Profile - Warren Harding, the "Silent Strategist"
Warren G. Harding (1865-1923) became president on a platform that stressed a return to isolationism, yet he played an important role in international affairs and took a number of steps that would help set the stage for victory in the Pacific. The president was of English Puritan background, the family settling in New England in 1623. They later moved to New York, intermarrying with Dutch families. Harding family tradition has it that the president’s great-great-great-grandfather Abraham Harding served as an officer in the Continental line during the Revolution, rising to major, and was later in the New York State militia, but this cannot be confirmed from official documents. Over the next three generations, neither President Harding’s great-great-grandfather Amos, nor his great-grandfather George Tyron Harding, nor his grandfather, Charles Alexander Harding, seems to have served. The president’s father, George Tyron Harding II, did serve during the Civil War. In 1864 the 19-year old enlisted as a field musician in Company I, 136th Ohio Volunteers. The young man’s service was short, however, for some months later he was discharged for ill health. The future president Harding was born about a year later, a few months after the Civil War ended.
Warren Harding had a very good education for his time, graduating from college when most Americans never made it out of elementary school. He had no military service. As a young man he tried a number of different business ventures, and then became a successful newspaper publisher. Entering politics as a Republican, he held a variety of elective posts, in the Ohio legislature, as lieutenant-governor, and in the U.S. Senate. Although not particularly distinguished as a political leader, in 1920 he was selected as Republican candidate for president, and won by a surprisingly comfortable margin, largely on a platform of “Back to Normalcy.”
Harding’s administration was one of retrenchment for the armed forces. Budgets and strength fell markedly from the historic highs attained during World War I, when personnel peaked at over 4,000,000 men and some women. Although the Army was authorized nearly 280,000 personnel during his administration, active personnel fell to 110,000 by the President’s death, while the National Guard had little more than 100,000 of its authorized 400,000, and the Army Reserve many fewer than its 100,000 authorization. The Navy too felt the cuts, falling to just about 100,000. Procurement for both services was slashed, and the Army in particular continued to draw upon World War I stocks through the advent of the Roosevelt Administration in 1933.
While some the cuts naturally hurt readiness, nevertheless, during Harding’s administration a number of important steps were taken to strengthen the armed forces in ways not necessarily noticeable purely on the basis of counting men and weapons. While the Army benefited from the expansion of the Air Service and the introduction of an extensive reserve officer training program, the most important measures undertaken during these years affected the Navy. Of these, the most notable was the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Naval Armaments (November 1921-February 1922).
In the immediate aftermath of World War I the principal naval powers had resumed construction of “capital ships” (battleships and battlecruisers). The end of the war had left the Royal Navy saddled with scores of obsolete vessels, with only one capital ship completed post-war (the battlecruiser Hood) and just four more ships on order. By contrast, the U.S. already had three postwar ships and fourteen under construction, and Japan two postwar vessels and a half dozen or so under construction. So Britain began rearming. A new naval arms race loomed. This prompted a call for a naval arms limitation conference, an idea first proposed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. The point of the conference was to avert an arms race by reducing armaments to a level that produced a mutually acceptable ratio among the various major navies. Since the U.S. had more money than either Britain or Japan, and could thus “win” a spending contest on new construction, the other powers acquiesced to the plan, with some grumbling. The final agreement set the U.S. and British fleets at parity of tonnage and numbers of battleships and battlecruisers and, with some flexibility, vessels in other categories as well. Japan accepted 60 percent of that, and France and Italy each at little less than 20 percent. Provisions of the agreement included the scrapping of obsolete vessels, of which there were a lot in all navies, and of some ships under construction. In addition, a “holiday” on battleship construction was instituted, using an internationally accepted replacement schedule for each ship as it attained 20 years in service, while limitations were imposed on the size of new construction. Largely unnoticed by the public, but arguably the most important provision, was the dissolution of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, seen by most American strategists as the most serious threat to national security. Called by some super-patriots a disaster at the time (and even today), the treaty actually left the U.S. with the most powerful battleline in the world and opened the way for greater Anglo-American cooperation. The treaty also probably postponed a Pacific War by a decade: Japanese naval expansion plans envisioned having 24 capital ships under eight years old by 1930, a construction program that would have led them to bankruptcy before then and left them with the option of admitting they could not compete with the U.S. (or even the British) or going to war.
The Harding administration also saw important developments in naval policy in other ways, largely overseen by Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby. The Navy began the serious development of the later famous War Plan Orange and refined or introduced many new technologies such as radio communications, underway refueling, conversion from coal to oil, modernization of older vessels, and, of course, the aircraft carrier, with the USS Langley (CV-1) entering service. To test these innovations and to explore the problems of a Pacific War, annual massed maneuvers known as the Fleet Problems were introduced. One historian has actually termed Harding and Denby “Silent Strategists” for their quiet contributions to the naval service.
Meanwhile, on the domestic scene, the U.S. began the economic boom that created the “Roaring Twenties”, and led first to unprecedented prosperity and then to the Crash of ’29.
But Warren Harding missed most of that, for he died suddenly of a stroke in 1923.
The Hardings had no children.
|