[CTRL] [7] The Ohio Gang

[Anonymous]

 -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
--[7]--

XIX.

The Hardings in the White House

"NO RUMOR COULD have exceeded the reality," Alice Roosevelt Longworth said,
having tagged along with Congressman Longworth to a poker game in the White
House. "The study was filled with cronies, Daugherty, Jess Smith ... and
others, the air heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every
imaginable brand of whisky stood about, cards and poker chips ready at handa
general atmosphere of waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on the desk, and spittoons
alongside."

Harding thought he would like wienerwurst and sauerkraut for dinner, but Mrs.
Harding thought they were unsuitable for the White House. Harding wanted
toothpicks on the table, but Mrs. Harding thought they were vulgar. Harding
wanted to chew tobacco, but Mrs. Harding would not allow it. "She says,"
Harding told a visitor, as he surreptitiously tucked a cut into his cheek,
"cigars are all right, but it's undignified to chew."

Mrs. Harding was extremely nervous. Each time she and Evalyn Walsh McLean had
been together at a reception with a group of the smart set, Mrs. Harding
would ask Evalyn afterward, "What did they say about me?"

When William Allen White, the editor of the Emporia, Kansas, Gazette called
at the White House, he found Mrs. Harding "well-groomed, neatly dressed and
highly marcelled when in public. She had a determined mouth, but her eyes
lacked decision. They reflected ambition, but they had a clouded, puzzled
look, rather than the clear brightness which is associated with an active and
logical mentality."

Samuel Hopkins Adams, one of the other journalists who kept a particularly
close watch on the White House, thought Mrs. Harding "overdid it; she tried
too hard to be a great lady. Uncertain of herself, she took refuge in
volubility and effusiveness. . . . She was prone to be overrouged and
overcoiffured, often overdressed."

As for Harding himself, when he first took office, he did not quite fit in at
the White House. Several people noticed that his trousers were too long. In
time, however, Mrs. Harding got him spruced up, so that one day when William
Allen White came to call he noticed that the president was dressed "with
exact sartorial propriety, with exactly the kind of boutonniere he should
wear, with precisely the gray stripe in his trousers that the hour required,
with a proper dark four-in-hand tied most carefully. For a moment or two,
while he was offering cigars and moving festively out of the preliminaries of
a formal conversation, he was socially and spiritually erect. But as we sat
in the south sunshine flooding through the windows of his office, he warmed
and melted and slouched a little."

He played golf at least twice a week, and he was overjoyed whenever he
managed to shoot in the nineties. Colonel Starling of the Secret Service
followed Harding around the course and kept track of his score and of the
side bets he kept making with those who played with him. "He played,"
Starling said, "as if his life depended on every shot, and he made so many
bets that sometimes he was betting against himself."

He played most often at the Chevy Chase Club, and he loved to bet with his
partner six dollars Nassau against their opponents: a bet of six dollars out,
six dollars in, and six dollars across. He would lay a side bet with his
partner on low score, and then, as the game moved along, he would double up
his bets, betting on individual holes, and then on individual shots as they
went down the fairway. "I had to keep accounts," said Starling, "and it was a
job for a Philadelphia lawyer."

At the end of the round, the players would repair to a house set aside for
the president at Chevy Chase. Starling would get out the key to the liquor
cabinet and bring out the scotch and Bourbon, and a black man named Taylor
would serve highballs while Starling made his calculations and announced the
winners. Harding would take a single drink, and then, when the bets were
settled, he would turn to Starling and say, "Telephone the Duchess and say I
am on my way home."

Twice a week, he would convene the poker sessions at the White House. Ohio
friends, cabinet members, senators, visiting businessmen, and political
acquaintances would gather after dinner. Never more than eight would sit at
the table at one time, though the cast of characters would shift sometimes in
the course of the evening. Mrs. Harding hovered, not playing, but fetching
drinksnervous, some thought, about letting Warren out of her sight. Daugherty
called her "Ma"; Ned McLean called her "Boss"; and some of the other regulars
picked up Harding's habit of calling her "Duchess."

