Pledging a nostalgic “return to normalcy” (sounds like "make America great again") following World War I. Harding's brief administration accomplished little of lasting value, however, and soon after his death a series of scandals doomed the Harding presidency to be judged among the worst in American history.
President-elect Harding appointed to his cabinet a mixture of outstanding leaders and unscrupulous politicians waiting for an opportunity to line their pockets. In the first category were Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, and in the second were Attorney General Harry Daugherty and Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall.
Harding was a notoriously poor judge of character who expected his appointees to repay his trust with integrity. He was to be deeply disappointed.
Other achievements were more in keeping with the
Old Guard Republican views with which Harding had long been associated: a higher protective tariff (Fordney-McCumber),
lower taxes on business, and a sharp reduction in the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States from southern and eastern Europe.
The nation plunged into mourning,
little suspecting that the beloved leader they eulogized as “an ideal American” would soon be revealed to have been the head of the most corrupt administration in the nation’s history. Senate investigations uncovered Forbes’s illegal financial dealings at the Veterans Bureau and pointed to Daugherty’s collusion with the Ohio Gang. Far more serious was the unfolding of the Teapot Dome Scandal. In 1921 Interior Secretary Albert Fall had persuaded Harding to transfer authority over two of the nation’s most important oil reserves—Elk Hills in California and Teapot Dome in Wyoming—from the Navy Department to the Department of the Interior. Fall then leased these reserves to private oil companies, netting for himself several hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts and loans. Fall and Forbes later received jail sentences for their crimes; Daugherty twice went on trial, the first resulting in a hung jury and the second in a not guilty verdict.
Harding was never personally implicated in the scandals, but he was aware of the actions of Forbes, Smith, and the Ohio Gang and failed to bring their corruption to light. By the mid-1920s the public began to regard Harding
as a man who simply did not measure up to the responsibilities of his high office. Rumours of his heavy drinking in the White House (at a time when Prohibition was the law of the land) and of
his involvement in extramarital affairs further degraded his reputation. In 1927 Nan Britton published The President’s Daughter, in which she claimed that in 1919 she had given birth to a child fathered by the future president. In 2015 genealogists announced that DNA tests showed that Harding was the biological father. Although historians have challenged the veracity of other allegations made against him, most of them agree that
he was the least capable of the nation’s chief executives.
