Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties Part 3

As a teetotaler, Hearst frowned on excessive drinking. The first c.o.c.ktails of the day were served at 6 p.m., and although Marion gathered friends in her rooms for surrept.i.tious drinks, people who made the mistake of bringing their own flasks would find them emptied by the butler who unpacked their bags. Each guest at San Simeon was permitted two c.o.c.ktails, no more.

For all his stuffiness, Hearst could be endearingly childlike. One night his feelings were hurt because he hadn't been included in a game of charades. "Well," said the actor Jack Gilbert, "we'll play a charade on our own, and act out the word 'pill-box'-I'll be the box and you can be the pill." WR rushed out of the room, slamming the door: "I don't want to play your old charades." On other, happier occasions he would get up and tap-dance with the most "charming gaucheness."

Hearst was powerful enough-and his friends were loyal enough-to suppress the Ince affair when news of his death became public. Some years later Elinor Glyn insisted that all the rumors were lies, and that Ince had left the boat and died of heart problems following acute indigestion which he had refused to have treated because he was a Christian Scientist. Chaplin said that he had not attended the boating party at which the death was alleged to have occurred, but that Glyn had told him Ince had died of a heart attack. To this day no one knows what really happened because the only witness who might have spoken out, the gossip columnist Louella Parsons, accepted a lucrative job from Hearst when she stepped ash.o.r.e and never spoke of the incident again. The matter was not investigated by the police.

At last even Was.h.i.+ngton found it impossible to ignore scandals of this magnitude. Fears about Hollywood's corruption of America and American values were compounded by the knowledge that the film industry was created and run princ.i.p.ally by ambitious, innovative Jewish and Catholic immigrants including (to name producers and directors alone) the Polish Warner brothers, Louis Mayer, Irving Thalberg, Adrian Zukor and Sam Goldwyn. In this xenophobic era, nothing could have made Hollywood seem more threatening.

In 1922 the U.S. president Warren Harding's staunchly Presbyterian former campaign manager, Will Hays, was created first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (at an annual salary of $100,000) and charged with imposing codes of morality both on movies that were made and on the stars performing in them. His recommendations, designed to safeguard "American" family values and the sanct.i.ty of marriage and the home, were approved in 1930 and enforced from 1934. The first dictate read, "No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it." Heated love scenes-like those for which Pola Negri had been celebrated-and references to "impure love" were banned, in case they aroused improper pa.s.sions; virtue and morality were to triumph by decree; the clergy were not to be ridiculed and gangsters were not to be portrayed as sympathetic. But, for Hollywood hotshots as for Was.h.i.+ngton politicians, the appearance of morality remained far more important than the practice of it.

President Warren Harding and his wife Florence, 1921.

5.

"My G.o.d! HOW THE MONEY Rolls IN"

WILL HAYS'S CONNECTION WITH HOLLYWOOD DATED BACK to two years before he was appointed president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.

In August 1920, the "Harding-Coolidge Theatrical League" arrived in Warren Harding's home town of Marion, Ohio, to give their support to Harding's presidential campaign which Hays was masterminding. Newly married Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks led a group of actors and entertainers pledging their support for Harding in the upcoming election.

Hollywood loved Harding for his easy good nature, his sociability, his sincerity-and perhaps above all for his n.o.bly presidential looks. Lillian Gish described him as "a Roman statue carved out of marble" and was charmed by the way he held his arms out to her and her sister, Dorothy, when they were invited to the White House for a screening of one of their movies, calling them both "Darling!"

Fellow politicians found him less impressive. Harding won the Republican nomination by default: delegates and fixers agreed that the times didn't require a "First-Rater" but that Harding, politically conservative (as a senator he had always voted with the party) and with immense popular appeal, would be as malleable as he was electable. Harding was no less realistic about his attributes. After receiving his party's nomination he said he felt "like a man who goes in with a pair of eights and comes out with aces full."

