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Warren G. Harding
(b. Nov. 2, 1865, Blooming Grove, Ohio, U.S.--d. Aug. 2, 1923, San Francisco, Calif.), 29th president of the United States (1921-23), who was elected on a Republican platform pledging a nostalgic "return to normalcy" following World War I. He died during his third year in office and was succeeded by Vice President Calvin Coolidge. 
In his 20s Harding embarked on a barely successful newspaper venture in Marion, Ohio, but, after he married Florence Kling DeWolfe in 1891, she took charge and the Marion Daily Star prospered. Harding became a director in many local corporations and prominent in fraternal orders. An able public speaker with an impressive manner, he participated in Republican Party campaigns, allying himself with the Ohio political machine. 
He was elected a state senator (1899-1902), lieutenant governor (1903-04), and U.S. senator (1915-21). His terms in office were undistinguished and marked by conservatism. When three outstanding presidential contenders became deadlocked at the Republicans' nominating convention (June 1920) in Chicago, powerful conservatives--meeting at night in what came to be known traditionally as the "smoke-filled room" of American politics--decided on Harding as a compromise candidate. Harding eschewed a speaking tour for a "front porch" campaign; the image of the unassuming, undemanding Midwesterner who did not press for domestic reform or international involvement was a welcome relief to war-weary, disillusioned Americans. Harding was voted into office by the widest popular margin--60.3 percent--recorded to that time. 
On Harding's recommendation, Congress established a budget system for the federal government, passed the highly protective Fordney-McCumber Tariff, revised wartime taxes, and approved an act restricting immigration. His administration also convened the Washington Conference </elections/micro/631/85.html> of 1922, at which treaties limiting and reducing naval strength among the world powers were negotiated. 
Harding's greatest weakness lay in his loosely selected and largely unsupervised cabinet and in his lesser appointments, which included many patronage appointees and personal friends who were either unqualified for public office, politically naive, or plainly dishonest. By the spring of 1923, rumours of corruption were circulating in Washington, and Senator Thomas J. Walsh was gathering evidence to expose the Oil Reserves, or Teapot Dome </elections/micro/584/91.html>, Scandal, in which federal oil reserves had been secretly leased by Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall to associates in the business world. In the midst of the investigation, Harding set out (June 20) on a transcontinental tour. He arrived in San Francisco in a state of exhaustion and died amid conflicting rumours as to the cause of his illness. Though Harding's personal integrity was not questioned after his death, his political naïveté and lax administrative standards were apparent after the exposure of gross misconduct by a number of his most trusted appointees, some of whom drew long prison terms for fraud. 
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Samuel Hopkins Adams, Incredible Era: The Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding (1939, reprinted 1979), although dated, remains a highly useful biography. More recent treatments are Andrew Sinclair, The Available Man (1965); Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove (1968); and Robert K. Murray, The Harding Era (1969). Harding's administration is assessed in Robert K. Murray, The Politics of Normalcy: Governmental Theory and Practice in the Harding-Coolidge Era (1973); Eugene P. Trani and David L. Wilson, The Presidency of Warren G. Harding (1977, reissued 1985); and Charles L. Mee, Jr., The Ohio Gang (1981). Richard G. Frederick (compiler), Warren G. Harding: A Bibliography (1992), contains over 3,000 annotated entries.