Finally, some good news for Warren Harding
Some bystanders rate Donald Trump America’s worst president. But ratings are fluid, as shown by ratings given Marion’s Warren G. Harding, the last Ohioan in the White House.
Meanwhile, Trump’s critics deride him because of an anonymous New York Times op-ed, which said Trump’s aides, not Trump, run the administration because Trump is clueless.
In fairness, having a proxy or surrogate run a presidency isn’t unheard of. When Democrat Woodrow Wilson, president from 1913 through 1920, “suffered a severe stroke (in October 1919), his wife (First Lady Edith Galt Wilson) pre-screened all matters of state, functionally running the Executive branch of government for the remainder of Wilson’s second term,” which ended in March 1921, according to the White House’s own website.
As for presidential “ratings,” one of the better-known sets, skippered by the elder Arthur M. Schlesinger, published in 1962 in the New York Times Magazine, rated Abraham Lincoln as our greatest president. In contrast, Presidents U.S. Grant (1869-1877) and Warren Harding (1921-1923) ranked as “failures,” the survey’s lowest rank. Grant, a celebrated Civil War commander, could plead “political inexperience,” Schlesinger wrote, but Harding had “worked intimately with the Ohio Gang” – crooked Statehouse pals – “which had accompanied him to Washington.”
Truth is, Harding gets something of a bad rap. Conservative though he was, Harding freed socialist Eugene V. Debs from prison by commuting Debs’ 10-year federal sentence to time served. Wilson’s “liberal” administration had prosecuted Debs because of an anti-war speech he’d made in Canton on June 16, 1918.
And Harding’s Cabinet had some solid members. Still, when your Interior secretary goes to jail on corruption charges (for letting private oil companies exploit what were supposed to be the U.S. Navy’s petroleum reserves), and your attorney general (onetime Ohio Statehouse lobbyist Harry M. Daugherty, a native of Washington Court House) is twice tried on other corruption charges ( Jury 1 deadlocked; Jury 2 acquitted) it’s hard to bracket Harding’s presidency with, say, Lincoln’s and George Washington’s or Franklin D. Roosevelt’s.
C-SPAN’s 2017 Presidential Historians Survey, which surveyed “a cross-section of 91 presidential historians,” also ranked Lincoln No. 1. But Harding moved up. In 1962, he was bottom of the list. The C-SPAN survey ranked him fourth from the bottom.
Third-worst in 2017’s C-SPAN survey was Franklin Pierce (1853 to 1857); second-worst was Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, (1865 to 1869); and the worst was James Buchanan (1857 to 1861), whose dithering helped usher the United States into the Civil War.
And in 2018, a “Presidents & Executive Politics Presidential Greatness Survey” asked 320 current and recent members of the American Political Science Association’s Presidents & Executive Politics Section to rank presidential greatness.
When that survey had first been taken, in 2014 – before Trump’s presidency – Harding was ranked 42nd, with only Buchanan rated worse. But in 2016, the electoral college chose Trump to be president, so 2018’s “Presidents & Executive Officers” poll included Trump.
Result: Warren Harding, second-from-last in the 2014 “Presidents and Executive Officers” ratings, now ranks fifth-fromlast, or 39th. Rated worse than Harding are Andrew Johnson (40th); Pierce (41st); William Henry Harrison, president for just one a month (42nd); and Buchanan (43rd).
Also ranked worse than Warren Harding – and ranked our worst president to date by 2018’s “Presidents and Executive Officers” survey – was Donald Trump.
So, let no one claim the Trump administration hasn’t accomplished much. Because, along with Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, William Henry Harrison and James Buchanan, Donald Trump is helping make Warren Harding’s presidency look good. And that takes some doing.
C-SPAN’s 2017 Presidential Historians Survey, which surveyed “a cross-section of 91 presidential historians,” ranked Lincoln No. 1. But Harding moved up.