Warren G. Harding

Biography

Warren G. Harding was born in rural Ohio in 1865 and spent nearly his whole life in the state. At 14 he entered Ohio Central College in Iberia, where he helped publish a small newspaper. As a young man he and partners bought the failing Marion Star, the weakest of the town's papers, and he built it into a successful daily that gave him a base in Republican politics.

He served in the Ohio Senate from 1900 to 1904 and as lieutenant governor from 1904 to 1906. After losing the race for governor in 1910, he won Ohio's first popular election for the U.S. Senate in 1914. At the deadlocked 1920 Republican convention he was nominated on the tenth ballot as a compromise choice, ran a front-porch campaign from Marion promising a return to normalcy, and defeated Democrat James M. Cox in a landslide, the first sitting senator elected president.

As president he named Charles Evans Hughes, Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover to his cabinet, and his administration's Washington Naval Conference produced a decade-long agreement limiting naval armaments. He also freed political prisoners jailed for opposing the First World War. He died of a heart attack in San Francisco on August 2, 1923, during a western tour, and Calvin Coolidge succeeded him.

Scandals exposed after his death, chiefly Teapot Dome, which led to the bribery conviction of Interior Secretary Albert Fall, together with revelations of his affair with Nan Britton, badly damaged his reputation, though some historians have since reassessed his record.