After college he became the publisher of a newspaper and was a trustee of the Trinity Baptist Church, and belonged to charitable enterprises. He was not healthy in his youth and had several nervous breakdowns. He was the first president to be born after the Civil War. The 2 years in his term are remembered mainly for the scandals that clouded his administration, and Harding admitted to his close friends that the job was beyond him. He appointed his friends and among them were dishonest cheats, who came to be known as "the Ohio gang. Most of them were later charged with cheating the government, and some of them went to jail. One of the things he did with this group of friends was play poker, drink whiskey, smoke, play golf, and stay up until all hours. Some of the corruption was in the Department of Justice and (later Federal) Bureau of Investigation, and in Forbes' Veterans' Bureau. Harding was not very knowledgeable about foreign affairs when he became president.

However in a move of that surprised some, he called for political, economic, and educational equality for the races. One of the things that he was know for was the Immigrant Quota Act of 1921 that limiting entrants from each nation to 3 percent of that nationality's presence in the U.S. population as recorded by the 1910 census. Another legacy of his was the Dawes Plan which was a committee consisted of ten representatives, two each from Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States; it was charged with finding a solution for the collection of the German reparations debt, set at almost 20 billion marks. Harding called for lowering of taxes and removal of the wartime excess profits tax, a reduction of railroad rates and a national budget system, and the Department of Welfare. In June 1923 he started on a "Voyage of Understanding" which took him to the west coast and as far as Alaska. He was already suffering from a heart condition, he collapsed on his way back and died suddenly of a thrombosis, in San Francisco, on Aug. 2, 1923. Most historians regard Harding as the worst president in the nation's history.