CHAPTER XXXIII 

 WARREN G. HARDING 



Honorary Vice- President of the National Tuberculosis Association, 1921 



TO HAVE the President of the United States as an honorary 

 vice-president of any association is indeed a great distinc- 

 tion, and to be permitted to incorporate a biographical 

 sketch of the first citizen of the United States in the history of 

 the anti-tuberculosis movement in this country, because he has 

 honored us by accepting the honorary vice-presidency, is a 

 privilege which every member of the Association deeply ap- 

 preciates. 



Warren G. Harding is the son of a physician, the venerable Dr. 

 George Tryon Harding of Marion, Ohio. Dr. Harding, although 

 he has been nearly fifty years in practice, is still hale and hearty 

 and following his profession. Such an ancestry speaks well for 

 the President. The Hardings are of good, old Colonial stock. 

 They settled first in Connecticut, removing later to the Wyoming 

 Valley, Pennsylvania, where some of them were massacred and 

 others fought in the Revolutionary War. The mother of the 

 President, Phoebe Elizabeth Dickerson, was descended from an 

 old-time Holland Dutch family, the Van Kirks ; so that in Warren 

 G. Harding is found the blending of the blood of the hardy Holland 

 Dutch and the fearless, alert, and liberty-loving Scotch. His in- 

 terest in medical science, preventive medicine, and, what con- 

 cerns us particularly, the tuberculosis problem, he has evidently 

 acquired directly from his father. 



Warren G. Harding was born in Blooming Grove, Morrow 

 County, Ohio, November 2, 1865. Of his boyhood an unknown 

 biographer says: "He was just a natural, healthy, robust boy, 

 endowed with the supremest gifts of nature good, hard common 

 sense, a rugged constitution, a sunny disposition, and a heart full 

 of the milk of human kindness. " He attended the village school 

 until fourteen years of age, when he entered the Ohio Central 



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