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Write up the first half / term of Cleveland, and then do the other later. 
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Sep 12, 2018 05:31
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Social Studies 3rd Period posted:Write up the first half / term of Cleveland, and then do the other later. I see what you did there. Unfortunately, our clear winner is Warren Gamaliel Harding. I'll get to work--Harding will only be one, maybe two installments.
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Sep 12, 2018 11:58
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Tony Gunk posted:I see what you did there. Holy poo poo, the G is actually "Gamaliel* ", what the gently caress? It sounds like the name of an Orcish Warboss or an old weird man living in the woods hunting tiny blue creatures. *I loving looked it up.
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Sep 14, 2018 14:47
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Yes, he's an elf straight out of Tolkien.
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Sep 14, 2018 21:05
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Tony Gunk posted:
Technically it was ended as a result of all of these cases. Cases consolidated under court rules don't merge into one case - which even the first words of Brown recognize: "These cases come . . ." - they are all disposed of in one opinion, but remain separate cases. In fact, in what became Brown, the cases were argued before the Court separately, and when Chief Justice Vinson was alive the Court was widely divided on how to handle them. Upon Vinson's death, Chief Justice Warren, as ably described, corralled the Court into a unanimous decision after a re-hearing.
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Sep 14, 2018 22:18
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JohnCompany posted:Technically it was ended as a result of all of these cases. Cases consolidated under court rules don't merge into one case - which even the first words of Brown recognize: "These cases come . . ." - they are all disposed of in one opinion, but remain separate cases. In fact, in what became Brown, the cases were argued before the Court separately, and when Chief Justice Vinson was alive the Court was widely divided on how to handle them. Upon Vinson's death, Chief Justice Warren, as ably described, corralled the Court into a unanimous decision after a re-hearing. I know nothing about law; I just do the research. Thanks for the clarification, though!  I feel it necessary to inform you that I'm still working on Harding. His life is much more interesting than I remember reading--he's probably the biggest party hack we've ever elected President. Stay tuned--I'm hoping to release something later today.
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Sep 15, 2018 18:04
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Warren Gamaliel Harding, 29th President of the United States It’s odd, but of all the Presidents, I have more difficulty reconciling Harding’s physical appearance with his personality than I do any of the others. This man who looks like your kindly, probably-slightly-racist grandfather was a roaring, backslapping, poker-playing cad. The President who kicked off the Roaring Twenties was, perhaps, a man who embodied the free-spiritedness that defined it better than any other politician. Warren Harding was a man of great warmth and personality--he loved the social aspects of politics: the handshaking, the backslapping, the pressing of the flesh--and he possessed an extraordinary charisma that is perhaps the reason he found himself President in early 1921. Sadly, his personality came with a few flaws. Much of what tainted Harding only became known after he died--he was one of the most popular Presidents we’ve ever had while he was in office. Harding, by all accounts, was not the brightest light on the Christmas tree, and it is unclear if he was just a good-natured dupe or if he really was personally corrupt--but it is clear that the friends he made along the way to the Presidency, friends he brought with him into the White House, are one of the primary reasons historians take such a dim view of Harding’s Presidency today. Add the fact that Harding was a serial philanderer (although he had nothing on John Kennedy), and it’s easy to see why his legacy took such a serious hit after his premature death in 1923. Yes, Harding croaked while in office...but we’ll get to that later. The questions we need to ask are the same ones we ask every time we embark on a new adventure: how did he get there? In the case of Harding, how did a mere newspaper editor from Marion, Ohio suddenly find himself on the biggest stage imaginable? Beginnings  I would have thought they’d have made his childhood home in Caledonia a historical site, but it looks like people live there... Warren Gamaliel Harding was born November 2, 1865 in Blooming Grove, Ohio to George Harding and Phoebe Dickerson Harding, the oldest of eight kids. Dad was a farmer and taught school in the nearby town of Mount Gilead, Ohio; mom was a state-licensed midwife. At one point, George Harding would, after a period of apprenticeship and study, establish his own medical practice. Harding’s got an interesting family history--some of his ancestors were Dutch, but he also had Scottish, English, and Irish in him as well...and until recently, rumor had it that he had a great-grandmother who was African-American. See, his great-great-grandfather Amos Harding’s story was that a thief, long ago, had started this rumor about Harding’s family in an attempt to exact some sort of revenge or extortion. Thanks to modern DNA testing, however, we know with almost certainty that Harding’s DNA lacked any Sub-Saharan ancestry markings--it was tested in 2015. Fun fact: these tests? Performed by Ancestry.com. They gave me $25K for this setup, so if you could just bear with me… In 1870 the Hardings moved to Caledonia, Ohio, where Harding’s father acquired the Argus, the town newspaper. It ran weekly, and from the age of 11, young Warren began to learn the basics of the newspaper business. George Harding used his paper to promote his personal politics...but don’t worry. Harding’s family were ardent abolitionists before the war and staunch Republicans after it. Harding enrolled in Ohio Central College, his father’s alma mater, at age 14 in 1879, and, in spite of the reputation he’d earn later in life, was a pretty good student. However, his time at the Argus had given him the journalism bug. He and a friend put out a newspaper, the Iberia Spectator (Ohio Central was in Iberia, Ohio) in their final year which was intended to draw in readership from both the college and the surrounding town. Harding’s family moved to Marion, Ohio that same year, and when he graduated in 1882, he would join them. That’s where Harding spent the majority of his life--and, biographers note, where he gained a sincere appreciation of life in a small town. When he gained political office years later--first the Senate, then the Presidency--Harding would tell stories of life in Marion, noting that while so many of the young people he’d known had left town to seek fame and fortune elsewhere, the man who stayed and became a janitor was “the happiest one of the lot”. I can relate, I guess. I live in a town that has more cows than people. Extra, Extra, Read All About It  Apologies for the alamy watermark. I loved this picture, because it was perfect--but not enough to pay 20 bucks for it. After Harding graduated he had some stints as a teacher and selling insurance, and he even tried studying law for a time. None of these jobs worked out; Harding was too restless for law school and not cerebral enough to be a teacher. Then he raised $300 (roughly $7,900 in 2018 dollars), in partnership with others, to purchase Marion’s flagging local paper, the Marion Star. The city was growing--and the Star was actually one of three papers. However, it had one advantage: it was the only daily. Harding became its public face--the 18-year-old used the paper’s railroad pass to go to the Republican National Convention in 1884, where he networked with better-known journalists and supported the Republican nominee, Maine Sen. James G. Blaine. There was a problem, though. When Harding got back, he found out that the paper had gone under and had been repossessed by the local sheriff. Whoops. Out of a job at 18. That didn’t deter our budding young journalist, however. He went to work for one of the competing papers, the Democratic Mirror. This...didn’t thrill him. The Mirror was, as its name suggests, a Democratic paper, and it meant that during the 1884 election Harding had to fall in line--which meant praising New York governor Grover Cleveland, the Democratic nominee. You gotta do what you gotta do, I guess. After the election, young Harding decided to redeem the Star. He hated working for the Mirror and he wanted a home of his own. With his father’s financial assistance, Harding would reclaim the Star--and he’d spend the next 6-7 years building it according to his own vision. While the city of Marion as a whole was Republican, Marion County, where the paper was based, was Democratic-leaning--so Harding’s editorial sections were not as pro-GOP as he perhaps would have liked. He declared the Star’s daily edition non-partisan, but he also circulated a weekly that was more pro-Republican. The plan worked. It killed off the other weekly paper by draining it of advertising money; those advertisers in turn flocked to Harding’s banner. As biographer Andrew Sinclair put it: quote:The success of Harding with