Ohio History Journal

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HARDING PAPERS     by DONALD E. PITZER     April 25, 1964, marked the beginning of an opportunity for a new perspec- tive in telling the story of the life and times of Warren G. Harding. On that date The Ohio Historical Society opened to the public a collection of Harding papers which it had received in the preceding six months from the Harding Memorial Association at Marion, Ohio.1 Material never before available for scholarly research thus began to shed a clearer light upon Harding and the variously-interpreted age of the 1920's.2 The latter has been characterized as one so misunderstood that historians "cannot as yet distinguish between the important and the unimportant."3 Already, the Harding Papers have yielded significant information for scores of individuals preparing theses, dissertations, biographies, and general histories of the period.4 The ultimate value of the insights into and possible reassessments     NOTES ARE ON PAGES 182-183

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HARDING PAPERS                              77

 

of Harding and his era gained through such use of the papers, however,

will stand in direct proportion to the nature and extent of the collection

itself.

Through a set of unique circumstances the Harding Papers have become

a part of the archives of The Ohio Historical Society library. It is insufficient

to suggest their worth merely by stating the fact that they bulk to an

imposing 350,000 sheets filling over eight hundred manuscript boxes. Early

in 1924, not more than six months after the death of her husband, Mrs.

Harding cast a continuing shadow over the papers by giving credence to

the idea that she had destroyed all of them. In that year during a visit to

Washington, D. C., she told Dr. Charles Moore, who had solicited the

contents of the President's files for the Library of Congress, and Frank N.

Doubleday, who wanted to publish a volume of Harding's letters, that she

had burned them in order to protect his memory.⁵ In reality, she had sorted

through only certain segments of the total collection and had preserved

much of what she had seen. Before she died the following November, she

had willed all of the remaining correspondence in her possession to the

newly-founded Harding Memorial Association. Nevertheless, the myth that

no material worth a scholar's time had survived her determined purge lived

on. Allen Nevins' sketch of the life of Harding in the Dictionary of American

Biography in 1932 both illustrated the persistence of the rumor and also

solidified it for the next generation by asserting that part of the reason

no biography of the twenty-ninth president had appeared was because "Mrs.

Harding before her death destroyed his papers."6

Although the Harding Papers as they now exist may never be completely

free from the stigma that becomes attached to any set of documents which

has been purposefully censored, it is felt that a knowledge of the sections

of the collection to which Mrs. Harding did and did not have access and

an understanding of the basic character and contents of all of the materials

that have been preserved should help to clear the air for an objective

appreciation of their historical value. When President Harding died in San

Francisco on August 2, 1923, his public and private correspondence was in

four definable divisions located in his offices in Marion, Ohio and Washing-

ton, D. C.⁷ The record of his three decades as a Marion businessman and of

his two decades as an Ohio politician before being elected to the United

States Senate in 1914 lay in the files of the Marion Star newspaper office.

Most of the material from his six United States senatorial years and from

his campaign for the presidency in 1920 was in the care of his long-time

private secretary, George B. Christian, Jr., and was stored either at the

latter's Washington, D. C., home or at the White House. The last two

groups of papers were in the Executive Mansion. The official correspondence

of the Harding Administration was kept in the Executive Wing office. Letters

to and from the President that were considered to be of special importance

or of a private, personal nature were filed in his private office on the

second floor.8

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Mrs. Harding evidenced a desire to screen all of her deceased husband's

papers, but succeeded in gaining control of only two sections of them --

the collections in the private office of the White House and in the Marion

Star office.⁹ For several days before she left the White House for the last

time on August 17, 1923, she directed the packing of her own and the

late President's belongings for shipment to Marion. Assisted by the former

military aide to the President, Major Ora M. Baldinger, she sorted through

the contents of the desk, safe and files of the private office, committing

certain items to the blazing fireplace as she did so. The private papers that

remained were put into six to eight boxes that measured ten feet long, a

foot wide, and a foot deep and were sent to the Marion offices, where the

widow could screen them further at her leisure.

During the six weeks of late September and October 1923, the former

first lady completed her mission of destroying certain sections of the

Harding Papers. Her objective seems to have been the eradication of any

evidence that might have cast an accusing finger toward her husband when

news of the scandals that had taken place during his presidency became

common knowledge. By the time her work was finished, the size of the

White House private office collection was reduced by about sixty percent,

so that it fitted snugly into two ten-foot-long boxes. Since the files in the

Star office were available to Mrs. Harding during these days of sorting and

burning, they also must have come under some censorship.10 Yet, judging

from the fact that the present collection of material from this source shows

few, if any, of the telltale gaps which undoubtedly would have resulted if

she had destroyed any significant parts of it, it can be assumed that the

files in the newspaper office were virtually untouched.

