A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (19 page)

And so it went, Means spinning his lies and living lavishly off the profits—until Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon was informed of his nefarious activities and reported them to Harry Daugherty. The attorney general promised an investigation and encouraged Mellon to pursue one as well. After all, both departments had been tainted by Means's dirty work, more and more of which soon came to light. With the reputation and public trust of the Treasury and Justice departments at stake—and with a character as wily as Means at the center of it all—Daugherty knew a strong government prosecutor was necessary, even if it meant that some of his own questionable activities might be exposed. He settled on Hiram C. Todd, a U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, who managed to secure indictments against Means on over one hundred charges.

Never one to fold in the face of adversity, or the truth, Means began fabricating diaries from the past several years that would conveniently place him far away from any criminal activity. He even hired two full-time stenographers to assist with the task. At the same time, he and his lawyer connived to delay his day of reckoning, or avoid it altogether. They found a way when Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana launched an investigation of Harry Daugherty and invited Means to testify.

President Harding had died suddenly in August 1923, only two years into his term, and was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge, the so-called Puritan in Babylon. Soon enough, reports of astonishing malfeasance by some of Harding's cabinet members and cronies emerged as the Teapot Dome scandal and other instances of high-level corruption came to light.
¹
Harry Daugherty had not been directly implicated in any of them, but Senator Wheeler was convinced he had profited from a number of criminal activities by failing to prosecute them. He was determined to bring the attorney general down. In Means, the senator believed he had the perfect witness—one who promised detailed records and other evidence of corruption at the Justice Department. And in Wheeler, Means saw his possible salvation. His perjured testimony could either destroy Daugherty, and thus Hiram Todd's prosecution of him, or it could at least delay the inevitable while he was under subpoena in the Senate.

“I am satisfied that [Means] is an unusually cunning crook,” Todd wrote to the attorney general, “and now that he is cornered I believe he is scheming to use the examination before one of the Senate Investigating Committees as a ground for claiming immunity.” On the eve of the Wheeler hearings, Means approached Daugherty to suggest that his testimony could be called off if the attorney general would simply stop Todd's prosecution. When Daugherty rebuffed him, Means stormed the Capitol with a fat file full of bogus documents and a glib tongue well practiced in the language of deceit. “Dimpled and beaming, he almost seemed to blow kisses to the spectators as he made his way to the witness chair,” wrote Francis Russell. “Grandly he waived immunity, saying that he asked for no quarter and would give none.”

“The witness was a complete master of himself,”
The New York Times
reported. “He knew all the members of the committee by name and answered questions, and sometimes asked them as if he and his inquisitors were old friends. He showed no evidence of nervousness or evasion.” The performance was indeed magnificent, filled with what Treasury Secretary Mellon called “vicious piffle,” but delivered with jaunty confidence and a cherubic smile. “While testifying in his easy, convincing voice,” wrote Russell, “he kept smoking one cigarette after the other, mugging for the crowd, shooting the smoke through his nostrils or jetting it high in the air with a thrust of his mobile lower lip.” Means regaled his audience with tales of corruption so deep and widespread that the entire government seemed to be infected. Delivered against the backdrop of the all-too-real scandals that were emerging at the time, his imaginary ones appeared frighteningly credible. Daugherty resigned under fire,
²
and Burns soon followed.

Senator Wheeler was so delighted with his star witness that neither he nor any of his fellow committee members bothered to question any of his stunning revelations. After all, Means seemed to have the corroborating evidence right there in his files, which he made a show of checking periodically throughout his testimony. Yet when it came time to enter the files into the record, they were nowhere to be found. Means told the committee that the files had already been picked up at his home by two men who said they were assistant sergeants at arms of the Senate. They had showed their badges, he claimed, and told him that Senator Smith Brookhart, chairman of the Wheeler Commission, had ordered them to collect the files. Means then produced a letter he said was the order from Brookhart. Brookhart instantly recognized it was a forgery. Now the committee's focus turned to an investigation of who had forged the letter and stolen the files—never once considering that Means might have been behind it all.

Means arranged for two false witnesses, one of whom was listed as a special agent for the Bureau of Investigation, to tell the committee that it was none other than Hiram Todd who had ordered the theft. The indignant prosecutor, still waiting to try Means, was hauled before Wheeler and the other members. Their interrogation had little to do with the stolen files. Rather, they wanted to protect their witness by impugning Todd. He was a tool of Daugherty's, they charged, out to destroy the man who had exposed the insidious corruption at the Justice Department. The members tried to probe into the evidence that had been gathered against Means, which Todd vigorously resisted. It was only after hours of tense exchanges with the committee on these matters that the prosecutor was allowed to address the issue of the stolen files. His testimony was so unassailable that members were left bewildered; perhaps Gaston Means wasn't so reliable after all.
³
On May 23, 1924, the Wheeler hearings concluded. A month later, Todd's prosecution began.

