-Caveat Lector- An excerpt from: The Ohio Gang Charles L. Mee, Jr.�1981 M. Evans and Company, Inc. 216 East 49th Street New York, New York 10017 ISBN 0-87131-340-5 218 pps � out-of-print/one edition --[2]-- IV. The House on H Street HARRY MICAJAH DAUGHERTY, age sixty-one, the attorney general, was born across town from Jess Smith's home in Washington Court House, Ohio. He was the older of two boys, whose father died when they were youngsters. Both boys went to work at an ,early age, encouraged by a mother who was determined that they would make good. Harry worked after school and on Saturdays at a grocery store. "He was so little," his mother said, "he had to stand on a box to reach the cash drawer." Along the way, Harry took an interest in Jess Smith, who was one of the other fatherless boys in town and twelve years younger than Harry. Daugherty took on young Jess with great sympathymore as a father than a friend or brother-and advised him, coached him, and helped him get started in his dry goods business. Harry's younger brother Mally meanwhile went straight into the banking business and came, in time, to own the Washington Court House bank. Harry himself, after he graduated from Washington Court House High School, went on to the University of Michigan, from which he received a law degree in 1881. Not long after Harry graduated from law school and returned to Washington Court House, he met Lucy Walker, who had come to town to teach music in the public school. She was said to be the most beautiful girl in town, and when Harry heard her sing "Last Night" and "Love's Old Sweet Song," he began to court her. They were married in 1884, and Daughterty's love for her apparently never weakened or wavered. They had two children, a boy and a girl; the boy grew up to be an alcoholic, and the girl was constantly ill. Daugherty's wife developed crippling arthritis at an early age, and Daugherty spent much of his time and thought caring for her and moving her from home to hospital and back again. By the time Jess and Harry had reached Washington, Jess was spending some of his time taking care of Mrs. Daugherty, too, putting her to bed, carrying her to the window to sit in the sunlight. Daugherty himself complained more and more of his own health and, from time to time, would simply collapse from fatigue. He started out as a criminal lawyer in Washington Court House, but, soon, he found it best to settle out of court and, then, even better to arrange things ahead of time in the halls of the state legislature in Columbus. He became known as a political lawyer, or fixer, and, to a local railroad construction company, he added a list of corporate clients that included the Ohio State Telephone Company, Armour and Company, and the American Tobacco Company. As a young attorney, he seemed always on the move, always to have a dozen deals in the works. He loved to put things over, but he seemed almost not to care whether he won or lost. He was entirely ruthless; but he carried almost no grudges. He swore copiously, and he often befuddled his less nimble-witted associates with his oblique jests. When the occasion called for it, no one could be more direct. He lied often, flatly, and without shame, to close friends as well as to strangers. He was a shrewd judge of character, adept particularly at seeing another man's weakness. He first ran for political office in the Fourth Ward of Columbus, a constituency of about a thousand persons, and was elected councilman. He next ran for prosecuting attorney of Fayette County and was elected. He then ran for representative in the state legislature, and he was elected, and reelected. He was never elected to office again. Soon after he was elected for his second term in the state legislature, he was accused of accepting a bribe of "seven crisp $500 bills" for his vote-this in the days when state legislatures elected United States senators-in a Senate election. Although nothing was ever proven, the accusation began a string of charges, investigations, hearings, inquiries, and trials that accompanied Daugherty all his life. He faced every charge, he met every accusation, he was never convicted of a single crime. But he was never trusted by the voters. He lost elections for nearly every office available in Ohio; he lost twice in campaigns for Congress, once in a campaign for the nomination for state attorney general, once for the nomination for Republican governor, and once for the nomination for United States senator. Not even the politicians trusted him-or perhaps the politicians least of all-and he was defeated, also, for a plethora of other, minor offices. In the 1920 election, although few politicians liked having him around, and almost none would make a firm deal with him, he threw himself into the presidential campaign with all the swagger, profanity, and robustiousness he could muster. He turned himself into a campaign manager for a dark horse candidate who held back for so long that no one else thought there was a campaign to manage; and, when the Republicans won in November, he found himself, by his own estimation, the leading contender for the office of attorney general. No one knew better, after all, where the bodies were buried, where the finances had come from, where the statutes had been broken, and which lawsuits might need to be settled out of court. His eyes were disconcerting: one was brown, the other blue. The brown eye had an opaque cast to it, and the blue one was in constant movement, rarely meeting another's eyes directly, but rather circling around whomever he was talking to, as though getting an impression of the other from a psychic aura, or from the atmosphere. With his Wheeling stogy, his pearl