In 1925 an event occurred which has made it possible to isolate the material

in the present Harding collection which was originally in the White House

private office group but passed unscathed through Mrs. Harding's hands

into the care of the Harding Memorial Association. In that year the

Association permitted editor John Van Bibber from the Doubleday, Page

Company to have copies made of over five thousand pieces of this corre-

spondence preliminary to publication.11 The proposed volume of letters

never appeared, but the typed copies¹² (and their three carbons)¹³ were

kept with the Harding Papers and now identify the letters in the collection

from which they were copied as ones from the White House private office

files. About twenty manuscript boxes full of this material, much of it

stamped "P.P.F." (private, personal file), have been identified.14

While the two divisions of Harding's papers that had undergone his

widow's screening remained under lock and key in the possession of the

Memorial Association, the two with which she had not tampered began to

gravitate toward the same depository. The job of packing the official papers

from the White House Executive Wing files after the President's death fell

to his trusted secretary, George B. Christian, Jr. Once Christian had finished,

however, he did not have them shipped to Marion for Mrs. Harding's perusal

in compliance with her instructions.l5 Instead, he had them stored in the

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HARDING PAPERS                              79

 

cellar of the White House. There this one hundred cubic feet of papers

remained practically forgotten until its discovery by workmen in 1929.16

At that time it was the fond hope of the director of the manuscript division

of the Library of Congress, Dr. J. Franklin Jameson, that this new find could

be secured for that institution and opened for historical research; instead, it

had to be sent to the Memorial Association at Marion, according to the

provisions of Mrs. Harding's will.

The last section of the Harding Papers was still in Christian's hands.

It contained at least two voluminous divisions of material. In the first were

the senatorial papers that had accumulated in Harding's Washington office

from 1915 to 1921. In the second was the contents of a ten-box shipment

of the forty-three drawers of senatorial and presidential election correspond-

ence which had been handled at the Marion campaign headquarters in 1920

and which had been sent to Christian at the capital just prior to Harding's

inauguration.17 In 1934, ten years after Mrs. Harding's death and five years

after the discovery of the Executive Wing collection in the basement of

the White House, the former presidential secretary decided to give some

of his holdings to the Library of Congress. On December 27, 1934, he donated

seven large and three small boxes of material from his collection. Eight of

the boxes contained the official presidential campaign correspondence filed

by states,¹⁸ recommendations for appointments, and congratulatory mes-

sages.¹⁹ The other two were filled with personal correspondence.20 Sometime

before May 1935, Christian made a second contribution to the Library of

Congress. This time it was eighteen letter-file cases of the senatorial and

election campaign material from the Marion campaign headquarters.21 At

the insistence of the officials of the Harding Memorial Association, however,

all of the Library of Congress acquisitions from Christian were forwarded to

Marion on May 4, 1935, and stored in the basement of the Harding home.

With the exception of the extremely valuable senatorial papers from the

1915 to 1920 period with which Christian had not chosen to part in 1935,

the Memorial Association collection had reached its full dimensions. The

cautious secretary, who at one time intended to write a definitive Harding

biography based in part upon the papers in his own possession,²² bound

most of the remaining senatorial papers in folders of the United States

Shipping Board with which he was associated. Not until near the end of

his life in 1951 did he release the last of his holdings.23 He decided to give

them personally to Dr. Carl W. Sawyer, then President of the Memorial

Association and guardian of the Harding Papers, while he was a patient

at the latter's Marion sanatorium.

It may have been the donation of the senatorial papers by Christian in

addition to a growing impulse that the time had come to open Harding's

papers for historical purposes that prompted Dr. Sawyer to begin the

task of arranging and processing the immense collection. In the mid-1950's

a vault was installed in the basement of the Harding home where all of

the papers, except those from the nearly forgotten Marion Star material,

which was in the attic, were placed in six fireproof files.²⁴ Then Dr. Sawyer

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began the work of identifying the sections of material, arranging them, and

having them processed by his secretary. Since the papers from the White

House Executive Wing files were still in their original folders and order,

and probably since the official correspondence of the Harding Administra-

tion seemed of paramount importance, Dr. Sawyer had his secretary begin

the processing with this section in 1957.25 Two items in the processing of

the Executive Wing material were of special importance to those who would

use the papers later. First, the labels and numbers of the original White

House folders were copied onto the new Harding Memorial folders to which

the material was transferred, thereby leaving the invaluable convenience

of Christian's filing and cross-reference systems intact for researchers.²⁶

Second, new folders were made even if the old ones were empty, thus making

obvious the spaces from which material was missing.27 Once the Executive

Wing papers were placed in new folders and each sheet numbered, the

surviving White House private office material, the typed copies made in

1925, the 1920-1921 campaign and senatorial correspondence, and finally

the contents of the rediscovered Star files were similarly processed by Dr.

