Missing
Warren G. Harding
by
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
DIGG THIS
 In
the aftermath of that ghastly horror called the Great War, Warren
Gamaliel Harding ran for president and won. His platform: Return
to normalcy. He was the dark-horse candidate, but won 60% of the
vote. Among his first actions was to pardon Eugene Debs, the socialist
candidate, who had been jailed for opposing the war draft. He reduced
taxes, deregulated, and generally calmed down the country after
a culture-wrecking, budget-busting war, and assured a time of great
prosperity.
Harding resisted
intervening at all in the recession of 1921, and it thereby went
away rather quickly, as all recessions will tend to do. He signed
the peace treaties which formally ended WWI, and sought world naval
disarmament at the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22. The Teapot
Dome Affair that wrecked his administration was a big nothing compared
to the crimes of presidents past and future.
Of course historians
hate him. They say he was a do-nothing president. Harding himself
admitted it. He said that he was unqualified to be president. Indeed,
no man is qualified to be president. Harding was honest enough to
say it outright.
After the Cold
War, we needed these kinds of policies. But normalcy is too boring
to the organized right and left, who want to keep the population
in a wild frenzy of fear in order to impose a massive state that
will do their ideological bidding. These people all agree that peace
and prosperity are the worst things that can happen to a country,
because these conditions supposedly make us weak and unprincipled.
In fact, normalcy is the precondition for civilization itself.
So let Harding
speak to us now again.
There isn't
anything the matter with world civilization, except that humanity
is viewing it through a vision impaired in a cataclysmal war.
Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever
has rendered men irrational; sometimes there have been draughts
upon the dangerous cup of barbarity, and men have wandered far
from safe paths, but the human procession still marches in the
right direction.
America's
present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy;
not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment;
not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate;
not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality,
but sustainment in triumphant nationality.
It is one
thing to battle successfully against world domination by military
autocracy, because the infinite God never intended such a program,
but it is quite another thing to revise human nature and suspend
the fundamental laws of life and all of life's acquirements...
This republic
has its ample tasks. If we put an end to false economics which
lure humanity to utter chaos, ours will be the commanding example
of world leadership today. If we can prove a representative popular
government under which a citizenship seeks what it may do for
the government rather than what the government may do for individuals,
we shall do more to make democracy safe for the world than all
armed conflict ever recorded.
 The
world needs to be reminded that all human ills are not curable
by legislation, and that quantity of statutory enactment and excess
of government offer no substitute for quality of citizenship.
The problems
of maintaining civilization are not to be solved by a transfer
of responsibility from citizenship to government, and no eminent
page in history was ever drafted by the standards of mediocrity.
More, no government is worthy of the name which is directed by
influence on the one hand, or moved by intimidation on the other...
My best judgment
of America's needs is to steady down, to get squarely on our feet,
to make sure of the right path. Let's get out of the fevered delirium
of war, with the hallucination that all the money in the world
is to be made in the madness of war and the wildness of its aftermath.
Let us stop to consider that tranquility at home is more precious
than peace abroad, and that both our good fortune and our eminence
are dependent on the normal forward stride of all the American
people.
 Here
is an audio
clip.
October
17, 2007
Llewellyn
H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him
mail] is president of the Ludwig
von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com,
and author of Speaking
of Liberty.
Copyright
© 2007 LewRockwell.com
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