Warren G. Harding

Warren G. Harding served as president from 1921–1923. He was a Republican from Ohio. Before politics his business was publishing a newspaper in Marion, Ohio — a small-town editor who reached the White House. After World War I his campaign promise was a “return to normalcy.” Americans were tired of war and upheaval. Harding said they wanted calm.

At home his economic policy included tax cuts. He tried to get government out of the wartime emergency mood. The Washington Naval Conference, his biggest foreign-policy success, tried to limit warships among the big powers. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 1922, and Harding spoke at the ceremony. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 set strict caps on immigration. He commuted the prison sentence of the famous socialist Eugene V. Debs, who had been jailed under wartime speech laws.

His crowd of old Ohio friends in government was nicknamed the Ohio Gang. Some were honest. Some were not. Teapot Dome was an oil-bribery scandal: Interior Secretary Albert Fall leased Navy oil land, including Teapot Dome in Wyoming, in return for bribes. Fall became the first Cabinet member sent to prison. Harding died suddenly on a trip west, in San Francisco. Did he live to see the full Teapot Dome story explode? No — he died before the scandal fully broke. Vice President Calvin Coolidge became president.