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American History magazine April 1999 has an excellent article on the life of
President Warren G. Harding. It would be well worth purchasing and
subscribing to this magazine as the period photos greatly enhance the story.
Historians say Harding was the most corrupt President in our nation’s history.
However, I think that Clinton has one up on him though. Read on reader.
Not as young as Clinton, Harding presided after a long dark period immediately
after the First World War when the nation desired attention upon domestic
issues, much as the initial desire for Clinton to focus upon domestic issues
after the Cold War. The Ohio mob controlled the White House, like the
Arkansas mob today. Yes there was corruption and even suspect suicides, just
as with Clinton. There was an affair with a woman in the little room off
of the oval office, that unlike Monica, gave birth to a child. The woman
wrote a book, just like Monica.
Harding met his end prematurely from the stresses of his corruptions, unlike
the still unfolding story of Bill Clinton. Several years after Harding died,
the Great Crash occurred and then the Great Depression. One hopes that such
would not happen after Clinton.
The sad thing was that in the end Harding’s accusers were castigated.
However few of his associates escaped without paying.
Note the many similarities to the Clinton Administration. Solomon was right,
there is nothing new under the sun. Shall we as Americans repeat history?
Best Regards,
Marshall Houston
Portland, Oregon
P.S. The ghost of Warren G. Harding still haunts us today in the form of the
problems that Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Interior Secretary Bruce
Babbit have regarding an accounting of the 2.4 billion dollars still owed to
Native Americans, but whose records have been lost. Robert Rubin has done an
outstanding job with Alan Greenspan on our ecomomy, but if he looks stressed,
it’s because he was struck by a c
American History magazine April 1999 has an excellent article on the life of
President Warren G. Harding. It would be well worth purchasing and
subscribing to this magazine as the period photos greatly enhance the story.
Historians say Harding was the most corrupt President in our nation’s history.
However, I think that Clinton has one up on him though. Read on reader.
Not as young as Clinton, Harding presided after a long dark period immediately
after the First World War when the nation desired attention upon domestic
issues, much as the initial desire for Clinton to focus upon domestic issues
after the Cold War. The Ohio mob controlled the White House, like the
Arkansas mob today. Yes there was corruption and even suspect suicides, just
as with Clinton. There was an affair with a woman in the little room off
of the oval office, that unlike Monica, gave birth to a child. The woman
wrote a book, just like Monica.
Harding met his end prematurely from the stresses of his corruptions, unlike
the still unfolding story of Bill Clinton. Several years after Harding died,
the Great Crash occurred and then the Great Depression. One hopes that such
would not happen after Clinton.
The sad thing was that in the end Harding’s accusers were castigated.
However few of his associates escaped without paying.
Note the many similarities to the Clinton Administration. Solomon was right,
there is nothing new under the sun. Shall we as Americans repeat history?
Best Regards,
Marshall Houston
Portland, Oregon
P.S. The ghost of Warren G. Harding still haunts us today in the form of the
problems that Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Interior Secretary Bruce
Babbit have regarding an accounting of the 2.4 billion dollars still owed to
Native Americans, but whose records have been lost. Robert Rubin has done an
outstanding job with Alan Greenspan on our ecomomy, but if he looks stressed,
it’s because he was struck by a contempt of court charge for failure to
produce lost records. The lost records were partially the fault of Harding’s
corrupt Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall. Read the following:
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-03/02/066l-030299-idx.html
<snip
The object of their efforts--and those to follow in 200 similar
locations across the country in the next two or three years--are
"unreconciled" trust accounts held by the federal government for as many
as 500,000 Native Americans that go back to the 1880s. That's when the
government began breaking up tribal land ownership and allotting small
parcels to individual Indians as compensation.
<snip
In 1994, after a $21 million audit of two decades' worth of accounts,
BIA officials acknowledged that they were unable to account for $2.4
billion in tribal trust fund transactions.
<snip
Audits have found that more than 45,000 accounts are for individuals
whose whereabouts are unknown; $21.7 million is held ostensibly for
minors who long since have reached adulthood; 21,000 accounts are for
deceased individuals; and 128,000 accounts have no Social Security or
tax identification numbers.
