Our Common Country: Mutual Good Will in America (review)

At first blush, the republication of a set of speeches by Warren G. Harding does not fill one with a sense of anticipation. The 29th president's reputation is tarnished by both official and personal scandal, and he is consistently ranked by historians near the bottom of all American presidents. Nor is Harding remembered as an accomplished orator. To the contrary, his style has been repeatedly and famously lampooned. The departing Woodrow Wilson quipped just before Harding's inauguration that "there will be one very difficult thing for me . . . to stand, and that is Mr. Harding's English." William Gibbs McAdoo wrote that Harding's oratory "left the impression of an array of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea." William Allen White scored Harding's rhetoric as "a mere bass drum, beating the time of the hour, carrying no tune, making no music, promoting no deep harmony; just a strident, rhythmic noise." Never to be outdone when it came to the literary lashing of official Pablum, H. L. Mencken wrote that Harding spoke the "worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges . . . of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it."

Even if Harding's political discourse can be rescued from such recriminations, further questions arise surrounding the reprinting of these particular public addresses. Originally published in 1921, Our Common Country purports to be a collection of extempore addresses Harding gave as president-elect. Harding did indeed give a number of platform and whistle-stop orations in late 1920 and early 1921. However, these speeches have received scant attention in the major histories and biographies of Harding. Nor is Our Common Country noted by historians as a significant primary source on Harding's career or political philosophy. Even within the much neglected corpus of Harding's public utterances, his speeches as president-elect are overshadowed by his front-porch campaign speeches in 1920 and by the series of speeches he gave on his ill-fated western speaking tour in 1923 (the trip on which he died of a heart attack). If there is a case to be made that Harding's speeches as president-elect had any demonstrable impact on the politics of the era, no one has attempted to make it.

The texts contained within Our Common Country are also problematic from the standpoint of public address scholarship. The book is organized as a series of thematic essays, with no notation of dates or occasions on which the speeches were given. The compositions themselves bear no marks of specific time and place, and read as heavily edited essays rather than extempore addresses. These speeches were presumably edited and rewritten by Harding himself, but even this is not established in the volume nor in any of the major works on Harding's political career. In fact, there is no mention in the secondary literature, at least that this reviewer can find, of Harding taking the time to edit these speeches for publication. By modern editorial standards for collections of speeches and other primary historical documents, this volume should have included at the very least an editor's note on the lineage of the texts, their authorship, and their relationship to the actual speeches upon which they were based.

Having said all of this, this collection does have value for modern scholars. One reason Harding's discourse is worthy of re-examination is that he was a significantly more able president than his historical reputation suggests. Even if the scandals that surfaced after his death had not badly damaged his historical image, Harding was doomed to be overshadowed by the series of dynamic figures that immediately preceded him. As John Milton Cooper Jr. puts it: "The nomination of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge signaled the end of...