The Pilgrimmage to Marion

I have returned, and while the trip to Hardingland was shorter than I would have preferred, I saw much and have much to say.

Marion, Ohio is still a farm city, pretty in its older core yet built-up with chainstores on the periphery, surrounded by dead level Midwestern farms. The southern approach via Columbus was initially ugly -- Walmarts, McDonalds, etc., plaza after plaza, plenty of traffic -- but thinned out eventually, and soon we were driving parallel railroad tracks thorugh pleasant rural central Ohio. You pass signs for Rutherford Hayes' presidential center on the way, reminding you that Ohio prides itself on being birthplace to eight presidents.

Harding's home (built in 1891) is located on Mount Vernon Ave, retains its green paint with white trim that Harding preferred back in the 1900s, and is in the midst of getting a serious facelift -- the famous "Front Porch" where thousands came to hear Harding speak during the 1920 campaign is being rebuilt. The parking lot is rather small (but was packed with cars, I was happy to see) and the museum/admissions hut is housed in the original 1920 press shack, ordered and built by WGH from Sears Roebuck so reporters would have a place to file their campaign stories. The grounds are well-kept and are studded with various Harding curiosities: a large mobile voting carriage from the 1880s, a small but handsome monument/sundial dedicated to WGH in the late 1980s, and a double-sided sign describing the 1920 campaign and helping visitors around Marion's "Harding trail."

Our tour (and those before and after) were full-up; many from Ohio, but the mix of accents suggested a pretty broad crowd. Once you step inside the backdoor and into the kitchen, you feel the air-conditioning and smell the musty odor of an old, closed-up house. And it really is a lovely house, with decorations quite typical of an era caught in-between late Victorian decadence and emerging modern simplicity, the era of velvet and walnut and another of electricity, iceboxes, and radio. What impressions did I have of the house? Three things came to mind:

1.) Harding was perhaps the most middle-class American president of the twentieth century (along with Truman probably). Think about it: son of a country doctor, highly religious parents, hates farmwork, moves to larger town when still a youth, tries but dislikes both the law and schoolteaching, works as a reporter because he has a love and gift for language (and gets fired because he was revealed as a Republican working for a Democratic newspaper), borrows $100 from father to buy a bankrupt Marion newspaper along with 2 friends, works hard to make it a success and eventually buys them out (selling the paper for $500,000 in 1923 -- it is still Marion's only newspaper, and you see red Marion Star paper boxes along all the roadsides), invests wisely and becomes moderately wealthy, enters Republican politics and by 1914 gets into the US Senate, works hard and maneuvers himself into the presidency in 1920. At the time of his death in 1923, his estate was worth $850,000. The house is a reflection of this, with its small library, its pretty front parlor complete with mobile Victrola, its rather small upstairs bedrooms, its many cigar humidors. This is not a mansion, along the lines of Oyster Bay, Hyde Park, or Hyannis. He built it for $3400 in 1891, mothballed it 1920, and planned to move back after the White House.

2.) That said, Let's not underestimate Harding's material comforts; he may have been middle-class, but it was in the upper echelons. The home is ornate in parts, with its heavily paneled rooms, carved woodwork, and parquet floors. When the original front porch collapsed around 1900, he had an immense replacement built for summer parties and political gatherings. Like many, he also employed one or two house servants to cook and clean.

3.) I was surprised at how European the house was decorated. The Hardings traveled in Europe before WW1 and returned with a number of goods they displayed proudy in their home: Italian marble busts, German and Italian china, elaborate French and Italian vases, several oil paintings. Again, WGH may have been middle-class, but he was gilded on the edges.

After leaving the house, running out of time, we drove across town to see his memorial. In my mind's eye, I thought it would be smaller; instead, the Harding Memorial stunned me by its size. It is huge and frankly impressive. Circular and white-columned, he and his wife are buried in the middle of a small Japanese garden at its center. There is little lettering on the walls, merely he and his wife's name and dates. No large quotes like Jefferson or Lincoln. What other presidents have been honored on this scale?

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