the Star was certainly in the model of Horatio Alger. He started with nothing, and through working, stalling, bluffing, withholding payments, borrowing back wages, boasting, and manipulating, he turned a dying rag into a powerful small-town newspaper. Much of his success had to do with his good looks, affability, enthusiasm, and persistence, but he was also lucky. As Machiavelli once pointed out, cleverness will take a man far, but he cannot do without good fortune. Harding would have been the modern GOP’s wet dream--he was George W. Bush with an actual rags-to-riches story. Well, 2000’s GOP, anyway. Marion was a city on the rise. It tripled in size between 1880 and 1890, to a population of about 12,000. This was an enormous boon to Harding’s paper, and he used the money to invest in a number of business ventures around town. While he did occasionally miss on a few of these, he was generally successful--and he parlayed it into a handsome sum of money. When he died in 1923 he was worth roughly $850,000--the 2018 equivalent of just over $12 million. John Dean, former White House Counsel and a name I’m sure you all know, was one of Harding’s biographers--and he said of Harding that his “civic influence was that of an activist who used his editorial page to effectively keep his nose--and a prodding voice--in all the town’s public business.” Harding is the only President we’ve ever had that had journalism experience, print or otherwise. Interlude: “Flossie” One of Harding’s favorite editorial targets was this man:  Amos Kling was a local developer and banker in Marion. A stuffy, haughty man, Kling was used to having everything in his world ordered in a specific fashion. Most elements of his life complied...with one notable exception.  Florence Kling was his ambitious, stubborn, headstrong daughter, and though Amos Kling involved her in all his affairs, taking her to work with him from the time she could walk, Florence butted heads with her father when she returned from music college at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Why? Over a guy, of course. Florence had fallen in love with Henry Atherton DeWolfe, a young man she’d met at school--and at 19 she married him in January of 1880. It didn’t last. The couple separated not long after Florence gave birth to her only child, Marshall Eugene, in September of that year, and they were formally divorced in 1886. Florence returned to Marion, and Amos agreed to financially support her child, but not her. Marshall DeWolfe effectively became his grandfather's ward. So why am I telling you all of this, you might ask? Well, “Flossie”, as she was known, began teaching piano lessons when she returned home to Marion. One of her customers? Harding’s sister Charity. Bear in mind this was before she was officially divorced. The stories are mixed on who pursued who--but by most accounts, Florence was much more “into” Harding than the other way around, despite the fact he was five years younger than her. It created a problem with her father, though. Amos Kling believed that old rumor about Harding having *gasp* black people in his family tree. Combine that with the fact that Harding slapped him around pretty good in his newspaper, and it’s no surprise that he didn’t approve of Florence dating the man who was blackballing him. He began to spread vicious rumors about Harding--telling local businessmen to boycott Harding’s business investments due to his supposed African-American heritage. When Harding found out, he confronted Kling and basically told him that if he didn’t stop, Harding would personally take him out behind the woodshed and tune his rear end up. Not kidding. Despite Amos’ objections, Harding and Florence married in July 1891. Florence would, from then on, involve herself extensively in her husband’s career--using her father’s determination and business acumen to turn the Star into a profitable enterprise through strict management of the circulation department. Flossie, it’s said, is the reason for Harding’s success. Without her he may never have become President. I Think I Wanna Try Politics Next One of the stars Harding’s paper hitched its wagon to early on was this guy:  Governor Joseph Foraker (R-OH) was one of Ohio’s Republican power players. Harding had supported him in his first bid for the governorship. Foraker was part of a new generation of Republicans challenging the old guard for control of state politics, and Harding, always the loyalist, supported him even as Foraker transitioned from the State House to the U.S. Senate a few years after that. He earned a delegateship to the state convention in 1888, at 22--representing Marion County--and he’d do so almost every year until he became President. The Star began to take a toll on young Harding’s health. Five times between 1889 and 1901, he’d end up in a sanitorium for a variety of illnesses--described by biographers as “fatigue, overstrain, and nervous illnesses”. Sounds like the guy was suffering from overwork. Dean posits that these illnesses were perhaps connected to his death in 1923. When the Star’s business manager quit, Florence Harding stepped into the role. She became her husband's top business associate, running a tight and efficient ship and making sure no money escaped her. Sometimes she even sent him to the bank with gallon buckets of coins in each hand. She wrote once “He does well when he listens to me and poorly when he does not”. Flossie Harding, in my opinion, was the first of many people who saw a convenient vehicle for their ambition in Warren Harding. His first try in politics was a local race--he ran for Marion County auditor in 1895. Unfortunately, due to the county’s Democratic tilt, he lost...but he did much better than expected. A year later, Harding was out on the campaign trail for former Ohio governor William McKinley, the GOP Presidential nominee. Folks, if you take anything away from this biography, it’s that Harding was first and foremost a party man. He’s Mr. Trimble from “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying”. Speechifying for others was great and all--it allowed Harding to travel and make contacts in the Ohio Republican Party--but he’d gotten the bug. He wanted to try again to win political office. But to do so, he’d have to maintain good relationships with the party bigwigs in the state. That meant both Foraker and this man.  Mark Hanna was the other Senator from Ohio, and he was the walking (or limping, given his knee problems) embodiment of insider politics in the Republican Party. He was immensely powerful and he was personally shepherding McKinley’s campaign at the time. He is also Karl Rove’s personal hero, which should tell you a great deal about him. Hanna, I mean. Anyway, through the influence and good graces of Hanna and Foraker, Harding was nominated for--and won easily--a state Senate seat. His four years in the Ohio State Senate would catapult him from unknown to one of the most popular figures in the Ohio GOP--to the point where he actually broke Ohio legislative tradition and was renominated for a second term (usually, legislators only served four years). He was, by all accounts, calm, humble, and very affable--traits that endeared him to his fellow legislators even as his meteoric rise passed them by. Then McKinley got shot and killed. That took a lot of the wind out of Ohio’s sails, especially when Theodore Roosevelt was sucking it all up from Oyster Bay in New York. Harding won a second term easily in the state legislature, however, by more than double the margin of victory he’d won by the first time. It should be noted that Harding was, as LBJ would put it half a century later, a “bourbon, beefsteak, and blondes” man. He accepted the level of patronage and graft inherent in politics and viewed them as necessary to grease the wheels of political progress. He arranged, for example, for his blind sister Mary Harding to get a job at the Ohio School for the Blind--over other better-qualified candidates. He even offered free publicity in the Marion Star in exchange for free train tickets for him and his family. It sounds gross, I know. Nevertheless, Harding’s activities paled in comparison to what his colleagues and those above him were doing at the time. Read a little bit about Republican politics in the age of Theodore Roosevelt and you’ll realize just how desperate the conservative wing of the party was to stop him. Harding himself never thought of it as dishonest--he viewed it as just rewards for faithful service. I should mention that this is around the time that Harding met someone who would change his political life forever.  