Sold – President Harding As Leader of the Republican Party

Though the 1920 Republican landslide had provided a top-heavy Republican legislature for in-coming Ohio Governor Harry L. Davis, he quickly found the going rough. There were rumblings in the state senate for an investigation of some administration activities, and the senate and house soon were at logger-heads over tax legislation and the time of adjournment. The impasse reached the point where the governor, exercising a constitutional prerogative, dismissed the assembly on May 28, 1921. When he did so, there were charges that the Governor had used this drastic method to send the lawmakers home to forestall an investigation of state contracts. In office for just four months, Davis began to think about leaving Columbus and making a race for the U.S. Senate seat up for grabs in 1922. Harding was consulted about the political situation and personalities in Ohio, and responded by showing that he was above petty considerations of individuals and sought only the good of the party.

Typed Letter Signed as President on White House letterhead, Washington, May 9, 1921, to W.H. Phipps, Ohio Republican politician and delegate to the party’s National Convention in 1916. “I have your letter of May 6. I quite agree with you that the Republicans of Ohio must be casting their lines to be ready for a party victory in Ohio in 1922. We shall all be deeply interested in continuing a Republican state administration and shall be anxious, of course, to return the big Republican delegation in Congress. I have not been able to keep in touch with things intimately, as you can well imagine, but I have assumed that Governor Davis has been making a very satisfactory record and that all the Republicans in the State would be cordially back of him if he seeks to succeed himself, as one would naturally expect him to do. Of course, the Governor has a perfect right to seek to transfer his activities from the Governorship to the Senate. Though I have nothing official on this score, I assume that it will be decided in ample time to make a line-up for the highest party good. Naturally, I cannot be a participant in the settlement of ambitions for nominations. My one concern is party victory at the polls. I unhesitatingly commend every proper effort being made now to fortify our position in the State for the next year.”

Harding was right to be concerned about the need to buttress the party’s position in 1922. With the collapse in 1921 of the economic boom attributable to World War I, and the resultant wage cuts, unemployment, growing farm distress, and urban resentment of prohibition, Harding found that much of his initial popularity was seeping away. The 1922 congressional elections were a rebuke to the Republicans, both nationally and in Ohio.

As for Davis, whatever his ambitions may have been to run for the Senate, they never came to fruition. Republican Simeon D. Fess, then a U.S. Representative from Ohio, took the  Senate seat in 1923 and held it until 1935. In the end, sensing he would lose, Davis did not even run for reelection as governor in 1922.