The Historical Presidency: “No Man Is Big Enough”: President Harding's Defense of the Proto‐Modern Executive

Abstract

© 2020 The Authors. Warren Harding's administration was not, as is widely perceived, a failed experiment in executive whiggism but a surprisingly spirited defense of presidential authority against the strongest anti-executive backlash since Reconstruction. His support for active-interventionist conservatism and a modied style of “steward” leadership separated him from his traditionalist Republican predecessors—William McKinley and William H. Taft—and successor—Calvin Coolidge. Ambitiously, Harding sought to fuse elements of the Roosevelt–Wilson experiments in presidential leadership with his own, less egocentric view of “balanced” constitutional government. His adaptability helped maintain the expansion of the administrative state and of the “institutional” and “rhetorical” aspects of presidential power, albeit at more modest rates than under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. By initiating, or further enabling, growth trends in cabinet government, media inuence, and institutional reform, he developed operational templates used by later Republican presidents, notably, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. Rather than being dismissed as irrelevant, therefore, Harding’s tenure should be credited both for its innovation and exibility at a time of institutional crisis and for its contribution to the development of post-1930s Republican presidential leadership.