Ryan Walters

The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding

From the publisher

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.

Reviews

“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

“Ryan Walters’s The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding is a long overdue defense of the man who was Trump before Trump, a criminally underrated and unjustly maligned president who in a just, America-first ranking would be regarded as one of America’s greatest presidents. This book is a timely and much needed salvo in the ongoing war to wrest American history back from the socialist ideologues who have dominated it for too long.” – Robert Spencer, author of Rating America’s Presidents

“Rather than one of the worst presidents, Harding should be regarded as a man who believed in the original intent of the presidency and who was able to stave off one of the worst economic crises of the twentieth century by doing nothing. You’ll have a new appreciation for Wobbly Warren after reading this book.” – Brion McClanahan, author of The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution and 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America and Four Who Tried to Save Her

Here are some of our earlier discussions about Presidents:

• • Christopher Cox — Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn

  • Michael Burlingame — The Black Man’s President: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and the Pursuit of Racial Equality

  • Marianne Holdzkom – Remembering John Adams: The Second President in History, Memory and Popular Culture

[Broadcast on June 1, 2023 and rebroadcasted on January 22, 2026. recorded earlier]