How Could They Tell?

This article appeared in Ceylon Today on Thursday March 16 2017

 

How Could They Tell?

 

Last week I wrote about speculation surrounding the death of the 29^th president of the United States, Warren Gamaliel Harding. There was also speculation about the death of Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge. Dorothy Parker was reported to have said, on being told by Robert Benchley that Coolidge was dead, “How could they tell?” I heard a different version of that story. Peter Benchley, creator of Jaws and the grandson of the Algonquin wit Robert Benchley, (Robert sent a telegram to his editor at the New Yorker, Harold Ross, upon arriving in Venice for the first time. “Streets full of water. Please advise.”) was speaking on Ned Sherrin’s BBC Radio 4 programme Loose Ends. According to him, Robert Benchley said, “Coolidge is dead”; Parker said, “How can they tell?”; Benchley responded, “He had an erection”.

The renowned lawyer Clarence Darrow dryly summed up Coolidge: “The greatest man who ever came out of Plymouth Corner, Vermont!” Coolidge had a reputation for taciturnity although some of his remarks could be interpreted as quietly witty. In that, he reminds me somewhat of Clement Attlee, although their political philosophies were totally different – Attlee was a founder of the welfare state whereas Coolidge was a small-government conservative.

Weaned on a Pickle

Coolidge was commonly referred to as “Silent Cal”. A woman once said to him, said to him, “I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” He replied, “You lose.” Coolidge often seemed uncomfortable among fashionable Washington society; when asked why he continued to attend so many of dinner parties, he replied, “Got to eat somewhere.” Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, loathed Coolidge: “When he wished he were elsewhere, he pursed his lips, folded his arms, and said nothing. He looked then precisely as though he had been weaned on a pickle”.

He did have a sense of humour, albeit a somewhat infantile one. He buzzed for his bodyguards and then hid under his desk as they frantically searched for him, presumably fearing him kidnapped.

“His ideal day,” HL Mencken wrote, “is one on which nothing whatever happens.” Walter Lippmann described Coolidge’s philosophy as “Puritanism de luxe, in which it is possible to praise all the classic virtues while continuing to enjoy all the modern conveniences.”

Irving Stone wrote in 1949: “Calvin Coolidge believed the least government was the best government; he aspired to become the least president the country had ever had; he attained that desire”.

Coolidge has generally been regarded as something of a joke but some historians have tried hard to find something positive about this accidental, do-little president who rose without trace to the highest office in the USA. Some have suggested that he created his image deliberately as a campaign tactic. He himself gave some support to this theory telling Ethel Barrymore: “I think the American people want a solemn ass as a President and I think I will go along with them.” “The words of a President have an enormous weight,” he would later write, “and ought not to be used indiscriminately”.

Continuity

He was the first vice president to attend cabinet meetings although he kept a low profile in the administration. There has been no suggestion that he was personally corrupt as were many of Harding’s cabinet. Nevertheless, he kept most of them on because he believed that, having attained the presidency because of Harding’s death in office, he was morally obliged to retain his predecessor’s appointees and policies until he won an election in his own right. Many expected that he would not be on the ballot in 1924 but he was and won convincingly.

Coolidge strongly believed that the accused were entitled to a presumption of innocence. He felt that the Senate investigation of allegations relating to the Teapot Dome scandal would suffice although he did personally intervene in demanding the resignation of Attorney General Harry MDaugherty after he refused to cooperate with the congressional investigation. He was methodical in seeking detailed briefing on the wrongdoing with Harry A Slattery reviewing the facts with him, Harlan F Stone analysing the legal aspects for him and Senator William E Borah assessing and presenting the political factors.

Coolidge ensured continuity with most of Harding’s policies, including immigration restrictions. Just before the Republican Convention began, Coolidge signed into law the Revenue Act of 1924, which reduced the top marginal tax rate from 58% to 46%, as well as personal income tax rates across the board. He has often been derided for saying, “The business of America is business”. What he actually said was: “It is probable that a press which maintains an intimate touch with the business currents of the nation is likely to be more reliable than it would be if it were a stranger to these influences. After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world”.

