Introduction: Why defend Warren G. Harding? -- The most maligned president in American history -- The League -- 1919 : the year of upheaval -- The fight for the Republican presidential nomination -- The election of 1920 -- The Harding administration -- Rebuilding a depressed economy -- Putting America first -- Harding, national healer -- The scandals -- Conclusion: Restoring Harding's reputation

"He's the butt of political jokes, frequently subjected to ridicule, and almost never absent a "Worst Presidents" list where he most often ends up at the bottom. Historians have labeled him the "Worst President Ever," "Dead Last," "Unfit," and "Incompetent," to name but a few. Many contemporaries were equally cruel. H. L. Mencken called him a "nitwit." To Alice Roosevelt Longworth, he was a "slob." Such is the current reputation of our 29th President, Warren Gamaliel Harding. In an interesting survey in 1982, which divided the scholarly respondents into "conservative" and "liberal" categories, both groups picked Harding as the worst President. But historian Ryan Walters shows that Harding, a humble man from Marion, Ohio, has been unfairly remembered. He quickly fixed an economy in depression and started the boom of the Roaring Twenties, healed a nation in the throes of social disruption, and reversed America's interventionist foreign policy"--