-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 --[4]-- x. A Short Course in Political Science "IF YOU WANT to get along," the one-time Speaker of the House of Representatives, Sam Rayburn, said, "go along." When Harding was only twenty-two years old, he set out for the state Republican convention as a delegate from Marion fully expecting to be a success in this as he had been in every other endeavor. As a Marion booster, and a Republican booster, and a newspaperman, it was only natural that he be brought along to the convention, and he proved himself an agreeable, likeable young fellow, a loyal supporter of the Republican party, of Ohio, and of America-and willing to speak out in favor of any of these causes at picnics or women's clubs, barbecues or meetings of the Elks' club. Because he was a loyal party man he was happy to run for county auditor in the late 1880s, although there was no chance of a Republican winning in that particular election-and, after a decade of similar unselfish services to the party, accepting defeat cheerfully, like a good soldier, he was given the Republican nomination for the Ohio State Senate in 1898, and won. Ohio politics was a rats' nest of warring factlons—but Harding amiably declined to take sides. He promoted everyone's cause, doing favors equally for the Cincinnati faction and the Cleveland faction, for the boys of Columbus as well as for the legislators from rural districts. "There may be an abler man in the Senate than Harding," the governor said, "but when I want things done I go to him." He was on his way to becoming a politician's politician—infinitely loyal, patient, self-effacing, conciliatory, willing to be of use, flexible, tolerant of frailty and foible, fitting in, going along. By 1903, there was already talk of running Harding for governor, although, when the bosses favored Myron Herrick, Harding remained as equable and affable as ever. He said contentedly that, if the party elders favored Herrick, then he thought Herrick would be nominated at the convention "by acclamation." His cheerful acquiescence might almost have seemed simple minded, had he not put himself forward modestly-almost unnoticeably—as a possible candidate for lieutenant governor. He was given the nomination—the office was and is, as such things go, a minor one—and he and Herrick won. The rewards for a political career in Ohio could be substantial, and any young man who had gotten along as Harding had might well have entertained even greater ambitions. Because Ohio was such a politically active, and corrupt, state—with such gutter fighters as Boss George Cox and Fire Engine Joe Foraker of Cincinnati; such hard money arm twisters as Mark Hanna, the Red Boss of Cleveland; and such snooty patricians as Charlie and William Howard Taft—anyone who came up through Ohio politics was destined to have a first-rate education in the intricacies and pitfalls of forcing and scuttling legislation, manipulating conventions, rigging elections, securing campaign contributions from large and small corporations, disposing of public funds, and letting utility franchises, road contracts, permits, licenses, and jobs. In the period between the end of the Civil War and World War I, Ohio provided more federal jobholders and cabinet members than any other state in the Union. So well schooled, and so skilled, were Ohio politicians that, in the same period, Ohio provided seven out of the twelve presidents of the United States—or every single Republican president except two, who succeeded to the job from the vice-presidency. They said they were elected because Ohio was in the middle of the country, and because Ohio was the crossroads of the country, a unique blend of North and South, East and West, of industrialists and farmers, old settlers and new frontiersmen. But that was just convention blather. The truth was that Ohio politicians did well because the state weeded out all but the most ferocious survivors, and the survivors built a network over the years that went from Cincinnati to Washington and back again. In 1905, Harding reached for the nomination for governor of Ohio, and he was slapped down. He had been too hasty. He had forgotten loyalty: Herrick himself wanted to run again for governor. Although it was clear that he could not possibly win the election, loyalty decreed that he must be given the nomination. He was, and he lost, and Harding returned to his office at the Marion Star to spend several years remembering to remember to go along. This is the first and last principle of party politics, and once Harding got it firmly fixed in his mind he needed no other principle. ===== XI. A Close Call THE MOMENT WAS irresistible. The Duchess had had major surgery for a kidney ailment and required a long period of convalescence. Harding's friend Jim Phillips, the co-owner of a dry goods store on Center Street, felt ill and out of sorts, so he went off, at Harding's recommendation, to the Battle Creek sanitarium. Harding himself, stung by his failed attempt to snatch the governorship, was in need of solace and reassurance. Carrie Phillips, Jim's wife, was thirty years old at the time, nine years younger than Harding, a beautiful young woman with golden hair, a round, pretty face, a full womanly figure, and a slender waist; she was warm and sensual, with quick, sometimes unpredictable passions, an exciting woman, an emotional adventure that might lead anywhere, a young woman full of wishes about the world beyond Marion, full of dreams, and, above all, full of a thousand ardent passions. She had an eight-year-old daughter, and she had just lost a five-year-old son—a loss from which she could not recover, for which she needed profound consolation. Harding fell in love with her as he had never fallen in love with anyone else. They made love at Carrie's house on South Main Street, and when they were apart, whether for a day or, because of business or the need for discretion, for a week, Harding wrote letters to her, letters filled with an outpouring of longing, of craving, of languishing, of lingering soliloquies of his wishes to caress and kiss her, of frank descriptions of his yearning for her lips and breasts, of extravagant happy praise of her eyes, the sound of her voice, her hair, her jokes, her murmurings, her thoughts of the world, her whispers, her dresses, her cheekbones, her earlobes, her laughter, her songs, the touch of her hand, her thighs, her shoulder, the nape of her neck, her flirtatiousness, her warmth and her loveliness. His letters ran to thirty and forty pages. Sometimes he threw in a terrible piece of doggerel, sometimes romantic verse, sometimes rhymed jokes. His letters were mostly awkward things, full of passages that would make any voyeur squirm and blush in embarrassment for their clumsiness, their desperate sentimentality, their inability, finally, to express all that was in Harding's heart. They are the letters of a man who had spent his life hiding his feelings, not revealing them, who had never had any practice writing love letters or speaking of such intimate things, and so hardly knew what to do when he came to want to express his deepest feelings, and to tell the truth.