-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
--[14]--
XL.
Things Get Out Of Hand
SAMUEL GOMPERS, THE head of the American Federation of Labor, formerly a
cigarmaker, a jovial fellow, an Elk and a Mason, a profoundly conservative
man who believed unions should stick to bargaining for wages and stay out of
radical politics, was finally moved to attack the Harding administration.
Gompers, an immigrant who had studied the U.S. Constitution in order to
become a citizen, understood the difference between Jess Smith and Harry
Daugherty. Smith, with his deals for liquor and fight films and kickbacks,
was corrupt. But Daugherty, with his injunction, was a threat to the
Constitution itself. To steal money was lousy and unfair. But to steal power
was to threaten the very Republic that safeguarded every citizen's freedom.
It is one thing to skirt the rules; it is another thing to eliminate them.
Jess was involved in some lowdown, dirty politics. Harry was involved in high
crimes and misdemeanors.
Gompers sent Jackson Ralston, the lawyer for the American Federation of
Labor, over to see Congressman Oscar Keller of Min-nesota. Keller, a nervous,
high-strung man was, unfortunately, not the strongest ally Gompers could
find�"an absurd creature," Sam-uel Hopkins Adams called him, "who might have
been imagined by Gilbert and set to music by Sullivan." But he was
suggestible. With Jackson Ralston's coaching, Keller introduced a resolution
in the House, impeaching the attorney general for "abridging freedom of
speech, freedom of the press, the right of the people peaceably to assemble,"
and a number of other crimes against the Constitution.
Keller had not taken the time to assemble any evidence for his charges, but
he had heard a great many rumors, and he found some colleagues who were eager
to join with him. The farm bloc, happy to damage the Harding administration,
joined in calling for hearings before the judiciary committee. Other
representatives, some who had friends or contributors who insisted that
Daugherty was prosecuting antitrust cases selectively, joined the move for
impeachment. Still other representatives had heard stories that the justice
Department prosecuted war profiteers selectively, or sold pardons to
criminals, or even that Daugherty had put Bureau of Investigation agents up
to spying on members of Congress with a view to blackmailing or intimidating
them.
"Let an individual," said Samuel Hopkins Adams, "or a constituted body, such
as an investigating committee, attempt to clean up or pry into evil
conditions, and the Bureau set in movement its formidable machinery of
espionage, menace, and oppression."
The rumor was that agents of the bureau were breaking into offices, tapping
telephones, copying private correspondence. No one was safe. The executive
branch of government was trying to subdue the legislative branch. Fear for
the Constitution, and fear for the individual skins of congressmen,
coalesced. It was just the sort of opportunity that members of Congress love.
"Well, let me ask you," as Senator Wheeler put it to Gaston Means in a later
investigation of the attorney general's operations, "at whose direction did
you investigate Senator Caraway?"
MR. MEANS: "I investigated him through Mr. Jess Smith's direction."
SENATOR WHEELER: "YOU investigated him through Mr. Jess Smith's direction?"
MR. MEANS: "Yes.
SENATOR WHEELER: "Was that at the time that Mr. Caraway was making some
attacks in the Senate on Attorney General Daugherty?"
MR. MEANS: "No. He had made some attacks on President Harding, too, prior to
that, and he had made attacks on the Attorney General, too."
SENATOR WHEELER: "Now, Mr. Means, you also investigated Senator La Follette,
did you not?"
MR. MEANS: "Yes."
SENATOR WHEELER: "And you went through his offices here, did you not, in the
Capitol?"
MR. MEANS: "No; I did not."
SENATOR WHEELER: "You had somebody do it?"
MR. MEANS: "I saw that it was done."
SENATOR ASHURST: "You did what?"
MR. MEANS: "Well, I saw that it was done."
SENATOR ASHURST: "Well, you saw that Senator Caraway's office was gone
through?"
MR. MEANS: "No, sir; I did not."
SENATOR ASHURST: "Who did?"
MR. MEANS: "We didn't go through Caraway that way at all, Senator."
SENATOR WHEELER: "You have never gone through my offices yet, have you?"
MR. MEANS: "If somebody will assign me to it, I will do it, though."
SENATOR WHEELER: "Senator Moses suggests to me that I can save time by asking
you what senators you have not investigated."
