By Martin Sieff

Published August 19, 2010

FoxNews.com

Glenn Beck, bless him, has opened the gate for American conservatives to finally appreciate and learn from a man who should have been one of their greatest heroes; President Obama needs to learn from that great man too.

I am of course referring not to the vastly overrated Theodore Roosevelt (If he’d been President in 1914, at least 2 million American boys would have been sent to useless deaths in World War I – but more on that another time.), but to the sainted Warren G. Harding.

American conservatives revere Calvin Coolidge, but are embarrassed by his predecessor. Yet Coolidge literally Did Nothing — nothing good at all. He inherited a booming economy from his far greater predecessor, and then he didn’t raise a finger to cool it down when speculation reached dangerous levels in 1927-28.

Harding, by contrast inherited a series of crises from the appalling Woodrow Wilson that were as serious as the Great Depression. America was in the middle of the worst depression in its history in 1920. Harding had full prosperity back and roaring within less than a year.

It took Franklin Roosevelt eight years of failed and bungled big government policies before he finally gave up and let the industrial demand of World War II and the restored confidence of Big Business rescue him in 1940-42.

Harding inherited race riots in American cities. He inherited a Department of Justice that under the infernal Woodrow Wilson had thrown the Bill of Rights and due process out the window. Harding restored those old fashioned standards.

American soldiers were bogged down in weird, nation-building activities in Siberia and Wilson even wanted them to create an independent Armenia, a policy that would have set off a major war in the Middle East with Turkey and lots of other people. Harding pulled the plug on that too.

He also defended the civil rights of black Americans more robustly than any other president between Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower — and of course they were conservative Republicans too.

Warren Harding could show Barack Obama how to create millions of jobs. He could show him how to restore business confidence. He could show him how to make the investors of the world flock back to America. He could show him how to make Wall Street boom.

But of course, Obama will never stoop to learn anything from President Harding. Failure will continue to sneer at Success. After all, what can Obama possibly learn from a man who only brought peace and prosperity to the American people? Warren Harding never went to Harvard Law School.

Martin Sieff is a former senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Times and the former Managing Editor, International Affairs, for United Press International. 

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/08/19/martin-sieff-president-obama-warren-harding-calvin-coolidge-theodore-roosevelt/

2 Comments »

1. I am of course referring not to the vastly overrated Theodore Roosevelt (If he’d been President in 1914, at least 2 million American boys would have been sent to useless deaths in World War I – but more on that another time.), but to the sainted Warren G. Harding.

   TDR is one of our worst presidents (along with the semi-dictators FDR and Lincoln). Naturally, they are the most widely admired by academics and libmedia because they vastly expanded government and its intrusion and undermined the Constitution which was intended to protect us from presidents like them.

   American conservatives revere Calvin Coolidge, but are embarrassed by his predecessor. Yet Coolidge literally Did Nothing — nothing good at all. He inherited a booming economy from his far greater predecessor, and then he didn’t raise a finger to cool it down when speculation reached dangerous levels in 1927-28.

   Coolidge dragged Republicans into a series of big-gooberment programs, including those generally blamed on FDR who institutionalized them. This is comparable to the modern GOP introducing their giant Pill Bill back in 2005 and then complaining that the Dims want to fully implement ObummerCare. Whatever the GOP does in expanding government, the Dims will shortly double down on.

   Harding, by contrast inherited a series of crises from the appalling Woodrow Wilson that were as serious as the Great Depression. America was in the middle of the worst depression in its history in 1920. Harding had full prosperity back and roaring within less than a year.

   The writer ignores Harding’s astonishing solution to the Great Depression of 1920: he did nothing! This was a market and bank crisis rather similar to the one of 1929, and much like the 1920 crisis, the 1929 crisis, the 2008 crisis, was directly caused by the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve, then less than ten years old. Harding forced the banks to sort out all their bad debt themselves, something we should have done in 2008 (not to mention the S&L crisis of the late Eighties or the peso crisis of the early Nineties. Times were very hard for about a year and a half while Harding was accused of being a playboy with a bunch of cronies (and there was some truth to that) and then the economy roared back to life, much as it did under Reagan. I would compare Harding to Reagan except Harding died a few years into his first term and Reagan served two terms. But there are a number of parallels between the two.

   It took Franklin Roosevelt eight years of failed and bungled big government policies before he finally gave up and let the industrial demand of World War II and the restored confidence of Big Business rescue him in 1940-42.

   A Republican, Hoover, preceded FDR as a one-term president. Much like George W. Bush in 2008, he experienced a banking/market crash in 1929. Like Bush, he bailed out everything in sight instead of forcing the failed institutions to sort themselves out as Harding did. FDR actually campaigned against these bailouts but, once in office, embraced them and extended the intrusion into the economy at all levels once. Once again, a liberal Republican established expansion of government and then a succeeding Democrat president expanded it radically. This is like Bush being followed by Obummer, much to the total lack of surprise among Austrian economists, libertarians and fiscal conservatives.

   It took Franklin Roosevelt eight years of failed and bungled big government policies before he finally gave up and let the industrial demand of World War II and the restored confidence of Big Business rescue him in 1940-42.

   FDR inherited and extended the financial interventionism of Hooever. However the “recovery” is completely a myth, foisted onto schoolchildren by Lefty academics. Unemployment does, of course, tend to decline sharply if you draft 25% of the nation’s workforce. That isn’t actually the same as private sector employment. The economy actually recovered in 1946 when the wars ended and Truman sharply slashed the size and spending of the federal government, making 1946 the single most profitable year in American history for stocks and investments. Again, Austrian economists are not at all surprised at this result but the Keynesians try to pretend it never happened because it ruins much of their big-gooberment ideology.

   He also defended the civil rights of black Americans more robustly than any other president between Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower — and of course they were conservative Republicans too.

   A key fact that many ignore. There have been a handful of truly great Republican presidents despite the awful legacy of the mass murderer and tyrant, Lincoln. Hoover and Eisenhower do qualify for that short list. Because they were great conservative presidents, the academics try to eliminate any positive references to their administrations.

   The key lesson is against government intervention and bailouts as per Bush and Obama. And the Republicans need to avoid things like farm subsidies and federal flood programs and such because Democrats will always up the ante in that game. Republicans can’t out-liberal the liberals.

   Comment by billdberger — August 21, 2010 @ 10:59 am

2. Everyone in the country who isn’t an unreconstructed leftist buffoon could teach Obama something about jobs.

   Comment by jwpegler — August 21, 2010 @ 4:49 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment