Books: Kiss Me, Harding

THE SHADOW OF BLOOMING GROVE:

WARREN G. HARDING IN HIS TIMES by Francis Russell. 691 pages. McGraw-Hill. $12.50.

Writing an exciting biography about Warren Gamaliel Harding is like filming a chase sequence with a wooden Indian. Harding's instincts were all for posture. Like a suntanned Roman, he struck his Midwest Ciceronian pose and held it, occasionally delivering himself of the sort of speech that instantly self-destructs upon reaching the brain.

Francis Russell, historian of Sacco and Vanzetti (Tragedy in Dedham), keeps his camera circling the 29th President of the United States and sometimes almost creates the illusion the body is twitching with life. Manfully he rates Harding as "an astute and able Ohio politician" and "above all, a kindly man." But he is up against one of the great political still lifes of modern times. The personal portrait that emerges reveals a man notable mainly for his mediocrity of mind and spirit—a rather lazy fellow for whom somebody else always had to open the door when opportunity knocked.

Substitute First Baseman. Even as a boy out of Blooming Grove, Ohio, "Winnie" Harding went in for nothing much more strenuous than tootling his B-flat cornet in the band. After five minutes of shucking corn, he gave it up for good, "saying it was too hard." At Iberia College—now Ohio Central College —his main interests were "debating, writing, and making friends," desultory preparation for the desultory professional floundering that followed.

Moving to Marion, Ohio, young Harding dabbled in teaching, browsed briefly over law books, sold insurance, played his cornet at the roller-skating rink, and rode the bench as substitute first baseman on the town's ball club. He also began to master perhaps his most highly developed skill: draw poker.

Backing into the newspaper business as a $100 investor in the nearly defunct Marion Star, Harding built it into a modest moneymaker, Russell claims, though apparently it was Harding's wife Florence (the "Duchess") who strong-armed both the newspaper and the man into success. A virago of a woman five years older than her "Wurr'n," she was the one driving masculine principle in her husband's life—the force that thrust him upward out of the comfortable country editor's chair in which Harding liked to slump in a "digestive trance" after lunch.

Harding floated into the Ohio senate, then the U.S. Senate, borne on waves of alliteration: "Progress is not proclamation nor palaver," he orated when delivering the nominating speech for Taft in 1912. "It is not pretence nor play on prejudice." He based his own progress on one cardinal rule: Don't "offend anybody." Half awesomely, he was described as "the greatest exponent of standpatism the state ever had."

After the 1920 Republican Convention, which chose him over two abler candidates, Major General Leonard Wood and Illinois Governor Frank O. Lowden, Harding became the compromise candidate to end all compromises. He was, at best, the man nobody really hated—the legendary two-o'clock-in-the-morning choice of political bosses horse-trading in a smoke-filled room.