49 Fun Facts About Warren G. Harding

Which president did Warren G. Harding succeed in March 1921?

Woodrow Wilson, weakened by a stroke, rode to the Capitol beside Harding, the first time a car carried a president to his inauguration, but was too frail to stay for the ceremony. Harding became the 29th president.

Where did Laddie Boy, Harding's Airedale terrier, have his own hand-carved chair?

At cabinet meetings. Laddie Boy was a newspaper celebrity, and newsboys across the country gave their pennies to be melted down and cast into a statue of him, which went to the Smithsonian.

How much did Harding, aged 18, raise with partners to buy a failing Ohio daily newspaper?

$300. The paper was close to collapse when he took it over, yet it prospered, became a favourite with Ohio politicians of both parties and gave him his start in public life.

Whose burial at Arlington did Harding lead on Armistice Day 1921?

The Unknown Soldier of the First World War had lain in state at the Capitol. At the tomb Harding gave the address and laid the Medal of Honor on the coffin of a man whose name no one knew.

What nickname did Harding give his wife Florence?

The Duchess earned the name. She took over the circulation side of his paper, spanked newsboys when she thought it necessary and, a friend recalled, let no pennies escape her.

Who angrily opposed Florence Kling's 1891 marriage to Harding?

Her father, Amos Kling, a wealthy local businessman, spread rumours about Harding's ancestry and threatened to kill him if they wed. The couple married anyway, in their own new home.

Which cereal pioneer ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where the young Harding stayed several times?

John Harvey Kellogg. While Harding was away at the sanitarium in 1894, his newspaper's business manager quit; his wife Florence took over the job, and the paper prospered.

Which statewide Ohio office did Harding win in 1903?

Lieutenant governor. He served a single term, went home to his newspaper, and lost when he ran for governor in 1910.

Which Ohio political fixer managed Harding's rise to the White House and became his attorney general?

Harry Daugherty, a lobbyist whose own bids for high office had failed, ran the 1920 campaign and was rewarded with the Justice Department. He was forced out in 1924 and later tried for defrauding the government, but never convicted.

Which amendment made Harding's 1914 Senate race Ohio's first direct election for the seat?

The Seventeenth Amendment took the choice of senators away from state legislatures. The 1914 campaign turned ugly: Harding's backers attacked his opponent's Catholic faith, though he never raised it himself.

How did Harding's political manager describe getting him to run for higher office?

Pushing a sunning turtle into the water. 'I found him sunning himself, like a turtle on a log,' the manager bragged, though he overstated his part: Harding had ambitions of his own.

What part did Senator Harding play at the 1916 Republican National Convention?

Keynote speaker. Party regulars gave him the job because almost nobody disliked him, and four years later the same quality made him the convention's compromise choice.

As a senator in 1919, Harding opposed American entry into which body?

League of Nations. Harding stood with Henry Cabot Lodge, whose side feared it would drag America into Europe's quarrels without a vote of Congress; the Senate rejected the treaty in 1920 and the United States never joined.

Harding's 1920 campaign promised America 'a return to' what?

Normalcy. Critics derided it as Harding's blunder for 'normality', but the word had been in print since 1857, and the slogan carried him to a landslide.

In which city did the deadlocked 1920 Republican convention nominate Harding on the tenth ballot?

Chicago. General Leonard Wood and Governor Frank Lowden blocked each other ballot after ballot, the only reason an outsider like Harding had a chance; when Lowden released his delegates, it was over.

Which phrase entered politics from the 1920 Republican convention that nominated Harding?

Smoke-filled room. The phrase stuck to a late-night huddle of party elders in a Blackstone Hotel suite, said to have picked Harding, though historians doubt the meeting decided anything.

Whom did 1920 Republican delegates choose as Harding's running mate instead of the leaders' pick, Irvine Lenroot?

Calvin Coolidge was famous for facing down the Boston police strike a year earlier. When his name was put forward, rebellious delegates stampeded to him and swept the party leaders' man aside.

Which fellow Ohio newspaper publisher was Harding's Democratic opponent in 1920?

James M. Cox, Ohio's governor, toured the country and spoke to some two million people while Harding stayed home on his porch. Cox lost in a landslide; his running mate was Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Whose flagpole was moved to Harding's lawn for his 1920 front-porch campaign?

William McKinley had won in 1896 by letting the crowds come to his own porch. Harding, who had worked on that campaign, copied it down to the flagpole.

Which star entertainer sang the 1920 campaign song 'Harding, You're the Man for Us'?

Al Jolson was one of a parade of stage and film stars brought to Harding's front porch. The visits were the idea of Albert Lasker, the advertising man the party had hired to sell its candidate.

H. L. Mencken compared Harding's prose to what?

A string of wet sponges, he wrote, and 'tattered washing on the line' and 'dogs barking idiotically through endless nights'. It was so bad, he added, that a certain grandeur crept into it.

Which group had just won the vote when Harding was elected in 1920?

Women. The amendment giving them the vote was ratified only that August, and the total vote leapt from 18.5 million in 1916 to almost 27 million.

Socialist Eugene Debs won 3% of the 1920 vote while campaigning from where?

A federal prison in Atlanta, where Debs was serving ten years for opposing the war. Harding freed him at Christmas 1921 and asked him to call at the White House on his way home.

Harding was the first sitting senator elected president; who was the second?

John F. Kennedy, in 1960. Harding made the leap after a deadlocked convention turned to a senator who had made few enemies; Barack Obama, in 2008, was the third.

Which Pittsburgh banker became Harding's Treasury Secretary?