Harry Daugherty was a key player in Ohio Republican politics at the time. Despite the fact that he’d only briefly served as an elected official (two terms in the Ohio General Assembly), his status as William McKinley’s right-hand man during McKinley’s tenure as governor had catapulted him to the forefront of state politics. Daugherty hitched his wagon to Harding’s star, commenting after first meeting him, “Gee, what a great-looking President he’d make.” Rising Star  In early 1903, Harding decided he’d cash in his chits and run for governor of Ohio after the leading GOP candidate, Congressman Charles Dick, withdrew. Unfortunately, there was a problem. Harding’s past support of (and work with) Senator Foraker presented a problem for Mark Hanna and Cincinnati political boss George Cox. With the Progressive faction in the Republican Party growing ever stronger (especially with Theodore Roosevelt, an avowed Progressive, as President), backroom wheeler-dealer politicians were viewed with increasingly suspicious eyes. Consequently, Harding was softly elbowed aside for Cleveland banker Myron Herrick. However, encountering no resistance, Harding decided to seek the lieutenant governor’s nomination--and he and Herrick won in 1904 by overwhelming margins, with the support of both Foraker and an ailing Mark Hanna. Hanna died in February 1904 of typhoid fever, incidentally. Once in office, according to Andrew Sinclair, “Harding had little to do, and he did it very well”. As Herrick made bad decision after bad decision that turned key GOP constituencies against him, Harding spent his time presiding over the state Senate and making more friends. He made so many friends, in fact, that he envisioned a successful 1906 campaign for governor (again, gubernatorial terms were only two years at the time) but was stymied by Cox, Foraker, and Charles Dick, Hanna’s replacement in the U.S. Senate. They were so upset, in fact, that Harding meekly bowed out of seeking any political office in 1906. Yeah. Like I said, he’s Mr. Trimble. Google it if you don’t know what I’m talking about, nerds. Harding got the last laugh. Democrat John Pattison was elected governor, but Republican Andrew Harris won lieutenant governor--and Pattison died five months into his term. Harding did not, of course, vent his frustration to anyone. He was a good party man. Incidentally, in 1908, the Ohio state legislature was up for re-election too--those would be the people who determined whether or not Joseph Foraker would return to the Senate. It should be understood: Foraker had a drat good thing going. He was a powerful Senator and a major player in Ohio politics. What, do you think, is the one thing in the world that could cause Foraker to gently caress all that up? If you answered “He thought he could be President”, you’re correct! 1908 was a momentous year--Theodore Roosevelt was bowing out of the Presidential race in favor of his chosen successor, close friend and Secretary of War William Howard Taft. Harding and the Star, however, decided to dance with the one that brought ‘em--the paper endorsed Foraker for President and chastised Roosevelt for trying to bypass the nominating process. Literally three weeks later Harding pulled a 180 and endorsed Taft. Oopsie doodle. According to Andrew Sinclair, Harding’s change of heart was “not because he saw the light but because he felt the heat”. Foraker crashed and burned at the convention and Harding’s endorsement of Taft, belated though it might have been, allowed him to escape the ensuing political conflagration. Foraker’s “transgression” had even further-reaching consequences: his attempt to gain the Presidential nomination and subsequent failure cost him his Senate seat too. With Foraker gone, Harding had one less powerful friend--but he’d also done favors for the progressive wing of the Republicans as well, allowing him to survive the anti-conservative backlash that had peaked during Roosevelt. In 1910, Harding earned the Ohio gubernatorial nomination--but the now-deeply divided Republican Party was unable to beat a united Democratic front. Despite having political whiz Harry Daugherty managing his campaign, Harding lost badly. Both Taft and Roosevelt campaigned for Harding, interestingly, despite the fact that the rift between them was already very deep. Taft and Roosevelt were fast retreating into opposite camps--Taft with the conservatives, Roosevelt with the progressives. It would grow into a full-blown split in 1912. That story you already know from my biography of Wilson; you know that Roosevelt and the Progressive Party bolted the convention, formed their own party, and put up the best third-party showing in United States history--but it just succeeded in handing Woodrow Wilson a landslide electoral victory. Harding was loyal, as always. He stayed with the Taft Republicans and supported the incumbent President, even as Taft went down in flames in November 1912, winning only Utah and Vermont in the election. Mr. Harding Goes To Washington  So what now? Party loyalty was, so far, screwing Harding badly. He was blunting his own ambitions (and Florence’s ambitions for him) on the whims of party leaders in Ohio, and when he actually had a chance at elected office, he was getting beat because Republican Party politics were so rancid. I have to give the man credit for patience. If it were me, I’d have said “gently caress it”, sold all my earthly possessions and become a goddamn monk. Then, against all odds, he caught a break. In 1908, Congressman Theodore Burton had taken Foraker’s spot in the Senate, and he’d announced that he was seeking a second term in 1914. OK, big whoop. Why was that a big break for Harding, you might ask? Because the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution had just been ratified by the requisite two-thirds of state legislatures, of course! Yes, if you know anything about our Constitution (I know I have some readers who aren’t from America), the Seventeenth Amendment was HUGE. It provided for direct election of Senators, rather than having them chosen by state legislatures...meaning that all these party hacks who’d been picked by bosses in back rooms? They were now at the mercy of the people. They had to campaign and face primaries, just like governors, representatives, and Presidents. Into the primary fray jumped former Senator Joseph Foraker, former Congressman Ralph Cole, and Burton--and Burton figured out pretty quickly that he wasn’t going to win. He withdrew. Foraker was the favorite, briefly, but he fell out of favor quickly due to his status as an old guard Republican. With Cole the only candidate left, Harding’s allies urged him to jump in--something Harry Daugherty later claimed sole credit for. “I found him like a turtle sunning himself on a log, and I pushed him into the water,” he said. You’ll see this is a common theme--Harding’s ambition was never quite enough to motivate him to do anything until those around him, like Daugherty or his wife, pushed him. The primary campaign, for Harding, was all sweetness and light. He campaigned so as not to offend anyone. It could be argued, in fact, that Warren Harding was the true father of the Republican 11th Commandment made famous by Ronald Reagan and broken so often by Donald Trump: “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican”. Remember, Harding was a party hack through and through. He did not attack Foraker during the race...but his supporters had no such compunctions. He won easily, by more than 12,000 votes. The general election was ugly. Harding’s opponent was Democratic Ohio Attorney General Timothy Hogan. Hogan was a Roman Catholic who had clawed his way up through the ranks despite widespread prejudice against Catholics in office (remember, we didn’t really get over this until Kennedy was elected in 1960). Propaganda leaflets like the Menace and the Defender made the rounds. The Menace told voters, “Read the Menace and get the dope, go to the polls and beat the Pope.” Yeah. These guys were the InfoWars of the 1920s. No rules. One of these things actually said that Hogan was part of a secret plot led by Pope Benedict XV to control Ohio by way of the Knights of Columbus. Jesus tittyfucking Christ. Harding did not get dirty personally. He never attacked Hogan for his religion, nor did he even get confrontational on most other issues. He ran a bland, genial campaign. However, he outright ignored the blatant nativist hatred rampant in those propaganda leaflets, despite Hogan being an old friend. The conciliatory nature of his campaign was an asset--one of his friends diagnosed his stump speech during the 1914 campaign as “a rambling, high-sounding mixture of platitudes, patriotism, and pure nonsense”. The point was that it sounded good. It didn’t have to mean anything. If you’re starting to see some eerie parallels to modern Republican strategy, you’re not the only one. It worked like a charm. Harding won in a landslide, swept into office by a margin of over 100,000 votes. The party hack was now a Senator. End of Part 1. I was originally going to do Harding in one update, but his life proved too interesting. Also, I just got the new Tomb Raider game. See you guys in Part 2, when we talk about Harding's Senate career, his election to the Presidency, and why he called his penis Jerry. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Sep 15, 2018 |
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Sep 15, 2018 19:10
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Admit it, you just pulled a random G name from the silmarillion and are trying to pass it off as his middle name. I'm on to you.
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Sep 16, 2018 07:34
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After Harding do David Cameron, who hosed a dead pig.
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Sep 16, 2018 14:05
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Azhais posted:Admit it, you just pulled a random G name from the silmarillion and are trying to pass it off as his middle name. I'm on to you. Nope! Harding's mother was a devout reader of her Bible, and Gamaliel is actually a name found in Acts 5--Rabbi Gamaliel is a Pharisee and the leader of the Sanhedrin 
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Sep 16, 2018 15:42
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Late but re: Ike, no mention of Operation Wetback?
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Sep 16, 2018 19:09
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Part 2 of Harding is still under construction. I've been extraordinarily busy and today is the first day I've had to relax...I expect it will come either later today or tomorrow.