His campaign confirmed expectations. "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 dispa.s.sionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality . . ." he declared, without running out of breath. Somehow Harding's bungled language and overblown rhetoric convinced voters that he stood for a return to what he called "normalcy" after the turbulent war years.

Even the man who became Harding's Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, commented on his preference for "three-dollar words." William McAdoo, one of the failed Democratic contenders for candidate, said Harding's speeches "leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea; sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork."

The journalist William Allen White, who liked Harding, agreed that he was "densely ignorant. At best he was a poor dub who had made his reputation running with the political machine in Ohio, making Memorial Day addresses for the Elks, addressing service clubs-the Rotarians, Kiwanians, or the Lions-uttering resounding plat.i.tudes and saying nothing because he knew nothing." Harding may have looked like a president, but he wasn't equal to the challenges of the job. Yet Harding's simple, wellintentioned affability struck a chord with millions of American voters. His election win was less a landslide than an earthquake, the most sweeping presidential victory ever; he came to office in early 1921 on a national wave of buoyant optimism. "The populace is on a broad grin," reported one newspaperman.

Despite his astonis.h.i.+ng majority-Harding won 61 percent of the popular vote and thirty-seven of forty-eight states-his campaign team must have heaved a sigh of relief. For months they had been struggling to prevent Harding's many affairs being made public. In return for signed affidavits denying their involvement with Harding, and the pa.s.sionate letters and erotic poetry Harding had written to them (often on blue Senate writing paper), his mistresses had been paid off out of a secret account funded by the National Republican Committee. One woman demanded and received $20,000. But Harding's craving for romance was hard to suppress. Even on the night before his inauguration the President-elect had to be prevented from sneaking out of his room in the middle of the night for an a.s.signation.

People joked that anyone who had to live with Florence Harding deserved extra-curricular activities, but despite his infidelities Warren (or "W'rr'n," as Florence called him) seemed to dote upon his determined, heavily-marceled wife. Certainly he always deferred to the woman he called the "d.u.c.h.ess" and trusted her implicitly; she was the one person he knew for sure had his interests at heart.

Seven years her husband's senior, Florence Harding was the most emanc.i.p.ated First Lady America had known. When the Belgian queen, Elizabeth, had visited Was.h.i.+ngton in 1919, Mrs. Harding (then a senator's wife) had met her not with a curtsy but with a "level eye [and]...an outstretched hand." A declared suffragist, she was the first president's wife to have voted for her husband, following legislation that granted women the vote in 1920. "If Warren G. Harding is elected there will be two P- well, personalities personalities in the White House," wrote a journalist during the campaign. "For Mrs. Harding is no mere gentle shadow flitting in the background of her husband's greatness." in the White House," wrote a journalist during the campaign. "For Mrs. Harding is no mere gentle shadow flitting in the background of her husband's greatness."

Florence had made her own living as a single mother before meeting Harding and then helped him make a success of his newspaper, the Marion Star Marion Star. Domestic life didn't interest her. "I'd rather go hungry than broil steak and boil potatoes," she said. "I love business." She refused to pretend that she wasn't interested in the running of her husband's administration. Having bossed W'rr'n around for years, she had no compunction about pressing for appointments, reviewing budgets, writing his speeches, attending government conferences and lobbying on behalf of her many interests, which included all-female prisons, Girl Scouts and animal welfare. She and Warren were childless but they both loved animals; their Airedale, Laddie Boy, was familiarly known as the "Publicity Hound."

Mrs. Harding brought a breath of fresh air and modernity to her role as First Lady and to the White House, throwing open its doors to visitors (and often leading tours herself), screening movies in the East Room and playing jazz at presidential functions. She was the first First Lady to fly in an airplane (with a woman pilot), the first to hold her own press conferences for female reporters, the first to welcome divorcees to the White House, and she made a point of entertaining black schoolchildren as well as white at White House receptions. Her unabashed prominence meant that she was popularly thought to be the power behind the throne. When John Anderson, a Swedish immigrant taking the U.S. citizens.h.i.+p test in the early 1920s, was asked who would a.s.sume the president's duties if he should die in office and replied Mrs. Harding, the judge, smiling, let him pa.s.s.

