Messages and Papers of the Presidents
WARREN G. HARDING

March 4, 1921–August 2, 1923

Messages, Proclamations, Executive Orders, and
Addresses to Congress and the People

The twenty-ninth President of the United States was born in Blooming Grove, or Corsica, Morrow County, Ohio, on November 2, 1865. On his father’s side, he was descended from Scotch ancestors who had settled in Pennsylvania in colonial days, migrating to Ohio by means of ox-carts around 1820. On the side of his mother, Phoebe Elizabeth Dickerson Harding, who died in 1910, he inherited a Dutch strain. His father, George Tyron Harding, who was still living when his son entered the White House, was a country doctor.

Warren, who was the oldest child, spent most of his boyhood on the farm which his father worked, in addition to his medical practice. When he was six, the family moved to Caledonia, a neighboring town of less than one thousand inhabitants, where the boy later attended the village school. He performed odd jobs when the opportunity presented, including work in a sawmill and on railroad construction. From 1879 to 1882, he attended the Ohio Central College at Iberia. This institution was little more than a high school or academy, and did not long survive the graduation of its most distinguished alumnus with the degree of bachelor of science. Warren Harding worked his way through college, doing whatever work presented itself, and getting valuable journalistic experience as editor of the college paper. Before graduation, he had learned also the art of practical printing, both hand composition and machine operating.

After trying his hand at various tasks, including insurance and reading law, young Harding became a reporter and handy man on the Mirror, published in Marion, Ohio. In 1884, he bought the moribund Star, of the same city, which his hard work and perspicacity soon made successful, and provided a permanent means of livelihood. Marion grew rapidly in size, and the owner and editor of the Marion Star identified himself with many of the business interests of the town. He became a member in good standing of the Baptist Church. On July 8, 1891, he married Florence Kling, daughter of a business man of Marion.

The newspaper owner soon took an active part in politics. As a youth, he had been a supporter of Blaine, and later became a lieutenant of Senator Foraker. He was regularly a delegate to the Republican State Convention of Ohio, and from 1899 to 1903 he sat in the state legislature as Senator from the Thirteenth Ohio Senatorial District. His services to his party were rewarded by nomination for lieutenant governor of the state, to which office he was elected, serving from 1904

to 1906. He was the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio in 1910, but was defeated. Harding was always a regular organization man, of conservative tendencies, and he supported President Taft for re-election in 1912, against the Progressive Party of ex-President Roosevelt.

In 1914, Harding was elected to the United States Senate for the six-year term beginning in 1915. He initiated no outstanding legislation, but became quietly influential behind the scenes. He was made chairman of the Senate Committee on the Philippine Islands, and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, which became all-important in the fight for the ratification of the Peace Treaty of Versailles, including the covenant of the League of Nations, after the close of the World War. Senator Harding, who had been an ardent supporter of the war efforts of the United States against Germany and Austria-Hungary, voted for the ratification of the treaty with the reservations added by the Republican majority in the Senate.

In the Republican National Convention of 1916, Senator Harding had delivered the "keynote address," and he became a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1920. He was one of the least frequently-mentioned candidates, receiving only 65 1/2 votes of a total of 984 on the first ballot and only 78 votes on the fifth ballot at the convention in Chicago in June, 1920. But due largely to a deadlock between the leading candidates, and to what were considered serious disqualifications of each of them, Senator Harding became the compromise candidate and was nominated on the tenth ballot. In the following November, he was elected President by the overwhelming majority of about 7,000,000 popular and 277 electoral votes over his Democratic opponent, Governor James M. Cox, of Ohio. He assumed the Presidency on March 4, 1921.

President Harding died in San Francisco, California, on August 2, 1923, from a stroke of apoplexy following an attack of ptomaine poisoning. He was returning from Alaska, whither he had gone after a speaking tour through the Middle West and West in behalf of his policies. Funeral services were held over his body in the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington on August 9, and on the following day he was buried in Marion, Ohio.

[p.8923]

[p.8922-C]

One of the brief poems that have touched the hearts of men is that wherein Leigh Hunt tells of the visit of an angel to earth, recording the names of "those who love the Lord."