At last the spider was trapped in his own web, and his only recourse was to spin even more lurid tales of scandal in the Harding administration. The object was to inundate the jury with so many stories of wrongdoing at the highest levels that Means would appear to be only a minor cog in a massive corrupt machine. His defense attorney even went as far as to subpoena Treasury Secretary Mellon in the hopes of implicating him in a number of bootlegging conspiracies and thus demonstrate just how pervasive criminal activity was in the great halls of power. It didn't work. Gaston Means, ten days shy of his forty-fifth birthday, was convicted for the first time in his life and sentenced to prison.

During his incarceration at the Atlanta Penitentiary he met May Dixon Thacker, wife of a prominent Southern evangelist as well as a contributor to such publications as
True Confessions
, who was doing research at the prison. As Means shared with her imaginative tales of his exploits, she assured him that they would make an interesting book and invited him to call on her in New York when he was ready to tell his story. On July 19, 1928, he was released from prison. Asked by a reporter what he planned to do in the future, he replied with a grin, “Anyone I can.” Mrs. Thacker was his first target.

Means dictated his outrageous stories to Thacker, who excitedly compiled them into a book entitled
The Strange Death of President Harding
. In the book Means claimed to have been hired by First Lady Florence Harding to investigate her husband's extramarital dalliances. As a result, he had earned the wrath of the president, and all the legal troubles he had faced over the years were the direct result of an orchestrated campaign by Harding and his cohorts to destroy him. But the book's most shocking claim was that Mrs. Harding had killed her husband with poison in retaliation for his infidelities. It was a monumental hoax that became a bestseller. And though poor, gullible Mrs. Thacker eventually repudiated the book, the lies it contained still resonate.

About the time Means was dictating his nonsense to Mrs. Thacker, he met Ralph M. Easley, executive director of the National Civic Federation. Easley was obsessed with what he called “the menace of Socialism as evidenced by its growth in the colleges, churches, newspapers.” Means had little trouble convincing him that he was the man to help root out the subversives. He produced several trunks filled with forged papers that purportedly documented Bolshevik activity in the United States, for which Easley paid him $25,000. The poor man was disgraced when the con was exposed; he was convinced it was part of a Soviet plot to discredit him. As it turned out, he needed to look no further than Gaston Bullock Means.

 

After so many years perfecting his devilry, Means topped off his career with what was undoubtedly his cruelest con yet. When the young son of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh was snatched from his crib on the evening of March 1, 1932, Means sniffed opportunity. He was approached by Evalyn Walsh McLean, the wealthy grande dame of Washington society and owner of the Hope Diamond, who believed his connections with the criminal underworld might help her contact the kidnappers and get the child back to his heartbroken parents. “I had no illusions about Means,” Mrs. McLean wrote in her autobiography, “except that I supposed the chance to act as go-between in the ransoming of the Lindbergh baby would seem a bigger prize to him than any other chance he might discern in his dealings with me.” She was wrong.

Means invented an elaborate cloak-and-dagger story that cast Mrs. McLean into the center of the action. It appealed to her desire for excitement and intrigue, as well as to her genuine wish to rescue the little boy. The scheme also excited a brief flicker of hope in the Lindberghs, which made it particularly cruel. Mrs. McLean was instructed to go to Fairview, her estate outside Washington, D.C. There, Means said, the kidnappers would observe her carefully, and, once satisfied that it was safe, hand over the child. The ransom would be $100,000 in cash, plus $4,000 for his own expenses. The well-intentioned woman hocked the Hope Diamond and gave the money to Means. The kidnappers, however, never showed at Fairview. “Each night I waited there,” she wrote, “and through the darkness tried to see along the paths…. Each dawn was just another disappointment; but with sunrise hope would grow again.”

The kidnappers had been spooked, Means claimed. They expected Mrs. McLean to come to Fairview alone, not with members of her staff. But, he said, there was still an opportunity to get the boy back. A new rendezvous was selected in Aiken, South Carolina, where Mrs. McLean had rented a home while her son attended school nearby. An accomplice of Means's named Norman Whitaker appeared at the house and pretended to represent the kidnappers. He identified himself only as “the Fox,” and made a show of checking the premises for wires or secret agents. Yet for all that, the baby still was not delivered. And so it went at the next arranged meeting place in El Paso, Texas, where the supposed kidnappers demanded an additional $35,000. Finally, Mrs. McLean grew suspicious and demanded her money back. Means, feigning dismay, told her he had already delivered it to the kidnappers. She had him arrested. By that time, Charles Lindbergh had identified the remains of his dead son.

