‘The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding’
By Ryan S. Walters
Regnery, 320 pages

“I am simply trying to restore Harding to what he once was in the eyes of the American people: a beloved president,” his biographer, Ryan S. Walters, writes. He rejects the term revisionism, saying that is what was done by historians: “smear and besmirch our twenty-ninth president and his legacy, causing his reputation to suffer and pushing him to the bottom of presidential rankings.”

Mr. Walters catalogs the charges: that President Harding was lazy and licentious, an amiable dunce, a vapid and corrupt political hack. Harding’s own words have been turned against him, especially his statement that he was not qualified to be president. The very name of Harding is synonymous with scandal, privately and publicly, and the man did nothing while in office, critics say.

Yet Harding was elected with 60 percent of the vote and remained popular during his term of office. Although Mr. Walters occasionally compares Harding to Ronald Reagan, as another president attacked as a lightweight, a better comparison might be with President Eisenhower, who liked to work behind the scenes and managed the presidency far better than his sometimes bumbling persona led people to believe.

Harding shrewdly sized up his arrogant, dictatorial predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, whose second term foundered on his refusal to work with Republicans to achieve his dream of a League of Nations. Harding dispensed with Wilson’s progressive promises, put the national budget in order, and tempered the anarchist wave of protests, pardoning socialist Eugene Debs and even meeting with him in the White House.

Throughout this biography Wilson is the foil to the easy-going, poker-playing Harding. Where Wilson thought he could go it alone in making the world safe for democracy, Harding actually supported a naval disarmament conference that perhaps staved off a world war for at least a decade, Mr. Walters argues.

Harding, whose opponents sneered that he had “[n-word] blood,” reversed Wilson’s segregationist policies, resumed the hiring of African Americans in federal jobs, and met with important African-American leaders. He spoke up for other minorities and supported a Jewish state.

Mr. Walters cites several economists and historians who have also sought to rectify the injustice perpetrated against a good, if not great, president, pointing out that much of the scandal in his administration did not become known until after Harding’s death. Fault him for trusting certain friends, but he was not personally corrupt, some say.

Mr. Walters owes a great debt to John Dean’s Harding biography. Yes, that John Dean, whose “Harding” I reviewed on January 21, 2004, in The New York Sun, praising his “grace of style, depth of research, affinity for the subject, and understanding of biography.”

The conservative Mr. Walters’s effort is more policy prescriptive than Mr. Dean’s. “The Jazz Age President” is very much a work of the past and present, referring to President Trump a few times while invoking Harding’s “America first” agenda. Harding employed the phrase to emphasize that he had to restore America’s good humor and economy after the depredations of the Wilson years. 

Like Mr. Trump, Harding was a protectionist and believed in immigration restriction as the best way to protect American jobs. Mr. Walters clearly believes he is right, and so the Harding economic and political program is never seriously challenged.

You might call this biography an overcorrection, an effort, like John Dean’s, to disrupt the consensus of historians, which Mr. Walters believes is the product of liberal, progressive orthodoxy.  

Mr. Walters spends less time than Mr. Dean does on Harding’s extramarital affairs. There seem to have been two of them, one of which was magnified in the memoir of a mistress refuted by long-serving members of the White House staff.  

I would like to know a little more, however, about the whole man, including the adulteries. Harding’s sexual affairs hardly amount to anything close to what we know now about presidents such as JFK and LBJ, but presidential biography, as least in my book, belongs both in the boudoir and the Oval Office. 

Quarrel all you wish with the biographer’s conclusions as a brief for his subject, but notice also how, like Mr. Dean’s book, this is a biography about biography and about who gets to shape history.  For that alone, the book is worth reading.  

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography” and is writing a book, “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History”