Laissez Faire

Coolidge is admired by those who share his belief that that America and its business will prosper if the federal government does not interfere. Coolidge spoke in his inaugural address about lynching, child labour and low wages for women but did not attempt to solve these problems. One could not imagine a person less like Donald Trump than Coolidge. However, like Trump, he followed a “foxes in charge of the hen house”” approach to government departments. The Federal Trade Commission was given a new boss, William E Humphrey, who had constantly opposed its work. In 1925 the government received $677 million more than it spent but there were still drastic cuts. The Interior department saw its budget fall from $48 million in 1921 to $32 million in 1928.

 

Great Depression

Some claim that his do-nothing philosophy led to the Great Depression. Historian Robert Sobel points out “As Governor of Massachusetts, Coolidge supported wages and hours legislation, opposed child labour, imposed economic controls during World War I, favoured safety measures in factories, and even worker representation on corporate boards. Did he support these measures while president? No, because in the 1920s, such matters were considered the responsibilities of state and local governments.”

Under Coolidge, the stock market swelled into an enormous bubble, inflated by borrowed money. Coolidge managed to get out of office before the bubble burst but that does not absolve him of blame. “Nero fiddled,” HL Mencken said, “but Coolidge only snored.” Hugh Brogan says of Coolidge: “As president, he thought it was his duty to mind the store while the republicans ran the country as they saw fit. He intervened in the economic process only to veto the proposals of more active men in Congress … He was almost equally supine in foreign affairs.”

Model for Reagan?

Another historian, David Greenberg, argues that Coolidge was a model for Reagan. Like Reagan, he cut taxes, drastically reduced federal programmes and refused to compromise with striking government workers. He avoided entanglement with the World Court and the League of Nations. Coolidge liked to take a nap in the afternoon. Greenberg claims that Coolidge mastered radio in the same way that Reagan mastered television. To compare Silent Cal with the Great Communicator seems a bit of a stretch. A contemporary claimed that Coolidge could be silent in five languages. “If you keep dead still,” he advised Herbert Hoover, his successor, regarding visitors to the White House, “they will run down in three or four minutes. If you even cough or smile they will start up all over again.”

Achievements

The best that can be said is that John Calvin Coolidge Jr restored public confidence in the White House after the scandals of Harding’s presidency; he was very popular when he left office after deciding not to run for a second term. He told Chief Justice Harlan Stone, “It’s a pretty good idea to get out when they still want you.” Claud M Feuss wrote in his 1940 biography of Coolidge: “He embodied the spirit and hopes of the middle class, could interpret their longings and express their opinions. That he did represent the genius of the average is the most convincing proof of his strength.”

Coolidge’s retirement was relatively short, as he died at the age of 60 in January 1933, less than two months before his immediate successor, Herbert Hoover, another member of the Harding administration, left office.

 

 

 

Was President Harding Murdered?

 

This article appeared in Ceylon Today on Thursday March 9 2017.

Rajiva Wijesinha made a kind comment on my article last week about Warren Harding and also gave me a heads-up about a novel which incorporates Harding’s death. The novel proved an entertaining read. It is Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold which is about the illusionist Charles Carter, admired by Houdini himself, who persuades the president to participate in an illusion at his San Francisco performance on August 2 1923 which seems to involve Harding being eaten by a lion. Two hours later Harding dies and Carter attracts the interest of the Secret Service.

 

 

Conspiracy Theories

There have been many bizarre theories about Harding’s death. Many conspiracy theories propose that world events are being controlled and manipulated by a secret society calling itself the Illuminati. Henry Makow PhD believes that Harding (and Franklin Roosevelt, John F Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln and several other presidents) was murdered by the Illuminati because he was a Mason. The real-life Carter’s first theatrical appearance was at Pat Harris’s Masonic Temple in Baltimore at the age of ten, where he appeared as “Master Charles Carter the Original Boy Magician”.