After a crisis in 1911, when Florence discovered letters from her best friend to Harding revealing the affair they had been having for more than five years (and would continue for almost a decade), an impa.s.se was reached. Florence decided to stay with the man she still adored and turn a blind eye to his infidelities, as long as they were contained enough to jeopardize neither her pride nor his career. The price she paid was isolation. Afraid of making female friends because she suspected that they would try to ensnare Warren, she devoted herself to his interests. "I have only one real hobby," she said. "My husband."

This willingness to put Harding's needs before her own was evident in the public sphere. Friendly, easy-going Harding never put anyone's back up or said no to anyone-his razor-sharp wife decisively did it for him. As bold as she was abrasive, Florence relished political battles. Her secretary described Warren looking on with admiring pride as she took on opponents like Henry Cabot Lodge.

But while Florence's tenacity and drive in part compensated for her husband's weaknesses, like him she was a poor judge of character. They were no match for the band of unscrupulous cynics who saw in the laid-back President an unparalleled opportunity to get rich quick. When the Hardings moved into the White House, wrote the popular historian Frederick Allen in his 1931 review of the 1920s, "blowsy gentlemen with cigars stuck into their cheeks and rolls of very useful hundred-dollar bills in their pockets began to infest the Was.h.i.+ngton hotels...[and] the oil-men licked their chops."

For all his skirt-chasing, Warren Harding was a man's man, a member of fraternal and civic societies, a lover of cards and golf, whisky and women, and his administration reflected his interests. He created, said Alice Roosevelt Longworth (daughter of former President Theodore Roosevelt and a prominent Was.h.i.+ngton hostess), "a general atmosphere of waistcoat unb.u.t.toned, feet on the desk, and the spittoon alongside"-and, with his "girlies," as Longworth said he called them, "put the White House closets to a whole new range of uses."

Harding's informal, guileless style made his intellectual inadequacies hard to disguise. The year he took office, he confessed to a journalist that he was having trouble coming to terms with the complexities of his new duties. "I don't know what to do or where to turn in this taxation matter. Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don't know where the book is, and maybe I couldn't read it if I found it. And there must be a man in the country somewhere who could weigh both sides and know the truth. Probably he is in some college or other. But I don't know where to find him. I don't know who he is and I don't know how to get him. My G.o.d, but this is a h.e.l.l of a place for a man like me to be!" He put his hand to his head, smiled at his own discomfiture, turned and walked heavily away.

Harding's initial response was to form a cabinet to compensate for his deficiencies. He was persuaded to give the State Department to the respected lawyer Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican presidential candidate for 1916; he brought in the efficient and progressive Herbert Hoover, who had served under Woodrow Wilson during the war, as Secretary of Commerce; his commitment to business interests was underlined by his choice of Andrew Mellon, the aluminum magnate, as Treasury Secretary. These men were experienced and reliable.

Less popular was Harding's decision to appoint to the Attorney-General's office his closest political ally, Harry Daugherty, as a reward for his long-standing support. Under his aegis the Justice Department became known as the Department of Easy Virtue. Daugherty was the most prominent member of what came to be known as the Ohio Gang, a group of trusted friends (many from Ohio days) with whom Harding played whisky-soaked poker sessions through the night in the private rooms of the White House with the d.u.c.h.ess beadily serving the drinks.

Harry Daugherty and his sidekick, Jess Smith, lived in a house two blocks from the White House on H Street (overlooking Lafayette Square, a notorious gay cruising ground) from where Daugherty conducted most of his Department of Justice business. Both men were devoted to Daugherty's invalid wife, Lucie, who had remained in Ohio. Harry loathed Jess's ex-wife, Roxie, although Jess remained close to her. They were, said one friend, "partners if ever two men were." Daugherty declared Smith was "indispensable to my personal comfort"; Smith wors.h.i.+pped Daugherty (according to one of Daugherty's agents) "with a dog-like devotion."

