The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding

by Ryan S. Walters

Overview

"Presidents are ranked wrong. In The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding, Ryan Walters mounts a case that Harding deserves to move up—and supplies the evidence to make that case strong. -Amity Shlaes, bestselling author of Coolidge

He's the butt of political jokes, frequently subjected to ridicule, and almost never absent a "Worst Presidents" list where he most often ends up at the bottom. Historians have labeled him the "Worst President Ever," "Dead Last," "Unfit," and "Incompetent," to name but a few. Many contemporaries were equally cruel. H. L. Mencken called him a "nitwit." To Alice Roosevelt Longworth, he was a "slob." Such is the current reputation of our 29th President, Warren Gamaliel Harding. In an interesting survey in 1982, which divided the scholarly respondents into "conservative" and "liberal" categories, both groups picked Harding as the worst President.

But historian Ryan Walters shows that Harding, a humble man from Marion, Ohio, has been unfairly remembered. He quickly fixed an economy in depression and started the boom of the Roaring Twenties, healed a nation in the throes of social disruption, and reversed America’s interventionist foreign policy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684512805
Publisher:	Skyhorse Publishing
Publication date:	02/15/2022
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	600,463
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Ryan S. Walters is an independent historian who currently teaches history at Collin College in Texas. He is the author of The Last Jeffersonian: Grover Cleveland and the Path to Restoring the Republic, Grover Cleveland: The Last Jeffersonian President, and Remember Mississippi: How Chris McDaniel Exposed the GOP Establishment and Started a Revolution. He has appeared on Breitbart Radio and has spoken at a number of venues, including the Abbeville Institute and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He lives in North Texas.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Why Defend Warren G. Harding? ix

Prologue: The Most Maligned President in American History xv

Chapter 1 The League 1

Chapter 2 1919: The Year of Upheaval 15

Chapter 3 The Fight for the Republican Presidential Nomination 33

Chapter 4 The Election of 1920 57

Chapter 5 The Harding Administration 77

Chapter 6 Rebuilding a Depressed Economy 93

Chapter 7 Putting America First 115

Chapter 8 Harding, National Healer 141

Chapter 9 The Scandals 159

Conclusion: Restoring Harding's Reputation 175

Notes 191

Index 219

Editorial Reviews

"Presidents are ranked wrong. In The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding, Ryan Walters mounts a case that Harding deserves to move up—and supplies the evidence to make that case strong.

-Amity Shlaes, bestselling author of Coolidge

"Ryan Walters’s The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding is a long overdue defense of the man who was Trump before Trump, a criminally underrated and unjustly maligned president who in a just, America-first ranking would be regarded as one of America’s greatest presidents. This book is a timely and much needed salvo in the ongoing war to wrest American history back from the socialist ideologues who have dominated it for too long."

-Robert Spencer, author of Rating America’s Presidents

"Rather than one of the worst presidents, Harding should be regarded as a man who believed in the original intent of the presidency and who was able to stave off one of the worst economic crises of the twentieth century by doing nothing. You'll have a new appreciation for Wobbly Warren after reading this book."

-Brion McClanahan, author of The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution and 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America and Four Who Tried to Save Her

From the Publisher