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Dead Last: The Public Memory of Warren G. Harding's Scandalous Legacy

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Author Phillip Payne does an admirable job at examining Warren G. Harding in this 2009 work. There are several Warren G. Hardings within U.S. history. The most popular - Harding the infidel, the adulterer, the man of mixed race is the also least accurate public image of the man. There is also the Warren G. Harding that created Veterans Bureau, the Office of Management and Budget and the Harding that appointed both strong (Mellon, Hoover) qualified men to cabinet positions as well as the Harding that appointed Albert Fall and Harry Daugherty to cabinet positions that got themsleves, and ultimatly Harding himself in a boat load of hot water.

Like all men, however, Warren G. Harding was person of many virtues and vices, and this is the Harding that gets lost in history.

That he rose to the Presidency in an era when duty to country and party were seen as virtues, that he found love outside of marriage with one woman (documented) and was rumored to have conceived a child with another (alleged) is nothing new in American history.

The tragedy of the Harding story (and the word tragedy is often used with Harding) is that the man died just as the betrayals of others were coming to light. His death, and the death of his wife shortly thereafter, left the childless couple with no one to defend their honor, no one to tell their story.

What the reader will not find in this book is credibility to the rumors loved by those who insist that the legends and salacious rumors which have swirled about Harding for for almost 90 years. The people who hang on to this hope that someone will validate their beliefs in Harding, and in doing so will validate themselves. But Payne doesn't play that game and it angers the supporters of the fringe that he ignores them, as he should. Payne is out to write his own book, not theirs -- and there plenty of them, most available on Amazon for those who want to read them, out there making their claims that Harding was the first Black President, or that Harding fathered children, ad nauseum.

Into this, comes Payne, who re-invites the READER to examine Harding, the man, who was a very different person from the Harding of lore and legend. Payne does a good job at helping to separate the fiction from more fantastic claims made by those who have to own Harding to validate their own positions.

Author Phillip Payne tells us, "The story of the creation and use of Harding's image illustrates the role of reputational entrepreneurs in shaping the national civic religion." He assumes that academic historians ("entrepreneurs") purposely craft the Harding image according to their interpretation of the civic religion. This is his main thesis and he spends the books' 223 pages extolling the virtues of a man who was never fit for the office, even by his own words.

Payne claims that others have "constructed Harding's image and reputation." Harding was responsible for creating his own image, reputation, and character. He didn't need help from academic historians. He takes on Presidential rating polls and takes issue with historians whose "academic judgments regarding Harding as part of a public discourse." He even claims that the CSPAN visit to the Harding home in their presidential series of visits to Presidential homes, denigrated Harding's character.

Payne's "Freudian slip" occurs in the very first sentence of the section "Acknowledgements": "Two themes often emerge when authors discuss writing a book. The first is the image of the lonely historian researching and writing. The second theme is that of community, where the author thanks those folks who helped influence the thinking and research and thus made the book possible." The reader now knows that the author feels "lonely" (read: alone in his views); and second, those "folks who helped influence the thinking and research" (clue: he worked for the Harding Memorial Association and the Ohio Historical Society.... "where most of my materials came from.") In other words, what we have here is a small-college professor, who is biased in favor of Harding and seeks to rehabilitate his reputation and character, without doing serious research.

Payne praises author Robert Ferrell (no surprise there: another Harding devotee), for "...debunking many of the falsehoods that permeate Harding's biography..." while wrongly assuming that "Progressive writers favored the policies of Woodrow Wilson which worked against the reputation of Harding." Payne needs to do some competent Wilsonian research, and not on the internet or through library-loan (which he includes in his "Acknowledgements"), but some genuine primary-source research.

Payne states that Harding was not Black. But Harding was what we know as an Octoroon, meaning a person of fourth-generation black ancestry. Genealogically, it means one-eighth black. Payne has given only cursory attention to the actual photographs and accompanying information now available in open sources, not locked away by the Ohio Historical Society and the Harding Memorial Home. He needs to take a closer look at Oliver Perry Harding. And he needs to ask the current Harding family to un-block Warren Harding's ancestry from being viewed on-line. What does Dr. Richard Harding have to hide?

Payne talks about the "two women rumored to be Harding's extramarital sexual partners...Carrie Phillips...and Nan Britton...") But what about Rosa Hoyle, Augusta Cole, Miss Allicott, Maize Haywood, Blossom Jones, Margaret Gorman, and Grace Cross? Harding fathered more than one child.

Payne claims that "Much of (his) book deals with these efforts to create, control, and use Harding's reputation and the scandals that define his place in our national memory." So is not Payne trying to create, control, and enhance his own version of Harding's reputation? He claims that for one to state that Harding was a failure as a president is not a fair assessment. What about the facts?

Payne attempts throughout the book to use the theory of "American Civil Religion" to mask his attempt to rehabilitate Harding, a man who was unfaithful to his wife, his constituents, and his country. He passes off Harding's personal scandals with the statement: "Harding's private scandals have lived on in part because they are easier to understand than are the scandals of his administration." I contend that they are both easy to understand, both have been examined in great detail, and anyone who wants to understand his scandalous administration, only has to observe his scandalous private life...his flawed character has permeated both. He was more than the "slob" per Alice Roosevelt Longworth; he couldn't tell the truth about his on-going adultery to the men who were going nominate him. Payne omits much that is known about Harding's sexual exploits. And don't forget that Payne glosses over the fact that Florence Harding burned a substantial quantity of Harding's papers. Florence's own attempt to cover-up her past is omitted from the book.