Snappily dressed, s.h.i.+fty-eyed Jess Smith was a tall, plump, lazy mama's boy who always wore a large diamond-and-ruby ring. He took care of Daugherty's informal business, keeping house and keeping his fingers in all the pies in town, humming his favorite popular song with its catchy chorus: My sister sells snow [cocaine] to the snow-birds My father sells bootlegger gin My grandma does back-street abortions My G.o.d! How the money rolls in!

My brother's a poor missionary He saves fallen women from sin He'll save you a blonde for five dollars My G.o.d! How the money rolls in!

Smith sold useful introductions to shady businessmen, pardons and paroles for criminals, and impounded booze and licenses to sell liquor from drugstores out of a small greenstone house on K Street. An Ohio lawyer-turned-bootlegger, George Remus, paid Daugherty and Smith $350,000 a year for government licenses to sell medicinal alcohol, making $40 million in three years. When the regime changed he was caught and imprisoned.

Harding's att.i.tude towards Prohibition was emblematic of his administration's self-serving hypocrisy and his own eagerness to ignore unpleasant facts if they interfered with his pleasures or peace of mind. "Though President Harding likes to drink as much as I do, he is prepared to stand or fall by the enforcement of Prohibition on the ground that it is the law and must be enforced," one of his former Cabinet ministers commented in 1923. Alice Roosevelt Longworth said that throughout the twenties, "the Cabinet member who did not take a drink when it was offered to him was an exception." Although Longworth herself later became what was called a "const.i.tutional dry" (supporting and practicing Prohibition because it was the law), when Prohibition first came into effect she had a home-still from which her butler concocted "a very pa.s.sable gin from oranges."

One of Daugherty's Department of Justice agents, Gaston Means, later claimed that it was in "the little green house in K Street" that, between 1921 and 1923, he had turned over $7 million to Smith from bootleggers. Means had started work at the Justice Department on a weekly salary of $90 but, thanks to Jess Smith, and Means's own rapid grasp of his job requirements ("I was to do as I was told and ask no questions"), he was soon living in a fully-staffed house with a monthly rental of $1,000 and being driven around Was.h.i.+ngton in a chauffeured Cadillac. His house contained an a.r.s.enal of weapons and had a buried safe in its garden.

Smith held notorious parties where showgirls were s.h.i.+pped in from New York at weekends to dance on the tables. p.o.r.nographic films, "featuring a couple of dolls who later put on clothes, changed their names and became famous in Hollywood, were shown nightly," remembered one journalist acquaintance. One evening things went too far. A "dope fiend" call-girl was either accidentally hit on the temple by someone throwing bottles or had a gla.s.s smashed in her throat by another girl, and died. Harding, who was present, was hustled away; when the dead girl's brother tried to blackmail the President he was hastily put behind bars.

Daugherty and Smith's H Street house, known as the Love Nest because Harding used it for a.s.signations with his "lullapaloozas," was owned by Evalyn and Ned McLean. Wealthy, f.e.c.kless Ned McLean was proprietor of the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post, known during Harding's administration as the "Court Journal." He shared Harding's pa.s.sions for drinking, gambling and womanizing; his mistress, Rose Davies, was the sister of Marion Davies, W. H. Hearst's lover. It was McLean, aided by Gaston Means and Jess Smith, who had been entrusted with paying off Harding's girlfriends in the run-up to the election. McLean even moonlighted as a spy: Daugherty appointed him a Special Agent of the Bureau of Investigation (which a former private eye, William Burns, ran for him as a personal protection racket) with a nominal salary of a dollar a year.

