Non-fiction: Inaugural Address

Occasion and Mood
Warren G. Harding’s 1921 inaugural address meets a nation unsettled by war, influenza, inflation, labor strife, and political division. He speaks in a tone of humility and reconciliation, promising steadiness rather than drama. His core promise is a return to the normal processes of constitutional government and private enterprise, with confidence anchored in law, restraint, and public faith rather than sweeping experiments.

Restoring Constitutional Balance and Fiscal Order
Harding emphasizes coordination between the executive and Congress, stressing party responsibility and the supremacy of the popular will expressed through representative institutions. He calls for a comprehensive national budget, disciplined taxation, and debt reduction to replace wartime improvisation. Efficiency in administration and an end to bureaucratic excess are framed as moral as well as economic imperatives, essential to renewing trust and unleashing enterprise. He favors withdrawing extraordinary wartime controls and restoring limited government, arguing that stability in law and finance is the precondition for prosperity.

Economic Policy, Agriculture, and Transportation
Championing a protective tariff and policies that encourage domestic production, Harding presents recovery as a partnership with business rather than a contest. He pledges particular help to farmers who face falling prices and heavy debts after wartime expansion, endorsing better credit, cooperative marketing, and fair freight rates. Transportation, including railways and merchant marine, must be reliable and privately operated under public safeguards. The overarching goal is predictable conditions in which investment and employment can expand without government micromanagement.

Labor, Capital, and Social Peace
Harding affirms the legitimacy of organized labor and collective bargaining while insisting that neither strikes nor lockouts should imperil public safety or economic life. He appeals for industrial statesmanship from both sides, urging arbitration, mutual respect, and observance of contracts. Industrial peace, in his telling, depends on fair wages and conditions, productivity grounded in cooperation, and the abandonment of class war rhetoric that had sharpened during and after the war.

Citizenship, Rights, and National Character
Acknowledging women’s recent enfranchisement, he welcomes their participation as a vital reinforcement of civic life. He invokes public health, education, and child welfare as national concerns that deserve sustained attention, not emergency treatment. He rejects both intolerance and radicalism, defending free institutions and lawful dissent while warning against revolutionary doctrines hostile to constitutional order. The promise is equal opportunity under the law across creed and origin, with Americanization defined by loyalty to shared civic principles.

Foreign Policy, Peace, and Disarmament
Harding sketches an independent American internationalism: friendly, cooperative, and helpful, yet wary of binding commitments that could entangle the United States in distant quarrels. He declines the idea of joining the League of Nations as constituted, but proposes an association of nations devoted to conciliation, open diplomacy, and the limitation of armaments. Peace is to be secured through conference and candid agreements rather than coercive alliances. He affirms traditional doctrines of hemispheric responsibility, seeks stable relations with neighbors such as Mexico, and supports a strong but economical Navy consistent with the pursuit of disarmament.

Spirit of Normalcy and National Purpose
The address gathers its themes around a quiet ideal: to substitute normal processes for emergency measures, prudence for passion, and constructive work for agitation. Harding calls for patience in readjustment, charity in public debate, and confidence in the capacity of American institutions. The program is neither isolationist nor adventurous, neither anti-business nor statist; it is an appeal to moderation, responsibility, and cooperative effort as the surest path from war-borne turbulence to steady, lawful prosperity.