J. Edgar Hoover, who had succeeded William J. Burns as bureau director and held a personal vendetta against Means for having sullied the reputation of the institution, was delighted to learn of his involvement in the Lindbergh scam. It was time for a little retribution. Means was charged with larceny after trust and put on trial. His only defense was that he had accepted Mrs. McLean's money in good faith and delivered it to the men he believed were the kidnappers. The prosecution aptly called him “the prince of liars.” He was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years at Leavenworth. “The verdict of the jury in this case reveals that the defendant capitalized not only on the sweetest and tenderest emotions of the human heart,” the judge said at sentencing, “but also the basest.”

Means stood trial again the following year for having tried to extort the additional $35,000 from Mrs. McLean in Texas. Though his face appeared drawn and sunken, with a severe prison pallor, he still managed to sparkle. “He was the perfect picture of a man enjoying the crowd at his own hanging,”
Newsweek
reported, and his testimony was suffused with the bold lies that had made him infamous. He claimed, for example, that one of the kidnappers was the head of the Communist Party in America, and that the Lindbergh baby was still alive and well in Mexico. The prosecution called his testimony “a figment of a weird imagination that makes Baron Munchausen look like a piker.” But Means was rather proud of it.

“How did you like that story?” he asked J. Edgar Hoover at the trial.

“In all my life I have never heard a wilder yarn,” the director replied.

“Well, it was a good story, just the same, wasn't it?” he concluded with a grin.

It may have been, but no one believed a word of it. Means was convicted and sentenced to two more years in prison. He was now desperate for an escape, or at least some attention. To that end, he continued to torment the Lindberghs when he “confessed” that it was he who had taken and killed their child—not Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who had been convicted of the crime and sentenced to death. He also taunted authorities with false leads as to the location of Mrs. McLean's money, which was never found. The secret died with him when, on December 12, 1938, the black heart of Gaston Bullock Means finally gave out.

She was the unlikeliest of Arctic explorers: a San Francisco socialite who plumbed the icy mysteries of Greenland with her nose always freshly powdered and a personal maid to attend her every need. But Louise Arner Boyd was far from a pampered blue blood who liked to play adventuress. The numerous expeditions she led to the frozen North yielded a valuable photographic record of a region almost as alien as the lunar landscape, and earned her recognition from some of the most prestigious scientific societies. There's even a spot on the map that attests to her impressive accomplishments—a previously uncharted area of Greenland that she discovered and which now bears her name: Weisboydlund (Miss Boyd Land).

Born into fabulous wealth in 1887, Louise enjoyed all the privileges of an American aristocrat. But tragedy intruded when her two brothers passed away from rheumatic fever and both of her parents died within a year of each other. Left alone in the world at age thirty-two with a fortune to realize whatever she dreamed of doing, she stumbled upon her life's passion in 1924 while on a cruise from Norway to the frozen archipelago of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Sea.

“Far north, hidden behind grim barriers of pack ice are lands that hold one spellbound,” Louise later wrote of the new world that had been revealed to her. “Gigantic imaginary gates, with hinges set in the horizon, seem to guard these lands. Slowly the gates swing open, and one enters another world where men are insignificant amid the awesome immensity of lovely mountains, fiords, and glaciers.”

It was a world she would return to again and again, not as a mere tourist but as a scientific patron and well-respected explorer in her own right. “There is no question that she was a pioneer for women in expedition science,” Melvin Marcus, a professor of geography at Arizona State University, told
The Washington Post
in 1996. “If you consider the times, it was a big deal to have a woman in charge.” Lacking any scientific credentials or even a college education would normally have made the attainment of such a position impossible, but Miss Boyd was paying the bills and that made her the boss. Respect was another matter; she earned that.

“Not only did she hold the purse strings,” writes her biographer Elizabeth Fagg Olds, “but her systematic attention to detail, and her passion for converting her expeditions into serious instruments for contributing to knowledge of the polar regions, elevated her from the initial role of wealthy socialite indulging in an expensive hobby. She became a true leader, a presiding patron of scientifically trained personnel, a sponsor of science.”