In the case of the main BIA document center in Albuquerque, records were
reported to have been contaminated with rat feces containing a dangerous
virus and therefore were considered inaccessible by bureau employees.
"It's a logistical nightmare," said Kevin Gover, assistant secretary of
the interior for Indian affairs, who a year ago became the Clinton
administration's top Native American official.
Gover said warnings of an accounting disaster had been sounded as early
as the 1930s. But successive administrations had ignored the problem
and, until recently, Congress had failed to appropriate the funds needed
for a massive records cleanup. The records cleanup took on added urgency
last Monday after a federal judge cited Gover, Interior Secretary Bruce
Babbitt and Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin for contempt of court for
showing a "flagrant disregard" of his orders to produce trust account
documents in a class action lawsuit alleging mismanagement of the Indian
fund.
U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said federal officials have
engaged in a "shocking pattern of deception of the court" and "abused
the rights of Indians to obtain these trust documents." Apologizing for
their inability to produce the records, government officials blamed
their delays on bureaucratic turf battles, budget shortages and a lack
of coordination among agencies.
Lamberth's condemnation came two weeks after the Clinton
administration's special trustee for American Indians, Paul M. Homan,
resigned in protest of what he said were efforts by Babbitt to obstruct
his attempts to untangle the trust accounts. Homan, who had been at
loggerheads with the interior secretary for years over reforming trust
accounts, said a reorganization of the independent Office of Special
Trustee ordered by Babbitt had effectively "usurped" his powers to
implement reforms.
<snip
========================================================
American History
Volume XXXIV No. 1
A Primedia Publication
ISSN 1076-8866
is published bimonthly by Cowles History Group,
741 Miller Dr. SE
Suite D-2,
Leesburg, VA 20175,
a division of Cowles Enthusiast Media Inc.
6405 Flank Drive,
Harrisburg, PA 17112-2753
The Dark Side of Normalcy
President Warren Harding promised stability for a war-weary country. Instead
his administration took corruption to a whole new level.
By Michael D. Haydock
The night before the Republican Party nominated Warren Gamaliel Harding as
it’s standard bearer in the 1920 presidential election, party leader George
Harvey summoned the candidate to his hotel suite. "You should tell us now, on
your conscience and before God," Harvey said, "whether there is anything that
might be brought up against you that would embarrass the party, any impediment
that might disqualify you or make you inexpedient, either as a candidate or as
president."
Harding retired to the bedroom to mull over the question. When he returned to
the waiting party leaders, he informed them that there was no impediment to
his nomination. On the convention’s 10th ballot, the 55-year old Harding
became the Republican candidate for president. During his subsequent campaign
he took advantage of the postwar public desire for stability and peace by
promising voters a "return to normalcy." Instead, Warren Harding presided
over one of the most corrupt administrations in American history.
Before becoming President, Harding had a less-than-extraordinary political
career. Born in Blooming Grove, Ohio, on November 2, 1965, he became the
owner-editor of the Marion Star in 1884. Tall handsome, and likable, young
Harding became affiliated with Ohio’s old guard Republicans, and with their
support he was elected to two terms in the state senate and one as lieutenant
governor. In 1914, Harding won a seat in the U.S. Senate, but during his
term of office the amiable Ohioan demonstrated few leadership qualities.
Several months before the 1920 Republican National Convention, politician and
lobbyist Harry M. Daugherty commented that none of the candidates would muster
enough votes to win the nominaton. He predicted that the weary Republican
elders would eventually get together in a smoke filled room to choose the
party’s candidate. (The phrase "smoke-filled room" has since taken its place
in political folklore as a synonym for cynical electoral manipulation)
Daugherty expected that the man selected would be his long-time friend and
protégé, Warren G. Harding.
Daugherty’s predictions were correct. At the convention, Republicans sought a
candidate who had offended no one, looked presidential, and would be easily
manipulated. One by one they narrowed the possibilities until Harding emerged
as an acceptable compromise. As Senator Frank B. Brandegee from Connecticut
noted, there are no "first raters" among the candidates, but Harding was the
"best of the second-raters."
Once nominated, Harding returned to Marion to conduct his campaign—managed by
his old friend Daugherty—from the front porch of his home. There he received
delegations of reporters from national newspapers, to whom he granted
interviews and offered broad platitudes about government. The candidate even
built a three-room house for the reporters behind the home of his next door
neighbor, and he met with newsmen there daily.
