Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (43 page)

Harding’s regime was agreeably liberal. Against the advice of his cabinet and his wife he insisted on releasing the Socialist leader Eugene Debs, whom Wilson had imprisoned, on Christmas Eve 1921: ‘I want him to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife.’ He freed twenty-three other political prisoners the same day, commuted death-sentences on the ‘Wobblies’ (Industrial Workers of the World) and before the end of his presidency had virtually cleared the gaols of political offenders.
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He took the press into his confidence, calling reporters by their Christian names. When he moved, he liked to surround himself with a vast travelling ‘family’, many invited on the spur of the moment, occupying ten whole cars on his presidential train. He chewed tobacco, one of his chewing companions being Thomas Edison, who remarked, ‘Harding is all right. Any man who chews tobacco is all right.’ He drank hard liquor too, asking people up to his bedroom for a snort, and it was known he served whiskey in the White House. Twice a week he invited his intimates over for ‘food and action’ (’action’ meant poker). Commerce Secretary Hoover, a stuffed shirt, was the only one who declined to play: it irks me to see it in the White House.’
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Hoover’s instinct was correct: a president cannot be too careful, as
had been demonstrated in virtually every presidency since. There is no evidence that Harding was ever anything other than a generous and unsuspicious man. The only specific charge of dishonesty brought against him was that the sale of the
Marion Star
was a fix; this was decisively refuted in court, the two men who bought the paper receiving $100,000 in damages. But Harding made two errors of judgement: appointing the florid Senator Fall, who turned out to be a scoundrel, and believing that his Ohio campaign-manager Harry Daugherty, whom he made Attorney-General, would screen and protect him from the influence-peddlars who swarmed up from his home state, ‘I know who the crooks are and I want to stand between Harding and them,’ Daugherty said. This proved an empty boast.
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The result was a series of blows which came in quick succession from early 1923. In February Harding discovered that Charles Forbes, Director of the Veterans Bureau, had been selling off government medical supplies at rock-low prices: he summoned him to the White House, shook him ‘as a dog would a rat’ and shouted ‘You double-crossing bastard’. Forbes fled to Europe and resigned, 15 February.
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On 4 March Albert Fall resigned. It was subsequently established that he had received a total of $400,000 in return for granting favourable leases of government oilfields at Elk Hills in California and Salt Creek (Teapot Dome), Wyoming. Fall was eventually gaoled for a year in 1929, though his leases later turned out well for America, since they involved building vital pipelines and installations at Pearl Harbor.
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But that was not apparent at the time and Fall’s departure was a disaster for Harding, more particularly since Charles Cramer, counsel for the Veterans Bureau, committed suicide a few days later.

Finally on 29 May Harding forced himself to see a crony of Daugherty’s, Jess Smith, who together with other Ohians had been selling government favours from what became known as ‘the little green house [no. 1625] on K Street’. The ‘Ohio Gang’, as the group was soon called, had nothing to do with Harding and it was never legally established that even Daugherty shared their loot (he was acquitted when tried in 1926–7, though he refused to take the stand). But after Harding confronted Smith with his crimes on 29 May, the wretched man shot himself the following day and this second suicide had a deplorable effect on the President’s morale. According to William Allen White (not a wholly reliable witness), Harding told him, ‘I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends, my God-damn friends, White, they’re the ones that keep me walking the floors nights.’ Given time, Harding would certainly have managed to stabilize the situation and refute the rumours of guilt by association – as have several presidents since – for his own hands
were completely clean, so far as the latest historical research has been able to establish. But the following month he left for a trip to Alaska and the West Coast and he died, of a cerebral haemorrhage, at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco, in early August. His wife followed him in November 1924 having first destroyed (so it was then believed) all Harding’s papers, and this was taken as conclusive evidence of guilty secrets.