"We played at a rectangular table in the north end of the room," said one of
the regulars about the sessions in the White House library. At one session,
he recalled, "the President sat at one end and Will Hays, who was then
Postmaster General, at the other. The others were Albert Lasker, at the time
chairman of the Shipping Board; Harry Daugherty, Ned McLean, Mrs. McLean, and
Mrs. Harding.... I remember that it was very hot and that Albert Lasker took
his coat off, displaying red suspenders two inches wide.

 Nan visited the White House for the first time several months after the
inauguration, in June—apparently at her own initiative. She made the
arrangement through her Secret Service contact, Tim Slade, and he met her at
her hotel in Washington when she arrived and took her to the White House.

We entered the executive offices through the main office entrance, which is
the entrance on the right of the White House portico, and passed through the
hall leading to the Cabinet Room. . . ." There they waited for Harding—"Mr.
Harding," as Nan still called him.

She was impressed by the long table in the Cabinet Room, "around which stood
the substantial chairs of the ... men who met there.... A fireplace, a clock
on the mantelpiece, and a few pictures completed the furnishings. Mr.
Harding's chair at the head of the table interested me most, and I stroked
the back of it and sipped stale water from a partially filled glass which
stood on the table in front of the President's chair. So this was where sat
the leaders of the greatest nation in the world!"

They had been waiting only a few minutes before Harding opened the door just
behind his Cabinet Room chair. He greeted Nan cordially and instructed Slade
to remain there in the Cabinet Room. He took Nan into the adjoining room, a
small room with a single window, an anteroom, and then through another door
into his private office. As soon as they were in his office, with the door
closed behind them, he turned and took her in his arms "and told me what I
could see in his face—that he was delighted to see me."

She looked carefully around his office, to fix it in her memory. His desk was
large and seemed to have many drawers. Opposite the desk was a large
fireplace, where, "Mr. Harding told me, he burned all the letters I sent him
after he had committed their messages to his heart." On top of his desk was a
portrait of his mother, and Nan noticed that fresh flowers stood on the desk
just next to the picture.

Along one side of the room were windows that opened out onto the White House
grounds, the green lawn—and, not far off, the president's guard. "Mr. Harding
said to me that people seemed to have eyes in the sides of their heads down
there and so we must be very circumspect. Whereupon he introduced me to the
one place where, he said, he thought we might share kisses in safety. This
was a small closet in the anteroom, evidently a place for hats and coats, but
entirely empty most of the times we used it, for we repaired there many times
in the course of my visits to the White House, and in the darkness of a space
not more than five feet square the President of the United States and his
adoring sweetheart made love."

The work of being president, however, was beyond Harding. "I can't make a
damn thing out of this tax problem," he said to William Allen White one day.
"I listen to one side and they seem right, and then—God!—I talk to the other
side and they seem 'just as right, and here I am where I started. I know
somewhere there is a book that will give me the truth, but hell! I couldn't
read the book."

When Arthur Draper, the foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune,
dropped by after a trip to Europe, Harding called in his political secretary
Jud Welliver and said to Draper: "I don't know anything about this European
stuff. You and Jud get together and he can tell me later; he handles these
matters for me."

He had said, when he had been a senator, that he thought he was not fitted to
be president—and, of course, it had seemed that he was hoping to be
contradicted. But the expressions of unease came more frequently now, until
they became a common theme of his conversation. "Judge," he said to one of
his companions after a round of golf, "I don't think I'm big enough for the
Presidency." And, to a newspaper columnist he said, as they talked in his
office, "Oftentimes, as I sit here, I don't seem to grasp that I am
President."

