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-
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
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.
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);