Warren G Harding Quotes

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He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. (writing about US President Warren G. Harding)
H.L. Mencken
I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of my enemies in a fight. But my friends, my goddamned friends, they're the ones who keep me walking the floor at nights!
Warren G. Harding
I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.
Warren G. Harding
FOR WARREN G. HARDING, the summer of 1927 was not a good one, which was perhaps a little surprising since he had been dead for nearly four years by then.
Bill Bryson (One Summer: America 1927 (Bryson Book 2))
In 1920, Warren G. Harding ran his famous “front porch campaign” from his family home in Marion, Ohio; a few months before, Marion was the scene of an ethnic cleansing as whites drove out virtually every African American. According to Harding scholar Phillip Payne, “As a consequence, Marion is an overwhelming[ly] white town to this date [2002].
James W. Loewen (Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism)
We must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.
Warren G. Harding
James Cox, the Democratic candidate who was Wilson’s would-be successor, was crushed by the nonentity Warren G. Harding, who never even campaigned. In the biggest landslide in the history of American presidential politics, Harding got almost 64 percent of the major-party votes. The people were “tired,” textbooks suggest, and just wanted a “return to normalcy.” The possibility that the electorate knew what it was doing in rejecting Wilson never occurs to our authors.32 It occurred to Helen Keller, however. She called Wilson “the greatest individual disappointment the world has ever known!
James W. Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong)
First and foremost, find out what it is you’re about, and be that. Be what you are, and don’t lose it. . . . It’s very hard to be who we are, because it doesn’t seem to be what anyone wants.” But, of course, as Lear has demonstrated, it’s the only way to truly fly.
Warren Bennis (On Becoming a Leader)
President Warren G. Harding’s secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, organized an Advisory Committee on Zoning to develop a manual explaining why every municipality should develop a zoning ordinance. The advisory committee distributed thousands of copies to officials nationwide. A few months later the committee published a model zoning law. The manual did not give the creation of racially homogenous neighborhoods as the reason why zoning should become such an important priority for cities, but the advisory committee was composed of outspoken segregationists whose speeches and writings demonstrated that race was one basis of their zoning advocacy.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
Adela Rogers St. Johns, always the journalist closest to Gable, wrote that “The King is dead. Long live the King. There has been no successor, nor will be. The title died with him.” She recalled that Gable once told her, “I don’t believe I’m king of anything, but I know why they like to think I am. I’m not much of an actor, but I’m not bad unless it’s one of those things outside my comprehension. I work hard. I’m no Adonis, and I’m as American as the telephone poles I used to climb to make a living. So men don’t get sore if their women folks like me on the screen. I’m one of them, they know it, so it’s a compliment to them. They see me broke, in trouble, scared of things that go bump in the night, but I come out fighting. They see me making love to Jean Harlow or Claudette Colbert, and they say, ‘If he can do it, I can do it,’ and figure it’ll be fun to go home and to make love to their wives.
Warren G. Harris (Clark Gable: A Biography)
In all matters of consequence, General P.P. Peckem was, as he always remarked when he was about to criticize the work of some close associate publicly, a realist. He was a handsome, pink-skinned man of fifty-three. His manner was always casual and relaxed, and his uniforms were custom-made. He had silver-gray hair, slightly myopic eyes and thin, overhanging, sensual lips. He was a perceptive, graceful, sophisticated man who was sensitive to everyone's weaknesses but his own and found everyone absurd but himself. General Peckem laid great fastidious stress on small matters of taste and style. He was always augmenting things. Approaching events were never coming, but always upcoming. It was not true that he wrote memorandums praising himself and recommending that his authority be enhanced to include all combat operations; he wrote memoranda. And the prose in the memoranda of other officers was always turgid, stilted, or ambiguous. The errors of others were inevitable deplorable. Regulations were stringent, and his data never was obtained from a reliable source, but always were obtained. General Peckem was frequently constrained. Things were often incumbent upon him, and he frequently acted with the greatest reluctance. It never escaped his memory that neither black nor white was a color, and he never used verbal when he meant oral. He could quote glibly from Plato, Nietzsche, Montaigne, Theodore Roosevelt, the Marquis de Sade and Warren G. Harding. A virgin audience like Colonel Scheisskopf [his new underling] was grist for General Peckem's mill, a stimulating opportunity to throw open his whole dazzling erudite treasure house of puns, wisecracks, slanders, homilies, anecdotes, proverbs, epigrams, apothegms, bon mots and other pungent sayings. He beamed urbanely as he began orienting Colonel Scheisskopf to his new surroundings.