Andrew Mellon, one of the richest men in the country, stayed on at the Treasury after Harding's death and pushed through deep cuts in income tax, above all for the highest earners.

Who was Harding's Secretary of State?

Charles Evans Hughes had left the Supreme Court to run for president in 1916 and lost. Harding made the former candidate his senior cabinet officer and gave him a free hand to run foreign affairs.

Will Hays left Harding's cabinet after a year to become what?

Chief censor of the film industry: Hollywood's studios hired the Postmaster General in 1922 to head their new trade body, and the rules it enforced on what films could show became known as the Hays Code.

The Washington Conference of 1921–22, a major success of Harding's presidency, set limits on which weapons?

Battleships. The idea came from Senator William Borah, and it ended with America, Britain and Japan agreeing to scrap ships and hold their fleets at a ratio of 5:5:3.

Which future vice president did Harding make the first director of the Bureau of the Budget?

Charles Dawes made every department draw up a true budget, so that a president could send Congress one plan in place of a pile of separate requests.

Which immigrants did Harding's 1921 Emergency Quota Act hit hardest?

Southern and eastern Europeans were newer arrivals whose numbers in the 1910 census were small, so quotas set at 3% of those numbers cut them back hard while northern Europeans and the whole Western Hemisphere were barely touched.

In which Alabama city did Harding urge equal political rights before a segregated crowd in 1921?

Birmingham. Harding came for the city's fiftieth-anniversary celebrations, and when he said democracy was a lie without equality, the Black side of the park cheered while the white side fell silent.

Whom did Harding appoint Chief Justice in 1921?

William Howard Taft, president from 1909 to 1913, was teaching law at Yale when the call came. He became the first person to hold both offices, and counted the chief justiceship the greater honour.

On his 1923 'Voyage of Understanding', Harding drove the golden spike completing a railroad in which US territory?

Alaska. He hammered the spike home at Nenana in mid-July to finish the Alaska Railroad, fell ill on the voyage back, and was dead within three weeks.

Which city did Harding visit in July 1923 as the first sitting US president in Canada?

Vancouver. He told the crowd in Stanley Park that 'no grim-faced fortifications' marked the two countries' border; he died days later, and a memorial to him went up in the park in 1925.

In which city did Harding die on 2 August 1923, as his wife read to him in a hotel suite?

San Francisco. He had been put to bed at the Palace Hotel after falling ill on his western tour and seemed to be mending; Florence was reading him a magazine article about himself when he collapsed.

What did rumour accuse Florence Harding of doing to her husband?

Poisoning him. Her refusal to allow an autopsy fed the whisper, and a sensational book spread the charge across the country in 1930; his doctors and later historians blamed a failing heart or a stroke.

Which president finally dedicated the Harding Tomb, years after it was finished?

Herbert Hoover had sat in Harding's cabinet. With the scandals fresh, no president would go near the tomb until he did in 1931, and he spoke of a man 'betrayed by a few of the men whom he had trusted'.

The Teapot Dome oil reserve at the centre of the scandal was in which state?

Wyoming. The oil under Teapot Dome was being held in reserve for the Navy until Interior Secretary Albert Fall leased it out in secret, without bids, and took bribes from the oilmen.

Albert Fall became, in 1931, the first US cabinet member to do what?

Be imprisoned for crimes in office. Fall was convicted of taking a bribe from an oilman whom another jury acquitted of giving it, and he served nine months of a one-year sentence.

What did guests at Harding's private White House poker nights enjoy in defiance of the law of the day?

Whiskey. Prohibition was the law of the land, yet at one of the president's card games Alice Roosevelt Longworth saw 'trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey'.

Charles Forbes, whom a furious Harding caught selling off hospital supplies, ran which agency?

Veterans' Bureau. Forbes took payoffs on hospital contracts and sold off medical supplies; Harding berated him violently at the White House but let him go abroad, and he later went to prison.

What did Harding's cronies sell from the 'Little Green House on K Street' in Washington?

Protection for bootleggers. Men close to the attorney general took payoffs there in return for immunity from prosecution, in a house where, it was whispered, pardons and appointments were for sale too.

Harding's corrupt friends and appointees were collectively dubbed what?

The Ohio Gang were the cronies he liked to play poker with and could not say no to. Many were later charged with defrauding the government, and a few went to jail.

What did 2015 DNA testing prove about Elizabeth Ann Blaesing?

She was Harding's daughter, born in 1919 to Nan Britton, whose best-selling 1927 tell-all made the affair public. Most of Harding's family rejected the claim for decades, until the test proved her right.

What did Republicans pay Harding's mistress to do in 1920?

Leave the country: to keep the affair out of the campaign, the party gave Carrie Phillips and her husband $20,000 and a slow trip to Japan. Harding's love letters to her stayed sealed at the Library of Congress until 2014.

Where did Harding rank when Arthur Schlesinger Sr. polled historians on the presidents in 1948?

Last, one place below Ulysses Grant. He stayed at or near the bottom of later polls, though some historians have since given him credit for his views on race and civil rights.

Which Watergate figure wrote the Harding volume in 'The American Presidents' series in 2004?

John Dean was the White House counsel whose testimony helped to sink Richard Nixon. Thirty years on he turned biographer of the president whose name had meant scandal before Watergate did.

What did the G in Warren G. Harding stand for?

Gamaliel. The journalist H. L. Mencken seized on the name and christened the president's windy way with words 'Gamalielese', the title of his best-known attack on it.

In which Ohio city was Harding's home and newspaper, and where is he buried?

Marion. Democrats expected his rival's whirlwind tour to force Harding off his front porch there; instead some 600,000 people travelled to the town to hear him.