According to the chief usher of the White House, Ike[sic] Hoover, Harding
read no books, attended few plays, listened to no music-and seemed always to
be plagued with anxieties. Hoover had served ten presidents, and he said
Harding worked harder and slept less than any of the others. He seemed to
want to do a good job. He paced the corridors of the White House restlessly,
day and night.

pps.108-116

=====

XX.

Pillars of Society

TWICE A WEEK, every Tuesday and Friday morning, the members of the cabinet
gathered around the polished table in the big room with the highbacked
leather chairs next to Harding's office. Daugherty was there, of course, as
attorney general, appointed to his job in spite of enormous opposition from
politicians, newspapers, and the people in general, who saw Daugherty as a
cheap and unreliable fixer. Daugherty's track record as a fixer, however, far
from discrediting him, was precisely his main qualification for the job. Not
all attorneys general are appointed for the same reason, but it is prudent
for a president to have his chief law enforcement officer be someone who will
see to it that the administration itself is not prosecuted for anything.

The attorney general's power derives not from his authority to prosecute
criminals, but from his authority to decide which cases he will prosecute and
which cases he will not prosecute or prosecute inadequately or let slide or
quash, and in his authority to authorize an investigation or not, to promote
an investigation or prevent it. It was this authority that brought
bootleggers with cash to see Jess Smith—and that caused politicians with
uncertain consciences to squirm when they considered Daugherty's wandering
eye and erratic manner.

Will Hays, at five and a half feet, was the shortest man there, barely able
to get his elbows up on the table. "He is the one hundred per cent American
we have all heard so much talk about," the Washington journalist Edward Lowry
said of him. "Apply any native or domestic standard and he complies with it
to a hair-line. He is as indigenous as sassafras root. He is one of us. He is
folks. ... He is a human flivver, the most characteristic native product; a
two-cylinder single-seater, good for more miles per gallon than any other
make of man. He takes you there and brings you back ... a politician to his
finger-tips and a strong josher: a real handshaker and elbow massager."

Hays had been a precinct committeeman before he was twenty-one years old, and
had been chairman of almost every Republican political committee Indiana had
to offer before he became chairman of the National Republican Committee. He
had been in nearly every factional fight in Indiana during the preceding
twenty years and, as Lowry said, had "come through clean as a smelt." He was
rewarded, and entrusted, with the job of postmaster general of the United
States, the principal patronage dispenser of the federal government.

During the preceding administration, Wilson's Democratic administration,
thirteen thousand Post Office jobs had been removed from the machinery of
patronage and placed under nonpolitical Civil Service regulations. One of
Harding's first acts as president was to return these jobs to the patronage
dispensary. Newspaper editorial writers were appalled, but Hays disposed of
the jobs with great finesse, according to the usages of honest
corruption—that is, he did not simply give the jobs to loyal Republicans;
rather he gave the jobs to loyal Republicans who could, and did, carry out
their duties responsibly, giving almost a day's work for a day's pay.
Newspaper editorial writers were relieved and grateful and praised Hays for
not practicing politics with the Post Office.

John W. Weeks, secretary of war, sat to Hays's left at the table. Weeks was a
plump, balding, boring man from Massachusetts who had been a member of the
House of Representatives for eight years and then a senator and had, during
his political career, built up his banking business back in Boston, so that
he had become one of New England's leading bankers. In the convention of
1916, he had had a brief run at the Republican presidential nomination, and
in the election of 1920, he had done some major fund raising for the party.
He was a member in good standing of the Senate's Old Guard, although, because
he had just lost in his bid for reelection to the Senate, he was available.
He was Senator Lodge's choice. And he played poker.

As secretary of war, Weeks might have been expected to be interested in
demobilizing the war machine that had been built up during World War I, or
taking a profit from the sale of surplus military materials. In fact, he
stepped delicately back from all these matters. The planning and construction
of hospitals for veterans was transferred from the army to Harding's and
Weeks's pokerplaying friend Charlie Forbes at the Veterans' Bureau, and the
disposal of surplus materials was transferred from the Quartermaster
General's Department to Forbes's Veterans' Bureau, too. Weeks remained, like
Hays, "clean as a smelt."

