WARREN G. HARDING: DIRECTLY OUT OF A COEN BROTHERS' MOVIE: 100 YEARS SINCE THE DEATH OF A PRESIDENT

Warren G. Harding: Straight Out of a Coen Brothers Movie 100 Years After a President's Death Did the widespread corruption and incompetence of the Harding Administration pave the way for a new century of politics? "We are the forgettable, adequate American interim presidents.

I Love Lisa, The Simpsons A century later, the beginning of the 1920s seems startlingly familiar: America was considering how to deal with a devastating pandemic, counterrevolutionaries were fighting in the streets while counterrevolutionaries were both backed by and represented by the state, and demagogues were trying to lay the blame for everything on immigrants and anarchists. But the man who was elected president on the promise of putting an end to it all is largely relegated to history's annals.

This is unusual because a president who is elected on a platform of reversing the anxieties of an era usually becomes associated with that era, such as Richard Nixon with the unrest of the 1960s or Barack Obama with the global recession of 2008. Warren Gamaliel Harding, however, only leaves behind one significant historical legacy: the word "normalcy," which he accidentally coined while searching for the word "normality," has since become widely used.

However, Harding, who passed away 100 years ago this August, unintentionally laid the foundation for all of the most idiotic, dishonest, and, to be honest, Coen Brothers-esque tendencies in contemporary politics.

Harding, who was unsuited to and uninterested in the details of policy, largely delegated these tasks to the people who helped him win the presidency. Like middle-aged Jason Voorhees victims, those men were removed from office one by one by public scandals. Harding, however, passed away suddenly while still in office, preventing any meaningful accountability for his actions.

Harding, like many other future presidents, was never anticipated to advance to that point. As 1920 got underway, Mitchell Palmer, President Wilson's attorney general and the man behind the infamous postwar raids on anarchists and leftists, and Gen. Leonard Wood, a Republican hero from the Spanish-American War, seemed to be the front-runners.

In the end, Ohio Governor James Cox defeated Palmer for the Democratic nomination, but at the Republican National Convention, Harding campaign manager Harry Daugherty negotiated deals until the party's nominee was the new senator.

After a decade of turmoil, war, and upheaval, Harding easily won the election by running on the platform of a "return to normalcy.

" Normality—or normalcy, for that matter—isn't necessarily an improvement, as evidenced by his cabinet picks. In the worst possible way, the new president danced with those who had brought him into office by appointing a group of machine hacks who were so cartoonishly crooked that seeing them without cigars would have the same effect as seeing Nick Offerman without a moustache.

Daugherty, the attorney general that Harding had appointed, was the closest thing the fictitious Ohio Gang had to a leader. Interior Secretary Albert Fall, the publicity-savvy private eye William J. Burns, the Cincinnati bootlegger George Remus who served as the inspiration for Jay Gatsby, and Daugherty's bagman and potential lover Jess Smith were among the other members and orbiters.

The best example might be Gaston Bullock Means, the private eye and Burns sidekick who is so Coen-like that he was portrayed by legendary character actor Stephen Root in HBO's "Boardwalk Empire." When Harding took office, Prohibition was already in full swing but it was well known that it lacked teeth, especially among the Ohio Gang, and Means eagerly introduced himself to bootleggers as a friend in Washington.

Means claimed to have documents implicating senior administration officials when he was involved in a probe into the Harding administration's lax enforcement of Prohibition in 1924, but he later returned saying they had been stolen. After defrauding an heiress of $100,000 that he claimed would be used to ransom the Lindbergh baby, he committed suicide in prison. These men had few characteristics in common with contemporary politics when it comes to specifics and policy matters.

Instead of being ideologues, they were primarily taxpayer-funded children shopping in candy stores. They far more accurately anticipated the "where the hell did you find this guy" vibe that would arise whenever a state party chair blamed his wife's oversensitivity for a sex scandal or George Santos claimed to be the first white man recruited by the Yakuza.

Because anyone who leaves an unpopular administration is guaranteed a book deal, Means published a fabricated tell-all in 1930 that implied Harding was murdered by his widow Florence. This was a fairly standard move from him, but it is still easily recognised today. This all culminated in the Teapot Dome Scandal, which at the time was regarded as any presidency's biggest black eye, along with numerous other, lesser scandals.

The first presidential cabinet secretary to be imprisoned was Interior Secretary Fall, who was charged with accepting bribes in exchange for oil company leases awarded without a competitive bidding process. Daugherty was not found to be legally responsible, but Jess Smith was discovered dead from a gunshot wound not long after Harding instructed his attorney general to fire Smith. Three months later, the President himself passed away from a heart attack.

It's unclear whether Harding was acutely aware of the web of corruption involving his friends, but what is known about his personality and intellectual curiosity suggests he was probably content not to know. The reader is free to judge whether this is significantly superior to enthusiastic corruption.

The President's paper trail, which frequently used Senate letterhead, suggests that his true passion was for women other than his wife. For years, he alternately wrote sexy and romantic letters to different women, in which he occasionally referred to his penis as "Jerry." The fact that Harding was able to engage in embarrassing sexts in the 1920s should be considered the most impressive aspect of his presidency.

The way that Harding and his allies' largely apolitical corruption opened the door to potentially more harmful individuals who acquired their ideas honestly, however, is perhaps their worst legacy. Vice President Calvin Coolidge succeeded Harding, a flinty New Englander whose laissez-faire banking practises contributed to setting the stage for the 1929 stock market crash. Herbert Hoover, Harding's commerce secretary, succeeded Coolidge as president.

Hoover would become so closely associated with the Great Depression that most modern Americans are unaware of anything else about him.

When Daugherty's reformer successor, Harlan Fiske Stone, deposed Burns in 1924, the Bureau of Investigation was given to a young Justice Department lawyer named John Edgar Hoover, who may have ruined more lives in the twentieth century than any other single American.

A century later, the Harding administration seems to be a living, resigning-in-disgrace contradiction. Despite the fact that cynical Americans have been labelling their leaders as a bunch of crooks for generations, the brazen greed and misdeeds of the Ohio Gang and Harding's shrugging ignorance seem almost archaic in comparison given the poisonous belief systems that frequently accompany such character flaws today.

The Harding presidency was the corrupt peace that followed the most horrifying conflict the world had ever seen, and it paved the way for a world where we occasionally seem destined to experience both at once rather than having to make a choice.  (“Warren G. Harding: 100 Years Since the Death of a President Straight Out of a Coen Brothers’ Movie”)