"And is my name there?" "Nay, not so," replied the angel. "Then write me down," he was told, "as one who loves his fellow-men." The angel came again to show his list of those who love the Lord. "And lo!" the name of him who loved his fellow-men "led all the rest."

It will be hard to find a better picture than this of President Harding, the man we loved and mourn. He loved his fellow-men, and because they felt it and knew it, they loved and trusted him. His whole life, from the knee of that cherished mother who had an inspired faith in him, down to the day when a sorrowing world laid its tributes at his bier, was a continuing testimony to his devotion to them and to their faith in him.

Some will say that such a sweet and gentle nature could only have found its setting and its opportunity for service in a strange and peculiar time. Perhaps they are right. Yet he came to the world’s stage in an hour when it seemed set for other characters. The captains and the kings, the armies and the navies, the men who would have war, and the men who would not have peace, had long dominated the scene. Where among them could place be made, could ear be found, for this kindly, gentle, gracious soul?

Yet he found his place. He caught the ear of a war-tired world. He called our country back to paths of peace, and gladly it came. He beckoned the nations to come and sit in council. He pointed them the way to peace. He set example of readiness to cast away the sword from the arm of might. He sought for men and nations a peace-the only true and lasting peace-based on justice and right. He stood first and firm for his own country, then for mankind. His sincerity and frankness won to his side those who sensed the great truth of human brotherhood. So he led the way to the monumental accomplishments of the Washington Conference on Limitation of Armament.

The same simplicity and directness marked his program in domestic affairs. His was the steady, strong, inspiring hand of guidance and helpfulness. It was never the mailed fist of compulsion. He knew that the greatest need of the world was peace with industry and production. He asked for these, and with them for thrift and the will to make good the losses that had been inflicted in the years of strife. He called his countrymen to set an example of those homely virtues, and they did.

He gave without remorse of his own strength, down to the tragic end. He rose above misunderstandings and misrepresentations, but he was curiously incapable of hard feeling toward those who were unfair with him. In a time when the minds of many men were prone to seize upon hurried conclusions, he held back and dared to take his time and thought before deciding. He was free from the pride of opinion, but strong in the determination of conviction. He had that calm courage which could not be overpressed, but that was firm and final when decision had been reached.

He was criticized because his own country, under his leadership, did not move forward so fast as some wished. But when, worn out by the struggle he had so bravely borne, he laid down the burden, his critics saw clearly what his leadership had accomplished. They saw that it had been a leadership forward and upward, in an era when most other countries were moving backward and downward. They saw that prosperity smiled once more on a favored land. They saw that prosperity and material well-being were somehow strangely rare in other lands. So they came to realize what this modest, unassuming leadership had wrought for his country.

It was natural that such a character, passing from the stage of life, should leave the multitudes a sense of personal loss. Seldom indeed has any man’s death left that feeling among so many. He was mourned abroad and at home. The conviction was felt everywhere that he was one of the men best fitted to serve a distracted world in a difficult period of its history.

But he was not permitted to finish his task. He broke and went down under its load. In the hour of sorrow for his loss, men and women were moved to a broader charity, a relaxation of partisan excesses, a determination to be fair and moderate and reasonable. His life became, in the tragic sorrow of its end, a lesson in the value of simple and modest ways.

We mourn him today, and we shall mourn him so long as remembrance holds before us the picture of his patience, forbearance, faith and Christian tolerance. Those are rare virtues, too seldom found among the men who have the strength to rise to high places. They are the virtues that men need to seek and cultivate in these years of stress in the world. They point the way to salvation for men, for nations, for humanity itself.

We may well hope that his example to his own countrymen and to the world may help greatly to bring a spirit of charity, accord and true fraternity, whereby shall be lighted the lamp of understanding to show our feet into the paths of peace on earth, good will toward men. We may well consider by what means we can show our appreciation and by what method we can best enshrine his memory.

[The above appreciation of President Harding was broadcasted over the radio by President Coolidge on December 10, 1923.]