"Let me urge you again to write the Harding story," Brand
Whitlock wrote to William Allen White, as one progressive
Republican to another. "It has all the elements of an old Greek
tragedy, with the angry and disgusted gods at the end wiping out
all of the personages in a kind of Olympian Fury." ¹ White did
not write the Harding story. For the Kansas editor was as fervent
a believer in the small-town myths of America as was his proposed
subject. When the disgusted gods had wiped out Warren Gamaliel
Harding and his friends, they had also begun to wipe out the
myths that had made him President of the United States. Main
Street was rarely to enter the White House so easily again.

Warren Harding became the most notorious President in Ameri-
can history because the myths that had formed him were not ade-
quate to meet with the power and responsibility of the Presidency
after the First World War. As Will Hays commented when he
was a member of Harding's Cabinet, "The government is like a
corner grocery which a few years ago could be run by one man,
and now we try to use the same system in running Marshall
Fields." ² Harding could have run admirably a corner grocery,
as he ran his small-town newspaper, the Marion ( Ohio) Star.
Unfortunately, social and political myths washed him into the
Presidency and left him stranded there. He could not cope with
the international and industrial complexity of postwar America
with the beliefs of small-town Ohio. It was too late to
muddle through.

As a man, Harding was uninteresting. He was not important

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