Warren Harding

Warren Harding won the largest popular-vote margin in American history to that point, died in office two and a half years later, and was posthumously buried under the worst corruption scandal of the era. He was an Ohio newspaper publisher and senator with no particular record, nominated in 1920 as a compromise after the convention deadlocked, and he campaigned from his front porch on a return to normalcy - a phrase that caught the exhaustion of a country coming out of war, influenza and labour unrest. The presidency had real achievements: he released Eugene Debs from prison on Christmas Day 1921, having invited him to the White House afterwards; he pushed the first federal budget system into existence; and the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22 produced the first modern arms limitation treaty, which held for a decade. He spoke in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1921 for black political and economic rights to a segregated audience, which no president had done in the South since Reconstruction. He also appointed friends who stole on a large scale. Interior Secretary Albert Fall leased the Teapot Dome naval oil reserves to private companies for personal bribes and became the first cabinet member to go to prison; the head of the Veterans Bureau stole an estimated two hundred million dollars. Harding died suddenly in San Francisco in August 1923, probably of a heart attack, before most of it surfaced. Genealogical DNA testing in 2015 confirmed the long-denied daughter by Nan Britton. He is a fixture at the bottom of presidential rankings, which flattens a term that was not uniformly bad. His wife Florence had run the business side of the newspaper and was widely thought to have made his career. Rumours that she poisoned him circulated for years on no evidence. No autopsy was performed.

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