[*][ * The letters are now, because of litigation by Harding's heirs, sealed by court order. They may not be quoted directly—or even seen (so I am told)—except in clandestinely circulated, purloined copies.] He was a handsome man-with a fleck of gray at the temples by this time—a man of boundless energy and cheerfulness, with an expansive smile and a ready handshake, the sort of man who infused everyone he met with a feeling of happiness and security. A teenage schoolgirl who saw one of his campaign posters at about this time fell in love with him at first sight-overcome as she later recalled, with "unforgettable sensations," knowing at once "that he was for me my 'ideal American.'" 'Me teenage girl cut out pictures of him from the newspapers and put them on her bedroom wall, as though he might be a teenage idol-someone who radiated excitement, someone destined for brilliance in a larger world. Carrie must have been drawn to him, in part, at least, out of a similar sense of him—for she, too, had an urge to get out of Marion and into a life somehow richer, more exciting, and still secure. Carrie and Harding carried on their affair for five years—meeting sometimes in another town where Harding had gone to make a political speech. Sometimes, bizarrely, Harding and the Duchess, and Jim and Carrie, would go off together on motoring trips. Once they even managed to go, all of them together, on a month-long holiday to Europe. Aboard the ship, as they traveled across the Atlantic, after the Duchess and Jim had gone to their staterooms, Harding and Carrie would meet out on the deck, to embrace in the shadows and to talk. Sometimes Carrie, undone by the strain of the situation, would feel herself yielding to Harding's caresses, and then suddenly push him away. Letters home, to friends in Marion, show a man resolutely uncomplicated, resolutely bland, resolutely optimistic, resolutely able to ride right through any situation with perfect equanimity. "Saturday," Harding wrote home to a friend, "we stopped at Madeira, drank of the wine, bought of the embroideries, and sent a wave of prosperity over the island. Mighty pretty place. I could gladly stay a couple of weeks. Cannot say I greatly like riding on ox-drawn sleds over cobblestone pavements, but we tried it. Made the ascent of one of the mountains by cog-wheel railway and tobaganed [sic] down. Same stunt in another form. The tabog is an iron-shod sled, pulled, pushed, or held back by two Portuguese, and we descended over two miles of paved mountain roads and streets in that sled, with the two poor men pushing, panting, puffing, and pulling. I never gave anybody a fee so willingly in my life." So what if he seemed to enjoy his own good looks too much, if he was too attentive to his own appearance, too pleased with his own charm, too frequently given to preening, too fond of the words "becoming" and "seemly." So what if his interminable letters to Carrie sometimes conveyed less the sense that he professed his love than that he loved to profess—or even, sometimes, raised the question whether he was trying to talk himself into a feeling he did not feel? Whatever his failings, however preoccupied, he did work harder at courting Carrie than anyone else ever had, write to her more than any other man ever had, appreciate her more than any other man had, try harder than any other man had to break through the limitations of character and convention that bound him—in order to love her. Why Harding and Carrie broke up is not entirely clear. It appears that Carrie wanted to marry Harding, and Harding balked. Doubtless he found it hard to consider leaving the Duchess, who held him so firmly to the course he had plotted out for himself, who supported him so completely in what he wanted. Perhaps he found it hard to imagine what would become of him if he began to give in to his feelings—to begin, perhaps, to follow his whims, recklessly, as his father had done. What is certain is that of all the people Harding surrounded himself with, and kept around him, Carrie was the only one who did not want him to go farther in politics. Politics only took him away from her. Once he understood the choice she offered him, he backed away completely. It had been a close call: he might have fallen in love, and dropped his career. Carrie, her feelings hurt, commenced to talk of how much she had enjoyed Europe, and especially Germany, and of how she might like to return to live there one day. No one tried to talk her out of it. She began, then, to belittle his political aspirations, and that finished it for him. He began to travel more, to accept more invitations to speak in places where Carrie could not easily accompany him-and she talked more and more of going off to live abroad. At last, Carrie did take her daughter and go off to settle in Germany. She wrote home-both to her husband and to Hardingto say that she was not coming back. Neither of the men wrote to implore her to change her mind. When she finally did return, it was to her husband. ==== XII. The World's Most Exclusive Club HARDING RENEWED HIS efforts at politics at just the time the Old Guard of the Republican party had come under attack from a reform movement led by the former president of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Progressives. The bosses feared that a genuine, popular, grass-roots