Domestic Policy and Affairs

Harding’s domestic policies and affairs are somewhat interesting, but the bad affairs overrule. Similar to Grant’s presidency, Harding wasn’t really the one corrupting, but instead his chosen officials were. His chosen officials viewed their positions as a path to wealth. Due to his party loyalty, his presidency was pulled down to the worst. One of the most famous scandals during Harding’s presidency was the Teapot Dome. This scandal involved Albert B Fall, who was accused of taking bribe of $308,000 in return of the rights to private companies to investigate in oil field in Teapot Wyoming. As a result, Fall was jailed for a year. Before he was impeached, he died of stress from dealing with his corrupted officials.

Even though Harding is mostly known for the bad affairs, he has left behind some of the good policies. Like what presidents should do to help their country recover from war, he lowered the taxes, after World War One. He did a job of taking US out of the war and brought it back to normal state by reducing national debt by 26 billion dollars. Also he created a Department for managing and budgeting government’s budget, called Bureau of the Budget, which put restriction in government’s spending to prevent corruption. This Department was known to be one of his nominated issues in his presidency. He also tried to protect the civil right by passing an Anti-Lynching Act and spoke out against the unfair treatment of the minority. With his amnesty, he released Eugene V Debs who was a socialist that speaking against President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to join the World War I under the Espionage Act. He also protected Woodrow Wilson’s plan for budgeting and accounting, allowing the president to submit his own budget to the congress. During his presidency, the congress also passed the Emergency Quota Act, which helped control the amount of immigrants inside United States. Lastly to protect the farmer from cheap import, he created the highest tariff in U.S. History, Fordney-McCumber Tariff.

In my opinion, Harding wasn’t as bad as how he was rated. He helped protect the civil rights of African American by passing the Anti-Lynching Act and the farmer by passing really high tariff. Unfortunately, all of them were ruined by his thoughtlessly chosen officials. This poor guy’s reputation suffered from scandals caused by the Ohio cronies, but he didn’t give up. He has planned to make better understandings with people, but unfortunately he passed away before he had a chance to amend his mistakes. On August 2nd, 1923, he passed away from heart attack in San Francisco. After his death, more scandals were exposed, which hurt more of his reputation as a president and pulled him down as the worst president of U.S.