After her enchanting introduction to the Arctic in 1924, Louise returned in 1926—stopping off in London along the way to be presented at the Court of St. James's. She was still a full-time grande dame, not yet the intrepid explorer she was to become. Science, in fact, played no part in this trip. Louise and her society pals were there to shoot polar bears, reportedly bagging twenty-nine of the great Arctic creatures in one day. Frivolous as the expedition was, she did begin the photographic documentation of the region that would one day become her legacy.

A third trip in 1928 began as another lark, but turned into a rescue mission instead. Roald Amundsen, the famed Norwegian explorer who in 1911 became the first to reach the South Pole, was declared missing while searching for the crew of a crashed dirigible. His disappearance stunned the world at a time when polar explorers were revered the way astronauts would be by later generations. Upon hearing the news, Louise immediately volunteered the ship and crew she had chartered for her pleasure trip, and joined the search. For months they cruised the coastlines of Greenland, Spitsbergen, and the collection of tiny frozen islands known as Franz Josef Land, eventually covering ten thousand miles.

Vivid mirages produced by the unstable Arctic atmosphere often led the searchers astray. “Four of us stood watch round the clock,” Louise reported. “We would just stand there and look. Ice does such eerie things. There are illusions like mirages, and there were times we clearly could see tents. Then we'd lower boats and go off to investigate. But it always turned out the same—strange formations of the ice, nothing more.”

Though Amundsen was never found, Louise was awarded for her efforts by the king of Norway with the Knight Cross of St. Olaf, First Class, the first non-Norwegian woman to be so honored. The search also allowed her the opportunity to meet some of Scandinavia's top Arctic explorers, who inspired her with stories of Greenland's legendary east coast—a “dramatic alpine complex of waterways, mountains, and glaciers,” as she described it, “where the approach to land is rendered difficult by an exceptionally wide belt of ice.” Polar bears were no longer her quarry. She was now determined to break through this hazardous, ice-crusted barrier, having understood that “the reward of crossing this belt is access to a land of extraordinary grandeur and beauty.”

The expedition that resulted in 1931 was more rewarding than she might ever have imagined. “The luck of the beginner, as well as a season of favorable weather, smiled upon Louise on this trip,” writes Olds, “so that despite the lack of scientists in her party (she would assemble these for her next and all subsequent trips), she achieved astonishing results.” Perhaps the most impressive of these was the discovery of the uncharted area in Greenland's eastern fiord region that now bears her name, as well as other previously unknown geographic features that she literally put on the map. All this from a dainty, upper-crust hostess who insisted upon wearing a fine wool suit while gardening and who wouldn't dream of leaving her mansion without a hat.

Louise had indeed accomplished much on this journey, but she came to realize that it would take expertise in a number of scientific fields to begin plumbing Greenland's many mysteries. This desire to better understand the land she loved prompted her to gather some of the world's top surveyors, physiographers, and geologists for her subsequent expeditions. Although she also brought along botanists, Louise herself collected hundreds of plant specimens and learned how to professionally preserve them. In Greenland, she wrote, “nature has created…rock gardens that have a beauty almost beyond description—masses of brilliantly colored blooms in exquisite arrangement.”

Though she traded her fine gowns and high heels for parkas and hobnailed boots when the Arctic beckoned, Louise always carried a little of her gilded life in San Francisco with her. That included her personal maid and a touch of her fashion sense. “I don't feel dressed unless I'm wearing flowers,” she said. “Even in Greenland, I'd find something and wear it with a safety pin.” A few of the scientists on the expeditions tended to denigrate her because of her wealth. “Louise was not only a woman in a man's realm, a nonscientist among scientists, but a capitalist who inadvertently riled the chip-on-the-shoulder have-nots,” writes Olds. “She chose to ignore these tensions and sailed along in serene indif-fe-rence; but she did not later issue second invitations.”

And woe to anyone foolish enough to underestimate her. One time she sent two scientists inland to examine a specific site, but for whatever reason the pair decided the task wasn't worth their effort and turned back without reaching their goal. Upon their return, they reported that the mission had been completed—unaware that Louise had elected to make the same trek. When they saw her making her way back to the ship, they knew they were caught. “This is where we had better duck,” one of them reportedly said. Neither was asked back.

Taskmaster though she was, Louise shared in many of the difficulties her team faced. She often trudged through extremely difficult terrain, laden with her photographic equipment, without benefit of sleds or marked trails. These excursions, though strenuous, allowed her to witness more intimately the magnificence of a world unknown to most; a world where, she wrote, “inanimate nature seemed almost alive.”

