Warren Harding: Corpse Of An Administration

About this episode

This episode explores the hidden corruption and scandals surrounding President Warren G. Harding's administration following his death.

The nation wept for Warren G. Harding in August 1923. The funeral train crawled home through crowds that stretched for miles, mourners singing hymns by the tracks, certain they were burying one of the most beloved men ever to hold the office. They had no idea what they were really putting in the ground. Within a year, the floorboards of that respectable house started to creak, and the bodies that had been piling up around the president began to make sense. This episode walks you back into the White House and down into the rot. We start with Harding's sudden death in a San Francisco hotel room, the autopsy his widow refused, and the papers she burned in the fireplace afterward. From there we meet the Ohio Gang, the cronies who understood that the presidency could be sold off one favor at a time out of a little green house on K Street. We sit with the wounded men of the Great War, gassed and shaking in their hospital beds, while Charles Forbes turned their bandages and their medicine into bribe money and bled the Veterans Bureau of more than $200 million. And we follow the oil. Teapot Dome is famous in name, but the truth is dirtier than the half-memory: a broke Interior secretary…

Topics covered

• Warren G. Harding
• political corruption
• Teapot Dome scandal
• Ohio Gang
• Veterans Bureau
• history of the presidency

Keywords

• Warren G. Harding
• Ohio Gang
• Teapot Dome
• political corruption
• Veterans Bureau
• Charles Forbes
• Albert Fall
• history
• true crime

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Veterans Bureau, U.S. Navy

Places: San Francisco, Ohio, Montana

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