The Mirrors of Washington | Page 6

Rep. Nat. Com. since 1904
BORAH, William Edgar,
Senator; b. at Fairfield, Ill., June 29, 1865; Educ. Southern Ill. Acad.,
Enfield, and U. of Kan.; Admitted to bar, 1889; U. S. senator from
Idaho, Jan. 14,1903; elected U. S. senator for terms 1907-13, 1913-19,
1919-25

WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING
Every time we elect a new President we learn what a various creature is
the Typical American.
When Mr. Roosevelt was in the White House the Typical American
was gay, robustious, full of the joy of living, an expansive spirit from
the frontier, a picaresque twentieth century middle class Cavalier. He
hit the line hard and did not flinch. And his laugh shook the skies.
Came Wilson. And the Typical American was troubled about his soul.
Rooted firmly in the church-going past, he carried the banner of the
Lord, Democracy, idealistic, bent on perfecting that old incorrigible
Man, he cuts off the right hand that offends him and votes for
prohibition and woman suffrage, a Round Head in a Ford.
Eight years and we have the perfectly typical American, Warren
Gamaliel Harding of the modern type, the Square Head, typical of that
America whose artistic taste is the movies, who reads and finds mental
satisfaction in the vague inanities of the small town newspaper, who
has faith in America, who is for liberty, virtue, happiness, prosperity,
law and order and all the standard generalities and holds them a perfect
creed; who distrusts anything new except mechanical inventions, the

standardized product of the syndicate which supplies his nursing bottle,
his school books, his information, his humor in a strip, his art on a
screen, with a quantity production mind, cautious, uniformly hating
divergence from uniformity, jailing it in troublous times, prosperous,
who has his car and his bank account and can sell a bill of goods as
well as the best of them.
People who insist upon having their politics logical demand to know
the why of Harding. Why was a man of so undistinguished a record as
he first chosen as a candidate for President and then elected President?
As a legislator he had left no mark on legislation. If he had retired from
Congress at the end of his term his name would have existed only in the
old Congressional directories, like that of a thousand others. As a
public speaker he had said nothing that anybody could remember. He
had passed through a Great War and left no mark on it. He had shared
in a fierce debate upon the peace that followed the war but though you
can recall small persons like McCumber and Kellogg and Moses and
McCormick in that discussion you do not recall Harding. To be sure he
made a speech in that debate which he himself says was a great speech
but no newspaper thought fit to publish it because of its quality, or felt
impelled to publish it in spite of its quality because it had been made by
Harding.
He neither compelled attention by what he said nor by his personality.
Why, then, without fireworks, without distinction of any sort, without
catching the public eye, or especially deserving to catch it, was Warren
Harding elected President of the United States?
One plausible reason why he was nominated was that given by Senator
Brandegee at Chicago, where he had a great deal to do with the
nomination. "There ain't any first raters this year. This ain't any 1880 or
any 1904. We haven't any John Shermans or Theodore Roosevelts.
We've got a lot of second raters and Warren Harding is the best of the
second raters."
Once nominated as a Republican his election of course inevitably
followed. But to accept Mr. Brandegee's plea in avoidance is to agree to
the eternal poverty of American political life, for most of our presidents
have been precisely like Warren G. Harding, first-class second raters.
Mrs. Harding, a woman of sound sense and much energy, had an
excellent instructive answer to the "why." The pictures of the house in

Marion, the celebrated front porch, herself and her husband were taken
to be exhibited by cinema all over the land. She said, "I want the people
to see these pictures so that they will know we are just folks like
themselves."
Warren Harding is "just folks." A witty woman said of him, alluding to
the small town novel which was popular at the time of his inauguration,
"Main Street has arrived in the White House."
The Average Man has risen up and by seven million majority elected
an Average Man President. His defects were his virtues. He was chosen
rather for what he wasn't than for what he was,--the inconspicuousness
of his achievements. The "just folks" level of his mind, his small town
man's caution, his sense of the security