In the midst of all the natural splendor, danger always lurked—particularly the grim possibility of being trapped in the ice if the brief summer window that made exploration possible suddenly slammed shut. Louise and her crew very nearly faced this ordeal in 1933 when their ship, the
Veslekari,
ran aground at the end of the summer season. Stuck in a fiord with no hope of rescue, dramatic action had to be taken to buoy the ship. “By the removal of 30 tons of sea-water ballast, 2 motor boats, 1 rowboat, 3
¹
/2 tons of fuel oil, and 17 barrels of petrol she was lightened,” Louise reported, “and we hoped that the incoming tide would free her.” It didn't. Next, fifteen tons of coal were tossed overboard, yet the
Veslekari
still remained mired. It was then that the ship's captain devised a brilliant plan utilizing a nearby iceberg. A cable was thrown around it and connected to the ship's winch. “The motor dory shoved the berg as the winch pulled on the cable,” she continued, “and the iceberg was grounded in a desired position aft of us. Fortunately for us, the next tide was the spring tide, and at high water (11:30
A.M.)
on September 4, with the engines full speed astern and the winch pulling on the cable connected with the iceberg, the ship was floated undamaged. Here was a case when an iceberg was a friend.”

They had narrowly avoided entrapment in the soon-to-be frozen fiord, but still had to escape the Greenland coast as winter rapidly approached. Fierce gales twice forced them back. “Nature was closing her doors on us!” Louise wrote. “We had arrived in early July when the last winter's ice was still blocking the entrance to the fiords and on shore spring flowers were in full bloom! Now the snow of coming winter had appeared. Extending from summit to sea level, as far as one could see, Greenland was white. Overhead were foehn clouds and northern lights, not in their real glory, but sufficiently to show that we had passed from one season into another—from a season of perpetual sunshine into one of darkness. Nature's warning to us was: ‘Go Home!'” They heeded it just in time.

Harrowing as the experience had been, Louise returned to Greenland in 1937, after representing the U.S. government as a delegate to the International Geographical Congress in Warsaw and coauthoring
The Fiord Region of East Greenland,
the first of her three books.
¹
She had purchased a high-tech depth finder prior to the expedition, and used it to discover an entirely unknown ocean bank. It was appropriately named the Louise A. Boyd Bank, and joined Louise Boyd Land and the Louise Glacier as a geographical monument to a “dauntless leader of scientific expeditions into the Arctic,” as the American Geographical Society described her when awarding her its prestigious Cullum Medal in 1938.

The medal, which put Louise in the august company of the great polar explorers Robert E. Peary and Robert F. Scott, both previous recipients, was awarded right after she achieved another remarkable milestone. A push to the northernmost limit a ship could travel along Greenland's east coast placed Boyd and her crew only eight hundred miles away from the North Pole, a place she had dreamed about since childhood. The feat was reported in
The New York Times
on September 9, 1938, with a declaration from Dr. John K. Wright of the American Geographical Society: “Miss Boyd may claim the credit of having gone further in a ship along the East Greenland shore than any other American and of having attained what is probably the second highest latitude ever reached by a vessel in these waters.” It would be her last expedition to the region.

The splendid isolation of Greenland, a Dutch possession, was shattered when Nazi forces arrived after conquering Denmark in 1940. With the great northern land mass suddenly of strategic importance to the United States, Louise was called upon by her government to withhold publication of her third book, which contained photographs and data from her 1937 and 1938 expeditions, because of its potential value to the enemy. “Immediately I put into ‘security' not only the material contained in this book,” she wrote in the introduction to
The Coast of Northeast Greenland,
which was finally published in 1948, “but also my extensive library of photographs taken on these and my previous Arctic expeditions and the hundreds of maps and miscellaneous publications, dealing with the northern countries of Europe as well as with the Arctic, that I had collected over the years. All this material was turned over to departments of our government upon request and restricted to their use for the duration of the war.” Given the extreme level of American ignorance about the region, the contribution was significant and, wrote Rear Admiral Edward H. Smith of the U.S. Coast Guard, it provided “great assistance in the navigation of these little known ice-infested waters.”

As part of the war effort, Louise led a secret expedition she funded into Canadian Arctic waters to obtain data affecting long-distance radio transmission in the Arctic ionosphere. “Many thrilling experiences were reported by Miss Boyd,” a Department of Commerce report read. “At one time the
Morrisey,
a small but stout vessel, was battered by a 100-mile gale, with waves 60 feet high. Everything movable on board was thrown about, including members of the party. Nobody knew whether the vessel would survive, but there was no sign of panic among either members of the crew or technical personnel.”