Posted on 08/14/2015 10:05:22 AM PDT by NRx
A woman at a dinner party told Silent Cal she’d made a bet she could get him to say at least three words.
“You lose”, he replied.
However, his brand of racism does need to be tempered with an understanding of his real life experience which experienced Indian warfare, collaboration with the British during the War of 1812 and even during the Revolution in Jackson's youth.
I'm not so sure most of us wouldn't have had similar views given similar experiences.
OTOH, what did Black people ever do to Woodrow Wilson? He was mostly shielded from the Civil War during his childhood with a preacher father who lived behind the lines except for a short period when his birthplace of Staunton, Virginia was threatened early in the war. His father actually came from Ohio and his grandfather had published an anti-slavery newspaper. The guides at his boyhood home will tell you that their slaves were treated very well and were very protective of and loyal to the family, especially young Woodrow. One of the young men even slept on a mat by the door which protected the hallway to Woodrow's room, such was their devotion. Ironic, eh?
Very cool. I like the wraparound porch.
Tell me that any President of either party would live
in a home that modest today.
LOL!
Yes, I also had to buy cheese from the factory which you described at Plymouth Notch. Very pricey, as I recall, but also excellent in taste since they tempted you with free samples on a toothpick. I'd estimate that one of every three samplers bought the cheese the day we were there.
I think what did Harding in was probably his diet. He liked dishes such as waffles smothered in beef gravy for breakfast, and he was a heavy user of tobacco.
It was weird because you rarely see such an impressive national monument butt-up against a second-tier shopping mall.
I am guessing he was buried there decades before someone came along and built a mall next-door.
I believe the letters referencing Carrie Phillips were the
ones my father found in the safe at the Uhler-Phillips department store in Marion, Ohio.
As I recall, he was flabbergasted that they had probably been placed there by Warren Harding himself, and had not been touched until he (my father) found them in the sixities.
I remember reading them as a youngster, but they made no
lasting impression.
Dad, as I recall, turned them over to the Ohio State Historical Society.
Your memory is faulty, and so is your geography.
The Sears store was not in the immediate proximity of
the Harding Memorial.
It was on the same road (Route 23/Delaware Avenue).
The memorial is on an acre +/-, and stands alone as the photo
in this thread shows.
Across Delaware Avenue is a veterans’s memorial and park.
To the right of the Harding Memorial is Vernon Heights Boulevard; and
on the other side of that, is the Marion Cemetary.
I read a rumor that Harding was part-black and if it were ever exposed his political career would have been ruined.
He was our first black president.
And that character was supposed to be Theodore Roosevelt.
Theodore had been treated shabbily by Wilson. He had asked for the same deal he had gotten from McKinley in the Spanish American War two decades earlier. He wanted a commission as a colonel and permission to recruit a regiment to fight under his command in France. Wilson turned him down, stating that this war would be fought by conscripts under the command of military professionals.
No one was fooled. Wilson was secretly planning to run for a third term in 1920, and he didn’t want TR to come home a military hero the way he had twenty years earlier.
As the war ended, Wilson experienced an electoral catastrophe in 1918 when the Republicans took Congress. Immediately afterward, TR indicated he wanted the Republican nomination for 1920. All other potential candidates for president pulled in their horns. If Theodore wanted the nomination, no one would attempt to stop him, and it was understood that he would easily defeat anybody the Democrats threw at him.
Death tends to be a bad career choice. TR died in his sleep of a heart attack, and Wilson had a massive stroke barnstorming the country in his attempt to impose his solution to the war on a reluctant populace.
At that point, three men jumped back into the Republican race. Retired general Leonard Wood was the front runner, but Gov. Frank Lowden of Illinois had a following as did Gov. Hiram Johnson of California. (Johnson was the man who castrated the political parties and bequeathed Californians government by initiative, referendum and recall.)
Sen. Warren Harding of Ohio positioned himself as everybody’s second choice. He wanted delegates to the convention to say, “I’m for General Wood, but if I can’t get him, I’ll settle for Harding.
Harding was an astute judge of political horseflesh. Concerning Wood, he said, “No former doughboy will vote for the man who ordered him to march straight into machine gun fire.” On Lowden: “He married a Pullman daughter, so he’s too close to the railroads.” On Johnson: “He’s a goddam Red.”
When the deadlock at the convention could not be broken, Hiram Johnson called for a meeting of all Republican senators who were not declared candidates in his suite at the Blackstone Hotel. This was the famous “smoke filled room.” Harry Daugherty, Harding’s campaign manager, was frantic that Harding was to be excluded from the room. Harding said, “Harry, when the story is finally told, it’s best that history shows we were nowhere near that room.”
The smoke filled room came up with the name of RNC Chairman Will Hays. Hays, from Indiana, was too young to be a credible candidate, and the Hays boomlet didn’t even last a day. When it collapsed on the convention floor, Harding went in for the kill. (Hays became Harding's campaign manager, and he was the man who invented the "front porch" strategy.)
Harding was one of those politicians who understood power, and how sometimes it was best to lead from behind while others led from in front, took the flack and built the base for a change of policy.
The book, “Shadow of Blooming Grove” by Francis Russell, addresses
that rumor. Thus, “Shadow” in the title.
From personal experience, I know the lore, legend, and legacy
of Warren and Florence Harding was treated very carefully in
Marion, Ohio when I was growing up there in the forties thru seventies.
When Russell’s book was published in 1968, it was read by everyone;
spoken of by few.
I’d kill to have a President as good as Harding today.
He shaved the debt by 1/3 (along with Coolidge),
The debt was actually reduced by $20.00 a second. They did it by slashing government spending ant the economy was so good the Roaring Twenties came about and Sliced Bread, Air Conditioning, and zippers were invented
Me to.
It sickens me how Harding is treated by historians, most brand him one of the worst, HA!
After the 1912 episode where TR tried to unseat Taft, there weren’t exactly that many Republicans thrilled with TR. Added to the fact....the split vote across the fifty states easily handed Wilson the race (40 states to TR’s six).
TR walked away and did mostly nature studies for the remainder of his life....ending up on the Amazon (1913-1914) as his way of getting away from the failure of the election. After a serious bout with Malaria....TR barely survived that and was in a weaken state for very long and extended period. I don’t think he had that much enthusiasm for politics after the 1912 election.
The amusing part of this entire downturn is that TR’s executive order given in the last six months of his Presidency over national forest rules is what derailed this relationship between him and Taft, and created the 1912 epic mess.
Yet he started tax cuts that took the top rate from 75% to 25% and the bottom rate from 25% to 5%, and still ran a surplus every year.
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