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The false historiography which presented Harding and his administration as the most corrupt in American history began almost immediately with the publication in 1924 in the
New Republic
of a series of articles by its violently anti-business editor, Bruce Bliven. This created the basic mythology of the ‘Ohio Gang’, run by Daugherty, who had deliberately recruited Harding as a front man as long ago as 1912 as part of a long-term conspiracy to hand over the entire nation to Andrew Mellon and Big Business. Thereafter Harding was fair game for sensationalists. In 1927 Nan Britton, daughter of a Marion doctor, published
The President’s Daughter
, claiming she had had a baby girl by Harding in 1919. In 1928 William Allen White repeated the conspiracy theory in
Masks in a Pageant
and again ten years later in his life of Coolidge,
A Puritan in Babylon.
In 1930 a former
FBI
agent, Gaston Means, produced the best-selling
The Strange Death of President Harding
, portraying wholly imaginary drunken orgies with chorus girls at the K Street house, with Harding prominent in the ‘action’. Equally damaging was the 1933 memoir
Crowded Hours
, by Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, which presented Harding’s White House study as a speakeasy: ‘the air heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whisky stood about, cards and poker chips ready at hand – a general atmosphere of waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on the desk and the spittoon alongside …. Harding was not a bad man. He was just a slob.’
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To cap it all came an apparently scholarly work by a
New York Sun
writer, Samuel Hopkins Adams, called
Incredible Era: the Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding
(1939), which welded together all the inventions and myths into a solid orthodoxy. By this time the notion of Harding as the criminal king of the Golden Calf era had become the received version of events not only in popular books like Frederick Lewis Allen’s
Only Yesterday …
(1931) but in standard academic history. When in 1964 the Harding Papers (which had not been burnt) were opened to scholars, no truth at all was found in any of the myths, though it emerged that Harding, a pathetically shy man with women, had had a sad and touching friendship with the wife of a Marion store-owner before his presidency. The Babylonian image was a fantasy, and in all essentials Harding had been an honest and
exceptionally shrewd president. But by then it was too late. A
New York Times
poll of seventy-five historians in 1962 showed that he was rated ‘a flat failure’ with ‘very little dissent’.
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The treatment of Harding is worth dwelling on because, taken in conjunction with a similar denigration of his vice-president and successor Calvin Coolidge, a man of totally different temperament, it amounts to the systematic misrepresentation of public policy over a whole era. Coolidge was the most internally consistent and single-minded of modern American presidents. If Harding loved America as Arcadia, Coolidge was the best-equipped to preserve it as such. He came from the austere hills of Vermont, of the original Puritan New England stock, and was born over his father’s store. No public man carried into modern times more comprehensively the founding principles of Americanism: hard work, frugality, freedom of conscience, freedom from government, respect for serious culture (he went to Amherst, and was exceptionally well-read in classical and foreign literature and in history). He was sharp, hatchet-faced, ‘weaned on a pickle’ (Alice Longworth), a ‘runty, aloof little man, who quacks through his nose when he speaks … he slapped no man on the back, pawed no man’s shoulder, squeezed no man’s hand’ (William Allen White).
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He married a beautiful, raven-haired schoolteacher called Grace, about whom no one ever said a critical word. During their courtship he translated Dante’s
Inferno
into English but immediately after the wedding ceremony he presented her with a bag of fifty-two pairs of socks that needed darning. He always saved his money. As Harding’s vice-president he lived in four rooms in Willard’s Hotel and gladly accepted the role as the Administration’s official diner-out – ‘Got to eat somewhere.’ He ran the White House down to the smallest detail (rather like Curzon, but much more efficiently), scrutinizing and initialling all household bills, and prowling round the deepest recesses of the kitchens. He banked his salary and by 1928 had $250,000 invested.
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He went to bed at ten, a point celebrated by Groucho Marx in
Animal Crackers:
isn’t it past your bedtime, Calvin?’. But the notion propagated by Mencken – ‘He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled but Coolidge only snored’ – was misleading.