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
As expected, Nevada’s summer heat was oppressive; temperatures under the desert sun bubbled around the 130-degree mark, which made it even harder for Monroe and almost everyone except [Clark] Gable to put in a full day’s work. Though he had a chauffeured limousine at his disposal, he drove himself back and forth to work in his silver Mercedes-Benz SC. He always arrived punctually at eight-forty-five A.M., bringing along gallon Thermoses of booze-spiked lemonade and iced tea to fortify himself. For the better part of the morning, he would sit around studying that day’s script pages or gabbing with the crew while waiting for the other principals to arrive. Though the delays were driving him mad, he tried not to show it. But one day while his writer-friend John Lee Mahin was visiting from Los Angeles, Gable told him, “It’s not professional, John, it’s stealing. It’s stealing the bank’s money and United Artists’ money. I don’t see how they’re going to get a picture out of this, but I’m stuck with it now, and I’m trying to do the best I can. It’s been hard on me.
Warren G. Harris (Clark Gable: A Biography)
On April 30, 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Reily, a former assistant postmaster in Kansas City, governor of Puerto Rico as a political payoff. Reily took his oath of office in Kansas City, then attended to “personal business” for another two and a half months before finally showing up for work on July 30.24 By that time, he had already announced to the island press that (1) he was “the boss now,” (2) the island must become a US state, (3) any Puerto Rican who opposed statehood was a professional agitator, (4) there were thousands of abandoned children in Puerto Rico, and (5) the governorship of Puerto Rico was “the best appointment that President Harding could award” because its salary and “perquisites” would total $54,000 a year.25 Just a few hours after disembarking, the assistant postmaster marched into San Juan’s Municipal Theater and uncorked one of the most reviled inaugural speeches in Puerto Rican history. He announced that there was “no room on this island for any flag other than the Stars and Stripes. So long as Old Glory waves over the United States, it will continue to wave over Puerto Rico.” He then pledged to fire anyone who lacked “Americanism.” He promised to make “English, the language of Washington, Lincoln and Harding, the primary one in Puerto Rican schools
Nelson A. Denis (War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony)
Delbert was the only Bumpus kid in my grade, but they infested Warren G. Harding like termites in an outhouse. There was Ima Jean, short and muscular, who was in the sixth grade, when she showed up, but spent most of her time hanging around the poolroom. There was a lanky, blue-jowled customer they called Jamie, who ran the still and was the only one who ever wore shoes. He and his brother Ace, who wore a brown fedora and blue work shirts, sat on the front steps at home on the Fourth of July, sucking at a jug and pretending to light sticks of dynamite with their cigars when little old ladies walked by. There were also several red-faced girls who spent most of their time dumping dishwater out of windows. Babies of various sizes and sexes crawled about the back yard, fraternizing indiscriminately with the livestock. They all wore limp, battleship-gray T-shirts and nothing else. They cried day and night. We thought that was all of them—until one day a truck stopped in front of the house and out stepped a girl who made Daisy Mae look like Little Orphan Annie. My father was sprinkling the lawn at the time; he wound up watering the windows. Ace and Emil came running out onto the porch, whooping and hollering. The girl carried a cardboard suitcase—in which she must have kept all her underwear, if she owned any—and wore her blonde hair piled high on her head; it gleamed in the midday sun. Her short muslin dress strained and bulged. The truck roared off. Ace rushed out to greet her, bellowing over his shoulder as he ran: “MAH GAWD! HEY, MAW, IT’S CASSIE! SHE’S HOME FROM THE REFORMATORY!” Emil
Jean Shepherd (A Christmas Story: The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film)
