1923 President WARREN G. HARDING Antique U.S. Mint Presidential Medal i49265

Item: i49265

Authentic

U.S. Mint

Medal of
President

Warren G. Harding

75mm (3″) (230.8 grams)
Designed
by George T. Morgan
Reference: Mint List # 128
WARREN G. HARDING, Bust of Warren G. Harding left, wearing suit and tie.
Liberty standing right, holding olive branch with left hand over heart and
veiled, Presidential seal above inscription, INAUGURATED PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED
STATES MAR. 4.1921 DIED AUG. 2. 1923, wreath with branch within, pattern design
below.

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Guarantee of Authenticity.

Warren Gamaliel Harding (November 2, 1865 – August 2, 1923) was the
29th

President of the United States
(1921–23), a
Republican
from Ohio who served in the
Ohio
Senate
and then in the
United States Senate
, where he played a minor role.

With the
Republican Party
convention near deadlock, Harding was chosen as an
inoffensive compromise candidate in the
1920 election
. He brought leading advertising experts on board, especially
Albert Lasker
, to publicize his presidential appearance and conservative
promises. He promised America a “return
to normalcy” after World War I, with an end to violence and radicalism, a
strong economy, and independence from European intrigues. “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 submergence in inter-nationality,
but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”
Harding represented the conservative wing of his party in opposition to
progressive followers of the late
Theodore Roosevelt
(who died in 1919) and Senator
Robert M. La Follette, Sr.
. He defeated
Democrat
and fellow Ohio newspaper publisher
James
M. Cox
with the largest popular vote landslide (60% to 34%) in presidential
history.

Harding’s cabinet included
Andrew Mellon
at the
Treasury
,
Herbert Hoover
at
Commerce
, and
Charles Evans Hughes
at the
State Department
. He rewarded friends and contributors, known as the “Ohio
Gang“, with powerful government positions. Multiple cases of corruption were
exposed during his presidency and after his death, including the notorious
Teapot Dome scandal
, regarded in pre-Watergate
times as the “greatest and most sensational scandal in the history of American
politics”.

Domestically, Harding signed the first
federal child welfare program
, and dealt with striking mining and railroad
workers in part by supporting an 8-hour work day. He created the
Bureau of the Budget
to prepare the first
United States federal budget
. Harding advocated an anti-lynching bill to
curb violence against African Americans, but it failed to pass Congress. In
foreign affairs, Harding spurned the
League of Nations
and negotiated peace treaties with Germany and Austria.
His greatest foreign policy achievement came in the
Washington Naval Conference
of 1921–22, in which the world’s major naval
powers agreed on a naval limitations program that held sway for a decade.

In August 1923, Harding suddenly collapsed and died in California. His
administration’s many scandals have earned Harding a
bottom-tier ranking
from historians,
but in recent years there has been some recognition of his fiscal responsibility
and endorsement of African-American civil rights.
Harding has been viewed as a more modern politician who embraced technology and
was sensitive to the plights of minorities, women, and labor.