The Veterans' Bonus and the Evolving Presidency of Warren G. Harding

Palmer, Niall A., Presidential Studies Quarterly

Between July 1921 and September 1922, the administration of Warren G. Harding was embroiled in a prolonged dispute with Congress on the issue of cash compensation for veterans of the First World War. The "soldiers" bonus debate was not a straightforward partisan struggle. In arguing its case for fiscal restraint in a time of recession, the Republican White House faced not only a coalition of Democrats and dissident Republicans but also the organized might of the American Legion of Ex-Servicemen, one of Washington's most powerful lobbying groups. Further, the confrontation worsened tensions in an already-divided and rebellious Congress and raised the specter of class conflict by aggravating the resentment felt by many war veterans at their postwar economic status.

For scholars of the presidency, the most compelling feature of this dispute is its impact upon the leadership style and political convictions of Warren Harding. The countervailing pressures exerted by party leaders, lobbyists, journalists, and members of Congress upon the president, this article will suggest, forced him to abandon, at least temporarily, his settled political convictions. His once unshakable faith in Congress as a responsible legislative body was weakened and his confidence in partisan politics as a governing tool similarly declined. Harding's conduct during the bonus controversy, it will be argued, differs significantly from the stereotypical portrait of this "weak-willed" president--a portrait still more or less embedded in standard surveys of American history. This article adopts the broadly revisionist perspective of early 1920s politics offered within The Available Man (Sinclair 1965), The Harding Era (Murray 1969), and Warren G. Harding (Dean 2004) but suggests that, to date, curiously little emphasis has been placed upon the bonus debate as an important contributing factor toward what has been termed Harding's "metamorphosis" in office (Sinclair 1965).

The Harding Mythology

Unusual for a twentieth-century administration, there are comparatively few detailed, scholarly assessments of Harding's tenure. This is partly an accident of circumstance. His landslide election in November 1920 closed out an epoch of progressive reform and war, whereas his death, in August 1923, came only months before the true beginning of the "Roaring Twenties" and the later descent into depression and world war. Harding's presidency, therefore, tends to be regarded as something of a historical backwater, overshadowed at either end by momentous events and colorful characters. (1)

Conversely, the personality of the twenty-ninth president has drawn attention and criticism entirely disproportionate to his seemingly dismal historical status. Portrayals of Harding published before the 1960s generally depicted him as a lazy, tragicomic figure, hen-pecked by a domineering wife, "controlled" by a corrupt political manager, "befuddled" by the complexities of policy making, and "overawed" by the responsibilities of his office. After his death, writers generally unsympathetic to his conservative social and political views produced accounts of the administration heavily reliant upon secondhand, impressionistic sources and, in some instances, simple gossip. (2) For four decades, as legal wrangles delayed the release of the late president's papers, these accounts were the primary source of reference for students of history. Equally dubious "memoirs" published by Harding's reputed mistress and by a discredited former Secret Service agent inflicted further damage by focusing public attention upon melodramatic stories of illegitimate children and murder plots. (3) Subsequently, it seemed, no criticism of Harding or his administration could be deemed too derogatory or overblown. Thomas A. Bailey, who largely blamed Harding for terminating Woodrow Wilson's hopes for U.S. membership in the League of Nations, dismissed him as "morally sick" (Bailey 1945, 353). William Allen White pronounced him a man with "a weak heart and a thick head" (White 1928, 421). Samuel Hopkins Adams, referencing Sinclair Lewis's fictional Midwestern character, called Harding "an amiable, well-meaning, third-rate Mr. Babbitt" and "an ignoramus" (Adams 1939, 190).

After the president's death, some administration officials, including Interior Secretary Albert Fall, Veterans Bureau Chief Charles Forbes, and Attorney General Harry Daugherty, were indicted for corruption. The Teapot Dome scandals obsessed the press in 1924-1925 and were used by Harding's detractors as a blanket justification for their claims that the president's inability to judge character had resulted in an administration rife with thievery and incompetence. (4) As James David Barber later observed, Harding's not inconsiderable political achievements were "lost in the fascinating revelations that began to emerge toward the end of his presidency" (Barber 1972, 193).

