The most maligned President in US history was Warren G. Harding, who served from his inauguration on March 4, 1921 until August 2, 1923, when he died while on a tour of the West Coast. But so much of what is known about Harding and his presidency is in the realm of myth, not fact.

Since the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the federal government had rarely lifted a finger to help America’s black population when Warren Harding entered the White House in March 1921. The last civil rights bill had come in 1875. The plight of African-Americans was left up to the states. Washington had long since washed its hands of the issue. 

FBI agents arrived in the dead of night, kicked in the front door, ransacked the house, and dragged away the patriarch for the crime of being born the wrong race in a time of national hysteria. This was not the work of President Harding, or even President Donald Trump; it was President Franklin Roosevelt’s doing.

This article was originally published at FEE.org on March 5, 2022 and The Epoch Times on March 9, 2022.

One is viewed as among America’s greatest presidents; the other perhaps the worst of all. One is hailed as a savior; the other as a failure. One is given memorials to enshrine his name for all time; the other is pushed into the sea of forgetfulness.

*Originally published at Townhall.com on March 1, 2022:

The most disparaged, defamed, and denigrated American President was, without doubt, Warren G. Harding, who served as the 29^th President from 1921-1923. Leftwing historians and journalists have tarnished his reputation for a century, making it one of the great tragedies of American history.

Originally published on LewRockwell.com, February 23, 2022:

The insults hurled at Warren G. Harding over the years have been downright brutal, even decades after his death. In 1981, Ralph Nader said of the newly inaugurated chief executive, “Ronald Reagan is the most ignorant President since Warren Harding.”

Others have been a bit more pithy: worst president ever, dead last, unfit, corrupt, immoral, incompetent, inept, lazy, indecisive, shallow, an amiable fool, and a notorious womanizer.

He “came into the White House as President of the United States on the crest of a wave of hate,” his detractors wrote. His campaign “was made upon hate of the current President, which was fanned by a cheap super-nationalism.” The Republican Party was filled with “bitter hatred,” and was “isolationist, governed by its emotions, and not amenable to reason. Out of that witch’s pot of mad malice rose the stench which produced his election and became the new administration.” 

In sharp contrast to his segregationist predecessor, President Warren Harding wanted to take some action in support of the nation’s black population. He called for a federal civil rights law, a federal anti-lynching law, a commission on race, spoke at an all-black college in Pennsylvania, and, in October 1921, traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, in the heart of the old Confederacy, to give a speech to a segregated audience on providing blacks with equal political rights and equal opportunities in education. That represented the height of political courage at the time.

He was born a Seventh-Day Adventist, but later became a Baptist. He was a Mason of high degree, joined the Elk Lodge, the Rotary Club, the local Chamber of Commerce. He even played the sousaphone. He was, wrote journalist William Allen White, “the Prominent Citizen” in Marion, Ohio. One of his Secret Service agents said he was “the kindest man I ever knew.”