Mrs. McLean was the indulged only daughter of an immensely rich gold prospector. She had grown up, as she put it, in a home where the cost of things never influenced decisions. On their honeymoon she and Ned had driven round Europe in a vast, pale yellow Mercedes filled with whisky, with Evalyn in a chinchilla coat "decked with fifty marks' worth of violets." Stopping in Paris on the way home, the jewel-obsessed heiress went shopping for a wedding present and bought the cursed 92-carat diamond the Star of the East for $120,000, declaring confidently that bad luck for other people would be good luck for her.

Ever since she first stole what she called "fluid emerald" (creme de menthe) from her parents' drinks cupboard in her early teens Evalyn had been an alcoholic. When her brother died at a tragically young age, grief helped turn her into a morphine addict. "In those days a woman, diamond laden, could buy laudanum by the quart if she would simply pay the druggist what he asked," she wrote, describing the animal cunning with which she would hide caches of the drug under her bedroom carpets or in the stuffing of furniture.

Her extravagance was legendary. Alice Roosevelt Longworth cattily declared that she loved going to the McLeans's parties because they were "so endearing in [their] vulgarity." Evalyn, she said, "could be very likeable with her queer loud voice and great generosity" although Longworth, who despised the Hardings, had dropped her when she became friends with Florence in about 1915.

Perhaps because she showed no interest in sleeping with Warren, or perhaps because they both had notoriously unfaithful husbands, Evalyn became Florence Harding's only trusted female friend. She found Warren "a stunning man . . . full of life and eagerness to enjoy the world of riches that had been opened to him by politics"-although she added that while he had the charm necessary to succeed, it was his wife who possessed the ambition.

Unlike most of the hyenas circling the President, Ned and Evalyn McLean seem to have had nothing to gain from their intimacy with the Hardings except the cachet of being known to be their closest friends. According to Lillian Gish, their home was "said to be the unofficial White House." They provided an escape from the pressures of official life in the form of their estate outside Was.h.i.+ngton, Friends.h.i.+p (which, incongruously, had once been a monastery), where Evalyn's pet monkey and llama ran wild and Harding did the rounds of the 18-hole golf course. Jess Smith called Friends.h.i.+p "a d.a.m.n swell layout." It was on the lawn there during Harding's presidential campaign that the McLeans burned the entire print-run of The Ill.u.s.trated Life of President Warren G. Harding The Ill.u.s.trated Life of President Warren G. Harding, a book exposing Harding's mistresses and alleging that he was descended from runaway slaves and that Florence had Jewish blood.

Other Harding cronies were greedier. A character in John Dos Pa.s.sos's 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer Manhattan Transfer justified graft like this: "a live man, nowadays, wants more money, needs more money than he can honestly make in public life. Naturally the best men turn to other channels." By this definition corruption was only natural-a form of survival of the fittest and evidence more of a man's ambition than of immorality or criminality. This philosophy seems to have characterized the men with whom Harding surrounded himself and to whom he felt such a misplaced sense of loyalty. justified graft like this: "a live man, nowadays, wants more money, needs more money than he can honestly make in public life. Naturally the best men turn to other channels." By this definition corruption was only natural-a form of survival of the fittest and evidence more of a man's ambition than of immorality or criminality. This philosophy seems to have characterized the men with whom Harding surrounded himself and to whom he felt such a misplaced sense of loyalty.

When he became President, Harding had wanted to make Albert Fall, his former seat-mate in the Senate, Secretary of State, but Republican elders dissuaded him. Fall contented himself with the Department of the Interior. William Allen White thought the six-shooter-carrying Fall looked like a "patent medicine vendor" selling Wizard Oil out of the back of a wagon. Evalyn McLean also found Fall menacing. He customarily wore a black cape and big hat and "the cigar that stuck forward from his angular jaw was about the size of a lead pencil and as poisonous as a cobra."

