A century ago yesterday, Republican Warren Gamaliel Harding (1865 - 1923) was elected president.
Harding was from the small town of Marion, Ohio. He purchased the Marion Star and built it into a successful newspaper. From publishing, he moved into politics, becoming a state senator in 1899, and running unsuccessfully for governor in 1910. In 1914, he was elected to the United States Senate. When he ran for president in 1920, he was considered a long shot, but there was a divided convention at which, for two days, no candidate could get a clear majority. Harding's support gradually grew until he was nominated on the tenth ballot.
Both major party candidates were Ohioans; Harding’s Democrat opponent, James Middleton Cox, was the sitting governor of Ohio at the time. Both men had also been in the newspaper business, as Cox had owned the Dayton Daily News. Harding conducted a “front porch campaign” mostly staying in Marion and allowing the people and press to come to him; he ran on the theme of “returning to normalcy” after the upheavals of the First World War and the Influenza pandemic that followed on its heels, which had killed some 600,000 Americans.
Harding won in a landslide, with over 60% of the popular vote. He carried every state outside of the old Confederacy except Kentucky, and Cox even managed to lose Tennessee. Harding appointed a number of well-regarded, noteworthy men to his cabinet, including Andrew Mellon at Treasury, future president Herbert Hoover at the Department of Commerce, and Charles Evans Hughes at the State Department.
A major foreign policy achievement came with the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922, in which the great powers agreed to limit the number of warships they would build in the next decade. Harding released what amounted to political prisoners, who had been arrested by Woodrow Wilson’s administration for their opposition to America’s participation in World War I.
So what was Harding’s connection to Adventism?
Well, in 1879, when Harding was away at Ohio Central College in Iberia, Ohio, his mother, Phoebe, and his aunt, Sarah Priscilla Flack, joined the Adventist Church. The youngest of his siblings, George, Jr., and Carolyn--13 and 14 years younger than he, respectively--were raised in the Adventist faith. Some accounts suggest that sisters Abigail, Mary, and Charity, also embraced Adventism.
On five separate occasions over a 14-year span (1889, twice in 1894, 1897, and 1903), Harding went to John Harvey Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium for treatment of depression, anxiety, or nervous breakdown, the last visit coming after he had entered Ohio politics. All told, Harding spent nearly a year at the Adventist health center. Both of Harding’s parents were homeopathic physicians, and throughout his life the future president remained interested in homeopathic remedies.
Harding’s younger sister, Carolyn, married an Adventist minister named Heber H. Votaw, and the couple were missionaries to Burma from 1905 to 1914. Heber Votaw left the employment of the SDA Church in 1917 to serve as Harding’s Senate office clerk, and Senator Harding got Carolyn a job running a program for unwed mothers in Washington, D.C.
The president’s younger brother, George Harding, Jr., followed in his parents’ professional footsteps, and became a prominent Adventist doctor, operating a mental health sanitarium in suburban Columbus, Ohio. Presidential nephews George III and Charles attended Washington Missionary College in Takoma Park, Maryland, (later Columbia Union College, now Washington Adventist University) just one mile from the Adventist Church’s world headquarters. President Harding and his wife, Florence, attended nephew George’s graduation at the college on May 20, 1923, a visit duly noted and lauded in the pages of Adventist Review.
Unfortunately, Harding, though surrounded by Adventist family, did not live the Adventist health message. He was known to smoke an average of two cigars per day, and also drank whiskey and brandy almost daily, even though his presidency was during prohibition. During a west coast tour in the late summer of 1923, Harding began having upper abdominal pain that at least one of his doctors suspected was heart trouble. On August 2, Harding died at age 57, apparently of a heart attack, at the Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco. His heart left him in San Francisco, you might say. The next day, the taciturn Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as president in the parlor of his home in Plymouth Notch, Vermont.
In retrospect, it is probably fortunate that Harding did not claim the Adventist faith. Rumors of an extramarital affair with a woman named Nan Britton were discussed soto voce even while he was president; she later claimed that Harding had paid monthly child support for her daughter. In 1963, a scholar came across correspondence between Harding and a Marion, Ohio, woman named Carrie Fulton Phillips indicating that he had a 15-year affair with her. Also after Harding’s death it emerged that his secretary of the interior, Albert Bacon Fall, had leased federal petroleum reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding; this was considered the biggest presidential scandal until Watergate.