Dez Prez Rankings: Corruption Abounds

#36 of 39:
Ulysses S. Grant (18th president)
Term: 1869-77
Party: Republican


ABOVE: Depending on the version of the story you believe, Grant was pulled over while driving his carriage around Washington D.C. and ticketed for speeding or drunk driving (or both) by a cop who did not realize it was the president. (ANCIANT, here is another 19th Century president who enjoyed his booze.)

U.S. Grant was a decent general (using the tried and true Russian war strategy of “I have more bodies to throw on the battlefield than you do” during the Civil War), but he was a crappy president. Grant himself was not really that corrupt (neither was our next selection), but he allowed corruption to flood his administration and did nothing about it. You could lay some of the blame on the times, the 1860-70’s were one of the most corrupt times in American history, the era of graft, patronage and Boss Tweed’s political machine. Still, the example is set at the top. Grant’s Treasury Secretary William Richardson was forced to resign due to a corrupt bargain with a tax collector. Grant’s personal secretary Orville Babcock was implicated in the Whiskey Ring case, and Grant personally interceded to get Babcock off the hook. Fisk and Gould practically cornered the U.S. gold market based on their reliance on Grant’s brother-in-law being able to keep Grant from selling government gold. The U.S. economy almost collapsed until Grant finally put some government gold back on the market. Grant also vacillated between being tough in enforcing Reconstruction and being lenient, making Reconstruction inconsistent.

Pros:
• Grant had a solid economic policy. He resisted the temptation to increase the money supply even in the face of a depression. He helped to prevent the economy from getting worse with an easy, popular fix

Cons:
• Grant refused to offer any leadership to his party or country. He believed that Congress set the agenda and the president simply executed that agenda. Congress was not setting any coherent agenda, and Grant’s party and country needed direction. He provided none
• Corruption abounds in and around his administration: Fisk and Gould, Richardson, Babcock, the Credit Mobilier scandal
• Grant was inconsistent dealing with Reconstruction. At times he enthusiastically supported the Republican Reconstruction governments against the rising Ku Klux Klan and Democrat opposition. At other times he had a hands off, free for all approach

#35 of 39:
Warren G. Harding (29th president)
Term: 1921-23
Party: Republican


ABOVE: Warren Harding liked to join lots of groups and organizations. Here he is wearing a mason hat.

Harding at least understood his own limitations, God bless him. Before the election, he wrote to a friend “The only thing I really worry about is that I might be nominated and elected. That’s an awful thing to contemplate.” He later said to another friend “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” No argument here. A journalist from the time period wrote that Harding “was nominated because there was nothing against him, and the delegates wanted to go home.” So with these ringing endorsements Harding was elected at the beginning of the Roaring 20’s. His short administration (he died in office from a heart attack, and was followed by the comotose Calvin Coolidge) was marked by corruption and little else. Harding himself was never implicated (other than fathering an illicit love child while he was president), but he presided over an administration that included a rampantly corrupt Justice Department under Harry Daugherty, as well as graft throughout the Veteran’s Bureau. The real doozy was in the Interior Department, where Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall was caught taking bribes in exchange for selling off government land to oil speculators in the Teapot Dome Scandal. Fall remains the only cabinet member to be imprisoned.

Pros:
• Harding at least had a pulse, which could be argued that Woodrow Wilson lacked during the last year of Wilson’s administration when he was debilitated by a stroke and his wife was essentially running the White House

Cons:
• Harding was not smart or strong, and knew it
• Harding allowed corruption to run rampant throughout his administration
• He favored racist and unfair immigration restrictions
• He was a supporter of the failed Prohibition experiment
• His (and Coolidge’s) rudderless leadership in the 20’s contributed to the unregulated, Wild West atmosphere of Wall Street and the banking industry that in part resulted in the Great Depression