Dr Hugo Pecos of The Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency (FVZA) has his own theory. On the night of August 1 1923, Franklin Prevost, Director of the FVZA office in San Francisco, was told by Assistant Attorney General Jess Smith that President Harding had been bitten by a vampire some time the previous evening. Smith told Prevost that a Norwegian sailor named Olaf Johans, had done it. Prevost entered the Presidential Suite and found Harding in a coma, with puncture wounds on his neck, his wife Florence at his bedside. The President was put out of his misery with a dose of cyanide.

Vampires and Gangsters

Prevost left San Francisco for Washington on September 12, 1924, but as he stepped off the train in St. Louis, two men with tommy guns shot him 12 times, and died a short time later at a nearby hospital. Eyewitness accounts of Prevost’s murderers matched descriptions of Al Capone hit men Scalise and Anselmi. Before police could question the two men, they were shot dead in a Chicago barbershop. Although Prevost’s file was gone, he left behind enough information in his San Francisco office to build a case against Jess Smith in the death of Harding. Smith killed himself (although the gun was found in his right hand, but the bullet wound was in his left temple). Dr Pecos speculates: “Is it possible that Warren Harding’s close friend and Assistant Attorney General Jess Smith arranged and helped carry out the murder of the President? The evidence is certainly compelling. Unfortunately, we will never know the truth”.

Jess Smith

Differing Doctors

The facts of Harding’s death are difficult to establish and it is no wonder that wild speculation began almost immediately after his demise. At 7:20 p.m. on the evening of August 2, 1923, in the presidential of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel Harding’s wife, Florence, was reading the Saturday Evening Post to him. An article about himself seemed to please him because he said, “That’s good, go on.” He shuddered and dropped dead onto his bed.

Rumours about the cause of death began to circulate almost immediately. Some speculated that Harding committed suicide because of emerging corruption scandals. Some believed that his cronies murdered him to stop him revealing their crimes. Some believed Florence, “The Duchess”, poisoned him because she was sick of his infidelities. “It’s a good thing I’m not a woman. I would always be pregnant. I can’t say no,” Harding told reporters when he was president.

Gaston Means

The story of Florence poisoning the president was started by a chancer called Gaston Means. In his book, The Strange Death of President Harding (1930), Means alleged that Harding had been consciously complicit in all of the major scandals of his administration. He insinuated that the President had been murdered by his wife with the help of their personal physician, Charles E Sawyer. Mae Dixon Thacker confessed that not only had she ghost-written the book for Means but also that Means had stolen her share of the profits. Means died in Leavenworth after being sentenced to 15 years for grand larceny after swindling Washington socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean (owner of the Hope Diamond) in connection with the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh. McLean was great friend of Florence Harding and her husband, Ned McLean, owner of the Washington Post, procured women for Warren Harding.

McLeans with Dog

Who was actually with Harding at the time of death remains unknown. The official cause of death was given as a stroke but that seems to have been Sawyer’s unqualified opinion. The other, better-trained, doctors thought it was a heart attack. Florence’s favourite astrologer Madame Marcia had predicted in 1920 that Harding would not survive his first term – he would die “by sudden, violent and peculiar death by poison.”

Madame Marcia

 

Cover Up?

Florence did behave suspiciously. She refused to allow an autopsy. Within an hour of his death, Harding was embalmed, rouged, powdered, dressed, and in his coffin. By morning, he was on a train to Washington. Florence had several dozen long wood boxes of presidential correspondence transported to the Friendship estate of Evalyn Walsh McLean where they were burnt.

Glen David Gold describes this well: “And so it went, all conspirators great and small realizing that the only man with a conscience was no longer about to spill the beans. The Duchess went back to her duties and when she was finished with her fires. She left the White House with blisters on her hands, never to return”. Gold seems to adhere to the view that Harding was basically decent if weak and was betrayed by his corrupt cronies: Jess Smith, Albert Fall, Harry Daugherty and Charles R Forbes. Forbes had been appointed head of the Veterans Bureau at Florence’s insistence and had milked it for his own financial profit. This was a blow to Florence because the care of World War I veterans was her signature policy issue. Warren had choked and shaken Forbes against the wall of the Red Room – but permitted him to flee to Europe. Forbes was prosecuted and convicted of conspiracy to defraud the US Government, fined $10,000, and sentenced to two years. He was put in prison on March 21, 1926 and  served one year, eight months and six days at the Leavenworth federal penitentiary. He died at the Walter Reed military hospital in Washington DC at the age of 74 on April 10, 1952.