When the Harding presidential papers were finally opened to scholars in 1964, a modest reevaluation became possible, based upon an overdue shift of focus away from Harding's private affairs and toward his performance as a political leader. Murray, in particular, shed new light on the twenty-ninth president's executive style, policies, and achievements. These reappraisals, partially echoed later by Robert K. Ferrell and John Dean, measured Harding's performance against the political conditions and public demands of the 1920s rather than against the standard in executive dominance which was set by Franklin Roosevelt after 1932 and adopted as a yardstick by most historians and political scientists for the next forty years. (5)

Applying this yardstick, most accounts of Harding's political philosophy inevitably disapproved of his desire to restrain the presidency's growth in size and power. From the prevailing liberal perspective of the mid-twentieth century, this desire appeared shortsighted, even regressive. Harding's presidency, therefore, was condemned not merely for what it did or failed to do, but for what it was. Harding's political views had matured in the late nineteenth century, a period in which laissez-faire economic policies permitted rapid and largely unrestrained industrialization. In this period, the semi-dictatorial powers enjoyed by the executive during the Civil War had been sharply curbed by powerful congressional figures such as Thaddeus Stevens and Roscoe Conkling. Presidents of the "Gilded Age" were forced to tread carefully, both in their relations with Congress and in their assertions of independent authority. Between 1865 and 1901 (by which time aspiring Ohio politician Warren Harding was thirty-six years old) the executive branch endured a period of relative eclipse similar to that of the 1840s and 1850s.

By 1920, however, many in Congress were concerned that an irreversible shift in the constitutional balance of power in favor of the presidency had occurred since 1901. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, they argued, had deliberately weakened congressional authority by using the judiciary and the press as weapons against both the national legislature and the traditional concept of states' rights in pursuit of their own independent political agenda. This view was not universally held. Many, though not all, progressives regarded the government in Washington as an ideal engine for driving reform. They claimed that devising and applying new national standards in food hygiene, workplace safety, environmental protection, corporate behavior, and child labor enabled the federal government to expand the range of its regulatory activities and circumvent the greedy, short-sighted partisanship of Congress, which often worked against the interests of the American people as a whole.

The "Whig" theory of presidential power, for which conservative senators of both major parties had become nostalgic by 1920, was rooted in the older, nineteenth-century norm of a presidency constrained, on one side, by powerful House and Senate leaders and, on the other, by strict adherence to states' rights. Under this constitutional interpretation, presidents were expected to acknowledge the singular importance of Congress as a gathering of state representatives, as an arena of partisan power, and as a body more genuinely expressive of the wishes of American voters than the presidency could hope to be. Ulysses Grant, William McKinley, and William Howard Taft, Sinclair suggests, were content to follow this tradition (Sinclair 1965, 58-59). Roosevelt and Wilson, however, trampled it down--defying their party's leaders, transgressing states' rights, expropriating Congress's role as articulator of the public interest, and, at least in Roosevelt's case, encouraging the rise of a minor personality cult.

Harding, from his earliest days as a newspaper editor and Ohio politician, deplored these trends and the disruption they appeared to cause to the political system and to stable party politics. When Roosevelt bolted the Republican party in 1912 to campaign for the presidency on a third-party ticket, he attacked the former president for deserting his party--comparing him to Aaron Burr, "the same tendency to bully and browbeat, the same type of egotism and lust for power" (Dean 2004, 29). To Harding, as to Ronald Reagan later in the century, party loyalty was the central pillar of stable democratic government and presidential self-aggrandizement a dangerous weakness.

Wilson's error, equally grave in Harding's view, had been to ignore the legitimate authority of the Senate--the other political institution that Harding (a senator from 1915) most revered. Wilson's refusal to invite members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to join the U.S. delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1918 helped undermine the prospects for ratification of the Versailles Treaty. His later refusal to consider amendments offered by Congress contributed significantly to its defeat.

The careers of Roosevelt and Wilson were effectively terminated by these errors of judgment but their actions created lasting bitterness. By 1920, both the Republican and Democratic parties were, in different ways, experiencing the damaging aftershocks of presidential hubris. Harding believed that, by reining in the presidency, by restoring its partisan accountability and compelling it to cooperate with, rather than dictate to, Congress, a repetition of these problems might be avoided. No Congress, he commented in 1920, could work constructively with a president who "entered the political arena like an armed gladiator" (Murray 1973, 23-24).

This argument was not simply the knee-jerk reaction of an unreconstructed nineteenth-century Whig. Despite his appeals for executive restraint, Harding did not support reducing the president's status to, in the words of …

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Publication information: Article title: The Veterans' Bonus and the Evolving Presidency of Warren G. Harding. Contributors: Palmer, Niall A. - Author. Journal title: Presidential Studies Quarterly. Volume: 38. Issue: 1 Publication date: March 2008. Page number: 39+. © 1999 Center for the Study of the Presidency. COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale Group.

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