Personal scandals were never far from the surface with Harding. Married in
1891 to Florence Kling, a strong-willed divorcee whom many credited with the
success of the Marion Star, Harding was an inveterate womanizer. His father
once commented to Warren, "It’s a good thing you wasn’t born a gal....you’d be
in the family way all the time. You can’t say no." Whispers of his affairs
had long circulated in Marion. Reporters, many from newspapers sympathetic to
the Republican Party, learned of the candidate’s alleged sexual affairs soon
after they came to town.
When Harding arrived in Washington as senator, the rumors followed him.
After a friend asked Senator Harding to help find a federal job for Ohioan
James E. Cross, Harding instead hired Cross’s wife, Grace, as secretary in
his office and soon began an affair with her. His lengthy relationship with
family friend Carrie Phillips was well known in his home town. Yet Harding
managed to conceal another affair from almost everyone. For years he had been
involved with Nan Britton, an Ohio woman 30 years his junior. According to an
account Britton published after Harding’s death, Warren fathered her daughter,
Elizabeth Ann, in 1919.
Few hints of Harding’s personal life however, reached the general public.
Even Mrs. Harding’s previous marriage and divorce were concealed. When asked
about it, Florence first denied it, then changed her story and said she was a
widow. No one reported the inconsistencies in her story. Warren’s affairs
remained hidden as well. Reporters were reluctant to publish rumors, perhaps
even more so because they considered Harding, a former newspaperman, " one of
the boys." At the end of the campaign the newsmen even held a private banquet
in his honor and told him what a fine president he would make.
When rumors threatened to surface, operatives of the Harding campaign quickly
quashed them. In Marion, Carrie Phillips made no secret of her affair with
the candidate, so plans were made to buy her silence. A handful of Harding’s
wealthiest friends and supporters donated money to the "blackmail fund."
Assistant party chairman and advertising kingpin Albert Lasker handled the
negotiations and pay-off. Phillips received $20,000, and she and her husband
were bundled off on an all-expenses-paid tour of the Far East that lasted
until after Inauguration Day. Phillips received an additional $2,000 each
month that Harding remained in office.
Grace Cross, acting either out of jealousy or greed, threatened to make
public a series of letters Harding wrote during their affair. The William J.
Burns Detective Agency, run by a childhood friend of Daugherty’s and noted for
its brutal strike-breaking techniques and strong-arm methods, conspired to
steal them. An attempt to burglarize the Crosses’ home failed, but the
letters were snatched from Cross by her friend, reporter Bertha Martin, as
they dined together in a Washington restaurant. Jesse "Jess" Smith, a close
friend of Daugherty’s, had contacted Martin a few days earlier with the
promise of any number of journalistic opportunities if she would seize the
letters. When Mrs. Cross checked into the Willard Hotel in Washington the
night before the inauguration, agents from the Justice Department and the
Burns Agency visited her. Whatever transpired at that meeting caused Mrs.
Cross to leave Washington before the inauguration ceremony.
To a country weary from the war and Wilsonian progressivism, and feeling the
effects of the 1920 National Prohibition Enforcement Act. Harding seemed the
ideal man to be the next president. The people yearned for the "normalcy" he
promised and swept him into office with 61 percent of the popular vote and 404
electoral votes to his opponent James M Cox’s 127.
Once in Washington the new president made a mixed bag of presidential
appointments. Some--Charles Evans Hughes as secretary of state and Herbert C.
Hoover as head of the Commerce Department—were excellent. Others, such as
Andrew W. Mellon as secretary of the treasury, delighted pro-business
conservatives but dismayed progressives of both political parties. For
secretary of the interior, Harding chose New Mexico Senator Albert B. Fall, a
financially troubled rancher well known for his anti-conservationist views.
