Prosperity restored
Harding died of a heart attack on August 2, 1923, having fulfilled his goal of restoring prosperity. The night of his death, his wife Florence had been reading an article to him from the Saturday Evening Post entitled "A Calm Review of a Calm Man" by Samuel G. Blythe. "There is nothing so political as the Presidency," Blythe observed, "and the better a politician a President is the better President he will be."
Blythe reminded his readers that things had been in a bad way when Harding came into office, but now America was "the only legitimately prosperous country in the world." Prosperity, he continued, "extends from coast to coast, from the Canadian border to Mexico. Labor is universally employed at high wages. Money is plentiful. All lines of business are flourishing. And there is no other country in the world of which this can be said."
Blythe's account was accurate. Harding's policies, put into practice by men like Charles G. Dawes, succeeded in turning the country around. This was not easy with a fractious Republican party at odds over regional and economic issues. Nevertheless, Harding cut income tax rates for Americans at every income level. According to economist Benjamin Anderson, employment and businesses rallied as a result of "a drastic cleaning up of credit weakness, a drastic reduction in the costs of production, and on the free play of private enterprise."
It had been Harding's hope that inequality of income would decrease as foreign markets expanded, creating more economic opportunities; he worked hard with Herbert Hoover and Charles Evans Hughes to achieve this. Harding also modified his position on the tariff, coming to favor a degree of flexibility. He entered the White House having won an overwhelming mandate. He succeeded in healing a divided country by combining fiscal conservatism with some socially progressive attitudes. His efforts to end lynching and his belief in racial equality showed him to be more enlightened than many of his countrymen. They entitle him to be regarded as one of the first modern civil-rights presidents.
The policies of Harding and his successor Calvin Coolidge were undone in the 1930s, when President Hoover adopted the statist measures that laid the foundations for what would become the New Deal. With the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a new kind of welfare state was created, and progressivism began once again to flourish. Surveying the situation in 1940 after the economy's downturn and what people were beginning to call a new Roosevelt depression, Dawes penned a warning:
Some day, a President, if he is to save the country from bankruptcy and its people from ruin, must make the old fight over again, and this time the battle will be waged against desperate disadvantages. Against him will be arrayed the largest, strongest, and most formidably entrenched army of interested government spenders, wasters, and patronage-dispensing politicians the world has yet known.
Dawes was prescient. As the old fight is once again being waged, we can only hope that the president Americans elect in 2012 will be as much of a "reactionary" as Warren G. Harding--and as much of a success.
Ronald Radosh is an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and a writer for Pajamas Media. Allis Radosh is a historian. They are coauthors of A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel and are writing a book on the presidency of Warren G. Harding. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
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