Working Through the Harding Presidency Worksheet
The Harding Presidency Worksheet Answer Key is something that comes up constantly in AP US History classes and lower-level college surveys. Warren G. Harding's term runs from 1921 to 1923, and most worksheets on this topic end up asking the same core questions about the Teapot Dome scandal, the cabinet appointments, and the general vibe of the era. I've graded enough of these to know where students consistently trip up, and there's one pattern that shows up in virtually every section. Here's the straightforward breakdown you're looking for, and I'll flag the things that teachers actually want you to get right versus where people go wrong. Q: What was Harding's campaign slogan?
A: "Return to Normalcy." This isn't just a catchy phrase — it's the entire framework of his presidency. Students often write "back to normal" or miss the word "return." The full slogan matters because it signaled a deliberate pivot away from Wilson's internationalism and Progressive Era reform momentum. Harding was telling a exhausted postwar country that the federal government would stop trying to fix everything.
Q: Name three scandals of the Harding administration.
A: Teapot Dome, the Veterans' Bureau scandal, and the Attorney General's office corruption (specifically Harry Daugherty). Teapot Dome is the big one — Interior Secretary Albert Fall leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming to private oil companies in exchange for bribes. Fall went to prison. That detail about the prison sentence is worth noting because it distinguishes Harding scandals from Roosevelt's Square Deal era complaints, which were mostly regulatory failures without criminal convictions of cabinet members. Q: Who was Calvin Coolidge and what was his role?
A: He was Harding's vice president and succeeded him upon Harding's death in August 1923. Students sometimes conflate Coolidge's own later scandals with Harding's. They didn't inherit the same level of corruption — Coolidge was aggressively clean and actually purged some of Harding's holdovers. But they share the same era's political culture. Q: What was the Revenue Act of 1921?
A: It cut top income tax rates dramatically, from 73% down to 25%. This is part of the "normalcy" agenda — lower taxes, less federal intervention. Students miss the connection between this and the broader philosophy. It wasn't random. It was deliberate supply-side thinking before the term existed, paired with Mellon's Treasury reforms.
Here's a problem I ran into grading these repeatedly: students will correctly identify Teapot Dome but then attribute the corruption directly to Harding himself. That's the trap. There's no smoking gun linking Harding to the bribes. The evidence suggests he was negligent — he appointed the wrong people and failed to oversee them — but not knowingly corrupt. The Distinxtion matters for any essay question on the worksheet. If the prompt asks about presidential responsibility versus personal culpability, you need to hold both concepts separately. Harding's failure was one of judgment and oversight, not active conspiracy. Q: What was the Emergency Quota Act of 1921?
A: It restricted immigration by setting quotas based on 3% of each nationality's population as of the 1910 census. The Immigration Act of 1924 tightened this further to 2% using the 1890 census, which disproportionately favored Northern European immigrants. This reflects the nativist climate of the era and is often underweighted on worksheets. Don't skip it. Q: Why did Harding die in office?
A: The official cause was a heart attack, though some historians have speculated about other factors. He died on a speaking tour in San Francisco on August 2, 1923. The exact circumstances remain slightly unresolved, but the heart attack diagnosis is what any standard answer key will accept.
Get the Full Details
The one area where answer keys disagree the most is on evaluating Harding's overall presidency. Some rubrics want you to call him incompetent. Others want measured language about "prejudice against his administration." The reality is more useful than either label. Harding filled his cabinet with friends from Ohio — the "Ohio Gang" — and several of them were corrupt. He seemed largely unaware of the depth of the corruption until it became public, and even then his response was slow and ineffective. But he also presided over a period of significant economic growth and signed the McNary-Haugen farm bill (though Coolidge vetoed it). He called for a naval disarmament conference that produced the Nine-Power Treaty. It's a mixed record, and the worksheet question about his legacy usually wants you to acknowledge both the corruption and the genuine policy achievements without collapsing into pure cynicism or pure apology. If you're looking for the actual document, most versions circulate through teacher resource sites like Lesson Planet or shareable Google Drive folders that educators maintain. The most reliable source is usually the textbook companion site — if your class is using McPherson or Foner, check their supplementary materials first. Those tend to align with what your specific teacher's answer key will expect, which matters more than getting the historically accurate answer when you're handing in homework.
