The Federalist Society/Wall Street Journal book ranking the presidents via a survey of liberal and conservative scholars is doing quite well on Amazon.com. Too bad, then, that this survey, while far more balanced than most, ranks Warren Harding at the bottom. Forever tarred by the Teapot Dome scandal (though it’s not clear he was complicit in it), Harding’s great accomplishments have been overlooked: (1) pardoning Eugene V. Debs and ending the harassment of leftists and pacifists from the Wilson years; (2) after the horribly racist Wilson years, undoing Wilson’s segregation of federal offices, supporting anti-lynching legislation, and delivering a bold speech (in Birmingham!)in favor of equality for African Americans; (3) reducing government spending and taxes back to reasonable, pre-Great War levels; (4) repealing various wartime economic controls–the latter two policies were responsible for the boom of the 1920s; (5) appointing excellent Supreme Court Justices, notably Taft and Sutherland–the Justices appointed by Harding ushered in one of the most creative periods in Supreme Court jurisprudence (a time in which, among other things, the Court developed the precedents that underly modern civil liberties jurisprudence–see, especially Meyer v. Nebraska–and issued the most progressive opinion on women’s rights–Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, holding that the 19th Amendment granted women full equal citizenship so that they may not be denied rights given to men, namely liberty of contract in Adkins–issued by the Court until the 1970s).
Other than Teapot Dome, the only major flaw I can think of in Harding’s record is that he signed the first major law limiting immigration from Europe in 1921. But no one’s perfect, and this mistake, combined with a scandal that pales next to, say, Iran-Contra, hardly should assign Harding to the bottom of the presidential heap. And it’s especially hard to fathom Harding’s low ranking when the execrable and incompetent Woodrow Wilson consistently ranks as a “near-great” president.
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