Charles R Forbes

Early in Harding’s political career, a trust fund was set up to rent in perpetuity thirty thousand square feet at Paddock’s Storage House which abutted the waste disposal incinerator in Marion, Ohio. When federal investigators got a subpoena to enter the unit it was empty. There had been four thousand boxes ten feet long, each tightly packed with documents. When the National Archives called for documents relating to Warren G Harding, they received two boxes.

Quack

Charles Sawyer was clearly a charlatan but the Hardings trusted him. The president appointed him as a Brigadier General in the US Army and the chairman of the Federal Hospitalization Board. Dr Sawyer was dosing the president with purgatives, laxatives and injections of heart stimulants, including arsenic. I wonder if my Sri Lankan readers will note, as I do, a distinct resemblance to that illustrious writer, sage and scourge Emil van der Poorten?

Harding was only 57 but clearly was not in good shape. He took little exercise and engaged in twice-weekly marathon poker sessions fuelled by whiskey, cigars and roast beef sandwiches. He was often short of breath and complained of indigestion which was probably in truth angina. He had not fully recovered from a bout of influenza before going on a physically demanding tour. During his last trip to the west on the Voyage of Understanding his lips were often blue. These are all signs of heart disease. Sawyer maintained that Harding was suffering from ptomaine poisoning after eating crabs doused heavily in butter. He prescribed purgatives which provoked a cardiac arrest.

Harding probably was killed but by Sawyer’s negligence rather than because of any cunning plan of Florence’s. Sawyer died in Florence’s presence in September 1924. Florence herself died of renal failure in November of the same year.

 

 

Warren G Harding

 

This article appeared in Ceylon Today on Thursday March 2 2017.

 

Warren Gamaliel Harding was always considered the worst of all the American presidents. In a 1948 poll of historians conducted by Harvard’s Arthur M Schlesinger, Harding ranked last among the 29 presidents considered. That was before Trump came along. Harding had a great deal less scope to do harm than Trump has – nuclear weapons were not operational in the 1920s (although Ernest Rutherford was at the time fiddling with atoms at my alma mater the University of Manchester). Harding was the 29th President of the United States, serving from March 4, 1921 until his death in 1923.

As with Trump, it was a surprise when Harding achieved the highest office in the land. He started out as a newspaperman but had a great deal more political experience than Trump. One of his backers said that his biggest asset was that he looked like a president. The press considered his wife Florence, known as “The Duchess”, as the power behind him.  She was born Florence Mabel Kling (I am reminded that when James Joyce’s father learnt that his son had taken up with Nora Barnacle, he remarked “she’ll stick to him anyway”). One cartoonist depicted the couple as “the Chief Executive and Mr Harding”.

Not Quite the Helpless Idiot

In his 1968 biography of Harding, The Available Man, Andrew Sinclair wrote: “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’s sudden death shocked America and he was deeply mourned. He was called a man of peace in many European newspapers. In his review of Sinclair’s biography, political scientist Richard Hofstadter wrote: “Sinclair’s main point is that Harding could not have been quite the helpless idiot we take him for, and I think he argues it with some success.”  It was only after his death that the full extent of the scandals emerged. We know about Trump’s scandals while he still breathes.

Another Accidental President

In 1899, Harding was elected to the Ohio State Senate. He began his senate term as a political unknown; he ended them one of the most popular figures in the Ohio Republican Party. He always appeared calm and displayed humility (unlike Trump), characteristics that endeared him to fellow Republicans even as he passed them in his political rise. After four years, he successfully ran for lieutenant governor. He was defeated in the gubernatorial election in 1910, but was elected to the US Senate in 1914.  As a senator, he was respected by both Republicans and Progressives. Harding ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920, but he was considered to have small chance of success. Following deadlock when none of the leading candidates could achieve a majority, party professionals meeting in a “smoke-filled room” in a local hotel engineered the nomination of Harding on the tenth ballot.

