The death of Warren Harding

My lifetime contemplation of Warren Harding probably adds up to around an hour, so all this as came as news to me:

(1) When he died 99 years ago this summer, Harding was on a two-month (!) train trip across the North American continent, during which he became the first sitting president to visit the Alaska territory, and, more surprisingly, Canada.

(2) This was billed as “The Journey of Understanding.” It was probably in essence a campaign trip, but it’s a reminder of how different travel was just three generations ago, even for elites. It took several days to get from the East Coast to the West Coast even if you were trying to make the trip as quickly as possible. And this of course was a massive improvement from the situation just a few decades earlier, when such a trip necessarily took at least a month.

(3) Harding fell ill in San Francisco, and was being attended by five doctors, including Ray Wilbur, the president of Stanford, when he died of a heart attack, which was mis-diagnosed as a stroke at the time, because of the state of understanding of CVD in those days.

Amazingly, his wife refused permission for an autopsy, and had the body embalmed immediately. You can imagine how this went over. Wilbur:

“We were belabored and attacked by newspapers antagonistic to Harding, and by cranks, quacks, antivivisectionists, nature healers, the Dr. Albert Abrams electronic-diagnosis group, and many others. We were accused of starving the President to death, of feeding him to death, of assisting in slowly poisoning him, and of plying him to death with pills and purgatives. We were accused of being abysmally ignorant, stupid and incompetent, and even of malpractice.”

(4) In fact Harding may have been killed by his quack personal pseudo-doctor:

Another theory, from presidential biographer Carl Anthony, is that Harding’s preferred doctor, Charles Sawyer, gave the president “purgatives” to hasten his recovery. He believes the remedies issued by Sawyer, who wasn’t a trained physician, may have aggravated Harding’s heart condition.

“The evidence makes plausible that (Sawyer) accidentally provoked the death of the president with a final, fatal overdose of his mysterious purgatives,” Anthony said in a 1998 interview

I seem to recall vaguely that JFK’s personal physician was purportedly incompetent or reckless or something, but at least he was actually a doctor, probably.

(5) I suppose Harding’s death is the closest thing we’ve had to the fabled one heartbeat away from the presidency scenario, unless you count FDR, but it was widely assumed that FDR was a dying man when he was elected to a fourth term, which is an interesting story in itself.