Ku Klux Klan Members in United States Politics - Individual Cases - Warren G. Harding - Evidence Against Harding's Membership

Evidence Against Harding's Membership

In their 2005 book Freakonomics, University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner wrote of their visit to Stetson Kennedy's Florida home and alluded to Warren Harding's possible Klan affiliation. However, in a New York Times Magazine Freakonomics column, entitled "Hoodwinked? Does it matter if an activist who exposes the inner workings of the Ku Klux Klan isn't open about how he got those secrets?"," (New York Times Magazine, January 8, 2006, pp. 26–28), Dubner and Levitt, publicizing a new, revised edition of Freakonomics, repeated the allegations of an author, Ben Green, who had contacted them accusing Stetson Kennedy of dishonestly concealing that he had had help from uncredited associates in his 1940s undercover work against the Klan. Accepting Green's disparaging view of Kennedy uncritically, Dubner and Levitt insinuated that Kennedy's alleged lack of candor now cast doubt on his journalistic integrity. Although nothing in their article specifically addressed whether Warren Harding was or was not a Klan member, they now indicated that they no longer accepted Stetson Kennedy's testimony about the Klan at full face value. Other scholars, however, such as Peggy Bulger, now head of the Folklife Division of the Library of Congress, who wrote her Ph.D. on Kennedy, strenuously countered Green, Levitt, and Dubner's accusations. In fact, Kennedy, whose own house had been firebombed and who had left the country in consequence, had concealed the identities of his associates in 1954 to protect them from reprisals but had never denied to Bulger or anyone who asked that he had had help in writing his stories. In 2006, The Florida Times-Union, after extensive research, published an article "KKK Book Stands Up to Claim of Falsehood" (January 29, 2006) substantiating the general accuracy of Kennedy's account of infiltrating the Klan, while acknowledging that (as he himself never denied) he had made use of dramatic effects and multiple narratives in his 1954 book I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan.

Primary source material on file at the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus does not contain evidence of Harding's alleged membership in the Klan.

Primary source material on file at the Marion County (Ohio) Historical Society (Warren G. Harding Collection) also does not confirm or indicate any involvement in the Klan, nor support the idea of Harding’s alleged Klan membership.

Harding was the first American President to publicly denounce lynching and did so in a landmark 21 October 1921 speech in Birmingham, Alabama, which was covered in the national press. Harding also vigorously supported an anti-lynching bill in Congress during his term in the White House. While the bill was defeated in the Senate, such activities would be in direct conflict with Klan membership.

The Site Administrator of the Harding Home Museum (Ohio Historical Society property) in Marion, Ohio, draws a relationship between Harding's alleged Klan activities directly to the rumor-mill stirred up after the President died in 1923 and Mrs. Harding in 1924.

In his book, The Strange Deaths of President Harding, historian Robert Ferrell Ph.D. claims to have been unable to find any records of any such "ceremony" in which Harding was brought into the Klan in the White House. Also, John Dean, in his 2004 book Warren Harding (edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger), also could find no proof of Klan membership or activity on the part of the 29th President to indicate support of the Klan.

Review of the personal records of Harding's Personal White House Secretary, George Christian Jr., also do not support the contention that Harding received members of the Klan while in office. Appointment books maintained in the White House, detailing President Harding's daily schedules, do not show any such event.

In addition to the above points, the 1920 Republican Party platform, which essentially expressed Harding's political philosophy, calls for Congress to pass laws combating lynching.

Carl S. Anthony, biographer of Harding's wife (though not of Warren), found no such proof of Harding's membership in the Klan, he does however discuss the events leading up to the period when the alleged Klan ceremony was held in June 1923:

knowing that the some branches of the Shriners were anti-Catholic and in that sense sympathetic to the Ku Klax Klan and that the Klan itself was holding a demonstration less than a half mile from Washington, Harding censured hate groups in his Shriners speech. The press "considered a direct attack" on the Klan, particularly in light of his criticism weeks earlier of "factions of hatred and prejudice and violence challeng both civil and religious liberty".

Anthony also details Harding's induction into the Tall Cedars of Lebanon, a Shrine organization, during the convention week (making note of the conical hat used by the Tall Cedars in the ceremony); Anthony writes that he feels that the charges made by Grand Wizard Alton Young (reported by Wyn Craig Wade in 1985) against Harding were in "retaliation for the Shrine speech and another anti-bigotry speech made by Harding at the dedication of the Alexander Hamilton statue at the Treasury Building" in the previous month of May 1923.

In 2005, The Straight Dope presented a summary of many of these arguments against Harding's membership, and noted that, while it might have been politically expedient for him to join the KKK in public, to do it in private would have been of no benefit to him.