In Sunday's New York Times, Yale historian Beverly Gage has an interesting article suggesting that Harding may have been the first "black" president in the sense that it is possible that he had a remote black ancestor. Unfortunately, Gage's article about Harding and race relations completely ignores the fact that Harding made a well-known speech advocating full legal equality for southern blacks in 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama. As W.E.B. DuBois pointed out at the time (http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1129), Harding went farther in advocating equal rights for blacks than any other post-Reconstruction Republican president (the Democrats, at that time the party of southern whites, were even worse). [...] It's easy to belittle Harding's campaign slogan - "Return to Normalcy." But Harding's notion of "normalcy" included an end to the imprisonment of political dissenters (such as Wilson's notorious "Palmer Raids" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids)), abolition of wage and price controls, and the reversal of Wilson's numerous illegal seizures of private property. As David Bernstein and I briefly discuss in this article (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=620781), Wilson's administration was also highly racist and segregationist even by the standards of the day; here too, Harding was a sharp contrast. |
Unfortunately for Harding's good intentions, he was perhaps one of the most scandal-ridden presidents of all time.