After three weeks of lectures and receptions in New York, Einstein paid a visit to Washington. For reasons fathomable only by those who live in that capital, the Senate decided to debate the theory of relativity. Among the leaders asserting that it was incomprehensible were Pennsylvania Republican Boies Penrose, famous for once uttering that “public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Mississippi Democrat John Sharp Williams, who retired a year later, saying, “I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years.” On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the Congressional Record. David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this theory for three weeks,” he replied, “and am beginning to see some light.” But what relevance, he was asked, did it have to the business of Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.” Such discourse made it inevitable that, when Einstein went with a group to the White House on April 25, President Warren G. Harding would be faced with the question of whether he understood relativity. As the group posed for cameras, President Harding smiled and confessed that he did not comprehend the theory at all. The Washington Post carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while Einstein puzzled over one on the “Theory of Normalcy,” which was the name Harding gave to his governing philosophy. The New York Times ran a page 1 headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
Ford was a cover-up artist for the Warren Commission. His crime of lies about Oswald in his book and the cover-up of hard evidence make him guilty of crimes worse than Nixon was charged with. Ford covered up the killings of Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit, and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Ford brought neo-Nazi G. Gordon Liddy to Washington, D.C. to work in the Treasury Dept. Ford pardoned Nixon because he was guilty of the same charges, cover-up of conspiracies.
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
like the Anthony Weiner scandal seems unique to our time, there are precursors, such as the salacious love letters written by U.S. president Warren G. Harding to his neighbor’s wife, in which he nicknamed his penis Jerry and her vagina Mrs. Pouterson.
Aziz Ansari (Modern Romance: An Investigation)
intriguing, not standard Hollywood stuff. He was not a street kid who’d had to claw his way to respectability. His reasonably well-to-do family’s roots traced back to George Washington’s mother, and he was always proud of the fact that he was distantly related to “one of the founders of our country.” Bill was Irish-English-German, “mixed in an American shaker,” as he liked to say. His maternal grandfather was a cousin of Warren G. Harding, twenty-ninth president of the United States. Bill had been born William Franklin Beedle Jr. in O’Fallon, Illinois, on April 17, 1918. When he was three, the family moved to Pasadena, California. His father, William, was an industrial chemist; his mother, Mary, a teacher. He had two younger brothers, Robert (Bob) Westfield Beedle, and Richard (Dick Porter) Beedle.
Edward Z. Epstein (Audrey and Bill: A Romantic Biography of Audrey Hepburn and William Holden)
Warren G. Harding Warren G. Harding, the man General Leonard Wood lost the presidency to is quoted as saying : “I don't know what to do or where to turn in this taxation matter. Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don't know where the book is, and maybe I couldn't read it if I found it.” Warren G. Harding was born on November 2, 1865. A Republican, he became the popular 29th President of the United States, serving from March 4, 1921 until his death in 1923. Later, Harding was rated among the worst presidents due to scandals while in office; including the Teapot Dome scandal. He was also considered a lady’s man and revelations of his affair with Nan Britton, one of his mistresses, undermined his reputation at a time when having an affair was normally accepted.
Hank Bracker
Delbert Bumpus entered Warren G. Harding like a small, truculent rhinoceros. His hair grew low down on his almost nonexistent forehead, and he had the greatest pair of ears that Warren G. Harding had ever seen, extending at absolutely right angles from his head. Between those ears festered a pea-sized but malevolent brain that almost immediately made him the most feared kid below sixth grade. He had a direct way of settling disagreements that he established on the second day of his brief but spectacular period at W.G.H.