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Sep 23, 2018 16:40
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Part 2: Tempests In A Teapot Dome And Other Scandals When we last left Warren Harding, he was in the middle of a meteoric, yet truly odd rise to power. Years of unswerving party loyalty and a knack for attaching himself to powerful men had contributed to Harding’s good political fortunes. The Seventeenth Amendment, providing for the direct election of senators, had allowed Harding to jump into the Ohio Senate race in 1914, knocking off the incumbent and being swept--by a landslide--into office. It’s important to know that his Senate campaign was an eerie mirror of his later Presidential campaign. Even as independent leaflet campaigns bombarded his Catholic opponent with horrible, nativist hatred, Harding himself ran a bland, very genial, very inoffensive campaign. He rarely, if ever, engaged on issues, probably because, like the man he was the model for in 2000, he didn’t understand the issues. Let’s dive back into the rest of the short but happy political life of Warren Harding now. We’re going to talk about his Senate career, his election to the Presidency, the many scandals that made his Presidency such a mess, how he died, and why he called his dong Jerry. On Capitol Hill  Warren Harding had been swept into the Senate on a tidal wave of popular support in the first election cycle featuring direct elections of Senators. You might think it strange that a man who got to where he was with the support of bosses and power players also enjoyed enormous popular support, but like I said earlier--he possessed extraordinary charisma and was a very talented public speaker. Harding’s time in the Senate was largely unremarkable. He was the junior Senator from Ohio, and since Democrats controlled the chamber, the Republican leaders gave him rather unimportant committee assignments. Much as he had done his entire political career, Harding played the game and played it well. He carried out his duties and was a nice, safe, conservative Republican vote. Doing so earned him quite a bit of goodwill in the Republican caucus and made him a lot of friends. Because that’s really what it’s all about in the end, right? The friends you make along the way? However, not even Harding could avoid all the issues. He was forced to take real positions on two of the major issues of the time--Prohibition and women’s suffrage. In typical Harding fashion, he opted for nuance rather than absolutism. He declared he could not support women’s suffrage until the people of Ohio did, but he also could read the political landscape and he knew that suffrage was fast gaining majority support in the state--so when it came up for a vote a few years later, Harding was a firm supporter. On Prohibition, Harding drank, so he originally voted against banning alcohol...but he also voted for the Eighteenth Amendment, which imposed Prohibition--on the condition that there be a time limit for implementation. The expectation was that this stipulation would kill the bill in the Senate. When it didn’t, Harding would subsequently vote to override Wilson’s veto--thus assuring himself the support of the Anti-Saloon League. Think of them as the NRA of the early 1900s--they have enormously outsized impact on legislation and legislators. Harding’s conduct had earned him the respect of both the Progressive and conservative wings of the Republican Party, so much so that they actually asked him to chair the 1916 Republican National Convention and give the keynote speech. He used the opportunity to cement the two factions together under one nominee (so as to avoid the fiasco of 1912). He was successful--the convention nominated former Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes, and Theodore Roosevelt chose to decline the Progressive Party’s nomination for President and instead backed Hughes (they were old friends and Hughes was also the fairly progressive former governor of New York). Incidentally, this was also the death knell for the Progressives as a political force. Increased unity or not, the Republicans still lost in 1916...but Harding remained one of the most prominent figures, not just in Ohio politics but increasingly among Washington politicians now. When the First World War began for the United States, Harding voted in favor of (and spoke on behalf of) the war resolution that President Wilson came before Congress to get in April 1917. In August, he voted to dramatically expand Wilson’s wartime powers, stating that “democracy had little place in time of war”. That’s...frightening to say the least. In typical Harding fashion, though, after 1918, since Republicans were becoming less enthused about giving Wilson whatever he wanted, he opposed any further expansion of Presidential authority, even though he’d voted for the Espionage Act a year earlier. Once Republicans reclaimed the Senate in the 1918 midterms, Harding got an appointment to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Why does this matter? Because it was the committee that had to review the Treaty of Versailles. Wilson took no Senators with him to Paris when he negotiated on behalf of the United States; he thought that when he brought it back to the United States that he could shame the Senate into approving it. In the beginning, he was right. The country overwhelmingly approved of the Treaty of Versailles and the creation of the League of Nations. The sticking point, as you all know, however, was Article X--the one that stipulated that League members were obligated to defend any member nation that was attacked. Too many of them saw eerie parallels to the interlocking treaties in Europe that had started the war--they believed it would force the United States into war without Congressional consent. 39 Senators--Harding included--signed a round-robin letter that opposed the Treaty of Versailles. In response, Wilson invited the Foreign Relations Committee to the White House to discuss the treaty informally. When Harding brought up the Republicans’ concerns about Article X, Wilson dodged the questions--and Harding reciprocated by making a major speech against the treaty in September 1919 on the Senate floor. By then, Wilson had had his stroke--and without his leadership and advocacy, the Treaty failed. Harding had effectively used his Senate tenure, no doubt about that. Much like his time in the Ohio State Senate, he’d taken few risks, made lots of friends, and endeared himself to both factions of the Republican Party. If I didn’t know better, this sounds like a man positioning himself to run for President. The Presidential Election of 1920 Wait, that’s exactly what it was? Oh. How anti-climactic. The Progressive Party was dead, to begin with. Yes, Rizzo, that’s how the story begins. As dead as a doornail. Most of the members had rejoined the Republican Party, and Theodore Roosevelt himself was expected to make another attempt for the White House in 1920. It, uh...didn’t work out. Roosevelt died in January of 1919. Oops. It threw the nomination to the wind. A number of candidates emerged, including California Senator and former Progressive Party VP candidate Hiram Johnson, General Leonard Wood, Illinois Governor Frank Lowden, AEF leader General John J. Pershing, and a number of other personalities such as, well, this guy.  His name wasn’t mud with the GOP yet! Herbert Hoover was, at this point, known mostly for his extraordinary relief efforts both abroad and at home during the war. Democrats had already tried to recruit him, but Hoover’s growing conservatism--and the slow but sure evolution of the Republicans into the conservative party--had caused him to side with them. Hoover found himself outmatched in this particular field by candidates with a lot more money and firepower than he had, however. Harding wanted to be President. There’s no denying that. And Flossie and Harry Daugherty? They wanted him to be President even more. Harding had a couple of reasons to enter the race, though--a couple of powerful Ohio Progressives were eyeing his Senate seat, former Ohio governor Frank Willis (who had won election at the same time as Harding, six years earlier and had been beaten by the current governor of Ohio, James Cox, in 1916) and the CEO of Procter & Gamble, William Cooper Procter. Leading Ohio Republicans didn’t like these guys. They were Progressives, a dying breed in the GOP. National Republicans didn’t like Governor Lowden, either--they thought he was too much of a maverick. Too likely to make his own decisions, rather than listening to the party. That said, Harding knew that even if his bid failed, the prominence earned by a Presidential campaign would help to ensure he was reelected to the Senate in 1920. For these reasons, the Old Guard preferred Harding. Remember, Harding’s unswerving loyalty to the GOP was what endeared him to many of his Senate colleagues. Harding had appointed Harry Daugherty to run his campaign, and he was sure that at the convention none of the other candidates would be able to muster the majority needed to win the nomination. His strategy was clear: introduce Harding as the compromise candidate when all the leading candidates like Lowden, Pershing, and Johnson failed. Establishing a “Harding for President” office in Washington, Daugherty went to work establishing a network of Harding’s friends and associates. Harding himself started on a tireless letter-writing campaign to shore up support at the convention, but as one of his biographers says, it was Daugherty who made the difference...by any means necessary. “Without Daugherty’s Mephistophelean efforts, Harding would never have stumbled forward to the nomination,” Thomas Russell wrote. Not sure what that was meant to imply about the lengths Daugherty went to… In 1920, only 16 states were holding primary contests--but one of them was Harding’s home state of Ohio--and politicians back home were scheming to take it from him. Procter and Wood, particularly, hoped to win the state and seriously undercut Harding’s bid for the nomination. They weren’t successful, but they did seriously dent Harding’s victory. He carried a plurality by only about 15,000 votes over Wood, giving him less than half the total vote and only 39 of 48 total delegates. It was Pyrrhic at best. Harding’s overconfidence had burned him badly, as he’d moved on to the next state, Indiana, before Ohio’s primary--and he ended up finishing fourth, with less than 10%, and he won no delegates. At this point, Harding’s ambition had reached its breaking point. He was prepared to go to Daugherty, tell him he was giving up, and to file re-election papers for the Senate. The story goes that he had dialed Harry Daugherty’s phone number and was in the middle of discussing the matter when Florence grabbed the phone out of his hand and said “Warren Harding, what are you doing? Give up? Not until the convention is over. Think of your friends in Ohio!” I can’t possibly overstate this, guys...the ambitions of others for him far outstripped any ambition Harding might have had for himself. Florence told him “You tell Harry Daugherty for me that we’re in this fight until Hell freezes over.” You know, she might have made a good President. Harding bounced back--and part of his comeback was perhaps the most famous speech he gave during his campaign. In Boston, he tapped into what turned out to be America’s innermost desire after a decade roiled by war and death and unrest. quote:America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration. This was America’s G-spot, folks. We desperately wanted normality, or as Harding put it, normalcy. Interestingly enough, his use of “normalcy” was