About the Warren G. Harding Foundation

Warren G. Harding is often championed by historians as arguably the worst president in Vespucciland history. This indictment would be entirely deserving and appropriate if not for the single act in his presidential career that might’ve possibly redeemed his legacy, if only to bump him up to a tie for last, and if only people knew to credit him for it. That act was the formation of the Harding Foundation.

The Harding Foundation was originally conceived as an unofficial solution to the problem of unrestricted magic, extra-dimensional beings, time-space trespassers, Demons, Celestials, and whatever else showed up uninvited on the shores of Vespucciland. Back in the good old days Vespucciland was a much more conservative nation than most of the world, at least when it came to tolerance for the preternatural.

In fact, the popular mythology of the country depicts the original pilgrims of Vespucciland as specifically coming to the new world to escape the oppressive chaos and madness that constantly threatened to unmoor old Europa from its very tectonic plates. Of course, rarely mentioned are the much larger numbers of exiled criminals, fortune-seekers, indentured servants, good old fashioned slaves, and penniless nobles that also came over to make their fortunes, or at least to die somewhere not as crowded.

It’s not any great conspiracy that these people were overlooked in the grade school history books. It’s just that a proper national mythos requires a certain romanticism; escape from persecution is a great start, manifest destination is also an excellent choice, and of course the old divine exceptionalism. On the other hand, “I heard there was work” and “Too many creditors back home” didn’t exactly conjure up an ancestral legacy that’s bursting with patriotic possibilities.

In any case since national mythology tends to self-fulfill into a national identity, the majority of the populace came to hold a very strict attitude of firm intolerance for the extra-natural settling down in their neighborhood plane of existence. Luckily for its citizens, Vespucciland seemed to exist in the calm eye of Midway’s stormy reality. The first two hundred years or so after the birth of the Vespucciland nation was peaceful, predictable, and above all normal.

However, nature abhors disequilibrium, even in shares of chaos. Things started to creep in. They sneaked in with the new waves of immigrants from Europa and the Syndicated States. They left the vast wilderness, moved into the cities, and scared the living daylights out of people. And most ominously they started waking up from their centuries-long afternoon catnaps to the surprise of people who had built tract housing on their beds.

The populace got scared, but more importantly the populace also voted. Thus President Warren G. Harding in his painfully rationed wisdom decided to form the Harding Foundation to fight back against the paranormal tide. No one knows if it was a genuine act of foresight or just a way to score cheap political points. But even a broken clock is right twice a day… unless it’s digital .

The Harding Foundation, against all expectations, proved very successful in its mission to protect Vespucciland. While the country could never go back to its historical state of blissful ignorance, the Foundation at least was able to stifle all the supernatural tomfoolery to a low hum and keep the nastiest things out of the headlines.

However, even though the Foundation was able to protect Vespucciland’s existential reality, political reality eventuality caught up with it. After years and years of budget cuts, political in-fighting, backstabbing, frontblunting, and a dark period when the country flirted with libertarian socialism; the Harding Foundation found itself obsolete and on its own.

Without government support it could’ve simply withered and died. However, at that point the Harding Foundation wasn’t just another organization or firm; by then it was an honest to goodness “Institution”. And Institutions, eerily like living organisms, have the unsettling will to survive; they don’t need a purpose, they don’t need to be needed; they just needed to be.

The Foundation evolved or to put it more succinctly it sold out over the years. It expanded, diversified, and transformed itself until its original mission was just vaguely alluded to in its charter. It became a firm that the right people asked about when they needed to “troubleshoot” a “problem”, and always talked about in a way where air-quotes were implicit for every noun and verb.