Many of Harding’s other appointments were dubious at best. He named Charles
R. Forbes head of the Veterans’ Bureau as it embarked on a $35 million program
of hospital construction. The Hardings had first met Forbes, an unctuous
construction company executive, on a Hawaiian vacation while Warren was
senator. Forbes, a one-time army deserter, claimed to have distinguished
himself in France by winning the Medal of Honor during the Great War. Harding
apparently believed this claim, although the official Medal of Honor rolls
show no such award, and Forbes apparently served in a staff, not combat, role
during the conflict. On Forbes’s coattails came a close friend named Charles
F. Cramer, who received an appointment as the bureau’s general counsel.
Another crony, Colonel Thomas W. Miller, became alien property custodian and
was put in charge of disposing of German assets seized during the war. He
later used his position for personal gain when he arranged the illegal
transfer of German-owned American subsidiary to a syndicate that paid him
handsomely for his action.
Harding made by far his most controversial appointment when he named Harry
Daugherty to the post of Attorney General. Although Daugherty was a lawyer,
he spent most of his career as a lobbyist and "fixer" in Ohio. Faced with
criticism of the appointment, Harding responded, "Harry Daugherty has been my
best friend from the beginning of this whole thing. He tells me he wants to
be attorney general and by God he will be attorney general."
One of Daugherty’s first appointments was that of William J. Burns as head of
the Bureau of Investigation (predecessor to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation). Burns retained control of his detective agency, adding a
formidable force of private agents to his official ones. Daugherty also
brought to the Justice Department a clique known as the "Ohio Gang," headed by
his old friend Jess Smith, a former storekeeper from his home town.
Overweight myopic, and loud, Smith was Daugherty’s constant companion.
Although he held no government position, Smith acquired a Justice Department
office down the hall from Daugherty. He also had a "little green house on K
street" in Washington, where he and his cohorts peddled influence in the form
of withdrawal permits, which allowed liquor to be removed from warehouses for
"medicinal purposes" without penalty or prosecution. In addition to providing
services and protection to bootleggers, Smith’s gang guaranteed an ample
supply of liquor for the President’s weekly poker sessions at the White House.
The regulars who attended these card games included Daugherty, Forbes, Fall,
and Smith.
In the spring of 1922, barely a year after the inauguration, Congressman
Oscar Keller of Minnesota filed a formidable list of charges with the House
Committee on the Judiciary, calling for the attorney general’s impeachment.
He accused Daugherty of failing to enforce the anti-trust laws; refusing to
prosecute war profiteers and bootleggers; obtaining pardons for criminals;
employing corrupt officials in the Justice Department; diverting funds for
illegal purposes; ordering federal agents to follow; coerce, and intimidate
critics in Congress; and failing to prosecute oil companies that were
trespassing on government oil lands. Harding dismissed the allegations as a
mere partisan attack on the White House. Keller’s charges eventually died,
but whiffs of scandal in the administration began to emerge.
In the Senate, rumors reached John Kendrick of Wyoming that the government had
secretly leased private drilling rights to a naval oil reserve in Wyoming
known as the Teapot Dome. The interior Department denied the allegations,
but in fact one of Albert Fall’s first acts as interior secretary had been to
obtain control of the naval oil reserves, which he did with the president’s
knowledge.
Fall had persuaded Harding that the Interior Department could develop a better
long-range policy for the reserves than the Navy Department. Before Kendrick
learned of the situation, Fall had begun to lease oil lands to private
interest. Harry Sinclair of the Mammoth Oil Company and Edward Doheny of the
Pan-American Petroleum Company paid Fall substantial sums for the leases of
the Teapot Dome and a site in California called Elk Hills. In November 1921,
Doheny’s son hand-delivered a black bag containing $100,000 to Fall- a
transaction the oil man later characterized as a "loan"--- and Sinclair gave
Fall more than $300,000 in government bonds and cash.
On April 29, 1922, the Senate unanimously authorized the Committee on Public
Lands to initiate an investigation into what became known as the "Teapot Dome
Scandal." President Harding defended his secretary of the interior when he
told the committee that Fall’s oil policy "was submitted to me prior to the
adoption thereof, and the policy was decided upon and all subsequent acts have
all times had my entire approval." Nevertheless, the rumors of the scandal
grew stronger.
The president ignored or dismissed these indications of wrongdoing in his
administration, preferring his weekly poker parties and his continuing and
dangerous liaison with Nan Britton. According to Britton’s account, Secret
Service agents escorted her into the White House several times, and she and
Harding made love in a small closet just off the Oval Office. On one
occasion their encounter was interrupted when a furious Mrs. Harding tried to
gain entry to the president’s inner sanctum and was barely deterred by a
Secret Service agent.
