A Note on My Harding Research

The information I posted during 2020 mostly covered Warren Harding's front-porch campaign from his home on Mt. Vernon Avenue in Marion, Ohio. The campaign officially started on July 31, 1920, and ended on September 25. The plan was to post daily on events that occurred exactly 100 years ago that day, but I shared other information as well. You'll have to read bottom-to-top if you want to follow the campaign from Day 1.

I used the open web for some of my research but also information accessible by using my library card or my subscription to www.newspapers.com. The most useful resource was the Marion Star, which was owned by the Hardings at the time of the campaign. I also browsed online copies of other newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Star, and the Dayton Daily News, which, in 1920, was owned by Harding's Democratic opponent, Governor James M. Cox. I also posted information from other newspapers that covered Harding's trips away from Marion during the campaign.

Another great resource I used was Dale E. Cottrill's The Conciliator, a 1969 biography of the president that expanded an earlier bibliography of Harding's speeches. An online version is available at the Internet Archive, but I used a hard copy borrowed from the State Library of Ohio.

Readers should not construe anything posted here as a political statement on my part. I just like Harding as a historical topic.

9/12/2020

Sunday, September 12, 1920

It's Sunday. The Hardings travel to Columbus for the day.

Both candidates offer statements about the other for a full page that is published in numerous papers across the country:


Harding's opening paragraph: "Although I am a newspaper man and have written many 'personals' in the past, there is little that I feel I may say, in propriety, at the present time, about Governor Cox, yet there is something important that may be said about the meaning of the Presidency and the qualities that should inhere in the President of the United States."

Cox's opening paragraph: "Senator Harding, personally, is a man of appealing individuality who makes friends readily and whose character and record entitle him to the high respect in which he is held. As a speaker and as a writer he has a charming way of putting what he has to say. Moreover, I believe that he is conscientious and that he arrives at his conclusions honestly. He is standing for principles in which he believes and is using all his force to make them effective..."
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