Overview
2009 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 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.
Full Product Details
Author: Phillip G. Payne
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Imprint: Ohio University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 1.80cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.399kg
ISBN: 9780821418192
ISBN 10: 082141819
Pages: 296
Publication Date: 15 December 2008
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
"""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"
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
Author Information
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.