The Justice Department continued to try to hide both it’s own illegal
activities and the president’s tawdry private life, but some things could be
neither ignored nor concealed. At the Veterans’ Bureau, Charles Forbes saw
great opportunities for personal profit. With Charles Cramer’s assistance,
Forbes sold off government supplies as "surplus." In one transaction Forbes
and Cramer made a tidy profit from kickbacks when they arranged to sell 84,000
unused bed sheets. The sheets had cost the government $1.37 each and were
sold for $.26 apiece- at the same time the government was buying 25,000 new
sheets.
Forbes also informed a favored contractor, John Thompson of Thompson-Black
Construction, of the location and plans for proposed veteran’s hospitals.
After Thompson’s bids were accepted, Forbes received five percent of the
company’s profits on the work as payment.
Harding was furious when he learned about the deal, and he summoned Forbes to
the White House. An eyewitness later reported that the president grabbed
Forbes by the throat and shook him "as a dog would a rat, smashed him against
the wall and screamed ‘You double-crossing bastard.’" Forbes pleaded
forgiveness, and Harding finally allowed him to sail for Europe from where he
immediately resigned his post.
Harding chose to keep the matter quiet rather than turn Forbes over to the
proper legal authorities, but Congress began it’s own investigation. Faced
with the prospect of testifying before a Congressional committee, Cramer
spent the evening of March 16, 1923, writing a series of letters, including
one to the president. Then he stood in front of his bathroom mirror and fired
a .45-caliber bullet into his brain. The letters he composed that evening
somehow disappeared.
Jess Smith created another awkward situation with his sale of liquor patents
and other government favors. Already distressed about the Forbes situation,
the president told Daugherty to speak with Smith about the allegations.
Daugherty reported that the rumors were unfounded, but the stories persisted.
Harding ordered Daugherty to "get [Smith] out of Washington."
Jess Smith spent Memorial Day 1923 at Daugherty’s Wardman Park Hotel apartment
burning records of his own private accounts and a number of documents he had
taken from the Justice Department. The attorney general was Harding’s guest
at the White House at the time, but Daugherty sent of his assistants, William
F. Martin, to stay with his friend. Early the next morning, Martin said, he
was awakened by a noise that sounded like a door slamming. He found Jess
Smith dead, sprawled on the floor. His head was in a metal wastebasket among
the ashes of the burned papers, and he had a .32-caliber revolve clutched in
his hand. Martin immediately called William Burns, who also lived at Wardman
Park Hotel, and Burns quickly took charge of the investigation. Smith’s
death, ruled a suicide, made front page news, but Washington soon rang with
rumors that Smith was murdered because of his knowledge of the Ohio Gang and
his dealings.
While the Senate investigation of the oil leases was barely under way early in
1923, Interior Secretary Fall resigned from office and retired to his New
Mexico ranch. Both is personal financial status and the ranch had much
improved as a result of the payments and gifts from his oil friends. Fall
began to plan a trip to Russia with oil man Sinclair to negotiate drilling
rights there. He sought and obtained Harding’s approval for the trip.
At the same time, President Harding announced plans to seek re-election. He
and Florence and a large party from Washington planned a 1,500-mile, two month
trip to Alaska, with stops at cities along the way. Harding called the
journey a "voyage to understanding." He intended "to learn more about the
United States of America and .... to have the people of the United States know
more about their government."
That June, many members of Harding’s traveling party noticed that he appeared
withdrawn and depressed. Calling Herbert Hoover to his cabin aboard the USS
Henderson one day, the president intimidated the he had heard rumors,
centering on Smith, of irregularities at the Justice Department. "If you knew
of a great scandal in our administration, would you for the good of the
country and the party expose it publicly, or would you bury it?" Harding
asked his commerce secretary. Hoover responded that it should be published,
and that president remarked that such a course would be politically dangerous.
Harding dropped the subject and did not bring it up again. Later he told
reporter William Allen White, "My God, this is a hell of a job! I have no
trouble with my enemies. 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 floor nights!"