sneered at at the time...it was not thought of as an acceptable phrasing, and many news editors changed it to normality in their publications. Harding stuck to his guns, though--he claimed that he just liked “normalcy” better. It doesn’t sound like a heavy-hitting campaign platform, because it wasn’t. But it tapped into a primal need that an overwhelming number of Americans shared: we just wanted things to be normal again. We wanted peace and quiet. Hell, we’re going through a little bit of that now. Raise your hand if you would like to wake up tomorrow with Barack Obama at the helm again. Congratulations--you are wishing for a return to normalcy. John Dean in particular noted that “Harding, more than the other aspirants, was reading the nation’s pulse correctly.” The delegates assembled in June 1920 at the Chicago Coliseum, and they arrived bitterly divided. A report from a Senate investigation into campaign spending had just produced some rather eyebrow-raising results. Apparently, General Wood had spent $1.8 million (about $22 million today), lending credence to Senator Johnson’s claim that Wood was trying to buy the nomination. Governor Lowden had spent $600,000 that somehow ended up in the pockets of only two delegates. Ironically, Harding? He spent the least--only $113K. Johnson was behind the inquiry, interestingly enough--whether his motives were pure or not, it meant that there would be no compromise among the convention frontrunners. The convention itself was about as close to political anarchy as you could get--there was no boss, and with a Democrat in the White House, the party leaders couldn’t use patronage to coerce delegates. Harding came in as almost a non-entity, despite his Boston speech--he was in sixth place in the last poll taken before the convention. Four ballots were taken on June 11. All four were deadlocked. 493 votes were needed, and right now, Wood was closest with 314.5 votes. Lowden followed with 289.5, and Harding had only mustered a 65.5. That night, a meeting allegedly took place in a smoke-filled room in a hotel somewhere, wherein the GOP party elders tried to figure out a way to get Harding nominated. In RNC head Will Hays’ suite at the Blackstone Hotel, several senators--all of whom were backing Harding--presented their cases. Reed Smoot (R-UT) said that since Democrats were probably going to nominate Ohio’s governor, James Cox, Harding was their only chance at keeping Ohio in the GOP column in the fall. There are different accounts of what went on in this meeting. Smoot alleged later that there had been an agreement to nominate Harding after a few more deadlocked ballots, but this was found to be untrue. Colonel George McClellan Harvey, one of Hays’ close friends, reported that Harding was told he would be the candidate because all his rivals had so many liabilities. They really didn’t know. Harvey says that Harding was told this in person. Other people in the room deny it, and Harding biographer Charles Murray says that there is no evidence besides Harvey’s account that Harding was in that suite that night. He was so uncertain of victory that he filed re-election papers for the Senate--something he surely would not have done if he’d known he would leave Chicago as the nominee. The delegates in the convention hall got wind of the story and came to believe that a cabal of senators was trying to make Harding the nominee. When they thought about it, they decided that Harding was their escape valve from the bickering among the frontrunners. On the first ballot on the morning of June 12, Harding’s total rose to 133.5 votes. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA), the convention chair, was alarmed by this and immediately declared a three-hour recess. An outraged Harry Daugherty raced to the podium and confronted Lodge, declaring “You cannot defeat this man this way! The motion [to adjourn] was not carried! You cannot defeat this man!” Lodge couldn’t stop the train. Delegation after delegation flocked to Harding’s banner. On the ninth ballot he took the lead with 374.5 votes to Wood’s 249 and 121.5 for Lowden. Lowden bowed out and released his delegates--who flocked to Harding almost to a man. Harding was nominated on the tenth ballot with nearly 700 votes. For Vice President, Harding had suggested Senator Irvine Lenroot of Wisconsin. Lenroot didn’t want the job, but before his name was withdrawn, someone in the Oregon delegation suggested this man.  Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts was another also-ran for the nomination, and he had gained fame by brutally breaking the Boston police strike in 1919. He was nominated nearly by acclamation, so great was the consensus for his candidacy as second banana. Everyone wanted to leave Chicago--James Morgan of the Boston Globe wrote that “...the President-makers did not have a clean shirt. On such things, Rollo, turns the destiny of nations.” But for want of some clean laundry, who knows who would have been President in 1920. Harding and Coolidge immediately earned the backing of Republican-slanted newspapers, but independent publications were somewhat underwhelmed by the convention’s choice for President. The New York World called Harding the least-qualified candidate since James Buchanan--an unfair accusation, since Buchanan had been Secretary of State and Minister to Great Britain before being President. The World said that Harding was a “weak and mediocre man” who “never had an original idea”. They weren’t wrong. Harding’s success had largely originated from the efforts and ambition of others, and he had kept the friends he’d made by being a faithful party man. The New York Times was no less blunt, calling him “a very respectable Ohio politician of the second class”. As predicted, the Democrats nominated James Cox of Ohio at their convention a couple weeks later, and for Cox’s running mate they threw the nomination to the young Assistant Secretary of the Navy and former New York State Senator, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. You already know this, of course, because I covered FDR, and I mentioned this little fact. You do remember, don’t you? There’s going to be a quiz at the end. Harding, as the times demanded, ran a front-porch campaign in the mold of William McKinley two decades earlier. He stayed in Marion and gave addresses to visiting delegations. America, he argued, had no need for another Wilson. It needed a President “near the normal”. This is a rather stark admission that he was of rather mediocre intelligence and ability, don’t you think? H.L. Mencken was one of Harding’s many critics when it came to oratorical style. This particular passage was rather blistering. quote:...it reminds me of a string of wet sponges, it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a kind of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm ... of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of tosh. It is rumble and bumble. It is balder and dash. Very Hunter S. Thompson-esque. Cox found himself in a bit of a bind, too. Wilson had declared the election to be a referendum on the League of Nations, and while his Vice Presidential candidate was a strong supporter, Cox himself was unsure. Harding and Coolidge, on the other hand, were both staunch opponents of the League as negotiated by Wilson. It’s important to note that because Harding did favor some sort of “association of nations” as he put it based on the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague. It was enough to keep internationalist Republicans from bolting the ticket, and opposition to Wilson’s League kept the isolationists in the fold. The election wasn’t close. By November 2, Election Day, few had any doubt that Harding would win. He took over 60% of the popular vote, and the map, well…  Socialist candidate Eugene Debs, funnily enough, garnered 3% of the nation-wide popular vote while campaigning from inside a prison cell. A Cabinet Of Dunces  He was sworn in on March 4, 1921, without a parade--Harding wasn’t a fan. He preferred a low-key ceremony, followed by a reception at the White House. Let’s backtrack a bit. After winning in November 1920 he immediately noped the gently caress out and went on vacation, stating quite categorically that he wouldn’t make any decisions about White House jobs until he came back. He went to Texas and hung out with Frank Scobey, his friend from back in Ohio and the future Director of the U.S. Mint, played golf, and fished. Returning to Ohio, he said he planned to consult the “best minds” of the country on appointments. I should say straight from the outset that he did not do this. That isn’t to say that some of his appointments weren’t good--for example, as Secretary of State, Harding chose the venerable Charles Evans Hughes, the former Supreme Court Justice, Presidential candidate, and supporter of Wilson’s League of Nations. Herbert Hoover, the director of the relief efforts during the war, became Commerce Secretary and Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon moved into the big office in the Treasury Department. But Harding was a party man to the end. “My God,” he said at one point, “I can’t be an ingrate!” He brought in his old friend Harry Daugherty as Attorney General and appointed this man as Interior Secretary, a friend from the Senate.  Senator Albert Fall (R-NM) had been elected as the first Senator from the new state of New Mexico in 1912. In the Senate he made friends with Harding and the “Ohio Gang”, the informal cabal of advisors around Harding who would make most of the patronage decisions in the Harding White House. You’ll understand why he’s important in this narrative later. These two appointments--Daugherty and Fall--were shredded in the media. The New York Times derided the Daugherty appointment, saying that Harding had been content “to choose merely a best friend” rather than finding a good legal mind for the Justice Department. Conservationists everywhere, including Theodore Roosevelt’s old friend Gifford Pinchot, went after the Fall appointment with a vengeance. Fall was a former mining executive, and Pinchot wrote “it would have been possible to pick a worse man for Secretary of the Interior, but not altogether easy”. Harding’s Presidency wasn’t a good one, folks. For the few years he was in office, he widened the gap between rich and poor and continued the same decadent, laissez-faire economic policies that led to the catastrophe in 1929. Had it not been for his death and the retirement of Calvin Coolidge, they would have gotten the blame that was heaped on poor Herbert Hoover’s head. I’m going to cover a few things now that I think will neatly encompass the subpar Presidency of Warren Harding...as well as a couple amusing anecdotes I think you guys will like. He Had A Dong, Its Name Was Jerry Warren Harding was a lousy husband. Let’s just get that out of the way right out of the gate. I don’t really have a way to lead into that. There were two women in particular. One was this lady:  That is Carrie Fulton Phillips, a woman that Harding had carried on an affair with for 15 years. She was the the wife of a friend of his, and he’d started writing her some rather...steamy love letters in 1910. Here’s one such specimen, written by Harding in 1912: quote:I love your poise Giggity. Well, as John Oliver said in his expose on the Harding love letters: “As an R&B lyricist, Harding was decades ahead of his time”. The Montreal reference, by the way, refers to a trip on New Year’s Eve to Montreal where she spent the night with Harding and they totally banged to ring in the new year. This letter from 1915, however, is even better, because Harding becomes the first President to nickname his penis. quote:Jerry — you recall Jerry, whose cards I once sent you to Europe — came in while I was pondering your notes in glad reflection, and we talked about it. He was strongly interested, and elated and clung to discussion. He told me to say that you are the best and darlingest in the world, and if he could have but one wish, it would be to be held in your darling embrace and be thrilled by your pink lips that convey the surpassing rapture of human touch and the unspeakable joy of love’s surpassing embrace. I cordially agree with all he said. Perhaps it is not important maybe it is not even interesting, but he is devotedly, exclusively, for you. . . . Yes, that’s the President of the United States calling his penis “Jerry” and telling his paramour how awesome her blowjobs were. The New York Times covers this saga much better than I can: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/magazine/letters-warren-g-harding.html?