Three Cheers for President.....Harding?

I came across a presentation on the internet the other day that dealt with how our historical ranking of Presidents is very unfair. How so? In a nutshell the ranking system rewards Presidents who do "big things"---most of them being unconstitutional expansions of government power and authority. Presidents who actually followed the intended (limited) role of the office in which they served tend to rank lower. Presidents like Calvin Coolidge and Grover Cleveland are often not ranked high---yet both were very successful presidents. But let's face it, no president gets elected promising to be the next Grover Cleveland. However, there is one President who constantly ranks at the bottom of Presidential rankings and it's good old Warren G. Harding. By how most historians talk about him, you would swear the man did nothing right. A more in depth look, however, paints a different story:

Harding and his running mate Calving Coolidge destroyed the Democrat team of James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt (yes, that FDR). The country was fed up with the Wilson administration and supported Harding's call for a "return to normalcy." For years, Wilson illegally threw anti-war activists in prison. He confiscated anti-war books and other literature critical of the administration. When Harding took over he immediately began to undo these damaging actions. He symbolically freed and pardoned the Socialist activist Eugene V. Debs. Harding went on to free more political dissenters and ended the illegal seizures of private property that happened under Wilson's reign.

One thing that you never hear about in regards to Harding is his stance on civil rights. At this time in history the nation was attempting to address the "Negro problem." Wilson segregated the federal government, had white supremacists as close advisers, and even showed the KKK produced Birth of a Nation at the White House. Harding took a different stance. Harding received great praise from the civil rights pioneer W.E.B. DuBois. He wrote, "Today President Harding's speech, like sudden thunder in blue skies, ends the hiding and drives us all into the clear light of truth." He applauds the President for insisting that blacks be given full voting rights, access to a good education and economic opportunities. Harding, and the Republicans, fought for anti-lynching legislation. For the record, it was the Republican Party that addressed the prohibition of lynching in its official Party platforms during this era. The Democrat's platform does not mention blacks once.

In the same speech, Harding spoke of national unity stating, "The one thing we must sedulously avoid is the development of group and class organizations in this country. There has been a time when we heard too much about the labor vote, the business vote, the Irish vote, the Scandinavian vote, the Italian vote, and so on. But the demagogues who would array class against class and group against group have fortunately found little to reward their efforts." Unfortunately our nation has not listened to Mr. Harding's advice. It seems like the only thing we discuss today is how certain groups are influencing the political sphere.

DuBois ends his praise of Harding by answering some of the critics who believed it to be inappropriate for a white man to go to the South and lecture blacks on racial pride. DuBois responds (prophetically) "For the day that Black men love Black men simply because they are Black, is the day they will hate White men simply because they are White." I can think of numerous people who meet this description...Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton come to mind.

In closing, I just thought it note worthy that the next time you hear how poor a president was just remember that sometimes these are the Presidents with wonderful ideas but a non-exciting theater as their stage. But then there are truly really crappy Presidents...Jimmy Carter comes to mind.