If George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are the saints in America’s civil religion, then the 29th president, Warren G. Harding, is our sinner, consistently judged a failure and ranked dead last among his peers. Historian Phillip G. Payne offers the first significant reinterpretation of this controversial presidency in a discussion of his book Dead Last: The Public Memory of Warren G. Harding’s Scandalous Legacy. Payne, an associate professor of history at St. Bonaventure University in western New York, explores how Harding’s name became synonymous with corruption, cronyism, and incompetence.

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