_r=0 All the best letters from the Harding/Phillips correspondence are there. I should mention that by 1918, when the armistice was signed, the affair cooled. Phillips, believe it or not, had been a strong advocate of supporting Germany in the war, and Harding was eyeing the White House. Phillips demanded money in exchange for her silence, and Harding felt he had no choice but to agree. News of the affair would seriously injure his chances for higher office. This letter from 1920 reflects the changed tone: quote:Your proposal to destroy me, and yourself in doing so, will only add to the ill we have already done. It doesn’t seem like you to think of such a fatal course. I can’t believe your purpose is to destroy me for paying the tribute so freely uttered and so often shown. . . . Rough all over. It didn’t end there. See, this young woman had grown up an admirer of Harding’s in Marion. He was a friend of her father’s.  times infinity. She actually used to hang around near the Marion Star’s building in the hopes that she’d catch Harding walking home from work. Nan Britton was the daughter of Harding’s friend Samuel Britton, and she claimed later in her book The President’s Daughter that she’d been Harding’s mistress for the entirety of his time in the White House. When she first met Harding he was still sleeping with Carrie Phillips, but Britton claims the affair began in 1914--and that he was the father of her daughter, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing. One famous story involves the Secret Service standing guard while Harding and Britton had sex in a coat closet in the White House. She was 31 years Harding’s junior, so, you know...ew. Harding had, according to Britton, promised to support Elizabeth. However, when he croaked in 1923, Florence Harding (who knew about Britton) refused to honor Harding’s promise. So she wrote the book I mentioned to support her daughter and to champion the rights of illegitimate children. Britton sued, but she was unable to bring any concrete evidence to bear against Harding’s estate, and she was subjected to vicious personal attacks by the Congressional committee that questioned her. Yes, slut-shaming is not a new thing, guys. Luckily for us, we have DNA testing to put these things to rest, and in 2015 Ancestry.com conducted a test of the Harding and Blaesing families to see if they shared any genes. Sure enough, they concluded that Harding was indeed Blaesing’s father. Small wonders. Intermediate-Level Fuckups There’s one scandal in particular that deserves a section of its own (you all know which one), so I’m going to cover the others in this section. As you know, the appointment of Harry Daugherty to the Justice Department received perhaps more criticism than any of Harding’s appointments. Despite the fact that he had worked tirelessly to aid and abet Harding’s political rise, people didn’t think Ohio lobbying and back-room deals were enough to qualify him to be Attorney General. Spoiler alert: They were right. Interestingly, his Congressional enemies tried to tag him with Teapot Dome when that became a thing--but since Fall and Daugherty weren’t friends it was harder to buy the claims of illicit activity. It didn’t matter, though. Daugherty managed to do an extraordinary number of illegal things without Fall’s help. See, one of his aides, Jess Smith, had conspired with two other members of the “Ohio Gang”, Howard Mannington and Fred Caskey, to accept payoffs from alcohol bootleggers in exchange for either immunity from prosecution or the release of booze from government warehouses. Ouch. Volstead Act violations up the wazoo. Witnesses such as Smith’s ex-wife Roxy Stinson and former FBI agent Gaston Means alleged that Daugherty was personally involved--that he’d been at the “Little Green House” on K Street where Mannington and Caskey lived and where much of the deals took place--and it didn’t help Daugherty’s case when he refused to allow the Senate committee investigating him access to Justice Department records. By this stage Harding had died, and with it all protection from prosecution--President Calvin Coolidge requested that Daugherty hand in his resignation, and Daugherty did so in March 1924. That wasn’t even the scandal that caused Daugherty the most grief. Jess Smith had also made a deal with former Delaware Congressman Thomas Miller, which involved a payoff of around $500K in exchange for illegally facilitating a sale of a German-owned firm to new U.S. owners. Smith dumped $50K of that into a joint account with Daugherty that was to be used for political purposes, and Daugherty promptly destroyed any records relating to it. Miller and Daugherty were indicted for defrauding the government (Smith had committed suicide before the indictments came down). The first trial, in September 1926, resulted in a hung jury, but in 1927 a jury convicted Miller. However, they couldn’t convict Daugherty. The charges were dropped, but Daugherty’s refusal to defend himself shattered what remained of his reputation and no doubt contributed to the jaundiced view we have of Harding today. Daugherty remained defiant, blaming his troubles on the labor movement and on Communist influence within it. rear end in a top hat. That wasn’t all, sadly. The man Harding appointed to head the Veterans Bureau, Charles R. Forbes, had been tasked with building new hospitals around the country to help the 300,000 injured World War I veterans that the country was taking care of. In 1922, Forbes met a man named Elias Mortimer, an agent for the Thompson-Black Construction Company in St. Louis. This was sort of difficult to understand when I researched it, so hopefully you can follow my tortured explanation. The two became close as Forbes traveled the West looking for possible hospital sites. A third man, Charles Hurley of the Hurley-Mason Construction Company in Washington state, also became friendly with Forbes in his travels. Harding had ordered that all building contracts be pursuant to public notice (as in public-bid contracts), but Forbes, Hurley, and Mortimer worked out a secret deal wherein the two companies would get all the building contracts and the three caballeros here would divvy up the profits three ways. Forbes defrauded the government, artificially inflating construction costs per bed from $3K to $4K and pocketing the difference with Hurley and Mortimer. Forbes even spread the graft to acquiring land for hospitals--purchasing a land tract in San Francisco that was barely worth $20,000 for an eye-popping $105,000. Forbes began getting greedier. He started selling hospital supplies out of the warehouses he controlled at the Perryville Depot in Maryland--these supplies had been stockpiled by the government during the war. Forbes unloaded them to a private law firm even as the Veterans Bureau was buying more expensive supplies for the hospitals. Yeah. This fuckin guy, man. The secret got out when the guy who was the check on Forbes’ authority over the Perryville storehouses, Dr. Charles Sawyer, Harding’s personal physician and Surgeon General, told Harding of Forbes’ activity. Harding didn’t believe it until Sawyer produced proof in January 1923. Harding was simultaneously enraged and despondent at the fact that this level of graft had taken place in his administration. He summoned Forbes immediately, confronted him with the evidence, and demanded he resign. Harding didn’t want the scandal to be public, so he allowed Forbes to flee to Europe--but the story broke anyway two weeks later and the Senate began their investigation. Mortimer flipped immediately--Forbes had been loving his wife (true story!) and their friendship had hit the skids and Mortimer told the Senate committee everything. Despite Forbes returning from Europe to testify on his own behalf, few were convinced of his innocence. He was tried in Chicago on conspiracy to defraud the government and spent two years in jail. As Harding’s biographers tell it, though, “One of the most troublesome aspects of the Harding Presidency was that he appeared to be far more concerned with political liabilities of a scandal than in securing justice.” Point is? Harding knew that these guys were corrupt; he just didn’t wanna believe that friends of his would go this far in trying to loot the place, and he wanted them to go away as soon as possible so that they didn’t make him look bad. He deserves a great deal of scorn for this. And yet these were child’s play in comparison to the scandal everyone remembers Harding for. A Dome Of A Teapot Variety  In the early 20th century, the United States Navy began switching fuels in its vessels from coal to oil. Obviously, this meant that the government would need to ensure that its ships always had enough fuel to run. With that in mind, in 1912 President William Howard Taft designated several oil-producing sites in the country as Naval Oil Reserves--the products gained from drilling would go straight to Uncle Sam. In 1921, President Harding issued an executive order that transferred control of Teapot Dome Oil Field in Wyoming, as well as Elk Hills and Buena Vista Oil Fields in California, from the Navy Department’s control to the Interior Department. Wilson’s first Interior Secretary was an advocate for this; and when Albert Fall took Lane’s position he adopted the argument. Harding’s Navy Secretary Edwin Denby assented to the move. The problem, of course, was what Fall did with it. He turned around and leased production rights at Teapot Dome to a man named Harry Sinclair of Mammoth Oil, a subsidiary of a large Western oil company. Elk Hills was leased to Edward Doheny of Pan-American Petroleum, and it’s important to understand this: both these leases were granted without any competitive bidding. Fall gave them away. Technically, doing so was legal under the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920--but what Fall got in exchange? Yeah, that poo poo wasn’t legal. The terms of the leases were crazy favorable to the oil companies--and Fall, as facilitator, made a bundle of money. Doheny, in particular, gave Fall $100,000 (around $1.37 million today) in November 1921. Other gifts from Doheny and Sinclair totaled around $404,000 (roughly $5.54 million today). The leases, again, were not the illegal part--it was all this cash going straight to Fall’s personal accounts that was. Fall was dumb about it too. He tried to keep his actions secret, but all of a sudden he bought a new house and some really nice furniture--which raised some eyebrows among friends. The scandal didn’t really attract any attention, though, until April 1922 when a very pissed-off Wyoming oil operator wrote to Senator John Kendrick (D-WY) claiming that Harry Sinclair had gotten his hands on a no-bid contract for Teapot