Sawyer and his secretary by March, 1964.28

In the fall of 1963, then, when the Memorial Association began to release

the Harding Papers into the possession of The Ohio Historical Society,

the myth of total destruction was publicly exploded.29 It became immediately

apparent that not only material from the President's White House private

office and the Star files, which had passed through Mrs. Harding's censor-

ship, but also huge amounts of papers from the Executive Wing files and

from Christian's holdings, which she had not screened, had been preserved.

It remained for eager scholars to begin the research, however, that would

reveal the extent of the knowledge to be gained from this previously untapped

storehouse. Although this task is still in progress, it is possible to outline

in a general way the types of information which the various parts of the

Harding Papers are yielding:

The story of Harding's business and political careers in Ohio from 1888

to 1914 is recorded in the material which fills forty-nine manuscript boxes

from the newspaper office files.30 While the amount of the business corre-

spondence steadily increased over the period, the political mail fluctuated

with Harding's political fortunes.31 During his 1900-1904 terms as state

senator and his 1904-1906 term as lieutenant governor, the papers bulge.

They are especially full in 1905 when Harding was urged to oppose

incumbent Republican Governor Myron T. Herrick for the gubernatorial

nomination. His failure to seize this opportunity brought him into the

eclipse suffered by the Joseph Foraker faction of the party thereafter,

and the Harding papers reflect the decline. For 1910, when Harding finally

sought and gained the Republican nomination for governor, the material

is once again extensive, but it stops abruptly in mid-October, thus omitting

his defeat at the polls. Whether or not this is evidence of weeding done

by Mrs. Harding, the extant correspondence from the Star files is a prime

source for interpreting Harding's success as a businessman and his rise

to national attention as a state politician.

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HARDING PAPERS    81

Although the Papers contain a massive quantity of material on Harding's election to the United States Senate in 1914, virtually no correspondence is included from his first two years in office (1916-1917).32 Thereafter, his Washington senatorial papers fill thirteen manuscript boxes.33 The senatorial correspondence which was received and sent from the Marion campaign office is much more extensive, filling 144 such boxes.34 This section of the Papers is especially valuable. It not only includes letters from prominent individuals such as James M. Cox, Nicholas Murray Butler, Charles Evans Hughes, Eugene V. Debs, Henry C. Wallace, Will Hays, and William Howard Taft, but also contains material regarding the conditions in numerous countries and the prospective government appointments of ambassadors to these countries and also data on such topics as the coal situation, the Brotherhood of Trainmen, and the selection of cabinet members, which foreshadowed some of the impending issues of the Harding Administration. Directly related to the late senatorial papers is the outstanding collection of those preserved from the presidential election and pre-inaugural period. This material provides a prime opportunity to analyze the presidential nomination and election of Harding. Ten manuscript boxes of correspondence deal with pre-convention and presidential primary matters.35 One hundred and forty-three manuscript boxes contain the very revealing official campaign correspondence, arranged alphabetically by states.36 Eighteen manuscript boxes offer the contents of the election files of the Republican National Committee, also arranged by states.37 Finally, fifteen manuscript boxes hold letters of a personal nature from Harding's months of campaigning and awaiting inauguration.38

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In many respects the papers dealing directly with Harding's days in

the White House are the most important. Those from his private office

that escaped destruction by Mrs. Harding fill sixteen manuscript boxes.³⁹

This material is especially enlightening on issues of foreign affairs since

it contains not only intimate, personal letters from leading political figures

on subjects as diverse as the Genoa Conference and the China situation,

but also because it has much of Harding's correspondence with United States

ambassadors abroad, such as George Harvey in Great Britain. In some

cases the typed copies of over five thousand pieces of the private office col-

lection which were made in 1925 contain valuable letters not as yet found

in the Harding Papers themselves.

The material from the Executive Wing files which fills 352 manuscript

boxes provides the broadest contemporary view of the Harding Administra-

tion.40 Since the papers in this section have been kept in secretary Christian's

filing arrangement, research by topic is simplified by the folder labels and

by the convenience of using the original cross-reference system. It is facil-

itated further by an alphabetically-arranged card index of the folder titles

prepared at Marion and by a comprehensive inventory compiled at The

Ohio Historical Society which lists the titles of all of the labeled folders

and gives a resume of the contents of each box in the entire collection. Thus

it is possible to select the White House correspondence of each executive

department from Agriculture to War. Hundreds of topics related to the

Harding presidency and after are also available. A few of these include the

Civil Service Commission, Government Printing Office, Interstate Commerce

Commission, United States Railroad Commission, Railroad Strike of 1922,

Coal Strike, Negro Race, Indian Affairs, National Debt, Bankers Financial

Committee, United States Labor Board, Federal Reserve Board, Federal

Trade Commission, Veterans Affairs, Debs Case, United States Shipping

Board, War Finance Corporation, Farmers Problems, and Applications For

Government Jobs and Appointments arranged by states.