Edwin Denby, secretary of the navy, sat across the table from Hays. Denby was
bullet-headed, thick jowled, with heavy lips and dull eyes; it was never
clear whether he was bright or stupid. On the one hand, Denby had been quick
witted enough to become a millionaire in the automobile business in Detroit
and, when World War I broke out, to enlist as a private in the Marine Corps
and rise through the ranks to major. But, when he ran Into a spot of trouble
during his term as secretary of the navy—because he had transferred some
naval oil reserve lands from his jurisdiction to that of the Department of
the Interior, which had turned them over to some private interests—he had
such trouble remembering what he had done, such trouble recalling facts or
understanding their significance, he betrayed such stupendous gullibility and
absurd self-assurance, and he looked so dumb that he was finally accounted an
honest but extraordinarily feeble-headed man. And so, as secretary of the
navy, he would have, like Hays and Weeks, no blemish on his record—save, the
perhaps undeserved, one of stupidity.

James Davis, secretary of labor, served his purpose merely by sitting at the
cabinet table; indeed, the less he did to represent the interests of the
workers, the better Harding liked it. Davis, a short, muscular, robust man,
had been an ironworker who came up through the union ranks and, at the same
time, came up through the ranks of the Loyal Order of Moose, with such
cheerful success that he had been able to become a banker and a believer—
because of his own experience of life—that any poor boy can make good and
that the rich are rich because they work hard and deserve to be rich.

"When labor loafs," said Davis, "it injures labor first and capital last." He
believed strikes were bad and that labor-management "cooperation" was good.
Workers ought to accept wage cuts, he felt, to let management get the country
back to prosperity.

He constantly wrote notes to Harding, little notes of praise about one thing
or another that the president had done; and every time Davis made a speech or
said something to a newspaper reporter—usually something gushingly favorable
to Harding—a mimeographed copy of it would be delivered to the president.
Harding liked him. "You have brought to the office," Harding once wrote
Davis, "all that I have expected."

Henry Wallace, secretary of agriculture, who sat next to Davis, chewed
tobacco, as Harding did, but in very small, almost unnoticeable chaws: he did
not move his jaws, and he did not spit, choosing instead, to swallow the
juice. He had a round, pink face and wore pince-nez, and he liked to play
golf. Harding liked to play with him, because Wallace shot in the eighties,
and Harding always felt braced by the challenge.

Wallace was a moderate Progressive, the editor of a farm journal in Iowa, and
he enjoyed enormous respect among farmers, conservationists, and Progressives
around the country. Stubbornly independent, unwilling ever to compromise, a
battler at the cabinet table for the rights and plight of farmers, a man with
a disarming charm and a large repertory of Scottish jokes, Wallace stood up
for his rural constituents with zealous honor.

Having gotten such a fine man in his cabinet—and enjoying the good will of
the farmers for having done so—Harding could well afford to ignore Wallace
all he liked. While the secretary of agriculture told the president that
hundreds of thousands of farmers could not obtain credit, that the economy
was being manipulated to their disadvantage, that they were overwhelmed with
debt and unable, in many cases, to buy fertilizer, that they were the victims
of an economic condition that they had not brought about, Harding explained
to Wallace that "Government paternalism, whether applied to agriculture or to
any other of our great national industries, would stifle ambition, impair
efficiency, lessen production and make us a nation of dependent
incompetents.... Every farm is an economic entity by itself. Every farmer is
a captain of industry. The elimination of competition among them would be
impossible without sacrificing that fine individualism that still keeps the
farm the real reservoir from which the nation draws so many of the finest
elements of its citizenship."