Dome. Kendrick didn’t answer the letter, but two days later he brought a resolution onto the Senate floor proposing an investigation into the deal for Teapot Dome. Senator Robert La Follette Sr. (R-WI) led an investigation into Teapot Dome and was originally inclined to believe that Fall was innocent. Then his office was ransacked and documents pertaining to the investigation were stolen. Not making this up, by the way. Apparently Nixon’s ratfucking Plumbers had traveled through time. La Follette’s suspicions grew as Fall retreated, and Senator Thomas Walsh (D-MT) began a lengthy inquiry into the matter. Fall attempted to cover his tracks by hiding the money he’d received. The leases were evaluated and found to be within the law, but records of them kept mysteriously disappearing. Why? Because they all contained evidence of the payments from Doheny and Sinclair. Fall was destroying them. By 1924, the one unanswered question was this: How did Fall get so rich so quickly? He’d lived modestly prior to 1921, and it sure as hell wasn’t a government salary making him so wealthy. Money from the payoffs had gone to Fall’s cattle ranch and his business, and it looked like he’d successfully hidden all of it. The investigation was winding down and it didn’t appear that the committee had anything but circumstantial evidence. Then Fall screwed up. He’d forgotten to hide the $100K loan Doheny had given him, and Senator Walsh found it. The dam broke, as it so often does. Civil and criminal suits related to Teapot Dome started springing up like grass in April throughout the 1920s. In 1927, the Supreme Court brought down the final hammer--they ruled that Fall’s leases had been unlawfully distributed. The Elk Hills lease was invalidated in February of that year, Teapot Dome in October. Both were given back to the Navy Department. Finally, in 1929, Albert Fall himself was found guilty of accepting bribes from Doheny--and conversely, a year later, Doheny was acquitted of bribing Fall. What the gently caress? I have to say, I read this over and over and I still do not understand how a second court acquitted Doheny if they convicted Fall. What, did Doheny trip over something and money fell out of his pocket and into Fall’s hands? Doheny proceeded to foreclose on Fall’s home in the Tularosa Basin due to “unpaid loans”--perversely, the $100K loan that had started all of this. Fall was to blame for the scandal, undoubtedly. I guess you could say he was the...Fall guy.  Harding got tagged anyway, but only after he died in 1923--yet another strike against him that tarnished his legacy. Combine this with his affairs and the numerous other scandals and Harding looked like a lying doofus who enjoyed stepping out on his wife. Civil Rights  I feel like I can’t leave Harding without at least mentioning something that doesn’t involve scandals. Everyone gets one, I guess? I should point out that Harding actually called for Congress to pass anti-lynching legislation. If you’ll recall, his father was very anti-slavery and the Argus, his newspaper, was very pro-GOP in its time because of this fact. Initially, Harding seemed more inclined to do more for African-Americans than recent past Republican Presidents (including the great Theodore Roosevelt) had. He even asked his Cabinet officers to make sure they hired black people, breaking Woodrow Wilson’s segregationist stranglehold. But Harding was a political creature, and biographer Andrew Sinclair suggests that it was perhaps the fact that Harding garnered around 40% of the Democratic Solid South vote that led his people to believe that maybe there was political opportunity for him. In October 1921 Harding spoke to a segregated crowd in Birmingham, Alabama (roughly 20,000 white and 10,000 black). He said that social and racial differences between white and black people could never be bridged, but he also urged that the South accede to granting equal political rights to African-Americans. He supported the use of literacy tests if it meant equal application to both white and black voters, something he knew perfectly well no Southern state would do. “Whether you like it or not,” Harding told his audience, “unless our democracy is a lie, you must stand for that equality.” Seems legit. Problem was, rhetoric didn’t translate into action. He did support Congressman Leonidas Dyer’s (R-MO) anti-lynching bill, but even though it passed the House in 1922 it stalled on the floor of the Senate due to (what else) filibustering by Southern Democrats. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge withdrew the bill in favor of the ship subsidy bill Harding wanted Congress to consider--it would allocate public funds for the creation of a merchant navy. Harding sacrificed the anti-lynching bill on its altar, regrettably. Then he did something worse. Congress passed something called the Per Centum Act of 1921, which restricted immigration to the United States to 3% of those from a given country living in the United States based on the numbers in the 1910 census. It wouldn’t really restrict Irish and German immigrants, but they weren’t the ones coming here in droves. It was the Italians and Eastern European Jews who were hurt most. My family, in particular. gently caress you, Warren Harding. The Per Centum Act was born out of an unhealthy fear of socialists and Communists among immigrants, and Calvin Coolidge signed a bill in 1924 making the restrictions permanent. gently caress you, Calvin Coolidge. The Endgame  It happened fairly unexpectedly, I will say. Some of the things Harding did in the couple of years before indicated that he thought his days might be numbered. He made a new will, and he sold the Marion Star. He’d suffered some health problems, but when he wasn’t experiencing symptoms, he smoked and drank excessively (not in the depressing Franklin Pierce kind of way, but in the “have friends over, play poker, and gamble away the White House china” kind of way). In January 1923 he got the flu, and his associates said he never seemed to fully recover from it. He was an avid golfer and after it passed, he had trouble completing a single round of golf. In June of 1923, Harding set out on a huge cross-country tour, called the “Voyage of Understanding”. He wanted to see this country he was running. Not a bad idea, right? He was planning to cross the country, go north to the Alaska Territory, come back south down the West Coast, travel by ship down through the Panama Canal, visit Puerto Rico, then return to Washington. Sounds cool! Saddle up the RV! Road trip! The schedule was grueling. He spoke in Kansas City, MO, Hutchinson, KS, Denver, CO, and in a number of other cities in the West on a variety of issues. His productivity in this arena was rivaled only by Franklin Roosevelt a decade later. He visited Yellowstone and Zion National Parks and dedicated a monument to pioneer Ezra Meeker on the Oregon Trail. When he visited Alaska, however, the first signs appeared. He addressed a crowd in 94-degree heat (in Alaska???) and nearly passed out afterwards. The party had left Seward, Alaska by ship and was planning to return there by the Richardson Trail--but they went by train because Harding wasn’t feeling up to the trip. In late July Harding became the first President to visit Canada, touring Vancouver. He was welcomed by the British Columbia Premier and Vancouver’s mayor. He golfed afterwards, but only completed six holes before getting too tired to carry on. Image-conscious to the end, he played the 17th and 18th holes so as to appear that he’d finished the round--but reporters weren’t fooled. One reporter said he looked so tired that he’d need at least a week to recuperate--that a mere day wouldn’t do it. But Harding didn’t slow down. He spoke in Seattle the next day at the University of Washington to an audience of 25,000 people. In this, his final speech, he accurately predicted that Alaska would become a state. On the evening of July 27, 1923 Harding went to bed early. Late that night he called for Dr. Charles Sawyer, his physician, complaining of pain in his upper abdomen. Sawyer thought he’d just eaten some bad food, but his associate, Dr. Joel Boone, suspected a heart problem. The train rushed Harding to San Francisco, but on the way Harding began to feel better. He felt good enough that when they arrived two days later, Harding insisted on walking from the train to the car...which caused him to suffer a relapse. When he was examined, doctors discovered that Harding had contracted pneumonia--and in the days before real antibiotics this was a most bigly problem. The doctors confined him to his bed in the Palace Hotel for the duration of the stay in San Francisco. He was treated with caffeine and digitalis for his heart, and they at first appeared to be helping. He improved. The doctors allowed him to sit up in bed by the evening of August 2, 1923. That night, around 7:30 pm, Florence was sitting with him and reading an article out loud written in the Saturday Evening Post called “A Calm Review of a Calm Man”. It was a profile of Harding. When she stopped to fluff up his pillows, he said, “That’s good. Read some more.” Suddenly, he twisted convulsively and collapsed. Florence leapt up and ran to get the doctors, but it was too late. Warren Harding was pronounced dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 57 years old. It’s thought now that Harding actually had suffered a heart attack--it lined up better with his earlier symptoms, and doctors then didn’t understand how to diagnose heart attacks. The nation was in shock as Harding’s body made the journey back to Washington. The papers had been chronicling an apparent recovery, so this was completely out of left field. After funeral services in Washington his body was sent home to Marion, Ohio...where he is buried. Both Warren and Florence Harding’s bodies reside in the Harding Tomb, dedicated in 1931 by Herbert Hoover. Here it is:  Upon his death Harding was deeply mourned. Remember, for the most part, no one knew the bad stuff yet. American journalists lavishly praised him and Charles Evans Hughes wrote “I cannot realize that our beloved Chief is no longer with us.” But books in the mid 1920s came out that began to stain Harding’s memory. William Allen White wrote Masks in a Pageant, which mocked and dismissed Harding as an unworthy President, and Revelry by Samuel Hopkins Adams painted Harding as a boorish, womanizing dolt. Then the wrecking ball that was Nan Britton’s book came out--I mentioned that earlier--and everyone found out that he’d been cheating on his wife for years. It got so bad that Coolidge actually refused to dedicate the Harding Tomb. Hoover had to do it, and by the time he did it he was nearly as hated as Harding was. Overall, historians rate Harding pretty low due not just to his scandals, but due to the lack of depth and decisiveness in the man himself. Biographer Charles Murray makes the argument best: quote:In the American system, there is no such thing as an innocent bystander in the White House. If Harding can rightly claim the achievements of a Hughes in State or a Hoover in Commerce, he must also shoulder responsibility for a Daugherty in Justice and a Fall in Interior...By his inaction, he forfeited whatever chance he had to maintain the integrity of his position and salvage a favorable image for himself and his administration. As it was, the subsequent popular and scholarly negative verdict was inevitable, if not wholly deserved. She-DAISY. --- Check another one off the list! This one was long but I actually had a lot of fun writing it. Harding’s a political creature and I got to write about the stuff I love most. I hope you liked reading it. Feedback is welcome.