Jean Shepherd (A Christmas Story: The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film)
I said, what’s yer first name, kid?” Bumpus, backed up flat against the school wall, finally spoke up: “Delbert.” “Delbert! DELBERT!” Outraged by such a name, Dill addressed the crowd, with scorn dripping from his every word. “Delbert Bumpus! They’re letting everybody in Harding School these days! What the hell kind of a name is that? That must be some kind of hillbilly name!” It was the last time anyone at Warren G. Harding ever said, or even thought, anything like that about Delbert Bumpus. Everything happened so fast after that that no two accounts of it were the same. The way I saw it, Bumpus’ head snapped down low between his shoulder blades. He bent over from the waist, charged over the sand like a wounded wart hog insane with fury, left his feet and butted his black, furry head like a battering-ram into Dill’s rib cage, the sickening thump sounding exactly like a watermelon dropped from a second-story window. Dill, knocked backward by the charge, landed on his neck and slid for three or four feet, his face alternating green and white. His eyes, usually almost unseen behind his cobra lids, popped out like a tromped-on toad-frog’s. He lay flat, gazing paralyzed at the spring sky, one shoe wrenched off his foot by the impact. The schoolyard was hushed, except for the sound of a prolonged gurling and wheezing as Dill, now half his original size, lay retching. It was obvious that he was out of action for some time. Bumpus
Jean Shepherd (A Christmas Story: The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film)
La relación amigable con el gobierno se inició en 1922, cuando el presidente Warren G. Harding nos convocó a mí y a otros hombres de negocios a la Casa Blanca para ayudarlo a cumplir su promesa electoral de traer prosperidad a nuestra población poniendo «América en primer lugar».
Hernan Diaz (Fortuna)
amicable relationship with the government started in 1922, when President Warren G. Harding summoned me and other businessmen to the White House to help him fulfill his campaign promise to bring prosperity to our people by putting “America First.
Hernan Diaz (Trust)
Ashley Fleming's face froze in a mask of indignation as the President went into a coughing spasm. Seagram nodded weakly, grabbed Dana's arm, and quickly hustled her away into the mainstream of the crowd. "Did you have to do that?" he growled. "I couldn't resist it. That woman is nothing but a glorified hooker." Then Dana's eyes looked up at him in bewilderment. "He propositioned me," she said, unbelieving. "The President of the United States propositioned me." "Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy were rumored to be swingers. This one is no different. He's only human." "A lecher for a President. It's disgusting." "Are you going to take him up on it?" Seagram grinned. "Don't be ridiculous!" she snapped back.
Clive Cussler (Raise the Titanic! (Dirk Pitt, #4))
Somebody handed me two hand grenades,” said Seaman Warren G. Harding of the California. “I said: ‘What do I do with them?’ He said: ‘Never mind! Don’t pull this!’ That’s all the instruction I had.
Ian W. Toll (Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942)
[Warren] Harding diligently worked the knots of America's body politic from the moment he took office, soothing conservatives by resizing the federal government for peacetime and adopting a pro-business outlook, soothing his Republican base by raising tariffs and lowering taxes, soothing the left by releasing from prison the socialist icon Eugene Debs and other radicals rounded up during Palmer's Red Scare, soothing the battered farm belt with an emergency tariff and federal protection for farm cooperatives, soothing labor with public works programs to ease unemployment and by cajoling the steel industry into abandoning its inhumane practice of twelve-hour shifts. Harding soothed the isolationist and nativist majority in America with tighter immigration policies and a foreign policy emphasizing legitimate national interests over crusading idealism. He soothed international tensions by normalizing relations with Germany and other former enemy states, and by convincing the world's leading naval powers to reduce tonnage at his Washington Disarmament Conference, the first gathering of its kind and a remarkable, unexpected success.
Kenneth Whyte (Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times)
Warren G. Harding is remembered for the Teapot Dome scandal that benefited his crooked friends in business, but he also promoted nascent enterprises that would increase national wealth and opportunity, including aviation, cars and paved roads for them to drive on, and radio broadcasting.
David Cay Johnston (It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America)
The courts, the press, and two presidents (Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge) took stands, however limited, against the politics of fear.
Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
Andrew Mellon served as an officer or director for more than 160 corporations. In 1913, he and his brother established the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, which later merged with the Carnegie Institute of Technology to become Carnegie Mellon University. During the First World War, he served on the board of the American Red Cross and other organizations supporting America’s wartime efforts. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Andrew Mellon to secretary of the treasury, and he continued as such under both Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. As secretary, Mellon was a pioneer of supply-side economics, cutting tax rates in order to spur investment and
Jeff Miller (The Bubble Gum Thief (Dagny Gray Thriller))