On this year's centennial of the inauguration of William
McKinley, Ohio
University professor Alfred E. Eckes, a trade official under Ronald
Reagan,
addressed Ohio's Historical Society. Subject: our 25th president,
assassinated by an
anarchist in Buffalo in 1901. McKinley's was a truly extraordinary
presidency.
A teenager at Antietam and Civil War veteran of four years
fighting, McKinley
took over a nation still wracked by the Panic of 1893. To restore
prosperity, he
raised tariffs, taxing imports rather than workers, and gave
America an annual growth
rate of 7 percent!
Unemployment in McKinley's tenure fell from 14 percent to 4
percent.
Though he did his best to avoid war over Cuba, the blowing up
of the
battleship Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898 forced McKinley's hand.
Within four
months, he defeated Spain and captured Cuba -- annexing Puerto
Rico, Guam,
Hawaii and the Philippines. While making America a global power,
McKinley ran a
budget surplus and cut U.S. debt to $16 per capita. (Today, it is
$20,000 per
capita.) In 1900, he chose war hero Theodore Roosevelt as vice
president and
crushed William Jennings Bryan a second time.
In slashing the nation's misery index (unemployment plus
inflation), McKinley's
record, writes Eckes, is superior to any president this century,
save one. FDR?
Reagan? Nope. FDR ranks fourth, Reagan third. The president who was
first at
cutting the misery index is Warren G. Harding.
Which brings me to the subject of this column. Why is Harding
so reviled? In a
recent poll of historians by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Harding was
accorded the honor
of the most votes as a totally failed president.
But why? Though he served only as long as JFK, consider
Harding's
achievements. In 1920, he destroyed the Democratic Party in the
greatest popular
landslide ever. With Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, he began
slashing income
tax rates from 65 percent to 25 percent, presiding over the best
economic times of
the century. In his first year, Harding held the most successful
disarmament conclave
ever -- the Washington Naval Conference, where the United States
convinced Japan
to maintain a fleet of virtually no ships.
Harding and his secretary of state effectively ruptured an
Anglo-Japanese
alliance many Americans feared could leave us fighting both Japan
and Great Britain
in the Far East. "We have traded whiskey for milk!" an enraged
Japanese diplomat
said of Harding's triumph.
His achievements endured. Under Harding's tax cuts and
Fordney-McCumber
tariff, Cal Coolidge racked up growth rates of 7 percent a year.
The Roaring
Twenties were America's best times until the '50s. Yet Warren
Harding is disparaged,
while Woodrow Wilson is hailed as a "near great" president,
alongside Thomas
Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.
But consider Harding's predecessor. In 1913, Wilson gave us
our first
peacetime income tax. When World War I erupted in 1914, he pledged
to be neutral
in thought, word and deed but tilted to Britain and war when
Americans wanted to
stay out. Lacking the courage to keep all armed merchant ships out
of U.S. harbors
and to tell Americans not to travel on belligerents' vessels since
Britain and Germany
were blockading each other, Wilson bears responsibility for the
American deaths that
resulted.
Re-elected narrowly on the slogan "He kept us out of war!" a
month after
inauguration, he got a declaration of war. After Germany accepted
an armistice based
on his Fourteen Points, Wilson went to Paris to watch his allies,
Britain's Lloyd
George and France's Georges Clemenceau, dishonor his pledges,
divide and
dismember a newly democratic Germany, impose a brutal peace and
prepare the
ground for Hitler and World War II.
A failure at Paris, Wilson tried to ram the vindictive treaty
through Congress.
With modest compromises that leaders of his own party urged, he
would have had his
League of Nations. Instead, he ordered his party to vote down any
treaty containing
reservations proposed by Republicans.
Wilson gave us the income tax, inflation, war, a $25 billion
debt, a disillusioned
nation and a repudiated Democratic Party that would not recover for
a decade.
Felled by a stroke in 1919, he spent his last year in office an
angry, bitter, spiteful
recluse issuing orders through his wife.
At death, the popular Harding was smeared as venal and
dissolute -- allegedly
trysting with groupie Nan Britten in White House closets -- and,
perhaps, a victim of
murder. Historian Robert Ferrell, in his new book, "The Strange
Deaths of President
Harding," demolishes these malevolent myths.
Why do scholars, who despise the successful Harding, canonize
the failed
Wilson? Because Woodrow Wilson believed in big government,
globalism and world
government. To liberal historians, that covers a multitude of sins
and is enough to get
you in the pantheon.
cc: Bill Clinton