MR. MEANS: "Oh, there are lots of them I haven't. They are a pretty clean
body. You don't find much on them, either. You don't find very much."
SENATOR WHEELER: "Now, Mr. Means, coming back to Senator La Follette, you
investigated him at the instance of whom?"
MR. MEANS: ". . . I got those [orders] from Mr. Jess Smith.
I didn't�investigation with me is�the man is a number; I never ask who he is.
It doesn't make any difference. I would just as soon investigate a tramp as
anybody else. It doesn't make any difference to me. I never ask who he is or
what position he occupies. I designate the number and go ahead and get the
facts if I can, and I get nothing but the facts, and report what I find."
SENATOR ASHURST: "Nobody has asserted or supposed anything to the contrary."
MR. MEANS: "I mean by that it doesn't mean anything about investigating a
senator. Thousands of people have been investigated. Bishops have been
investigated without knowing it. And clergymen."
THE CHAIRMAN: "When did this terrific spy system start in the United States;
by what official authority, if you know?"
MR. MEANS: "I have been investigating since I was twenty-one. . . . "
Nonetheless, the Keller investigation got nowhere. The House Judiciary
Committee, overwhelmed by rumors, insisted that Keller back up his charges
with some facts, something that would definitely, unmistakably tie in
Attorney General Daugherty with some specific act. Keller had nothing on
Daugherty himself. The committee demanded that Keller appear and testify.
Keller held back. The committee then issued a subpoena and told the sergeant
at arms to go out into the hall, where Keller was consulting feverishly with
Jackson Ralston, and bring Keller in under arrest.
"On hearing the call of the sergeant at arms," Daugherty recalled with
pleasure, "Mr. Keller dashed down the corridor and ran at breakneck speed.
The ancients believed that the bowels were the seat of the human soul. In
this mad flight, the radical leader gave positive proofs of the truth of this
faith. Scrubwomen were called at an unusual hour."
Daugherty had squeaked by once again; he was nothing if not fast on his feet.
The talk in Washington was that there were a lot of other scandals in the
administration that might be exposed at any minute�more gossip about Fall and
Forbes and Jess Smith�but it looked as though those stories could be
contained, too, until people just forgot them.
pps. 202-206
=====
XLI.
Things Get More Out Of Hand:
Mr. and Mrs. Harding
ACCORDING TO THAT liar Gaston Means, Mrs. Harding confronted Mr. Harding with
the goods on Nan in her rooms at the White House. As Means approached the
door, he found it once again conveniently open and heard loud voices coming
from the room. Through the open door he saw the president stride across the
room and leave by another door.
When Means entered, he found Mrs. Harding, "in her inevitable flowered dress,
with pale, set face, and determination written all over her countenance ...
like a General on the field of battle ... her hands hanging straight at her
side were clenched until the knuckles were white. She was trembling all over."
"I've had a word with Warren," she said. "He knows now that I
know�everything. I have the whip hand."
Suddenly Harding returned to the room. "At a bound, it seemed," he was
standing directly in front of Means, "with extended arm, and pointing his
finger straight at me. His infuriated face was crimson: he was trembling all
over."
"I've instructed the Department of Justice," Harding told Means, "to
discharge you. By what authority have you put the President of the United
States under surveillance?"
"You ask two questions in one," Means likes to think he told the president
confidently. "Which do you want me to answer first?"
Mrs. Harding was still standing where she had been when Means entered. "She
kept her composure," Means recalled. "Her thin lips were pressed together."
"Either you prefer," Harding said.
"In reply to your second question, I didn't have you under surveillance�but I
did have your mistress and the mother of your child under surveillance."
Harding "staggered back a step or two," Means recalled, "but caught himself
by holding to the side of a couch. A small end-table overturned. Mrs. Harding
darted behind him, picked up the table and carefully set it upright again."
"Calm yourself, Warren," she said, "now calm yourself. Don't make a scene."
"Well," said Harding to Means, "you'll find that you have been summarily
discharged�and your discharge paper is now at your home. . . ."
"Will you," Means replied coolly, "allow me to confirm that statement by
using the phone?"
Means phoned home to confirm that he had been fired. When he put down the
telephone, Harding turned on him again. Mrs. Harding had apparently told him
that Means had got hold of all Nan's letters and diaries.
