ESSAY AND COMMENT
Historiography and
WARREN G. HARDING
re: The Shadow of Blooming Grove:
Warren G. Harding in his Times,
by Francis Russell (New York:
McGraw-Hill Company, 1968; xvi??691p.;
index, $12.50).
The image of Warren G. Harding has been
derived largely from pre-
1940 books by Samuel Hopkins Adams,
Frederick Lewis Allen, Mark Sul-
livan, and William Allen White. To these
life-and-times accounts must be
added the memoirs of Nan Britton, Harry
Daugherty, and Gaston B.
Means. The picture presented was that of
a lazy youth, a small town news-
paper editor dominated by his wife, a
"bloviating," do-nothing Ohio poli-
tician, a roll call-missing Senator
introducing vote bait bills on the occa-
sions he showed up, and an insecure and
incompetent President. Sex, pub-
lic scandals, and whispered claims of
Negro blood dominated the story.
Available since 1964, the Harding Papers
as well as those of close friends
Charles E. Hard, Malcolm Jennings, and
Frank E. Scobey offer researchers
the challenge to discover whether there
is more to the Harding story than
ineptness, low politics, and moral
degradation. Moreover, alert scholars
should be prepared to look for errors in
the Harding Profile as formerly
presented since none of the four
biographers mentioned was an historian
but rather a popular writer who was
looking for wide readership and was
bent upon placing "W. G." in
the prevailing "Ford, Flapper, and Fanatics"
and isolationist views of the 1920's. Also,
since the works of Britton and
Daugherty have been thoroughly
discredited and Means has admitted to
deliberate falsehood, a critical
approach to these writings is definitely in-
dicated. A call for a new historiography
is seen in the epochal monograph
by Henry F. May, "Shifting
Perspectives on the 1920's," and the equally
significant, "The Legend of
Isolationism in the 1920's," by William Apple-
man Williams, both of which encourage
students to take a fresh look at
the decade and at the Presidents of that
era as well.
It is regrettable to state that neither
of the two biographers who have
published books since the release of the
Harding Papers have added any
basic new insights to the early
accounts. Andrew Sinclair in The Available
Man offers an attractive literary style but little else as
he repeats the familiar
arguments for Harding's
"availability" and pursues the hoary theme of a
rural man lost in the big urban world.
Indeed, in his preface, Sinclair has
the integrity to explain away his
inadequate research by telling his readers
to await more definitive histories.
Francis Russell tells a full story in
691 pages, covering the period from
Harding's ancestry to the centennial
celebration of 1965. He adds new de-