Payne tries to have it both ways: "Harding scandals are grounded in reality but should also be taken with a grain of salt." He considers the truth as subjective: "Warren Harding continues to rank among our worst presidents. This is a subjective standard." Original research would tell a different story about how the rankings were done and by whom.

Payne's book deserves to be remembered for the fatuous inaccurate judgment of Harding it is. He falls in the same category as author Robert Ferrell, whom Payne lauds for his "classic biography of Wilson," which was excellent to a point, but whose book, "The Strange Deaths of President Harding" was another attempt to rehabilitate Harding's character. Payne, who worked in the Harding home in Marion, Ohio as "Historic Site Manager," has been able to see correspondence (not available to the public) between the Harding Memorial Association leaders and other historians. He then writes a biased interpretation (Chapter 7: "Harding Alley") of these individuals, who attempted and were denied access to the Harding papers, which were/still under lock and key by the same Harding Memorial Association he worked for. It is through such subterfuge that he has been able to present his rehabilitation of Harding.

One needs to read Payne's book carefully. Consider his introduction of Marion resident D.R. Crissinger (Daniel Richard Crissinger) on page 24. Crissinger is presented as a Democrat who organizes the town for the upcoming campaign. But what he doesn't tell you is that, Harding as no judge of character, appoints this friend, who was also vice-president of a local bank, to the post of Comptroller of Currency in 1921, and, then to Governor of the Federal Reserve Board in 1927. Crissinger would be indicted in 1929, for using the mails to defraud in a crooked real estate financing scheme. He would be the fifth Harding crony to be indicted. Many of the men, who would mold the Harding campaign, included the inept, vain, and medical quack, Dr. Sawyer (whom one of his present-day doctor-ancestors takes up for), who was given the post of Surgeon General with the rank of Brigadier General, and who, as the official White House physician, would contribute to the poor management of Harding's health. Yes, Payne states correctly that Coolidge eased him out of the White House, and rightly so, but to hear Payne tell it, it was done out of spite, and not because Sawyer was incompetent. But Sawyer was an incompetent medical quack, and this again shows a lack of original primary-source research by the author. If he had done his homework, he would know the full story of "Doc" Sawyer, as those of us who have.

Notice the author's play on words used in the Chapter 4 title: "My Damned Biographers," which is lifted and twisted from an original Harding quote, "I have no trouble with my friends, my g-damn friends; they're the ones that keep me walking the floors nights!" Payne now proceeds ad nauseam to spend several pages refuting the works of William Allen White, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Harry Daugherty, Francis Russell, John Dean, Carl Anthony, and even Alice Roosevelt Longworth!

He even claims that Francis Russell's Harding biography, "The Shadow of Blooming Grove," was incomplete....as well it was...partially... because....the very organization the author worked for, the same organization where he gathered the material for his book, was the one that also went to court to forbid Russell from printing the actual love letters Harding wrote to Carrie Phillips!

Consider his statement that "Russell fixates on the question of Harding's sexual life." Well, there's a lot to fixate on...and a lot of facts about Harding's known adultery that made him unfit to be president, in addition to his (Harding's) own statement on record that he was unfit to sit in the office. And what about the hush money that the Republican Party paid to Carrie Phillips and her husband to get them out of the country on a round-the-world trip while the election was in full swing. Payne deplores those current historians who did not use primary documents...documents that his own Ohio Historical Society/Harding Memorial Home, would not deliver up to them!

He takes to task Professor William Estabrook Chancellor's ground-breaking study of the Harding era, which explored Harding's Black ancestry. He states it is bunk, and then devotes an entire chapter showing his ignorance on the subject. Too bad he didn't include the pictures of Harding's ancestors! And what about the Harding cronies who broke the law by burning copies of the Chancellor book? And what about his cronies and use of Federal authority to harass Chancellor to the point he had to flee to Canada?

Payne also takes us on a tour-de-force trying to prove that Nan Britton was just a "twenties flapper," and was not one of his mistresses (he refuses to pursue DNA testing with the Britton child/grandchildren and Harding relatives).

Payne has also attempted to condemn those who brought Harding into what he calls the current "culture wars." Well...if the shoe fits....

He also tries to hide under the rubric of "Commentators have found it easy to select from a variety of commentaries on Harding to meet their needs." Well, what has he done, but cherry-pick which shows his own bias, while trying to mask Harding's adulterous lifestyle and fatally-flawed character under the thesis of "American Civil Religion."

He even blames Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge for Harding's failed reputation. Come on Professor Payne! You can do better than that!

And finally, he attempts to resurrect Harding's reputation by a comparison with current President George Bush, as if he could be considered "Dead Last." He returns to his inaccurate analogy/theme, that the Harding Memorial and Tomb represents the common man who can rise to a prominent place in democracy. Harding was not born in a log cabin, which the author continually alludes to. (A lot of pictures have been left out of this book...as I mentioned before).

It's a shame that Professor Payne became enamored with the Harding family, it's Association, and Ohio Historical folks, over a period of years, which he claims in the opening "Acknowledgements" is where he got his "facts." His resume from his college web site says it all: He gives as his "professional experience" (other than his current Assistant Professorship at St. Bonaventure University): Historic Site Manager for 15 months at the Harding's Home and Museum/Ohio Historical Society. What better place than that, to become a devotee? His forthcoming book, "Our Worst President? The Harding Scandals and the Making of History," will no doubt be another rehabilitation effort. This current biography is Dead Last in accuracy. Read it carefully.