Albert Fall, secretary of the interior, had grown up in the farming country
of Kentucky, an orphan, raised in poverty by a grandfather. Working his way
out of Kentucky, he was a schoolteacher, bookkeeper, cattlehand, chuckwagon
cook, miner, timberman, and-mining foreman. He fetched up in Mexico at the
age of nineteen, knowing a little about law, a little about mining, and a
little Spanish, and put together a living by representing Spanish-speaking
clients in cases involving mineral rights, land titles, and cattle rustling.

Out among the mines near Silver City, New Mexico, Fall met Edward Doheny, a
broke prospector, and they became lifelong friends. Doheny found his way into
the oil business, and Fall found his way into politics, in New Mexico, and
then in the Senate, where he had sat at the desk just next to Harding's and
became Harding's poker-playing chum. "The man's face," said William Allen
White, "figure and mien were a shock to me ... a tall, gaunt, unkempt,
ill-visaged face that showed a disheveled spirit behind restless eyes. He
looked like the patent medicine vender of my childhood days who used to
stand, with long hair falling down upon a long coat under a wide hat, with
military goatee and mustache, at the back of a wagon selling Wizard Oil."

He made no bones about his feelings for conservationists. The nation's
resources were there to be exploited, and profits were meant to go to the
quick and the shrewd. "His speech is fast," one of his opponents said, "his
manner is impetuous, and he becomes instantly aggressive at opposition. At
these times his powerful face clouds to sternness, he sits forward in his
chair, and pounds his statements home with gesticulation; or throws his head
back till he faces the ceiling while roaring with laughter at his opponents'
replies. He does not argue, because he does not listen." Nothing in Fall's
background or temperament would have prepared him to be naive or overly
scrupulous or reluctant to seize on an opportunity or hesitant to expect a
favor in return for a favor.

A man who moved as fast as Fall was bound to leave some loose ends, and at
the time he joined Harding's cabinet, he was short of funds. He owned one of
the largest ranches in New Mexico, a ranch scattered in various tracts in a
stretch fifty-five miles long and twenty-four miles wide, and he had engaged
in improvements and enlargements in his properties that had left him more
than $140,000 in debt and eight years behind in taxes.

It was to this man that Harding asked Denby to turn over, among other naval
oil reserves, the reserves in California at Elk Hills and the reserves in
Wyoming, about fifty miles north of Caspar, at Teapot Dome.

Andrew Mellon, the secretary of the treasury, who sat just to the left of
Harding at the head of the table, "looks like a tired double-entry
bookkeeper," Edward Lowry said, "who is afraid of losing his job. He gives
the instant impression of being worn and tired, tired, tired. He is slight
and frail. He sits in a chair utterly relaxed. He wears dark, sober clothes,
a black tie, his coat always buttoned, and in these days, when even the
office boys sport silk, his socks are black, cotton lisle, and not pulled up
as sharply as they might be.... Sometimes in his office he smokes small black
paper cigarettes. When they go out, he relights them and smokes them right
down to the end. Not an eighth of an inch is wasted. He doesn't smoke
lightly, casually, unconsciously, but precisely, carefully, consciously, as a
man computing interest on $87.76 for two months and eight days at 4% per
annum. Mr. Mellon looks as if he didn't know what fun was, and I don't
believe he does.... When he shakes hands he gives you only the tips of his
fingers."

The son of a wealthy Pittsburgh banker, Mellon had been banker to the robber
barons and become, with Rockefeller and Ford, one of the three wealthiest men
in America. His investments included steel, railroads, utilities, water
power, distilleries, coal, oil, insurance, and aluminum.

At the level of a man such as Mellon, graft is elevated beyond common
recognition, transmuted and dignified to the status of policy. In Mellon's
view, the slumping postwar American economy needed protection from foreign
competition so that it could get back on its feet, regain its vigor, and then
go back out into the world. What was required was a tariff wall that would
protect American farms and factories. Mellon's policy found its expression in
the Fordney-McCumber Act of 1922, which established the highest tariff rates
in American history. Incidentally, those who controlled the Mellon
investments, for example, in aluminum, and thus the alumium market,
immediately put up the price of aluminum behind the protective tariff
barrier, and made an annual profit of $10 million on an investment of $18
million.

