The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren Harding by Ryan S. Walters (Washington D.C.: Regnery, 2022) – A review by Heribert von Feilitzsch
Published through an imprint of Salem Communications, a conglomerate of conservative and Christian media outlets, Walters prefaces his monograph as looking at the Harding presidency through a conservative lens. I appreciate the transparency. True to his word, Walters presents the 29th American president as a likable, hard-working, conservative patriot who in his short 2.5 years in office pulled the US economy out of recession (which Walters labels a “Depression”) and laid the groundwork for unprecedented economic growth that trickled down to the lowest rungs of the American wealth pyramid. According to the author, Harding laid the economic and financial tracks, on which his successor Calvin Coolidge continued. According to the author, President Wilson caused the 1919 “Depression,” Harding fixed it in a few months, and created unprecedented wealth that lasted for a decade. Herbert Hoover, the closet liberal (he calls him a progressive), without the necessary ideological foundation caused the Great Depression. What was Harding's ideological bedrock? “Putting America first.” (Chapter 7)
A spectacular show of historical acrobatics are the author’s efforts to spin away the well-documented corruption of the Harding administration that sold out American domestic and foreign policy to oil tycoons Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny, and turned the burgeoning federal Bureau of Investigation into the administration’s fixer organization. While the author very superficially touches upon the Teapot Dome scandal that led to the prison sentence of Albert B. Fall, Harding’s Secretary of the Interior for accepting bribes, he contends that Harding had no idea and, when he found out, reacted responsibly. The opposite, of course, is the case. Harding personally signed papers that allowed Secretary Fall to lease oil rich navy properties to Doheny and Sinclair for a pittance. When Congress investigated the scandal in 1923, the FBI was so corrupted, that the US Secret Service was deputized to lead the investigations. The author mentions Gaston B. Means as a “former federal agent,” who is part of the cabal of authors and journalists maligning President Harding. As a matter of fact, the former German agent and conman had been hired as a Bureau of Investigation special agent during the Harding years. Head of the Bureau was Harding’s friend and fellow Ohioan William “Billy” Burns, who turned the federal agency into a cesspool of corruption. Means is a posterchild for the state of affairs of the Harding administration.
Walters’ lopsided story paints Woodrow Wilson a typical southern racist, while Harding was a “national healer,” who even pardoned his political opponent, the socialist Eugene Debs, and invited him to the White House. A heartwarming anecdote if viewed out of context. The author makes no mention of the Ku Klux Klan, which reached its zenith of eight million members in 1923 and terrorized minorities across the entire country. The Harding administration’s Justice Department under the corrupt leadership of Harry Daugherty, Harding’s former campaign manager, not only sat idly by, but the administration also adopted the clan’s America First slogan.
To further the ideological argument, the author blows the recession of 1919 completely out of proportion and squarely blames the Wilson administration for causing it. Once again, no mention of the flu, decommissioning millions of army soldiers, and adjustment of the economy to peacetime, which are the main factors of the brief economic downturn. Rather than Harding solely and single handedly saving the economy, the United States economy boomed as it collected on its wartime loans and supplied the utterly destroyed Europe with its products. The author’s lack of research and understanding of the historical environment show in painful mistakes, such as the Punitive Expedition to punish Pancho Villa for attacking Columbus, New Mexico in 1916 lasting three years (which would have prevented the US to participate in World War I - the US ended the incursion after nine months), or the occupation of Veracruz, Mexico in 1914 lasting two days (it lasted seven months).
To call Walters’ book a revisionist history would be too kind. It is a misinformed, horribly researched propaganda piece that selectively hides or elevates aspects of US history between 1918 and 1929 to suit the “most maligned president in American history,” a title conservative media now accord to Donald Trump. Other than a few memoirs and newspaper articles, the book completely lacks primary sources. In a solid scholarly approach, a historian lets the research lead to a conclusion, that may revise earlier works and conclusions. In this case the conclusion led the research, if one can be so generous as to call the use of a select few memoirs “research.” In summary, this book is a hack job of the first order.