For most of the presidential campaign he stayed in Marion, Ohio. Nevertheless, he won a landslide victory and became the first sitting senator to be elected president. For the first time in American history, election results were made available to the public by radio. Following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, in 1920, women voted in a federal election for the first time. Unlike Trump, Harding won a convincing majority of the popular vote – 60.3%.

Former Treasury Secretary William G McAdoo described a typical Harding speech as “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and over work.” HL Mencken wrote, “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.”

Making America Normal

During his campaign, Harding added a new word to the English language – normalcy. Like Trump, he promised to return America to a better time. “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”

Unfortunately, that kind of tranquillity is not what the Harding administration is remembered for. He drastically cut immigration and appointed his cronies to cabinet positions. Just as we see Obama’s legacy being dismantled today, Harding brought to an end the reform era of Roosevelt and Wilson. Unlike Trump, Harding seemed aware of his deficiencies. “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here”.

Crony Corruption

Harding appointed a number of friends and acquaintances to federal positions and many of this “Ohio Gang” proved to be corrupt. Teapot Dome was an oil reserve in Wyoming which was one of three set aside for the use of the Navy in the event of a national emergency. The Interior Department announced in July 1921 that Edward Doheny had been awarded a lease to drill along the edges of naval reserve Elk Hills in California. Wyoming Senator John Kendrick had heard from constituents that Teapot Dome had also been leased, but no announcement had been made. The Interior Department refused to provide documentation, so Kendrick secured the passage of a Senate resolution compelling disclosure. The department declared that there had been no competitive bidding because military preparedness was involved and Harry Sinclair’s Mammoth Oil Company was to build oil tanks for the Navy as part of the deal. Some conservationists, pushed for a full investigation into Interior Secretary Albert Fall and his activities. Hearings into Teapot Dome began in October 1923, after Harding’s death. Investigators found that Fall and a relative had received a total of about $400,000 from Doheny and Sinclair. Fall was convicted in 1929 for accepting bribes and, in 1931, the first US cabinet member to be imprisoned for crimes committed while in office.

Harding’s Sex Life

Harding’s first affair, after he had been married to Florence for three years, was with Florence’s best friend from childhood and resulted in the birth of a daughter. He also had an extramarital affair with Carrie Fulton Phillips of Marion, another close friend of Florence, which lasted about fifteen years until 1920. A cache of 106 letters written to her by Harding was discovered in 1964. The president referred to his penis as “Jerry”.  “Wish I could take you to Mount Jerry. Wonderful spot. Not in the geographies but a heavenly place, and I have seen some passing views there and revelled in them. Gee! How I wish you might be along. You could be such a dandy companion”. He referred to her private parts as Mrs Pouterson.

A third mistress was his Senate aide, Grace Cross, who went around Washington talking about a birthmark on the president’s back in an unsuccessful attempt to get blackmail money.

The allegations of another mistress, Nan Britton, who like Harding was from Marion, Ohio, long remained unproved. Britton was a campaign volunteer who started having sex with Harding when he was 51 and she was 22. In 1927, Britton published a book alleging that her child Elizabeth Ann Blaesing had been fathered by Harding.

Britton claimed that she and the president copulated in a White House closet, with Secret Service agents posted to ward off intruders. In 2015, DNA comparisons indicated that Harding was Elizabeth’s father.

There were numerous other women. Rosa Hoyle was said to have conceived his illegitimate son.

Augusta Cole’s pregnancy was terminated. Harding’s crony, Washington Post  owner Ned McClean, procured for him a Post employee known as Miss Allicott and former chorus girls Maize Hollywood and Blossom Jones. There were also many New York women, including one who committed suicide when he would not marry her.

Harding died of a cerebral haemorrhage caused by heart disease in San Francisco while on a western speaking tour – or did he? More about Harding’s mysterious demise next week.