"Well," said Harding, "what I want you to get down to And get down to right
now�is this: where are those papers and letters and documents and
articles�all those things that you got for Mrs. Harding. She tells me that
you have them."
"She's your wife. What she tells you, you wouldn't question, would you?"
Mrs. Harding had sat down in a low, old-fashioned rocker, and "was rocking
violently back and forth." The president had been striding back and forth
across the room, his voice choking "with rage and chagrin." Means remembers
himself as calm to the point of being sadistic. At last, Harding, seeing that
he would not get the letters or diaries from Means, turned to leave the room,
and then turned back again at the door and shook his fist at Mrs. Harding.
"You have ruined me," he said. "You have ruined me! You and your contemptible
detectives."
Then he turned to Means: "And as for you, you have been discharged and you'll
be indicted in twenty-four hours. You will never again put your foot in the
White House. And�I'll have those papers. I'll have search warrants�and you'll
be under surveillance for the rest of your life."
Means said nothing. He was struck, however, by the fact that the president
had "pointed his finger at me, but oh, how he did shake his fist at Mrs.
Harding."
Means was not present for the ensuing scene between the Hardings, but he said
that Mrs. Harding told him about it. Mrs. Harding asked the president,
finally, "What will you do with me?"
"You can do," Means said Mrs. Harding said the president said, "what you damn
please�"
"Warren�Warren�think of our young love-"
"Young love," he said, "our young love! Love! I never loved you. You want the
truth. Now you've got the truth. Young love! You ran me down' God in
heaven�young love�you ran me down�"
"Those," said Mrs. Harding, "are the very words that President Harding said
to me. The very words�to me, his wife-for thirty-three years. Oh�it was a
terrible scene."
pps. 207-209
=====
XLII.
Things Get Completely Out Of Hand, Jess Smith
TOWARD THE END, Roxy said, Jess was afraid. He was aware that any number of
mistakes might come back to haunt him. When he would take Roxy to the Hotel
Deschler for lunch or dinner, he might suddenly say to Roxy, "See that man
over there? How does he look to you?"
"Oh," Roxy would say, "he is all right."
"I don't like his looks," Jess would say.
"Don't look at him," Roxy would reply. "He is all right. He is just a
traveling man."
Or they would be sitting in the lobby of the hotel in a couple of chairs,
and Jess would say, "Don't let us sit here, let us sit over there; let us go
over." And they would move to a couch with their backs against the wall.
He had quit drinking. He had never been a heavy drinker, but his whiskey
deals had come to worry him so much that he had sworn off drink altogether.
The last time he went home to Ohio, he met Roxy in Columbus and took her at
once to the Hotel Deschler, where, as soon as they got into the hotel lobby,
he threw his arms around her and said, "I never was so glad to see anyone in
my life."
He had wired ahead to tell Roxy to make whatever plans she wanted for
Saturday night, but he had apparently forgotten that, for he asked, "What do
you want to do?"
She had made plans to go to a dinner dance.
"Let's go home," he said.
"But I've made plans for dinner tonight out at the club."
"Oh."
"You told me to."
"I know. Well, will you do me a favor?"
"What is it?"
"Will you come on home?"
"Why, certainly."
"Let's go home before dark."
He thought they might take an afternoon train down to Washington Court House,
and they caught the two o'clock train. Jess had brought along a brief case
that seemed to make him nervous. He asked Roxy to carry it.
In the coach, Roxy rode facing forward, Jess faced backward, and Roxy noticed
a man, apparently asleep, leaning somewhat over the side of his seat. She was
"Jabbering away," she remembered, about what changes she planned in the
house, and Jess interrupted her.
"Don't talk too loud," Jess said. "He will hear you."
"No," Roxy said. "I'm not saying anything; I'm not saying anything of
consequence."
"I don't like the looks of that fellow."
"Oh, stop looking at him."
"I don't like the looks of that fellow."
"Yes; but stop looking at him."
When they reached Washington Court House, Roxy noticed that Jess kept looking
behind them.
"Don't do that," she said. "Stop that."
"Well," Jess said, "I wanted to see if that fellow got off the train."
"Don't you do that again."