stickpin, his round, smooth face-hair parted in the middle-and his thick neck and stocky midsection, he impressed people in Washington as a tough, professional pol. He looked more like the accomplished manipulator, the fellow who never made a false move, than in fact he was. In the house on H Street, Daugherty and Smith set up an establishment that cost them�so Jess bragged, at least, in a letter to Roxy�$50,000 a year to maintain. They employed a black butler, Walter De Marquis Miller, and an aged cook named Emma Parker, and they received between 50 and 500 visitors a day, at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late into the evening- congressmen and lobbyists, Ohioans by the carload, men looking for appointments and paroles, pardons and opportunities. "The love nest," Daugherty called it. Will Hays, chairman of the National Republican party and dispenser of political patronage as postmaster general, was often there. Richard Washburn Child paid a courtesy call before he was appointed ambassador to Italy. William J. Burns checked in just before he was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation. Bill Orr brought the liquor in suitcases. John Ringling stopped by to talk about the arrangements for pitching his circus tents in Pittsburgh. Armour and Company delivered free hams and bacons to the house, and J. Ogden Armour himself stopped by once in a while. Harry Sinclair, the oilman, came by often. In Daugherty's term as attorney general, he was privileged to pass on the appointment of 88 judges across the United States, circuit, district, and Supreme Court judges, from Hawaii to Maine, from Alaska to Puerto Rico. Those who called on Daugherty and Smith could not be blamed-nor could Daugherty and Smith-for jumping to the conclusion that, in some places at least, the fix was in. ===== V The Poker Party A LOT OF different fellows sat in on the poker games around the dining room table at the little house on H Street-some smoked cigars, some chewed, most shed their jackets, loosened their ties, undid their collar buttons, partook of the whisky that had been set out by the butler, and made themselves at home. Ed Scobey, the former sheriff of Pickaway County, Ohio, beefy fellow whose mouth turned down at the corners, now the director of the United States Mint, was one of the regulars at the table. He must have been relieved to take off his jacket: he looked like a man who had never before been accustomed to buttoning it. Dick Crissinger, short, with a bow tie, erect and anxious-who had been the head of a small bank in Marion, Ohio, for a few months, was now the comptroller of the currency, and would soon be the governor of the Federal Reserve System-was another of the regulars. Charlie Forbes often sat in. A "pursy, rufous, convivial, highly energized individual," according to one of his contemporaries, "full of snappy stories and insinuating gossip, boisterous in mirth and fellowship . . . popular with men and alluring to women," Forbes was, as head of the Veterans' Bureau, in charge of disposing of millions of dollars worth of postwar government surplus stocks of sheets, towels, pajamas, rolls of gauze, soap, trucks, and floor wax. He both bought and sold, in order to get rid of surpluses and to make certain that veterans' hospitals were properly stocked. Sometimes he did both at the same time. Even as he sat holding his cards at the poker 'table, sheets he had purchased at an inflated cost from a friend who gave him a kickback were being brought in one door of a government warehouse-and taken out the other door to be sold cheaply as government surplus to another friend who gave Forbes a kickback. Thomas W. Miller, who often sat at the table, was the head of the Alien Property Bureau, charged with seeing to the disposition, among other things, of the assets seized during World War I from Germans. Miller had control of 31,000 trusts and several thousand pieces of real estate. An eminently respectable man, a member of Philadelphia's Union League Club and the Bankers of America, Miller was about to work a deal on a German claim on shares of American Metal Company that would net $50,000 for himself, $112,000 for one of the Republican national committeemen, and $224,000 for Jess Smith. Jap Muma, from Cincinnati, was making a deal to run some contraband prize fight films across state lines. Thomas B. Felder, an old law associate of Daugherty's, had established himself as the .attorney to see in New York for any problems with Prohibition enforcement officers. From time to time, Will Hays would stop by, as would Charlie Schwab, head of Bethlehem Steel and interested in the shipping business among other things, and Albert Fall, former senator from New Mexico, and now secretary of the interior. Ned McLean often joined the game. The house on H Street belonged to him, and he had loaned it to Daugherty and Smith. McLean was the son of John R. McLean, owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer, a figure in Ohio and national politics, owner of a gas company, a street railway, a bank, and a trust company, and owner of the Washington Post, Ned, who had inherited none of his father's forcefulness, never quite found a suitable occupation for himself By the time he was twenty-two, his hands shook so much that he sometimes had to use a sling to get a drink to his lips. He met and married a sharp-witted and rich young woman named Evalyn Walsh, who also had a terrible taste for alcohol, and by the time they had financed the first days of their marriage and their honeymoon abroad, the two had spent $200,000. On their next trip to Europe, evidently overcome by sudden whim, and against the advice of the superstitious Cartier, they