Warren G. Harding Trivia
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49 free Warren G. Harding trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Warren G. Harding bought a failing Ohio daily for $300 at eighteen, ran a front porch campaign copied from McKinley, won the biggest popular-vote share the two-party era had seen, and died in office more popular than almost any president before him. Then the scandals broke, and for decades scholars ranked him last of all. This quiz covers the whole story: Blooming Grove and Caledonia, The Marion Star and 'the Duchess', the Ohio Senate and the 1914 race that made him the state's first directly elected senator, the Boston 'normalcy' speech, the tenth-ballot nomination after the night at the Blackstone Hotel, Coolidge's surprise nomination, Albert Lasker's advertising, the cabinet of Hughes, Mellon and Hoover, the Washington Naval Conference, the Budget Bureau, the Mellon tax cuts, Debs's release, the Birmingham speech, the Voyage of Understanding to Alaska and Vancouver, the Palace Hotel, and then Teapot Dome, the Veterans' Bureau, the Little Green House on K Street and the 2015 DNA test. Early questions suit anyone who knows the outline of the 1920s; later ones ask for vote counts, ballots, treaties and the names of the men in the smoke-filled room. Fifty questions, every one sourced.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which president did Warren G. Harding succeed in March 1921?
Woodrow Wilson
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.
Q 02Where did Laddie Boy, Harding's Airedale terrier, have his own hand-carved chair?
At cabinet meetings
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.
Q 03How much did Harding, aged 18, raise with partners to buy a failing Ohio daily newspaper?
$300
$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.
Q 04Whose burial at Arlington did Harding lead on Armistice Day 1921?
The Unknown Soldier
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.
Q 05What nickname did Harding give his wife Florence?
The Duchess
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.
Q 06Who angrily opposed Florence Kling's 1891 marriage to Harding?
Her father
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.
Q 07Which cereal pioneer ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where the young Harding stayed several times?
John Harvey Kellogg
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.
Q 08Which statewide Ohio office did Harding win in 1903?
Lieutenant governor
Lieutenant governor. He served a single term, went home to his newspaper, and lost when he ran for governor in 1910.
Q 09Which Ohio political fixer managed Harding's rise to the White House and became his attorney general?
Harry Daugherty
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.
Q 10Which amendment made Harding's 1914 Senate race Ohio's first direct election for the seat?
The Seventeenth
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.
Q 11How did Harding's political manager describe getting him to run for higher office?
Pushing a sunning turtle into the water
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.
Q 12What part did Senator Harding play at the 1916 Republican National Convention?
Keynote speaker
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.
Q 13As a senator in 1919, Harding opposed American entry into which body?
Q 21H. L. Mencken compared Harding's prose to what?
A string of wet sponges
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.
Q 22Which group had just won the vote when Harding was elected in 1920?
Women
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.
Q 23Socialist Eugene Debs won 3% of the 1920 vote while campaigning from where?
A federal prison
League of Nations
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.
Q 14Harding's 1920 campaign promised America 'a return to' what?
Normalcy
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.
Q 15In which city did the deadlocked 1920 Republican convention nominate Harding on the tenth ballot?
Chicago
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.
Q 16Which phrase entered politics from the 1920 Republican convention that nominated Harding?
Smoke-filled room
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.
Q 17Whom did 1920 Republican delegates choose as Harding's running mate instead of the leaders' pick, Irvine Lenroot?
Calvin Coolidge
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.
Q 18Which fellow Ohio newspaper publisher was Harding's Democratic opponent in 1920?
James M. Cox
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.
Q 19Whose flagpole was moved to Harding's lawn for his 1920 front-porch campaign?
William McKinley
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.
Q 20Which star entertainer sang the 1920 campaign song 'Harding, You're the Man for Us'?
Al Jolson
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.
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.
Q 24Harding was the first sitting senator elected president; who was the second?
John F. Kennedy
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.
Q 25Which Pittsburgh banker became Harding's Treasury Secretary?
Andrew Mellon
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.
Q 26Who was Harding's Secretary of State?
Charles Evans Hughes
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.
Q 27Will Hays left Harding's cabinet after a year to become what?
Chief censor of the film industry
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.
Q 28The Washington Conference of 1921–22, a major success of Harding's presidency, set limits on which weapons?
Battleships
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.
Q 29Which future vice president did Harding make the first director of the Bureau of the Budget?
Charles Dawes
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.
Q 30Which immigrants did Harding's 1921 Emergency Quota Act hit hardest?
Southern and eastern Europeans
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.