"All right," he said and smiled and looked a little bit reassured.
But later on, when they were at home, Jess said, in the midst of a
conversation, "You have some letters." Roxy was laughing. "I am afraid," Jess
told her.
"Of what," she asked him.
"They are going to get me."
She was too unsettled to ask him what he meant, and, later, when she did ask,
all he said was that "they passed it to me." She thought he meant that "they"
were going to pin the blame on him, for all that "they" had been doing.
"Tell me all about it, Jess. I know so much."
"No," he said, "Just cheer me up."
And then, after a while, he said, "Do you miss me when I'm gone?"
One afternoon, when Jess was spending some time out at the Deer Creek shack
with Harry Daugherty, who had returned to Washington Court House, too, for a
visit, Daugherty was taking a nap when a man from Columbus came to the shack
to see him. Jess told the man that Daugherty was napping and could not be
disturbed, but the man insisted that it was urgent, and so Jess woke Harry up.
"You know I won't be disturbed," Daugherty shouted at Jess and flew into a
temper tantrum. (The caller from Columbus discreetly got out of the shack and
drove away.) Daugherty got out of bed, abusing Jess as he dressed, called for
his driver to get the car ready, and stormed out of the shack. He meant to
leave Jess behind, without a car. Jess called up Mal Daugherty and asked to
have a car sent out to the shack, but Mal said he couldn't send anyone until
after the bank closed at three o'clock. Finally Harry relented and gave Jess
a ride back into Washington Court House, traveling in silence, enraged.
Whether Daugherty had told Jess while they were at the shack that Harding had
told Daugherty to send Jess back to Ohio, permanently�because Harding had
heard too many rumors about Jess�or whether Daugherty had told Jess even
before they got to the shack is unknowable. But the men had clearly reached
the breaking point.
When Daugherty dropped Jess off in town, Jess went directly to the hardware
store, and although it was well known that Jess had been too frightened all
his life even to touch a gun, he bought a pistol, saying to the clerk, "This
is for the attorney general."
When Roxy saw him that afternoon, he was holding his head up and seemed to be
relieved of a burden, to be in higher spirits than she had seen him in some
time. She asked him if things were "all right now."
"Yes," he said. "They are all right now."
The next night, Jess and Daugherty returned to Washington. Apparently Jess
was returning to pack his things to take back to Washington Court House. They
had, by this time, moved out of Ned McLean's house on H Street to a suite of
rooms in the Wardman Park Hotel�but Jess went to the hotel alone. Daugherty
went to spend the night in the White House. But Daugherty asked his
secretary, a man named Warren Martin, to stay with Jess at the hotel because,
said Daugherty, he was worried about Jess.
Early the next morning, Martin told the police, he heard a crash. He thought
"it was a door slamming," as Mark Sullivan wrote, "or that a waiter had
dropped a tray; but he could not get to sleep again and he went into the
sitting-room. Looking into the other bedroom, he saw Jess Smith slumped on
the floor, his head in an iron waste-basket and a revolver in his right hand."
"The bullet," said Daugherty, who went to the apartment shortly after William
Burns of the Bureau of Investigation had arrived on the scene, "had driven
through his right temple and lodged in the door jamb."
"To my surprise," Daugherty continued, "I found . . . that Jess had destroyed
all my house accounts and my personal correspondence. In fact there was
hardly anything left pertaining to my personal affairs." All Jess's papers,
too, had been destroyed.
Roxy suspected murder, but the case was pooh-poohed and closed at once, never
to be reopened.
That night, "as usual," Sullivan wrote, "Daugherty�still a guest of the White
House�dined with the Hardings." Mrs. Harding had invited a couple of friends
to have dinner with them, to relieve the gloom. Far from being able to cheer
up Harding and Daugherty, the guests "were suffused with the numb despair of
the hosts," Sullivan wrote. "At the dinner table, only fragmentary sentences
were spoken.
"Afterward, a private showing of a motion-picture in the upstairs hall
furnished no real diversion-but did happily provide a darkness to five
harassed souls, a darkness that saved each countenance from sight of the
others. No one spoke. Only from one person came any sound; from time to time
Daugherty uttered a long-drawn-out 'O-o-o-o-o-o-o.' "
pps. 210-214
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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