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No president was ever better briefed on anything that mattered or less often caught unprepared by events or the doings of his team.

It suited Coolidge, in fact, to mislead people into believing he was less sophisticated and active than he was (a ploy later imitated by Dwight Eisenhower). ‘A natural churchwarden in a rural parish,’ wrote Harold Laski, ‘who has by accident strayed into great affairs.’
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That was exactly the impression Coolidge wished to convey. In fact few men have been better prepared for the presidency,
moving up every rung of the public ladder: parish councillor, assemblyman, mayor, State Representative, State Senator, President of the State Senate, Lieutenant-Governor, Governor, Vice-President. At every stage he insisted that government should do as little as was necessary (’He didn’t do anything’, remarked the political comic Will Rogers, ‘but that’s what the people wanted done’).
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But he also insisted that, when it did act, it should be absolutely decisive. He made his national reputation in 1919 by crushing the Boston police strike: ‘There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.’ He was elected Vice-President under the slogan ‘Law and Order’, and President with the messages ‘Keep Cool with Coolidge’, ‘Coolidge or Chaos’ and ‘The chief business of the American people is business’. He articulated a generally held belief that the function of government is primarily to create a climate in which agriculture, manufacturing and commerce can seize the opportunities which God and nature provide. At the climax of his campaign for the presidency in 1924 a deputation of America’s most successful men of affairs, led by Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone and Thomas Edison, called at his house. Edison, who as the world’s best-known inventor acted as spokesman, told the crowd outside, ‘The United States is lucky to have Calvin Coolidge.’
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He won this and all his other contests handsomely, most of them by landslides.

Coolidge reflected America’s Arcadian separateness during the 1920s by showing that, in deliberate contrast to the strident activism taking over so much of Europe and driven by the idea that political motion had replaced religious piety as the obvious form of moral worth, it was still possible to practise successfully the archaic virtue of
stasis.
Coolidge believed that all activity – above all of government – not dictated by pressing necessity was likely to produce undesirable results and certainly unforeseen ones. His minimalism extended even, indeed especially, to speech. It was said that he and his father, Colonel Coolidge, communicated ‘by little more than the ugh-ugh of the Indian’.
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He rejoiced in his nickname ‘Silent Cal’. ‘The Coolidges never slop over’, he boasted. His advice as president to the Massachusetts senate was: ‘Be brief. Above all, be brief.’ Taking over the White House, he settled the ‘Ohio Gang’ scandals by acting very fast, appointing special counsel and by saying as little as possible himself. Campaigning in 1924, he noted: ‘I don’t recall any candidate for president that ever injured himself very much by not talking.’
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‘The things I never say never get me into trouble’, he remarked. In his
Autobiography
, he said his most important rule ‘consists in never doing anything that someone else can do for you’. Nine-tenths of a president’s callers at the White
House, he stressed, ‘want something they ought not to have. If you keep dead still they will run out in three or four minutes.’
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Coolidge was as successful in handling the press as Harding but for quite different reasons. Not only did he keep no press secretary and refuse to hold on-the-record press conferences; he resented it if journalists addressed any remarks to him, even ‘Good morning’. But if written questions were submitted in advance to his forbidding factotum, C. Bascom Slemp, he would write the answers himself: short, very dry, but informative and truthful.
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The press liked his dependability, flavoured by eccentric habits: he used to get his valet to rub his hair with vaseline and, in the Oval Office, he would sometimes summon his staff by bell and then hide under his desk, observing their mystification with his curious wry detachment. Journalists also sensed he was wholly uncorrupted by power. On 2 August 1927, he summoned thirty of them, told them, ‘The line forms on the left’, and handed each a two-by-nine-inch slip of paper on which he had typed: ‘I do not choose to run for President in 1928.’ His final departure from the White House was characteristic. ‘Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration’, he snapped at the press, ‘has been minding my own business.’
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