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Sep 23, 2018 21:35
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Man, I had never really heard the Teapot Dome scandal explained before, that's, uh, brazen  Also, a couple of things I want to note: First, Dr Charles Sawyer was a practitioner of homeopathic medicine, and had been the Hardings' personal physician for years before Warren achieved the Presidency. Harding gave him the rank of Brigadier General in the Army Medical Corp, which is another example of Harding being loyal to friends over considering qualifications. Sawyer gets blamed for worsening Harding's condition, but considering he died of congestive heart failure leading to a heart attack, something that at the time wasn't well understood by medicine as whole, I feel like blame can't be laid entirely at the feet of homeopathic quackery. Second, there are of course conspiracy theorists that believe Harding was the victim of foul play. The story goes that, his wife conspired with the family doctor to poison Harding as revenge for his philandering ways. For evidence they point to Flossie being the last person to see Harding alive and her refusal (at Dr. Sawyer's recommendation) of an autopsy on his body. Again, the nature of Harding's death makes this unlikely, since it would be a hell of a coincidence for the poison to exactly mimic the symptoms of a condition that wasn't understood until later, but conspiracy theorists will believe what they will I guess 
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Sep 24, 2018 00:02
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Do a British Prime Minister next.
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Sep 24, 2018 03:48
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Grouchio posted:Do a British Prime Minister next. Eh. I know nothing about British Prime Ministers and they're not a subject that particularly interests me. If someone else wants to they're welcome to though.
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Sep 24, 2018 03:50
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I always thought the Teapot Dome Scandal was run-of-the-mill monopoly stuff with some graft on top. Turns out it was even worse than that. Great writeup.
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Sep 24, 2018 03:52
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We've reached that time again, folks...it's time to choose who our next topic for discussion will be. I'm your host, Tony Gunk, and let's play our game! The Faces Of Mount Rushmore will be our theme today. It deals with the Presidents who've gotten themselves carved into a bunch of rocks in South Dakota. You are already familiar with the contestants, but I'll introduce them anyway. 1. Theodore Roosevelt. Often thought of as the President who signaled the official end of the Gilded Age, the "Steam Engine In Trousers" was a political force of nature and has a life story worthy of epic poems. His environmentalist credentials were unmatched by nearly every President of his time, and he was perhaps the first President to attempt to regulate out-of-control big business. 2. Thomas Jefferson Jefferson's legacy has suffered some bruises...after the whole Sally Hemings story came out, he became less "the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence" and more "the guy who probably raped his slaves and fathered children on them". Nevertheless, Jefferson's genius is largely responsible for many of the central tenets we formed our nation around. 3. Abraham Lincoln What can be said about Abraham Lincoln, really? He's often thought of as one of the greatest--if not the greatest President--we've ever had. A closer examination of his actual record, however, shows that he probably would have left office with mixed reviews had he not gotten shot in the head. That said, his leadership during the Civil War in a time when it was sorely needed is something I think few men could have pulled off. 4. George Washington Yep. The man that started it all. The big kahuna. The Optimus Prime of Presidents. Lieutenant General George Washington set many of the precedents that became unwritten law for decades until some of them were enshrined as amendments to the Constitution. His career, love him or hate him, is a long and storied one...but I suspect my account will tell more unvarnished truth about Washington's military prowess than your textbooks did. Cast your votes, dorks!
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Sep 24, 2018 12:49
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Lincoln.
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Sep 24, 2018 13:00
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Gotta go for Lincoln.
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Sep 24, 2018 13:08
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Jefferson would be the one I'm most interested in reading, I think. quote:“It’s tricky with Jefferson because there are so many things about him that I disagree with,” Diggs says. “I think if you embrace all of his contradictions, you can end up with a lot of things about him that are great—but you still have to remember that he was a slave owner.” http://time.com/4287773/hamilton-daveed-diggs-jefferson/
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Sep 24, 2018 13:13
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Lincoln.
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Sep 24, 2018 17:41
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Tony Gunk posted:We've reached that time again, folks...it's time to choose who our next topic for discussion will be. I'm your host, Tony Gunk, and let's play our game! id say Lincoln and teddy. with lincoln being top.
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Sep 24, 2018 17:43
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Hmm...Washington would be interesting, but since I live in the Charlottesville area, I'm going to go with Jefferson.
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Sep 24, 2018 17:46
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Washington , Washington. 6 feet tall, weighs a fuckin' ton.
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Sep 24, 2018 18:04
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Personally, I'm torn. With Jefferson I get to make "1776" jokes, but with Lincoln I get to make "Assassins" references.
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Sep 24, 2018 18:07
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Washington I need to know if he really was 6 ft 8 and weighed a loving ton.
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Sep 24, 2018 18:17
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Jefferson
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Sep 24, 2018 18:32
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added Harding to the OP. I vote Lincoln edit: Re: Harding, his biography reads a lot like GW Bush. Folksy dumb guy who gets along well with people, surrounded himself with idiots and was grossly out of his league. GW Bush would've been the perfect MLB commissioner, kind of like how Harding would've been the perfect...whatever the 1920s equivalent is. axeil fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 18:35
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Only one of those four was in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, so let's Party On with Lincoln.
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Sep 24, 2018 18:42
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Slightly beaten, but I've got video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7iVsdRbhnc
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Sep 24, 2018 18:49
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I don't hear voting. I need voting, goddamnit!
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Sep 25, 2018 11:35
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JEFFERSON!
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Sep 25, 2018 11:41
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Tony Gunk posted:4. George Washington Washington, our worst military leader saved by European miscreants. If you needed a flambouyantly gay Prussian to teach your army formations, you are bad at war. <3 Von Steuben
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Sep 25, 2018 13:02
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Re-reading Irving Stone’s “They Also Ran” and geez, he really, really hates Henry Clay, US Grant, and William Jennings Bryan
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Sep 25, 2018 15:20
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Voting for George Washington, Millionaire.
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Sep 25, 2018 15:53
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Jefferson!
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Sep 26, 2018 00:16
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Thomas "Jacobins did nothing wrong" Jefferson!
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Sep 26, 2018 01:00
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Daniel Day-Lewis
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Sep 26, 2018 01:06
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Tony Gunk posted:Nope! Harding's mother was a devout reader of her Bible, and Gamaliel is actually a name found in Acts 5--Rabbi Gamaliel is a Pharisee and the leader of the Sanhedrin isn't that the sort of person a christian doesn't want to name her kiddo for
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Sep 26, 2018 01:54
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