Ohio History Journal

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-

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ESSAY AND COMMENT                                                   47

 

tails--mostly trivial but never boring--to the familiar story. His expanded

treatment of the youthful years of his subject as well as the Presidential

election of 1920 are helpful contributions of data, if not of interpretation.

The general reader, for whom the book is intended will enjoy Russell's

boundless energy, the sheer delight of his flirtation with words as he manu-

factures bon mots, creates caricatures, and occupies no middle ground with

respect to people, issues, or events.

Readers who enjoy the center spread of Playboy will be content with the

amazing amount of space devoted to sex. Russell not only scatters Nan

Britton's The President's Daughter throughout the book to renew interest,

which probably had not lagged anyway, but also adds another mistress,

Mrs. Carrie Phillips. Not satisfied with getting W. G.'s "woman story" com-

plete, the author--not Harding--in language more worthy of True Confes-

sions writes of girls running after the Presidential car with "their young

breasts quivering under their summer blouses" and goes out of his way to

cast aspersions at the sexual inadequacy, real or imagined, of persons in

the book. In so doing, Russell invites the suggestion that perhaps more

than a duty to historical accuracy motivated him. Like Hugh Heffner he

may realize that there is money in such things. Be this as it may, given the

emphasis of the work, it is appropriate that Russell, referring to his final

look at the Harding Memorial Tomb as he was ridding himself of Marion,

should make these the last sentences in his work: "There in the rain, un-

der two tons of black granite, he lay at last and at least beside his Duchess.

Death, I could not help but think as I drove away, makes strange bed-

fellows."

This preference for the dramatic, clever twist, and the compulsion to

be interesting result in distortion and a tone which constitute a disservice

to scholarship. For example, Frank Willis was Governor of and Senator

from Ohio, but if the reader uses the adequate index to chase down the

twenty-one references to the cultured lawyer-educator, he will find the Re-

publican leader nearly always referred to as the "hog-calling Willis." Again,

Charles Dawes's role as creator and first Director of the Bureau of the Bud-

get is drowned in a sea of trivia about the eccentricities of old "Hell 'n

Maria." The search for color causes distortion when Russell tells the tale

of the Duchess' destruction of her late husband's papers in six weeks of

"burning. . . burning. . . burning." Donald E. Putzer more prosaically

writes of the "imposing 350,000 sheets [of Harding correspondence] filling

over eight hundred manuscript boxes" in showing that Mrs. Harding did

NOT destroy any significant portion of the papers.

With respect to this episode and indeed all other content, Russell's evi-

dence is hard to verify because his "footnotes" consist only of a general ap-

pendix comment on sources used for each chapter. Even the author's full

history of the Carrie Phillips Papers and his account of the laudable wit-

ness of Kenneth E. Duckett to academic freedom is marred by the atten-

tion given to sneerings at the provincial Ohio scene. In the style of Henry

L. Mencken, the Easterner, Marion is discussed past and present as small

town in population, and especially attitude. One can easily imagine that

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48                                                  OHIO HISTORY

 

Russell enjoys being the "enfant terrible" as he pays his caustic disrespect

to the Sawyers, to Harding's relatives, to Fred C. Milligan, and other people.

Had Francis Russell not concentrated on merely enlarging the old themes

of sex, public scandals, and Negro blood, he could have added significant

new features to the Harding story. Examples of new insights that have been

gathered from the Harding Papers and monographs appear in a special

double issue of Ohio History in 1966, and in the first of a two volume study

of the Marion Man by Randolph C. Downes.

Russell's absorption with the unproven argument that Warren G. Hard-

ing had Negro blood was such that he not only made it the title of his book--

The Shadow of Blooming Grove--but strained unprofitably to show its con-

stant presence as a danger to the rising politician. This concentration in-

jured the author's analysis of other matters as well. Russell, for example, ac-

cepts the old version of Amos Kling's refusal to recognize his son-in-law on

the grounds that he was partly Negro. In so doing, he misses a promising op-

portunity to make a sociological (rather than a sarcastic) analysis of Marion

in the 1890's with the young journalist, "W. G.," on the side of those seeking

to build an industrial city opposing the older business leaders, among whom

was Amos Kling.

Moreover, with respect to the campaign of 1920, the author continues to

stress the Negro blood question rather than the issue of "Negro rights and

white blacklash" on which there is much material in the new sources. With

respect to the selection of Cabinet members, the writer offers the old view

that the President-elect gave the Secretary of State post to Charles Evans

Hughes after others had turned it down. Robert K. Murray has shown that

Hughes accepted the position in early December 1920, and was Harding's

first choice.

For the Presidential years, Russell's emphasis on public scandals led him

to either neglect or deal inadequately with the following topics: the Chief

Executive's ofttimes confidence in himself, in contrast to White's inability

thesis; the Wallace-Hoover split on agricultural policy, with the President

opposing the Secretary of Commerce's plan for laissez-faire; the "New Era"

aspects of Harding's economic outlook; evidences of a transition from

"America First" to an international view beyond the World Court issue; a

growing conception of the Presidency transcending that of an harmonizing

function. It is indeed surprising that Russell, who has written two other

books on the 1920's, has not followed the new historiography's invitation to

take a critical look at the men and events of that decade.

The purpose of calling attention to Francis Russell's failure to go beyond

what has been written in the past about Harding is not to defend a Presi-

dent who after revisionism may still be on the bottom rung to which

Thomas A. Bailey has assigned him in Presidential Greatness. Rather, it is

to suggest that historians should take Harding from the bedrooms, smoke-

filled rooms, card tables, golf courses, and drinking parties and give greater

consideration to public policy, administration, and philosophy of govern-

ment--information about which can be readily found in the Harding Papers.

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ESSAY AND COMMENT                                                  49

 

The True Profile of the Harding administration will emerge only as the

new historiography is joined with a modification of the old.

DAVID H. JENNINGS,

Professor of History,

Ohio Wesleyan University

 

ESSAY AND COMMENT

Oral History in Ohio

 

 

During the past half century as the telephone and computer are replacing

the personal letter and the telegraph, a new era in historical research is

emerging. No longer does the detailed letter serve as the major source of

expression, for the dominant mode of communication in the atomic-space

age is personal conversation. Leaders in many stations of American life can

manage their roles quite adequately without committing much of their ac-

tion or thinking to the cold permanency of ink and paper. Usually only

their conclusions settle into the printed pages of newspapers, magazines, re-

ports, and form letters.

How does the American historian of the recent period seek to penetrate

behind the often superficial written records to probe the cycle of background

events and the obscured motivations of the participants? One technique now

widely used by historians is called oral history. Defined simply, oral history

consists of tape recorded interviews with persons (respondents) by a trained

historical researcher (interviewer) for the purpose of documenting opinions

and events not readily available in written records. The tapes are then

transcribed into typed memoirs that may be used immediately or in the fu-

ture by qualified researchers.

The first oral history program in the United States was begun at Colum-

bia University by professor Allan Nevins in 1948. In the two decades since

that date, about thirty professionally staffed programs have been established.

The majority of the larger programs are at major graduate universities on

the east and west coasts and at the six presidential libraries, while there are

smaller programs at historical societies, company archives, and special li-

braries. Usually these have focused on subjects that relate directly to the in-

terests of the sponsoring institution. Examples of some of the well estab-

lished oral history programs plus a sample of a few of their many completed

interview projects are as follows: University of California, Los Angeles (his-

tory of motion pictures and California water problems); Kennedy Presiden-

tial Library (life of John F. Kennedy); National Library of Medicine

(American medicine) ; Princeton University (career of John Foster Dulles);

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