President Warren G Harding: 1921 Disarmament Conference Address in AI

[@gretchencanfield5908]

Back in the day when they reminded us we were a republic.

[@jimdrake-writer]

Another fascinating presidential "video speech" from Bob Fells, whose brief Introductions make these "living speeches" all the more inviting. Yesterday, October 26, 2024, was the 103rd anniversary of Harding's speech in Birmingham, AL, in which he told a vast multiracial audience that he believed strongly in equal educational and occupational opportunities for Black Americans, whose exodus to Chicago and other northern cities, he argued, would negatively affect the South's economy. In Ohio, Harding's home state, and especially in Marion, his hometown, the speech revived a rumor that had plagued Harding when he entered politics: that he himself was partly Black. When biographer Francis Russell's 1968 biography of Harding, "The Shadow of Blooming Grove," was about to be published, the Harding family exerted enough pressure on the publisher to delete passages and entire pages in which the rumor of Harding's Black ancestry was discussed. In his own way, Francis Russell got even: all of the deletions were typeset as blank spaces throughout the book.