Warren G. Harding

Harding spent his life in rural Ohio, bought The Marion Star as a young man and turned it into a success, then moved through the state senate, a stint as lieutenant governor, a failed governor's race in 1910, and election to the U.S. Senate in 1914. He was a long shot for the Republican nomination in 1920 until the convention deadlocked and he emerged on the tenth ballot, ran a front porch campaign from Marion, promised a return to normalcy after World War I, and crushed James M. Cox in a landslide. His cabinet had serious names - Andrew Mellon at Treasury, Herbert Hoover at Commerce, Charles Evans Hughes at State - and the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922 produced a decade-long naval limitations agreement among the world's major powers. He released political prisoners jailed for opposing the war. In 1923, on a western tour, he died of a heart attack in San Francisco. Then the trials: Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall convicted for corruption in the Teapot Dome scandal, Attorney General Harry Daugherty tried but not convicted, an affair with Nan Britton made public, and Harding's name dragged to the bottom of history's list.