In a Wall Street Journal piece published on June 24 (print edition), longtime journalist and essayist Lance Morrow compares today’s turbulent times with earlier episodes in American history. He notes that what we are experiencing today is hardly new or exceptional. He ends his piece, however, with lumping in Warren Harding with James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, describing them as our worst presidents.

In my view, however, Harding has much to his credit and hardly ranks among our worst presidents. To add my perspective to the discussion, I submitted a Letter to Editor, which the Journal published on July 7 (print edition) and can be accessed here. To keep within word count limits, the Journal shortened the letter. I reproduce the original directly below.

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In an otherwise fine piece comparing and contrasting today’s turbulent times with earlier episodes in American history, Lance Morrow joins a long-standing tradition of naming Warren Harding along with James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson as our worst presidents.  (“Could This Be an Antebellum Age?”  06/24/2022 at A-19.)  Few would dispute that the two presidents bookending Abraham Lincoln were among our worst, but lumping in Harding with Buchanan and Johnson borders on slander.  As documented by James Grant in his marvelous book, The Forgotten Depression of 1921, Harding came into office in the midst of a post-WWI recession beginning in 1920 and quickly turning into a depression in early 1921, with the stock market eventually falling by nearly 50% and concomitant collapsing wages, profits, and employment.  Rejecting a mindset of interventionism (“we have to do something”), Harding held to the now long-jettisoned principle of separation of economy and state.  The facts speak for themselves.  Free-market prices and wages adjusted, and recovery was already underway by the middle of 1921, only 18 months after the downturn started.  A near decade of prosperity followed.  Would that we had more “worst” presidents like Warren Harding.

Theodore A. Gebhard