A look at America’s ‘worst’ president

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/12/2014 (3957 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the view of many U.S. Republicans, President Barack Obama just may be the most despicable person to ever hold the office.

Following Obama’s recent announcement that he intends to use his executive power to permit millions of illegal immigrants to remain in the United States, House Speaker John Boehner declared that Obama was acting like an “emperor” and had “cemented his legacy of lawlessness.”

Time will tell how the Obama presidency is remembered. Even now with the great debates over his foreign policy and his health-care plan, Obamacare, the latest polls show that he has an approval rating of 42 to 47 per cent. Back in 2009, a year after he took office, his rating was closer to 70 per cent.

Obama will likely not be near the top of any historic presidential list with Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and George Washington, but he won’t be at the bottom either with Ulysses S. Grant, George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, and Warren G. Harding, who arguably has the worst reputation among all 44 presidents.

Harding was a Republican from the small city of Marion, Ohio, where he owned a newspaper before entering politics. He was a senator from 1915 to 1921 and served briefly as president from 1921 to 1923. He died from a heart attack at the age of 58 following a trip to Alaska in the summer of 1923. On his way back to California, he had stopped for a few days in Vancouver and was the first sitting president to visit Canada.

Following his death, revelations about corruption in his administration were made public, including the infamous Teapot Dome Scandal in which Albert Fall, Harding’s secretary of the interior, was found to have received an interest-free loan of $100,000 (more than $1 million today) for granting oil rights on federally controlled land in Wyoming to two oil executives he was friendly with.

Until the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, Teapot Dome symbolized graft and corruption in Washington and damaged Harding’s already poor reputation — one he did not dispute. “I am not fit for this office and never should have been here,” he half-seriously told one interviewer.

Now it turns out Harding may have also outdone such great (and notorious) presidential philanderers as John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.

Harding married Florence Kling DeWolfe, a divorcee in 1890. He was 25 and she was 30; in Washington circles, she became known as “the Duchess.” Harding enjoyed cigars, poker, and fine whisky, even while presiding during the Prohibition era. In 1905, he began an affair with Carrie Fulton Phillips, then the 32-year-old wife of dry goods merchant Jim Phillips. Carrie and Florence were good friends. Both Florence and Jim Phillips had health problems, which likely precipitated the affair.

A few months ago, more than 100 steamy love letters Harding wrote to Phillips during their 15-year romance were released by the Library of Congress. They had been hidden away in Phillips’s home. In 1964, four years after Phillips had died, historian Francis Russell discovered the letters while she was researching a book about Harding, but was prevented from using them by members of Harding’s family, who offered the letters to the Library of Congress providing they not be released for 50 years. The restriction was lifted this summer.

Harding’s correspondence with Phillips was passionate, intimate and graphic. He named his penis “Jerry” and in August 1918 wrote that he wished he could take Carrie “to Mount Jerry. Wonderful spot. Not in the geographies but a heavenly place.”

Five years earlier he wrote this ditty: “Honestly, I hurt with the insatiate longing, until I feel that there will never be any relief until I take a long, deep, wild draught on your lips and then bury my face on your pillowing breasts. Oh, Carrie! I want the solace you only can give. It is awful to hunger so and be so wholly denied… “

The letters also highlight Phillips’s pro-German sympathies. She travelled often to Berlin and other German locales. Prior to the U.S. entrance into the war in April 1917, she urged Harding, then a senator, to vote to keep the U.S. out the conflict.

No matter how much he adored her, he could not be convinced. “Frankly, I have all along recognized your intense partisanship and sympathy for and devotion to Germany, and have respected it because you are you, and most of the cutting things said I have been able to pass by,” he wrote to her in February 1917. “But I can and will do my duty accordingly to my best conscience and understanding and then take the consequences.”

The affair ended shortly before Harding became the Republicans’ presidential nominee in 1920. Concerned more about Phillips’s pro-German attitudes — there were even unfounded rumours that she was a German spy — than his adultery, the Republican National Committee sent Carrie and her husband on a trip to Japan with approximately $25,000 in spending money.

As strange as it may seem, publicity about Harding’s dalliance has improved his historical reputation. “He was very smart and an accomplished writer, which goes against this whole idea of him being a dumbhead in the White House,” writer James Robenalt said in an interview with the Globe and Mail in July. “He deserves a renaissance.” As for Carrie Phillips, Robenalt adds, that she “was his sexual outlet and the love of his life… She was a very modern woman. She clearly enjoyed sex and was open about it, which would have been unusual at the time.”

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.