In Mellon's view, the wartime excess-profits tax needed to be repealed and
the surtax on the rich needed to be cut from 65 percent to 50 percent, to put
more capital into the hands of the rich and the corporations so that they
could have more capital to invest. This policy, a form of "supply side
economics," though a happy one for Mellon in the short run, was ultimately
not widely admired. "This surplus capital," Andrew Sinclair said, "was, in
turn, to find its way to the stock market and start the speculative boom that
was to end in the Great Depression and in the fracture of the image of Mellon
the great financier."

Herbert Hoover, who sat at the far end of the table to Harding's right, was
the secretary of commerce. "Mr. Hoover's face," said Clinton Gilbert, one of
the journalists who watched him over the years, "is not that a decisive
character. The brow is ample and dominant; there is vision and keen
intelligence; but the rest of the face is not strong, and it wears habitually
a wavering self-conscious smile." He was an awkward man, uncomfortable in
situations of fluidity or give-and-take. At the dinner table, he did not move
easily in and out of a conversation but tended to keep his head buried in his
plate until the conversation reached a topic about which he knew something;
then he would look up, burst in with some relevant facts, and lapse again
into silence. He rarely said anything bright or clever, but often sounded
solid and reasonable. He was best, once he did get going, at monologues or
lectures in which no one interrupted or questioned him. Once, playing with
some small children, building a dam across a stream, Hoover was captivated
with the task, wading into the water to fetch stones and filling in the
chinks with clay; the children with whom he played, however, were most
impressed that he played in the river "with all his clothes on."

The professional politicians detested Hoover. "Hoover gives most of us
gooseflesh," Senator Brandegee said. No one could still be certain whether he
was a Republican or a Democrat, that is to say, whether he would be a loyal
party man and reward other loyal party men. His awkwardness was unsettling to
the sort of men who liked to shake hands, slap backs, grab elbows, play
poker, have a drink, and tell a joke. His standoffishness seemed suspicious,
as though he might not be the sort of man who would, in a pinch, come
through. All of the Old Guard in the Senate opposed Hoover.

For some reason, Harding insisted on having Hoover in the cabinet—because
Hoover's name was so well known and so admired that Hoover would provide good
window dressing for the cabinet or because Harding purposely wanted to defy
the Senate's Old Guard and declare his independence or because Hoover
provided a voice in the cabinet for the West and the Far West or because
Harding understand Hoover's economic views and plans and shared them.

In any case, when he was choosing his cabinet, Harding let it be known that
he wanted Hoover, and the Old Guard let it be known that they could not
tolerate him. The Old Guard did want Mellon, however: Mellon was the
candidate of them all, and especially of Boss Penrose of Pennsylvania. And so
Harding sent Daugherty to speak to Penrose, Knox, and Lodge. Harding would
take "Mellon and Hoover," said Daugherty, "or no Mellon."

Penrose, said Daugherty, "rose to heights of profanity I have never heard
equaled. He swore in every mood and tense. I had 'cussed' a little at times
when unduly provoked. But I listened in awe to my master's voice." Penrose
consented.

Hoover's policies as secretary of commerce appealed perfectly to Harding. To
Hoover, the postwar economic slump, with its unemployment and its collapsing
agricultural prices and industrial income and wages, was a good thing, "the
result of inflation and disaster from the war," and a necessary adjustment.
America had had fourteen depressions since the Civil War and had "come
through the thirteen others all right." It did not seem possible to Hoover,
Andrew Sinclair has written, "to doubt a system that had failed fourteen
times in fifty-five years, although he would certainly have doubted a company
that had done so once."