On July 27 the president delivered a speech in Seattle, but he seemed tired
and listless. After traveling to San Francisco, Harding took to his bed at
the Palace Hotel, where his physicians declared him to be in a state of utter
exhaustion. The president’s condition worsened that evening with the
development of bronchopneumonia. He died at 7:30 pm on August 2, 1923. His
doctors believed the cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage, but Florence
Harding refused to permit an autopsy.
Rumors spread that Mrs. Harding had poisoned her husband because of his
adulteries, or the he had committed suicide. Harding’s health, however, had
been declining since 1922 when he began to tire easily and complained of chest
pains. Herbert Hoover later wrote, "People do not die from a broken heart,
but people with bad hearts may reach the end much sooner from great worries."
Harding’s death brought forth a great outpouring of grief. Hundreds of
thousands of citizens lined the tracks as a funeral train carried the
president’s body to Washington to lie in state before being returned to
Marion.
When Florence Harding returned to the White House after the funeral, she
systematically destroyed many of her husband’s papers. She began with those
in his locked desk in the Oval Office and in the safe in his second-floor
study. Major Ora M. Baldinger, military aide to the late president, burned
many of the papers in a fireplace at the First Lady’s request, while she stood
by the hearth stirring the ashes with a poker. The destruction went on for
five days. No one know exactly what went up in smoke.
A Senate committee under Thomas Walsh was already looking into the Teapot Dome
Scandal, and in 1924 Senator’s Burton K. Wheeler and Smith Brookhart began
investigating Daugherty. In the following months Congressional hearings led
to legal action against various members of Harding’s administration. As the
investigations and trials dragged on, the public became less concerned with
government wrongdoing and more interested in enjoying the prosperity under
President Calvin Coolidge and the joys of the Jazz Age.
The investigators endured more condemnation than those who had defrauded the
government. Senators Walsh and Wheeler were castigated as "scandal mongers,"
and "mud-gunners." And "assassins of character," while the investigations
themselves were widely decried as "a Democratic lynching-bee." Daugherty
remained as attorney general after Coolidge became president, and he used
Burn’s Bureau of Investigation agents to uncover unfavorable information about
the investigators. In April 1924, the Justice Department actually indicted
Senator Wheeler for conspiracy to defraud the government by allegedly
continuing to practice law before a federal agency after he was elected
senator, but before he was sworn in. It took the jury only 10 minutes to
acquit him.
Daugherty consistently refused to supply congressional investigators with
requested files, decrying the demands as a "fishing expedition." President
Coolidge finally demanded Daugherty’s resignation, and the former attorney
general was tried twice for graft. The first case resulted in a hung jury,
and the second an acquittal due to insufficient evidence. Daugherty refused
to testify, citing the Fifth Amendment and claiming that any other course
would leave a deep stain on Harding’s memory.
Others involved in the scandals fared less well. Harry Sinclair and Edward
Doheny both went to jail; Doheny’s son, who transmitted the bribes to
Secretary of the Interior Fall, committed suicide; and Fall gained the dubious
distinction of being the first cabinet officer convicted of criminal
misconduct in office. Found guilty of accepting bribes, he was sentenced to a
year in a federal penitentiary and fined $100,000.
Of those involved in the Veterans’ Bureau scandal, Charles Forbes and
Contractor John Thompson received tow years in jail and a $10,000 fine each.
Forbes’s jail term began at Leavenworth in March 1926, but Thompson, who
suffered from heart problems, died before his prison sentence began.
Warren Harding’s reputation continued to sink. In 1927, Nan Britton
published The President’s Daughter, a book that told her story of their long
affair. In 1965, after Carrie Phillips died, letters from Harding found in
her house confirmed their illicit relationship.
These revelations overshadowed Harding’s actual accomplishments. He convened
the Washington Naval Conference on the limitation of Armaments (the first
peace summit); signed the Sheppard-Towner Act, which provide funding for state
programs on infant mortality and healthcare for women and children; and
pushed the 1921 Federal Highway Act through Congress, which furnished a $75
million appropriation for a national highway system. Nevertheless, Warren G.
Harding is remembered for presiding over an administration known for its
flagrant corruption--- brought about by a president who was lifted to a post
beyond his powers.
Freelance writer Michael D. Haydock is a frequent contributor to American
History.
