walking the floor at nights.”
The other reason we don’t know about Harding is that many observers couldn’t stand the possibility of the success of such a humdrum philosophy as “normalcy.” Normalcy after all precluded progressivism, which is all about change; it also somehow threatened intellectuals, who thought that they, and not everyman, must set the nation’s political direction. So they sought to drown Harding out with strong criticism. The attacks started with H. L. Mencken, hardly a progressive, but still eager to present Harding as an ignoramus. Harding’s writing, Mencken claimed, was “the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.” Coolidge scarcely fared better. He was trashed throughout his presidency for a policy of inaction that critics chose to deem laziness....