"There is always unemployment," Harding said, in agreement with Hoover.
"Under most fortunate circumstances, I am told, there are a million and a
half in the United States who are not at work. The figures are astounding
only because we are a hundred millions, and this parasite percentage is
always with us."

Hoover's notion was that there might be more "cooperation" between government
and business, with government paving the way for entrepreneurs to make
flourishing enterprises, helping businessmen instead of hindering them,
opening up markets and opportunities. When he took over the Commerce
Department, it was an undistinguished operation. His predecessor told him he
would hardly have to work more than two hours a day, "putting the fish to bed
at night and turning on the lights around the coast." But Hoover saw his
department as America's leading business booster and he built his own empire
in the Commerce Department to show just how it was done. He set up a Division
of Housing in his department, charged to encourage more and more building of
individual houses, to boom the sanctity of the single-family home, to work
out credit facilities and to get rid of cumbersome state and municipal
building regulations. He saw to it that his department's budget was increased
by more than 50 percent; he added employees; and he set up statistical
services and broadcast business information across the country. He acquired
the Bureau of Custom Statistics from the Department of the Treasury and took
over the Bureau of Mines and the Patent Office from Interior.

The key to his program for economic revival, however, was in his Bureau of
Foreign and Domestic Commerce. The man who had been all around Europe
organizing relief programs and had seen a great deal of European business at
first hand understood that, at a certain point, economic policy rises
naturally to a level of international arrangements.

He cleared out Wilson's appointees in the Commerce Department and replaced
them with men who understood foreign Ianguages, economics, and law. He set up
trade offices in a number of major American and European cities; he
quintupled the number of employees working in the foreign department, and he
increased the budget for foreign operations from $860,000 to $5 million. It
was Hoover who was the first to give a big, and concerted, official boost to
the institution of the American multinational company and to American
economic internationalism.

Immediately to Harding's right at the cabinet table sat the last of the
cabinet members, the secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, "a bearded
iceberg," as Teddy Roosevelt had called him. "He is as destitute of graces,"
Edward Lowry said, "of lights and shades, of frailties and foibles, of
idiosyncrasies and little personal eccentricities, of the 'human interest'
touch, as any man in public fife."

He was reckoned a man of impeccable character, of absolute moral rectitude, a
stiff figure. On the rare occasions, Lowry said, "when he tried to unbend he
almost audibly creaked." A just man, an able man, he was regarded by some as
a "Viking in a frock coat."

He had been a champion of public welfare, governor of New York, associate
justice of the Supreme Court, a candidate for president in 1916, and he would
be chief justice of the Supreme Court. "He had a trick," Lowry noticed, "of
standing back flat on his heels. This made his shoes turn up at the toes so
that from the ball of the foot forward the soles did not touch the ground. He
made an impressive figure."

In foreign relations, Harding was stuck with a country that had just
repudiated President Wilson's League of Nations. Some said that the entire
election had been nothing but a referendum on the League of Nations. The
opposition to the league had been stated as worry that America would lose its
historic character if it were to become entangled with evil and cynical
Europeans. The essential concern was that foreign entanglements would lead to
an internationalist, imperialist foreign policy, with all the customary
damage that does to a democratic country: the flow of power out of state and
locat governments to the federal government, and, within the federal
governments, to the executive branch, and within the executive branch into
the hands of an imperial presidency and so ending in the, destruction of the
Republic itself. The question of internationalism versus isolationism had
been drawn in no less compelling terms than these.

And yet, Harding had somehow straddled the issue during the election
campaign. He was against Wilson's league, no doubt of that. He was against
that sort of vague idealism that Wilson had come to represent. But he was not
quite, altogether, against some sort of American role in the world. And, when
it came time to choose his cabinet, Harding appointed both Hoover and Hughes,
both of them well known as internationalists.

Just what Harding was about confused editorial writers, who resorted to
commonplace political explanations: Harding wanted to make peace with the
liberal wing of the party; Harding wanted to smooth over differences; Harding
wanted to blunt criticism by absorbing it.

