President Harding Biography

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President Harding Born on a farm in November 2, 1865 Harding was the eldest of eight children of George Tryon Harding and Phoebe Dickerson Harding; his ancestry combined English, Scottish, and Dutch stock. His father later left farming to become a physician. Following a mediocre education at local schools in Ohio and three years at Ohio Central College, Harding tried his hand at several vocations until in 1884 he bought a struggling weekly newspaper in Marion, Ohio, to which he devoted himself. Seven years thereafter, he married Florence Kling De Wolfe (Florence Harding), and she proved instrumental in transforming the Marion Star into a financially successful daily paper. Soon Harding, a man of little discernible intellect or imagination,…show more content…
Paired with vice presidential candidate Calvin Coolidge, Harding eschewed a speaking tour in favor of a “front porch” campaign in which he read carefully scripted speeches to delegations of visitors at his Marion home. After eight years of the administrations of President Woodrow Wilson, during which Americans had been asked to sacrifice greatly to reform the United States and to aid the Allied cause in World War I, Harding’s undemanding call for a return to normalcy was precisely what war-weary, disillusioned voters wanted to hear. Harding won the election by the largest landslide to date, capturing some 60 percent of the popular…show more content…
Senate investigations uncovered Forbes’s illegal financial dealings at the Veterans Bureau and pointed to Daugherty’s collusion with the Ohio Gang. Far more serious was the unfolding of the Teapot Dome Scandal. In 1921 Interior Secretary Albert Fall had persuaded Harding to transfer authority over two of the nation’s most important oil reserves—Elk Hills in California and Teapot Dome in Wyoming—from the Navy Department to the Department of the Interior. Fall then leased these reserves to private oil companies, netting for himself several hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts and loans. Fall and Forbes later received jail sentences for their crimes; Daugherty twice went on trial, the first resulting in a hung jury and the second in a not guilty

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