Harding Tomb, Marion Ohio

At the edge of Marion, Ohio, a circular Greek temple of Georgia white marble stands among old elms and a formal garden. This is the Harding Memorial, the final resting place of Warren Gamaliel Harding, the twenty-ninth President of the United States, and his wife Florence. It is the last of the great elaborate presidential tombs, built in an era when the nation still buried its leaders with classical grandeur.

Harding was born in Blooming Grove, just north of here in Morrow County, and spent most of his adult life in Marion as a newspaper editor before rising through Ohio Republican politics to the Senate and then, in nineteen twenty, to the presidency by one of the largest popular vote margins in American history. The country was exhausted by Woodrow Wilson's idealism and wartime sacrifice, and Harding offered what he called a return to normalcy. He won.

His presidency lasted barely two and a half years. He died in San Francisco on August second, nineteen twenty-three, officially of a heart attack while on a Western tour, and the nation mourned genuinely. More than a million people lined the tracks as his funeral train crossed the country.

Then the scandals arrived. The Teapot Dome affair, in which Interior Secretary Albert Fall accepted bribes to lease federal oil reserves to private companies, became the defining corruption scandal of the era. Veterans' Bureau chief Charles Forbes stole tens of millions from programs meant to care for returning soldiers. Harding himself was never directly implicated, but the stench clung to his memory for decades.

The memorial, dedicated by President Herbert Hoover in June nineteen thirty-one, was funded by nearly a million dollars in donations from more than a million people, including an estimated two hundred thousand schoolchildren who contributed pennies. It rises fifty-three feet, ringed by marble columns twenty-eight feet tall, a formal monument to a complicated man.

Marion has made a different kind of peace with Harding. The Harding Presidential Sites here include his restored home, where he ran his famous Front Porch Campaign, receiving delegations of visitors on his own lawn. The Ohio History Connection manages the memorial. And Marion, a mid-sized Ohio city with its own industrial history and struggles, remembers a native son who reached the highest office and then left it under a shadow he never lived to see fully form.