But Hughes made the difference between Wilson and Harding clear: Hughes
spoke, on behalf of the new administration, in terms not of American
"ideals," but of American "Interests." America would enter the world to
pursue its interests-that and that alone. No one could object to that. To
protect one's own interests was surely an unimpeachable intent. To pursue
one's natural interest is simply to be true to one's character to pursue
one's natural destiny.

America's destiny, as Hughes understood it, harmonized nicely with Hoover's
and Harding's views. "The policy of the Government with relation to foreign
investments should be well understood.... [It] is the policy of the open
door. We seek equality of opportunity for our nationals. We do not attempt to
make contracts for them.... We do not favor one of our nationals as against
another. Given the open door, all who wish are entitled to walk in. We resist
policies of discrimination against American capital. This is true whether it
relates to oil or telegraphs."

In short, the destiny of America was not essentially to be a bastion of
liberty and justice, but rather a machine for making money. It was a view
with which Mellon and Fall, Wallace and Davis, Denby and Weeks, Hays and
Daugherty and Jess Smith could all agree. From this, all else would follow.

pps. 117-133

=====

XXI.

Bribery

WHEN THE UNITED States entered World War I, the American government took over
all the property in the United States that was owned by Germans. One such
piece of property was the American Metal Company, owned by the
Metallgesellschaft and Metall Bank of Frankfort-on-Main, Germany. The
American government took over the company, sold it, and invested the income
in Liberty Bonds. By 1921, these bonds, with accumulated interest, were worth
$6,500,000.

The original owners of the American Metal Company, in an attempt to get their
investment back, claimed that it had not been owned by Germans at all-and so
had been incorrectly taken over. It had really belonged all along to some
Swiss investors, the Societe Suisse pour Valeurs de Metaux.

Whatever the merits of the claim, a German attorney named Richard Merton
arrived in New York to see whether he could not find an American lawyer "who
could pave the way" and get some "speed" in the Office of the Alien Property
Custodian in Washington. Merton found his way to John T. King, a Bridgeport
garbage collector who had been General Leonard Wood's campaign manager until
Wood fired him for being too familiar with the bosses. King was, said Mark
Sullivan, "a 'smoothie,' suave, soft-spoken, well-dressed. . . . He was
unobtrusive in manner but energetic in action, slow in speech but quick in
mind, always a formidable combination."

The procedure in this case, as In many thousands of others involving hundreds
of millions of dollars, was to present the claimant's argument to the Alien
Property Custodian and then, to make certain that there was no corruption or
illegality involved, to have the custodian's judgment in the case taken to
the office of the attorney general for confirmation. "In this case," Samuel
Hopkins Adams said of the procedure, "it was expedited, in fact 'greased.' "

The custodian was Colonel Thomas Miller, "a lawyer of good though not eminent
standing," as Adams said, "a Yale graduate, a communicant of the Episcopal
Church, a member of leading Philadelphia clubs, a man of unblemished
character and record, he might have stood as the type of the gentleman in
politics."

Merton filed his claim on September 20, 1921. The claim was approved and
forwarded to the attorney general on September 22. The papers were returned,
approved, on September 23. Miller was able, within a few days, to give Merton
a Treasury check for $6,453,979.97, and two packages of Liberty Bonds worth
$514,350. Merton was naturally pleased and gave an intimate celebratory
dinnet in New York for Miller, John King, and Jess Smith. He had a small
token of his appreciation for all who had helped him: a handsome $200
cigarette case for each of them. As an additional token of his appreciation,
he gave $441,000 worth of Liberty Bonds to John King, of which King gave
$50,000 worth to Colonel Miller, kept $112,000 for himself, gave a double
share of $224,000 worth to Jess Smith, and somehow disposed of another
$55,300 worth in a way that has never yet been traced.

pps.134-135

--[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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