Warren G. Harding

Usually ranked near the bottom for scandal, Harding looks better through this lens. He commuted Eugene Debs's sentence in 1921 and invited him to the White House, released most of the other political prisoners held under Wilson's wartime laws, and in a 1921 speech in Birmingham, Alabama, called for political equality for Black Americans before a segregated audience. He backed a federal anti-lynching bill that passed the House but died in a Senate filibuster.