movement of reformers and mere citizens might take control of the party from them. There was plenty of work for a loyal party man, and Harding went out on the speaking circuit again, talking about how everyone was a reformer at heart, how everyone wanted to stand pat when things were fine, and progress when something new was called for, how all Republicans had the same basic interest at heart. Harding had become the country's most practiced champion of harmony, unity, and smoothing things over. By 1912, when President William Howard Taft decided to try to hang onto the presidency for a second term, Harding had performed so loyally that Taft tossed him a bone by asking him to make the nominating speech at the Republican Convention. Harding, wearing a brand-new cutaway with a red geranium in his buttonhole, understood perfectly the part he had to play. As he stepped up to the speaker's podium, he was greeted by boos, hisses, and catcalls. The bosses were going to railroad Taft through the convention. The reformers were shocked at the behavior of the bosses. It was clear to everyone that Taft, if nominated, would lose. The reformers could not believe the bosses wanted to put up a losing candidate. It had not occurred to the Progressives that the bosses would far rather lose the election to the Democrats than lose the Republican party to the reformers. The convention was designed to be an elaborate lesson in the principle of party loyalty. Even before Harding began to speak, some of the delegates started to rub pieces of sandpaper together, to sound like a steam engine getting underway-and called out "Toot! Toot! All aboard! Choo! Choo!" Harding, spokesman of the bosses, had become an old hack, even before he had ever quite been a rising star. Who ruled America, that was the question; and Harding had the answer: the people ruled America, "a plain people and a sane people . . ." "Where?" a heckler shouted from the audience. "... ruling with an unwavering faith and increased confidence in that fine embodiment of honesty, that fearless executor of the law ... At the far end of the hall, a Pennsylvania delegate was knocked to the ground by a solid punch to the nose. "... that inspiring personification of courage, that matchless exemplar of justice that . "Choo! Choo! Choo! Choo!" "... that glorious apostle of peace and amity Two members of the delegation from South Dakota got into a fist fight. William Howard Taft!" "Choo! Choo! Choo! Choo! We want Teddy! We want Teddy!" "Progress is not proclamation nor palaver. It is not pretense nor play on prejudice. It is not the perturbation of a people passion-wrought, nor a promise proposed." Delegates started to get up out of their chairs and leave the auditorium. Harding's style of speaking—the old mellifluous, alliterative, nineteenth-century style of the walling smoothie—was already old-fashioned. He was good at it. He still "shone at recitation." But it was the style of an old pol trying to put one over. There was nothing spontaneous or real about it. For all of its sly references to the issues at hand, it hardly seemed to grapple with any of the issues. To the extent that it was not infuriating, it was boring. "Progression is everlastingly lifting the standards that marked the end of the world's march yesterday and planting them on new and advanced heights today. Tested by such a standard, President Taft is the greatest Progressive of the age." The end of the speech brought forth the strained approving shouts of the loyalists, the wild, derisive bellowing of the reformers, and Harding stepped back down from the podium, thoroughly disgraced and victorious. Taft lost the election, of course, to Woodrow Wilson; and the Progressives, though down, were not out. The Old Guard still needed loyalists to hold the line against the insurgents. And so, in 1914, when it came time to choose a nominee for the office of United States senator from Ohio, the bosses looked around for a dignified and qualified candidate, and no one was better qualified than Harding. To be favored by the bosses was to be nominated, and to be the Republican nominee was to be elected. Thus, in 1915, Harding suddenly found himself in Washington, a member of the world's most exclusive club. Both of the Hardings had an uncertain time measuring up to the place their ambitions had brought them. Just as Warren continued to have digestive problems, the Duchess was often ill with one complaint or another. She seemed to dress too well, to have her hair done too often, and too perfectly, and to have acquired an air of grandeur that overshot the mark. Evalyn Walsh McLean, the wife of the heir to the Washington Post fortune, had a certain sympathy for the Duchess and her husband. She met the Hardings for the first time at the home of Alice Roosevelt Longworth—the daughter of Teddy, the wife of the patrician congressman Nicholas Longworth from Ohio. "We had gone there," Evalyn said, "for a poker game. That evening I decided that the new junior senator from Ohio ... was a stunning man. He chewed tobacco, biting from a plug that he would lend, or borrow, and he did not care if the whole world knew that he wore suspenders. However, whatever Alice cares to say, I say he was not a slob." As a senator, Harding was exceedingly careful not to stand out. He introduced no legislation that might be construed to be either important or controversial. Altogether, he introduced 134 bills, of which 122 were concerned with local Ohio matters, and the others were addressed to such issues as the celebration of the landing of the Pilgrims. He was careful to establish himself as a man who did not want to make any sort of public record, but rather as a man who was happy to blend in and go along and do his business in private. He was, therefore, an extremely popular senator—judged at once by his peers to be both sound and agreeable, an able senator, reliable, a man to be counted on, mature, above all "reasonable." He was one of the most highly admired members of the Senate; he made friends easily; he kept a flask of Bourbon in his desk; and he was known to be available for golf or poker at any time. Pps. 58-70 --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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