Warren G. Harding: The 29th US President, 'Return to Normalcy', and the Roaring Twenties

1. Ohio Newspaper Publisher & The "Return to Normalcy" Campaign

Warren Gamaliel Harding was born on November 2, 1865, in Blooming Grove, Ohio. Purchasing the struggling Marion Daily Star newspaper at age eighteen, Harding turned it into a lucrative publishing empire. Handsome, affable, and genial, Harding was elected Ohio Lieutenant Governor and US Senator (1915–1921).

At the 1920 Republican National Convention in Chicago, after party leaders met in a legendary "smoke-filled room" at the Blackstone Hotel, Harding emerged as the compromise nominee. He coined the defining catchphrase of the decade, declaring: "America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration." Harding won a historic 60.3% popular vote landslide over James M. Cox in the first presidential election in which women nationwide exercised their constitutional right to vote under the 19th Amendment.

2. Economic Mastery: Budget and Accounting Act & Naval Disarmament

Harding assembled an extraordinary cabinet alongside political cronies, appointing Charles Evans Hughes as Secretary of State, Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce, and Andrew Mellon as Treasury Secretary.

Harding signed the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, creating the modern federal budget process and establishing the Bureau of the Budget (now OMB) and General Accounting Office (GAO). In foreign policy, Secretary Hughes hosted the Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922), negotiating the historic Five-Power Naval Treaty which halted a dangerous naval arms race by establishing warship tonnage ratios (5:5:3 for the US, Britain, and Japan) and scraping over two million tons of battleships.

4. The "Ohio Gang" & The Shadow of the Teapot Dome Scandal

Harding's greatest weakness was his misplaced loyalty to corrupt personal friends, known as the "Ohio Gang", whom he appointed to high federal posts. Harding privately lamented to journalist William Allen White: "My God, this is a hell of a job! I have no trouble with my enemies... but my damned friends, they're the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!"

The most notorious corruption was the Teapot Dome Scandal, in which Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall secretly leased naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California, to private oil barons in exchange for over $400,000 in bribes, becoming the first US cabinet officer convicted of a felony and sentenced to prison.

5. The "Voyage of Understanding" & Sudden Death in San Francisco

In June 1923, learning of impending corruption investigations into his associates, an exhausted Harding embarked on a grueling cross-country train tour, the "Voyage of Understanding", becoming the first sitting US president to visit Alaska.

Returning to the mainland, Harding fell severely ill with cardiovascular disease and pneumonia. On the evening of August 2, 1923, at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, while his wife Florence was reading him an article from the Saturday Evening Post, President Harding died instantly from a fatal heart attack or stroke at age 57. Millions of grief-stricken Americans lined the tracks to watch his funeral train travel across the nation to Washington.

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