In Defense of Harding
Since today is not President’s Day, I thought I would indulge in a little rant.
Presidential rankings tend to be rather biased. The problem isn’t so much political. A 1982 survey of historians, for example, found that conservatives and liberals were in complete agreement as to the best eight and worst six presidents (though the ordering in each case was slightly different). Rather, bias in presidential rankings is that such rankings tend to reward presidents who do a lot and expand the power of the presidency while punishing those who do not. A president who presides over peace and prosperity is liable to be forgotten, whereas those who faced great crisis, economic or military, tend to be ranked more highly. Indeed, since success in averting or defusing crises often makes them seem less severe in retrospect, this sort of ranking could be said to actually reward presidents for mishandling potential crises, or even creating them in the first place.
How else to explain the consistently low ranking (often in last place) of our 29th President, Warren G. Harding. Harding assumed office during what might well have been a major economic crisis. Unemployment had more than doubled, while GNP fell 24% from 1920 to 1921. Harding responded by cutting taxes, cutting spending, and refusing to having the federal government intervene in the economy, with the result that in six months the recession was over and the U.S. began a decade of unprecedented peace and prosperity.
Harding’s civil rights record, while not perfect, was far superior to any president in the decades either preceding or following his term in office. He publicly advocated full legal equality for southern blacks (in Birmingham, Alabama, no less), and fought to get an anti-lynching bill enacted in Congress. Harding ended the civil liberties abuses perpetrated during the last years of the Wilson administration, and pardoned war protesters, including Eugene Debbs, who had been imprisoned for their opposition to World War I.
It’s true that various members of Harding’s administration were caught taking bribes exchange for giving preferential oil leases to certain companies. These days government officials can get bribed with sex and drugs in exchange for preferential oil leases and hardly anyone notices, but at the time this was a major scandal. Still, while things like Teapot dome are a black mark on Harding’s presidency, there is no evidence that he was personally involved in the scandals, and to put him last in presidential rankings, behind even figures like Hoover, Buchanan, and Jimmy Carter, seems a bit shortsighted. Barack Obama has recently had trouble with some of his cabinet nominees, and if he had made the mistake of appointing Rod Blagojevich to a cabinet post his problems might have been far worse, but I hardly think that would have put him in the running for the worst president ever. Corruption in one’s administration is certainly a bad thing, but compared to getting America involved in an ill-conceived war or perpetuating a decade long crippling economic depression (attributes shared by several higher ranked presidents), it hardly seems worth mentioning.
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W. Wesley McDonald, whose Kirk book is quite good, praises Harding here.
Myself, I’ve always been a Coolidge fan.
Our worst president? Wilson. Among his many other vices, he made George W. Bush look like the president of the ACLU.
perpetuating a decade long crippling economic depression
That’s nonsense, Blackadder. I know there’s a whole bunch of people on the right (led by Amity Schlaes) that really, really want people to believe that FDR and his New Deal made the Great Depression worse, but the evidence does not support that.
Shales and a lot of other economists and historians, including at least a couple of leftist ones here at TAMU, my alma mater. I’m going to read Folsom’s book, which seems like a good popular history, as soon as I get a chance -http://books.simonandschuster.com/9781416592228 – as it’s an important topic I don’t yet have the time to delve into, but there most certainly is evidence to support that FDR prolonged the depression.
FDR deserves credit for his work on the banking system, as his most ardent detractors tend to recognize. But, also, many of FDR’s most ardent supporters recognize some very big failings, erratic behavior, and hodge-podge of actions that even the brainiest of the “brain trust” had no clue whatsoever of the consequences of. Get ahold of the Robert Whaples survey from about a decade ago ( Journal of Economic History ) if you can. A significant number of economists and historians agreed with blackadder.
A significant number of economists and historians agreed with blackadder.
Do they all work at the Cato Institute and the Hoover Institution, Jonathan?
Whether you measure the New Deal by GDP, median household income, the foreclosure rate, the rate of bank failures, industrial output – all of which are good, valid measures – the New Deal was a stunning success.
Matt,
We can argue about whether the New Deal helped or hurt w/r/t the Great Depression, but it isn’t really necessary. Herbert Hoover consistently ranks higher than Harding on scholarly surveys, and I presume you’d agree that he did help perpetuate a decade long crippling economic depression, no?
No, Matt, it was all full-time academics. (Whose opinions may not be any “better” or “worse” than someone who works for Hoover, Cato, or Brookings for that matter, but it does demonstrate more than one or two experts have found significant fault with FDR’s policies.)
Unless it makes you feel really good to defend FDR no matter what for some reason, take a look at critical works (critical including those views that state the New Deal had little effect as well as an actively negative effect), maybe starting here:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w3829
http://www.shsu.edu/~eco_www/resources/documents/WhatEndedtheGreatDepression.pdf
And many other places. Shales got a personal update from Whaples and wrote about his study (which seems to be buried behind academic firewalls) here:
http://blogs.cfr.org/shlaes/2009/01/15/whaples-consensus-on-the-great-depression
FDR has been undergoing a comprehensive reevaluation for about two decades now (as I think Reagan will have relatively shortly). My guess is that the further we get away from the 40s, he will become significantly less deified.
By the way, if we are going to talk about whether the New Deal helped, hurt, or was neutral w/r/t recovery from the Great Depression, then we need to be more precise as to what exactly we’re talking about. FDR adopted a great number of different policies during the 1930s and 1940s. Some were abandoned, some were struck down as unconstitutional, and some did not really go into effect until after the recovery was well under way. Some of the policies FDR enacted were quite good. Others were quite bad. And there are many arguable cases. Unless we are clear which policies exactly we are talking about, this sort of conversation is apt to be unproductive in the extreme.
I know very little about Harding…but… Blackadder, you really need to stop linking to NRO on matters of economics. They are simply not serious.
You write the following (I assume from the NRO article):
“Harding responded by cutting taxes, cutting spending, and refusing to having the federal government intervene in the economy, with the result that in six months the recession was over and the U.S. began a decade of unprecedented peace and prosperity.”
What economic theory are you invoking to support this hypothesis? You cannot be seriously be invoking a supply-side response, given the magnitudes of the movements (like I said, NRO’s ecomomics is a sham). Are you making a Rubinesque argument about the effect of fiscal discipline on interest rates? (if so, what matters is the deficit, not spending or taxes).