and "Presidents are ranked wrong. In The Jazz Age Defending Warren G. Harding, Ryan Walters mounts a case that Harding deserves to move up - and supplies the evidence to make that case strong. -Amity Shlaes, bestselling author of CoolidgeHe's the butt of political jokes, frequently subjected to ridicule, and almost never absent a and "Worst Presidents and " list where he most often ends up at the bottom. Historians have labeled him the and "Worst President Ever, and " and "Dead Last, and " and "Unfit, and " and and "Incompetent, and " to name but a few. Many contemporaries were equally cruel. H. L. Mencken called him a and "nitwit. and " To Alice Roosevelt Longworth, he was a and "slob. and " Such is the current reputation of our 29th President, Warren Gamaliel Harding. In an interesting survey in 1982, which divided the scholarly respondents into and "conservative and " and and "liberal and " categories, both groups picked Harding as the worst President. But historian Ryan Walters shows that Harding, a humble man from Marion, Ohio, has been unfairly remembered. He quickly fixed an economy in depression and started the boom of the Roaring Twenties, healed a nation in the throes of social disruption, and reversed America's interventionist foreign policy.