The remainder of the material in the Harding Papers as received from

the Memorial Association is of peripheral, but useful, quality. It contains

many holograph and typed copies of Harding's speeches,41 his Executive

Orders and Proclamations,42 information concerning his fateful Alaska trip,

death, and messages of sympathy to his widow.43 The papers of persons

close to Harding are also included. Mrs. Harding's correspondence, mostly

from the 1920-1923 period, awaits a biographer.44 Kathleen Lawler, Harding's

stenographer in the pre-presidential days, is represented by a few letters

and the lengthy draft of her unsuccessful attempt to publish the story

of "The Hardings I Knew."45 A few personal Harding letters to George B.

Christian, Sr.,46 some correspondence of Drs. Charles E. and Carl W.

Sawyer in regard to Harding Memorial Association affairs,47 and the 1928-

1933 private papers of George B. Christian, Jr.,48 complete the collection

of Harding Papers once held by the Memorial Association and now open

to the public at The Ohio Historical Society.

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HARDING PAPERS                            83

 

In 1961, as soon as the Society had solid hopes of becoming the ultimate

beneficiary of the Papers, it began a concerted effort to build adjunct col-

lections of the correspondence of Harding's contemporaries and intimates.

As a result, fourteen collections have been acquired which add significantly

to the breadth of view that can be gained of Harding and his age.49 The

papers of Charles E. Hard, Portsmouth editor and political figure;50 Newton

Fairbanks, chairman of the Ohio Republican State Central Committee from

1916 to 1920;51 and Alfred "Hoke" Donithen, Marion lawyer and close

associate of Harding,⁵² who were all early supporters of the owner of the

Marion Star for the 1920 Republican nomination, help to document the

circumstances and events that brought political distinction to Harding. The

one hundred and fifty letters that have been preserved from the estate of

Walter F. Brown, Toledo lawyer and railroad executive who had at first

backed General Leonard Wood but switched to Harding at a crucial point

in the 1920 campaign, also help to illuminate this phase of Harding's life.

The contemporary political currents are reflected further in the extensive

papers of Arthur L. Garford, Elyria industrialist and often political candidate

in Ohio;⁵³ Simeon Fess, Antioch College president and United States

senator from 1923 to 1935;⁵⁴ and Frank B. Willis, Ohio governor from 1915

to 1917, nominator of Harding at the 1920 Republican Convention and

holder of Harding's former senatorial seat from 1921 to 1928.55 The Ohio

political climate during Harding's presidency is recorded in the friendly,

personal letters of Mary E. Lee, a party worker and presidential appointee

as postmistress at Westerville, Ohio.56 The most personally revealing letters

of Harding appear in the recently acquired Frank E. Scobey collection.57

Scobey and Harding became well acquainted during their days in the Ohio

legislature, and although Scobey moved to Texas later, he urged his friend

to seek the 1920 nomination and worked to deliver the Texas delegation

into his hands. As a reward Scobey was made director of the mint in 1922.

Harding seems to have felt completely free to put his inmost feelings into

his letters to the Scobeys. The correspondence of the close friend of the

Hardings and one-time managing editor of the Harding Publishing Com-

pany, Malcolm Jennings, also contains personal touches.58 A few additional

such pieces have been secured in relation to Harry M. Daugherty, Harding's

senatorial and presidential campaign manager and Attorney General. Finally,

two private collections of Harding material drawn from many sources that

had been gathered by Cyril Clemens, descendant of Mark Twain, who had

intended to write a biography,59 and Ray Baker Harris, librarian for the

Scottish Rite in Washington, who had similar plans,60 are now valued

adjuncts to the Harding Papers.

If Warren G. Harding is to have a second chance to clarify his position

and that of his age in the minds of Americans, his own papers, so long

suppressed, must secure it for him. The articles that appear in this edition

of Ohio History are indicative of the scope and depth of the yield that might

be expected from this 350,000 sheet reservoir of information. If the opening

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of this source results in the production of a more sophisticated and objective

interpretation of the life and times of the twenty-ninth president, April

25, 1964 will have been a landmark in American historiography.

 

 

THE AUTHOR: Donald E. Pitzer is

Assistant Professor of History at Indiana

State University, Evansville Campus.

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