Warren G. Harding

Death in office

In June of 1923, Harding set out on a cross-country "Voyage of Understanding," planning to meet ordinary people and explain his policies. During this trip, he became the first President to visit Alaska. Rumors of corruption in his administration were beginning to circulate in Washington by this time, and Harding was profoundly shocked by a long message he received while in Alaska, apparently detailing illegal activities previously unknown to him. At the end of July, while traveling south from Alaska through British Columbia, he developed what was thought to be a severe case of food poisoning. Arriving at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, he developed pneumonia. Harding died of either a heart attack or a stroke at 7:35 p.m. on August 2, 1923 at age 57. Naval physicians surmised that he had suffered a heart attack; however, this diagnosis was not made by Dr. Charles Sawyer, the Surgeon General, who was traveling with the presidential party. Upon Sawyer's recommendation, Mrs. Harding refused permission for an autopsy, which soon led to speculation that the President had been the victim of a plot. Sawyer's medical qualifications were also called into question. Harding was succeeded by his Vice President, Calvin Coolidge, who was sworn in by his father, a Justice of the Peace, in Plymouth Notch, Vermont.

Related Topics:
June - 1923 - Alaska - July - British Columbia - Food poisoning - San Francisco - Pneumonia - August 2 - Heart attack - Surgeon General - Autopsy - Calvin Coolidge - Plymouth Notch - Vermont

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Following his death, Harding's body was returned to Washington, where it was placed in the Gold Room of the White House pending a state funeral at the United States Capitol. White House employees at the time were quoted as saying that the night before the funeral, they heard Mrs. Harding speak for more than an hour to the face of her dead husband. The most commonly reported (though never verified) remark attributed to Mrs. Harding at this time was: "They can't hurt you now, Warren."

Related Topics:
White House - State funeral - United States Capitol

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Harding was entombed in the receiving vault of the Marion Cemetery, Marion, Ohio, in August 1923. Following Mrs. Harding's death in November 1924, she too was temporarily buried next to her husband. Both bodies were moved in December 1927 to the newly completed Harding Memorial in Marion, which was dedicated by President Herbert Hoover in 1931. The lapse between the final interment and the dedication was due in part to the aftermath of the Teapot Dome scandal.

Related Topics:
Marion, Ohio - August - 1923 - November - 1924 - December - 1927 - Harding Memorial - Herbert Hoover - 1931 - Teapot Dome

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In 1930, a former private investigator named Gaston Means wrote the exploitative book, The Strange Death of President Harding, in which he suggested many people had motives to murder the President, including his wife. Means claimed it was possible that Mrs. Harding poisoned the President, a rumor that has clouded the facts of Harding's death and heart condition. In 1933, an exposé in Liberty magazine denounced Means as a fraud who used a ghost writer for The Strange Death of President Harding. The theories advanced by Means—who had previously been imprisoned for his suspect activities while an FBI agent—have never been proven; they remain as speculative as they were sensational.

Related Topics:
1930 - Gaston Means - 1933 - FBI

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