President Nixon's former counsel illuminates another presidency marked by scandal Warren G. Harding may be best known as America's worst president. Scandals plagued him: the Teapot Dome affair, corruption in the Veterans Bureau and the Justice Department, and the posthumous revelation of an extramarital affair. Raised in Marion, Ohio, Harding took hold of the small town's newspaper and turned it into a success. Showing a talent for local politics, he rose quickly to the U.S. Senate. His presidential campaign slogan, "America's present need is not heroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy," gave voice to a public exhausted by the intense politics following World War I. Once elected, he pushed for legislation limiting the number of immigrants; set high tariffs to relieve the farm crisis after the war; persuaded Congress to adopt unified federal budget creation; and reduced income taxes and the national debt, before dying unexpectedly in 1923. In this wise and compelling biography, John W. Dean—no stranger to controversy himself—recovers the truths and explodes the myths surrounding our twenty-ninth president's tarnished legacy.

A simple biography of the popular Senator from Ohio who was elected as twenty-ninth president of the United States in 1920.

"Presidents are ranked wrong. In The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding, Ryan Walters mounts a case that Harding deserves to move up—and supplies the evidence to make that case strong. -Amity Shlaes, bestselling author of Coolidge He's the butt of political jokes, frequently subjected to ridicule, and almost never absent a "Worst Presidents" list where he most often ends up at the bottom. Historians have labeled him the "Worst President Ever," "Dead Last," "Unfit," and "Incompetent," to name but a few. Many contemporaries were equally cruel. H. L. Mencken called him a "nitwit." To Alice Roosevelt Longworth, he was a "slob." Such is the current reputation of our 29th President, Warren Gamaliel Harding. In an interesting survey in 1982, which divided the scholarly respondents into "conservative" and "liberal" categories, both groups picked Harding as the worst President. But historian Ryan Walters shows that Harding, a humble man from Marion, Ohio, has been unfairly remembered. He quickly fixed an economy in depression and started the boom of the Roaring Twenties, healed a nation in the throes of social disruption, and reversed America’s interventionist foreign policy.

"If love is the only right warrant for bringing children into the world then many children born in wedlock are illegitimate and many born out of wedlock are legitimate." So contends Nan Britton in this account of Elizabeth Ann, her daughter by Warren G. Harding.

This biography introduces readers to Warren G. Harding including his early political career and key events from Harding's administration including the Teapot Dome scandal. Information about his childhood, family and personal life is included. A timeline, fast facts, and sidebars provide additional information. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Checkerboard Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

A look at what really happened in the U.S. Veterans’ Bureau Scandal in the 1920s. In the early 1920s, as the nation recovered from World War I, President Warren G. Harding founded the U.S. Veterans Bureau, now known as the Department of Veterans Affairs, to treat disabled veterans. He appointed his friend, decorated veteran Colonel Charles R. Forbes, as founding director. Forbes lasted only eighteen months in the position before stepping down under a cloud of suspicion. In 1926—after being convicted of conspiracy to defraud the federal government by rigging government contracts—he was sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary. Although he was known in his day as a drunken womanizer, and as a corrupt toady of a weak president, the question persists: was Forbes a criminal or a scapegoat? Historian Rosemary Stevens tells Forbes’s story anew, drawing on previously untapped records to reveal his role in America’s commitment to veterans. She explores how Forbes’s rise and fall in Washington illuminates Harding’s efforts to bring business efficiency to government. She also examines the scandal in the context of class, professionalism, ethics, and etiquette in a rapidly changing world. Most significantly, Stevens proposes a revisionist view of both Forbes and Harding: They did not defraud the government of billions and do not deserve the reputation they have carried for a hundred years. Packed with conniving friends, FBI agents, and rival politicians as well as gamblers, revelers, and wronged wives, A Time of Scandal will appeal to anyone interested in political gossip, presidential politics, the “Ohio Gang,” and the 1920s.

When Warren G. Harding was elected president in 1920, he brought to Washington some of his political chums from Ohio. They played poker; they sold illegal liquor permits, pardons and paroles. They sold fixes in the Justice Department and transported contraband across state lines. They sold naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome and sheets out of Army warehouses. The Ohio Gang, an historical entertainment peopled with the characters of the day, follows Harding and his cronies from their Ohio childhoods to the smoke-filled rooms of the Republican convention and on to the White House. We meet Henry Daugherty, the attorney general with the disconcerting eyes; Jess Smith, tall and pigeon-toed; Nan Britton, the teenage girl who fell in love with Harding’s campaign posters and who later became his mistress and mother to his illegitimate daughter; and America’s first lady, the Duchess. Following the antics of the president and his administration, The Ohio Gang concludes with Harding’s whistle-stop tour of the country—his final, despairing attempt to keep his presidency from coming undone. An entertaining and immensely readable encapsulation of democracy American-style, The Ohio Gang is an historical tour de force in which the presidency is seen as a traveling medicine show.