-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 --[11]-- XXXI. The President Remembers His Schoolboy Aspirations NEWSPAPER EDITORIAL WRITERS were generally impressed by Harding's adminstration in Its first year. The New York Times, which had at first considered him "the firm and perfect flower of the cowardice and imbecility of the senatorial cabal," had come to conclude that Harding was "gradually assuming undisputed leadership and without offending his former associates in the Senate." Whether his newspaper clippings went to his head-or some forgotten longing within him commenced to emerge-Harding "deeply wanted," as Herbert Hoover came to notice, "to make a name as President." After all, as a schoolboy reading his McGuffey Eclectic Reader, he had learned the story about George Washington and the cherry tree. Alexander Hamilton had been his hero since earliest boyhood, and was still. He wished, somehow, to rise above himself; but he did not seem to know quite how to do it. Charlie Forbes, before he had met his comeuppance, had gone to play poker with the president one evening, and after the game broke up, Harding took Forbes aside and strolled with him out onto the White House lawn. Harding was, he told Forbes, dreadfully unhappy: his life had been empty. And then, to Forbes's amazement, the president simply broke down and cried. pps. 173-174 ===== XXXII. Things Begin to Come Apart: Gaston Means Investigates Nan Britton ACCORDING To GASTON Means, whose word is always suspect when it is not an outright lie, Mrs. Harding called him in one day. "I entered the White House," he said, "as usual through what I now called the 'viaduct entrance.' The guards within the White House knew me by this time and passed me quietly on to Mrs. Harding's private apartment upstairs." He found her door slightly ajar when he rapped. Through the door, he saw her standing across the room looking out of a window. In her right hand, he noticed, she was gripping some folds of the lace curtain at the window and that she was unconsciously "crushing the folds." At the sound of his knock, she turned at once. "Mr. Means," she said. "Come in." She closed the door behind him and directed him to a couch, where she sat, too, at the opposite end, with a pillow at her back. "I'm feeling fine this morning," she told him. "My masseur [sic] has just finished her treatment. She tells me that I have the firm flesh of a young girl. See?" She held up her arm for Means to inspect. "The loose violetcolored chiffon sleeves," Means observed, "fell away in soft folds." "My arms are smooth and firm and white-aren't they? I am very proud of my arms. And�you have noticed I am sure, that my walk has the same elastic spring that I had as a girl. I am really proud of my walk. I have kept myself young�and I always intend to." " 'No one is ever any older than they feel,' was my not very original rejoinder," Means recalled. "Many public men," Mrs. Harding said hesitantly, "many great men have had their careers utterly ruined-and the lives of all their loved ones totally wrecked�by�indiscretions. They have had to forfeit everything that was dear to them-by an act of weakness." Means could not disagree. "Warren Harding," Mrs. Harding said at last, "has had a very ugly affair with a girl named Nan Britton from Marion. It goes back to the actual childhood of this girl.... I became suspicious . . when she was but a child. . . . She was a greatly over-developed child and wore extremely short dresses above the knees. It was not considered quite decent. And she was always doing everything on earth that she could-to attract Warren's attention. This over-development tended to attract men-on the streets and together with her unusually short dresses, why she attracted attention of course and not in a very nice way. Why, I have watched men-watch her-even before she was in her early teens. . . ." Mrs. Harding wanted Means to investigate Nan Britton. The president's wife said she already knew that her husband and Nan were having an affair, but it occurred to Means that she was hoping he could disprove it. "This girl Nan Britton," said Mrs. Harding suddenly, "has a child and she claims that Warren Harding is the father of it!" Means was too astonished to speak. "I don't believe it!" the Duchess said. Where, Means inquired, would he find Nan Britton? "That girl! Oh�everywhere! She stays with this sister in Chicago sometimes-God alone knows where she calls home. But listen! You can find out. I want you to find out and put her under surveillance immediately, day and night." Would Means accept the assignment? He would. He would start, he said, with Nan's date of birth. "Oh�I don't care to know anything about her birth," said Mrs. Harding. "I know all about that. Don't waste time on things like that.... Begin at twelve years of age." Means understood his job perfectly: he was to prove that Nan and Harding were not lovers. Failing that, he was to prove that Nan had many lovers who could have been the father of her child. pps.175-178 ===== XXXIII. An Incidental Nuisance: The People Rise Up WARTIME PRICES CONTINUED to go up after the war ended. The cost of food had more than doubled in seven years. And so the years 1919 and 1920 were a time of strikes not only for higher wages, but also strikes for lower prices, buyers' strikes, and renters' strikes. Even William McAdoo, a former secretary of the treasury, joined the buyers' strike, appearing in a pair of trousers with patches on them to show he was making do with old clothes. Wearing old clothes became quite the vogue; old dresses were the fashionable style, and cotton bib overalls came off the farm and into the office now and then. It seemed that everyone was joining one sort of strike or another. Then prices began to fall, and with the falling prices, businesses failed, mortgages were foreclosed, some employers succeeded in convincing their workers to take wage cuts, others simply let their workers go; and unemployment rose to 11 percent. As inflation gave way to recession, the two forces intermingled, and whipsawed the country, and a general, alarming sense of chaos impressed itself on nearly everyone's imaginations. In 1919 there had been strikes of harbor workers in New York and of 35,000 dress and shirtwaist makers, a strike of shipbuilders in Seattle, a threatened strike of 86,000 packers, a strike in New York of 30,000 cigar makers, and in Chicago of 30,000 construction workers, of 70,000 railroad shopmen in Chicago, and of streetcar, elevated, and subway workers in Boston and Chicago, of New England railroad shopmen and of Chicago carpenters and steelworkers and of Boston policemen and of New York actors and of bituminous coal miners. During Harding's administration, the bituminous coal miners went out on strike again, led by John L. Lewis, the son of a Welsh miner and a miner himself, a man with a thick shock of hair and a prize fighter's face, who looked as though he wanted an excuse for a fist fight. The owners demanded that the miners take a pay cut, back to the pay scale of 1917. Lewis declared that the miners would never settle for that, and he called out 600,000 miners. In Herrin, Illinois, mine owners hired armed strikebreakers to go in and work the mines. The miners had seen bands of strikebreakers before; they had been clubbed and shot by them. At Herrin, union miners closed in with rifles and dynamite. The county sheriff and his men stood aside, and the miners attacked. The strikebreakers, even though they were armed with machine guns, could not withstand the siege. They raised a white flag. The miners accepted their surrender and forced them to run a gauntlet on their way out of the mine: twenty-one of them were lynched, shot, or beaten to death, in what came to be called the Herrin Massacre. pps. 179-180 --[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! 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