Recarving Rushmore: With Warren G. Harding

@Brett Champion,
Hmmm. I didn’t know that. Thanks.
Economic historian Jeff Hummel’s favorite is Martin van Buren, but when I’ve made that point to Ivan, his counter is that van Buren was behind the “Trail of Tears.”
What it goes to show is how hard it is to find a U.S. president who looks good on all 3 dimensions. Ivan’s main accomplishment with me, by the way, is causing me to rate Jimmy Carter higher (but not high) than I did.

It’s fairly uncommon knowledge that the first Republican not to get a majority of the black vote was Herbert Hoover. Why? This.

I guess the take away from this if you want to impress a libertarian its best to preside over the the four year period in which american influence and prestige plummeted to its all time low. Also maybe botch a boots on ground rescue mission too. It almost seems like being a Canadian David Henderson isn’t quite able to appreciate the natural dismay that engulfed Americans during the Carter presidency. After all what’s American prestige to him; it doesn’t getting him published or tenure and that’s what the U.S. is here for to provide social mobility to those who couldn’t find it at home.

Tyler simple reconigized the results of a democratic referendum on joining the union. Surely even white southerners can avail themselves to that most libertarian of tactics right? I think it would be more honest if libertarians just said “look of course our principles don’t apply to white southerners they suck.”

I’d remove from Mt. Rushmore all people who are most famous for holding political office – which is to say, I’d blast off all four of the currently sculpted faces. I’d replace them with images of the faces of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Gustavus Swift, J.J. Hill (even though he was Canadian!), and either Gail Borden or Steve Jobs – people who really define, and who helped in notable and noticeable ways to sculpt, what is good about America. (If obliged to include a non-entrepreneur among the four, there’s no question that the person whose visage I would choose is that wisest of all Americans, H.L. Mencken.)

Ironic that Don Boudreaux should choose Mencken, as he’s the man most responsible for Warren G. Harding’s lousy reputation. This is typical;

He [Harding] writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

As far as I know, Mencken completely ignored Harding’s admirable characteristics. One of which was that he wasn’t a racist, far from it. Nor was he a fan of government;

…we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.

and

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy….

and

Practically all we know is that thousands of native Haitians have been killed by American Marines, and that many of our own gallant men have sacrificed their lives at the behest of an Executive department in order to establish laws drafted by the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. … I will not empower an Assistant Secretary of the Navy to draft a constitution for helpless neighbors in the West Indies and jam it down their throats at the point of bayonets borne by US Marines.

The last one was delivered during the 1920 campaign, critical of Woodrow Wilson and his Navy Sec’y FDR.

@Patrick R. Sullivan,
Great quotes. Thanks.