bought the cursed Hope Diamond. By 1921, Ned and Evalyn had become idle Washington socialites, and Ned was profoundly grateful to Harry Daugherty for finally giving him a real job: at a salary of a dollar a year, Ned was appointed a special agent of the Department of justice and given his own badge and secret code number. Occasionally, too, as often as once a week, and sometimes more often, the poker players would open up their circle to take in one of the most compulsive cardplayers ever to pass through Washington, a man who loved not only to play the game, but to pile side bet upon side bet, who had a couple of poker games every week in his own quarters and then would go out on other nights to one friend's house or another, playing for stakes of money, sets of dishes, or jewelry: the president of the United States, Warren G. Harding, of Marion, Ohio, who arrived, of course, in a limousine, accompanied by his wife, the Duchess, and secret service agents, shed his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, bit off a chew of tobacco (offering the plug cordially to the others around the table), and played the others to exhaustion. He was a handsome man, genial, gentle, with a warm, resonant, rich voice, a courteous, considerate manner, a man who moved with ease and suppleness, a man with great presence, with a high forehead and distinguished gray hair, and a face that wrinkled into reassuring, paternal smile lines with gratifying frequency; he was calm and contained, solid, forthright, honest, almost noble in bearing, the one man in the group-everyone agreed-who looked like a president. One evening, one of the other players admired a pearl stickpin the president was wearing, and figured it must have been worth at least four or five thousand dollars. "I haven't often seen as fine a one," the fellow said. "Won it at the poker game Wednesday night," said Harding. "You must have been holding 'em." "Not so good," said the president. "I got this spading [betting one hand will have a higher spade than another hand] with the man on my left. He took it out of his pocket and said, 'I'll put this up against a hundred dollars.' It looked good to me, so I took him up. I won with a four of spades." The fellow was impressed -especially impressed by the odds that the unknown man to the president's left had given to Harding: 40 or 50 to 1. But, where Harding came from, such long odds were not uncommon. Indeed, sitting down at the poker table and letting another fellow come out ahead from time to time was the old, traditional way of passing money in Ohio politics. ===== VI. Warren Harding's Baby Pictures WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING-born on November 2, 1865, in Blooming Grove, a tiny farm village in the green rolling Countryside of northern Ohio-was a beautiful baby. He looked like a little girl, and, even years later, after he had grown into a substantial-seeming man, he had a mincing, prancing step. 'Me boy's father, George Tryon Harding, was a small, idle, shiftless, impractical, lazy, daydreaming, catnapping fellow whose eye was always on the main chance. He started out to be a schoolteacher-an easy sort of profession, it seemed at the time-but soon became bored with that. He bought a secondhand set of medical books, swotted up some medical knowledge, followed a doctor on his country rounds, and after spending two terms at the Western College of Homeopathy in Cleveland, was a doctor�a dignified sort of profession, although he never built up much of a practice, and he spent a -lot of time napping on his own moth-eaten examining room couch. His love was aroused not by medicine but by swapping: he was always eager to make a trade, a trade in horses, cows, pieces of machinery, bits of land, farm tools. He would trade with anyone for anything- although, on the whole, he hardly ever traded up, and, after a lifetime of deals, of many good and bad swaps, hard times and lucky breaks, of loans and handouts, bailouts and family welfare, he ended up slightly less than even. The boy's mother, Phoebe, was a devout churchgoer who attended the Methodist church every day, took her family to every Sunday service and church supper that the Methodists held, hummed hymns as she did her housework, and quoted Scripture with almost every remark she made. She worked hard, keeping a well-ordered house, cooking, baking, giving birth to eight children, and working as a professional midwife. She had a taste for the finer things: she taught Warren the alphabet, working with a stick of charred wood on the bottom of a shoebox, and set him to memorizing poems of refined sentiments before he was four years old. When the boy went visiting with his parents, he would turn to his mother and ask, "Will it be all right for me to speak my piece now?" And, upon receiving his mother's permission, he would deliver his piece without hesitation. She herself spoke in a quiet voice, firmly, always with love for her son, and always with complete conviction that he would succeed in whatever he set out to do. When he was older, Warren took flowers to his mother every Sunday morning-or, when he was out of town, made certain the local florist got them to her-without fail, until she died. The boy, Warren, spent his life uncertainly suspended between the character of his father and that of his mother. When he relaxed, he tended to be like his father; like his father, he often thought he could acquire something better than he had�a deal, a job, a wife; but he could never give up, either, his hope of being, himself, -someone better than he was. pps. 32-43 --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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