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The Historical Presidency : The Road Not Taken: Warren G. Harding and the Dilemmas of Regime Restoration
Author(s) -
Crockett David A.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
presidential studies quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.337
H-Index - 5
eISSN - 1741-5705
pISSN - 0360-4918
DOI - 10.1111/psq.12502
Subject(s) - presidency , conservatism , presidential system , interregnum , successor cardinal , politics , new deal , law , gilded age , political science , progressivism , history , mathematical analysis , mathematics
In Stephen Skowronek's political time schema, Warren G. Harding is a regime manager tasked with restoring the Republican regime established by William McKinley after Woodrow Wilson's interregnum. Harding faced a particularly interesting decision, for although McKinley was the founder of the modern post–Gilded Age Republican regime, his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, was clearly a more dynamic and disruptive force in the party. The overlooked figure in this sequence, however, is William Howard Taft—in some ways a throwback to a pre‐Roosevelt president, but one who prosecuted a reform policy agenda. Presented with three different models of presidential leadership, Harding ignored the progressive conservatism of Taft and returned to a mistakenly Whiggish view of McKinley's leadership. The result was a lost opportunity for Republicans in the 1920s, setting up their repudiation in 1932.