Dead Last — 2008 ·

The Public Memory of Warren G. Harding’s Scandalous Legacy

“Payne’s reappraisal of the Harding myth is first-rank scholarship and makes an impressive contribution to the debates about the life and misfortunes of Warren Harding. Summing Up: Essential.”

Choice

“(A) fascinating exploration of the man’s reputation in his own time and of how we have continued to play upon Harding’s reputation over the years since then. Payne’s concluding chapter on the smug (my word) presidential ratings by historians, and of the continued convenience of using Harding to this day as an example of failure is a fascinating one.”

Library Journal

“Phillip Payne’s Dead Last accomplishes a task for which historians of political thought will be very grateful: his assessment of Harding’s ideology of ‘civic boosterism’ in the 1920s is truly insightful and original.”

Clarence E. Wunderlin, Jr. — editor, The Papers of Robert A. Taft

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If George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are the saints in America’s civil religion, then the twenty-ninth president, Warren G. Harding, is our sinner. Prior to the Nixon administration, the Harding scandals were the most infamous of the twentieth century. Harding is consistently judged a failure, ranking dead last among his peers.

By examining the public memory of Harding, Phillip G. Payne offers the first significant reinterpretation of his presidency in a generation. Rather than repeating the old stories, Payne examines the contexts and continued meaning of the Harding scandals for various constituencies. Payne explores such topics as Harding’s importance as a midwestern small-town booster, his rumored black ancestry, the role of various biographers in shaping his early image, the tension between public memory and academic history, and, finally, his status as an icon of presidential failure in contemporary political debates. Harding was a popular president and was widely mourned when he died in office in 1923; but with his death began the construction of his public memory and his fall from political grace.

In Dead Last, Payne explores how Harding’s name became synonymous with corruption, cronyism, and incompetence and how it is used to this day as an example of what a president should not be.

Phillip G. Payne is an associate professor of history at St. Bonaventure University in western New York, where he teaches courses in United States and public history. He worked for the Ohio Historical Society at the Warren G. Harding Home.

Phillip G. Payne is available for interviews on the following topics: Presidential Legacies, Race and the Presidency, and Warren G. Harding. Find out how to contact Phillip G. Payne and other Ohio University Press experts.