“I discover a hundred thousand sorrows touching my heart, and there is a ringing in my ears, like an admonition eternal, an insistent call, ‘It needs to not be again! It should not be once again!'” stated a tearful President Warren G. Harding in Might 1921, as 5,212 wooden caskets with the remains of American servicemen from France showed up on the docks in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Warren Gamaliel Harding was a kind and generous male with a heart, a president who liked people, admired animals, and disliked violence, bloodshed, and war. Yet he is typically mocked as America’s worst president by the nation’s “scholars.” In spite of these erroneous opinions, he was a president of excellent accomplishments. He reversed a severe economic anxiety in brief order, restored the nation’s domestic tranquility, pardoned war dissenters, and required equality for black Americans. However perhaps his most ignored achievements were in foreign affairs.
When Harding entered into workplace in 1921, America’s global relations, like the economy, remained in disarray. The new president, along with most Americans, wanted to see the end of war and a go back to a more traditional American foreign policy. “I think it’s a motivation to patriotic devotion to protect America first, to stabilize America initially, to prosper America first, to think of America initially, to exalt America first, to live for and revere America initially,” he stated during his presidential campaign. These views helped move him to a landslide victory, becoming the very first president to gather 60 percent of the popular vote.
In his 1921 inaugural address, he was more exact about his foreign policy concepts. “The taped development of our Republic, materially and spiritually, in itself proves the wisdom of the inherited policy of noninvolvement in Old World affairs,” he said. “Positive of our capability to work out our own destiny, and jealously securing our right to do so, we look for no part in directing the fates of the Vintage. We do not indicate to be entangled. We will accept no obligation other than as our own conscience and judgment, in each instance, may determine.”
World leaders enjoyed to see a modification in the American federal government. The president of Mexico, Alvaro Obregon, had called Woodrow Wilson a “most awful enemy” however hailed Harding’s inauguration as “a day of deliverance.”
Extremely couple of scholars have actually acknowledged Harding’s accomplishments on the world stage in just 882 days in workplace. Justin Raimondowas one who did. “Although derided by contemporary historians, who prefer more remarkable figures such as the warmonger FDR, the crusading Wilson, and the authoritarian Lincoln, Harding presided over a period of peace and success,” he wrote in 2016. “He fixed our relations with Latin America, where Wilson’s promiscuous interventions had actually alienated the locals, cut military spending, beat back the naval lobby, and energetically pursued disarmament efforts. He turned down the meddlesome aspirations of the League of Nations, and kept the United States concentrated on resolving its issues on the home front instead of attempting to export ‘democracy’ to the farthest darkest corners of the world.”
However, in CSPAN’s most current presidential ranking, Warren Harding finished thirty-fourth in “International Relations.” Franklin Roosevelt finished first, Lincoln 3rd, and Wilson thirteenth.
In addition to those accomplishments listed by Raimondo, Harding likewise officially ended World War One, withdrew United States troops from the Rhineland in Germany and from the Caribbean, called the World War Foreign Debt Commission to hammer out an agreement on war debt, provided aid to millions of famine victims in Russia, and, perhaps most notably, “beat back the naval lobby” by calling the Washington Disarmament Conference to minimize the world’s most dangerous weapons. For his achievements in diplomacy, Harding was two times chosen for the Nobel Peace Reward.
The first big problem for Harding, throughout his project and the early days of his administration, was the League of Nations. While in the senate in 1919 and 1920, he had been instrumental in assisting stop Wilson’s League proposal, with its provision that would dedicate American soldiers to safeguard member countries without the approval of Congress. In his inaugural address, President Harding mentioned his dislike of such agreements. “America can be a celebration to no irreversible military alliance. It can enter into no political dedications, nor assume any financial obligations which will subject our decisions to any other than our own authority.” Under Harding, the League issue was lastly killed for good.
Possibly his greatest accomplishment was the Washington Disarmament Conference, held in DC from November 1921 to February 1922. “I have high hopes of this Washington Conference,” said Winston Churchill, who had actually worked as Very first Lord of the Admiralty throughout part of the Great War. “It has actually been called together by President Harding in a spirit of the utmost genuineness and excellent will.”
Harding also had high expect the meeting. He wanted to see the “peace of the world, the proximate end of the shocking waste of competing weaponries, and the establishment of peace on earth, good-will towards men,” he said in a speech to open the conference. The function of which was “a coming together from all parts of the earth to apply the better qualities of humanity to decrease the faults in our international relationships.” The conference, however, was on behalf of “a war-wearied world, having a hard time for repair, hungering and thirsting for much better relationship; of mankind crying for relief and yearning assurances of enduring peace.”
The countries of the world “need liberty and justice. There can not be one without the other,” Harding stated. “Fundamental rights are of God, and the tragedies of the world originate in their attempted rejection.” And that denial is enabled by machines of war. The peoples of the world “who pay in peace and die in war wish their statesmen to turn the expenses for damage into means of building, targeted at a higher state for those who live and follow after.” The conference would be “a service to mankind.”
In addition to establishing limitations on marine armaments, the conference likewise prohibited the use of poison gas, and saw the finalizing of several treaties with the objective of alleviating tensions in Asia. Harding had hoped this aim might be achieved by the conference. “The Pacific should be the seat of a generous, totally free, unbiased competition in between the aspirations and endeavors of the oldest and most recent types of human society,” he composed to the guv of the Hawaii Area.
President Harding was pleased with the results of the conference, noting that it “recorded a fantastic accomplishment in putting a certain end to expensive naval competitors and in the prohibitions relating to certain inhumane techniques of warfare,” along with agreeing to “warranties … for future peace” in the Pacific.
Thomas Bailey, an US diplomatic history scholar, wrote that the conference “might have prevented war in the Pacific for a decade,” and was the just such United States international meeting of the 1920s and 1930s “to achieve truly considerable outcomes.”
The achievements of Warren Harding in foreign affairs were a victory. He reversed the unsafe internationalism of Woodrow Wilson and put America back on the path of a traditional, non-interventionist policy. It is a record that is deserving of a higher ranking in the pantheon of American Presidents.
Originally released at Antiwar.com.Reprinted with authorization of the author.