Harding had none of White and McLean's scruples about his friend, but his faith in him was grievously misplaced. A confidential Bureau of Investigation file recorded that Albert Fall, a one-time district judge, had borrowed money to buy his seat in the Senate, and had colluded in the murder of one man and his six-year-old son and tried another man for murder knowing that he was innocent. Having made (and spent) a fortune prospecting in the wild Southwest, Fall was an arch anti-conservationist determined, as Secretary of the Interior, to exploit the nation's rich resources of oil, timber and coal. By the time he took the job he was also dangerously short of ready cash.

It was Fall who introduced the Hardings to Harry Sinclair. Sinco, as he was known, was a self-made oilman designed to appeal to Warren. He knew Daugherty, had contributed to Harding's campaign fund, was a keen poker-player and, as part-owner of a baseball team and owner of a Kentucky Derby winner, had attractive connections to the sporting world. When Fall asked Harding to approve the lease to Sinco of oil rich naval land at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, Harding was only too pleased to sign. As a mark of grat.i.tude, Sinclair's company gave Fall's son-in-law $233,000 in bonds, $85,000 in cash and a herd of pedigree cattle.

Sinclair was not the only oilman to benefit from his ties to Fall. In return for a black bag containing $100,000 in cash Edward Doheny, head of Pan-American Petroleum, was granted the lease of naval property at Elk Hills, California, also on extremely favorable terms. Like Sinclair, Doheny had supported Harding's presidential campaign, donating $25,000 to pay for publicity photos of Harding with his parents to counteract rumors of Harding's black ancestors.

The Hardings had befriended the ingratiating Charles Forbes and his wife when they were vacationing in Hawaii in 1915 and Forbes was supervising the construction of the new naval base at Pearl Harbor. Six years later, despite having almost no relevant experience, Forbes was placed at the head of the new Veterans' Bureau with a $450 million budget at his disposal. The gallant wounded veterans of the Great War were the official cause closest to Florence Harding's heart. Genuinely moved by their plight, she fund-raised on their behalf, nursed them in hospital and tirelessly pursued individual cases brought to her attention. Utterly taken in by Forbes's boastful affability, she had urged her husband to appoint him to what she considered the most important of roles.

In just two years, Forbes sucked the Veterans' Bureau dry. He reported medical and hospital supplies damaged and then sold them, pocketing the profit, and bought replacements from the companies that paid him; he inflated the price of government land sold for hospitals in return for a share of the profit from the sale; he awarded hospital construction contracts to firms who gave him a cut. One of these firms belonged to the husband of one of his mistresses-who just happened to be Warren Harding's sister; a second mistress was the wife of another rich building contractor to whom he also gave access to his rivals' bids. He took friends and girlfriends on lavish, bootleg-fueled junkets across the country, ostensibly on Veteran's Bureau business. In all, it is estimated that in two years he cost the Government $200 million-of which he personally appropriated perhaps $36 million.

These unprincipled men recognized that Florence Harding needed to be flattered and cajoled into bestowing her support upon them. Both Fall and Edwin Denby, the Secretary of the Navy implicated in Fall's leasing of naval land, wrote to the First Lady a.s.suring her that they would do all they could "to do as you desire." Daugherty himself wrote, almost in apology for having seen the President without her, "Of course you know it-you know everything which he or I do or think . . . I am loyal to him-that is as loyal to him as I can be considering that I always give your instructions preference over his." Only Forbes-perhaps the closest socially to Florence-paid little attention to her demands that he investigate the cases of specific veterans with whom she was concerned. But finally Mrs. Harding's suspicions as to Warren's friends' true activities and motives were awakened.

By the summer of 1922, less than eighteen months after he had taken office, the pressures of his position were wearing on Warren Gamaliel Harding. He began to drink whisky at official meetings. The appalled president of the Rail Workers Union described Harding as being too drunk to negotiate during talks at the White House. Harding confessed to a friend that he had no appet.i.te for the exercise of power and would rather be a diplomat than president-although he added, pathetically, "probably I should be a very poor amba.s.sador."

Florence was also affected by the strained atmosphere. Her health, which had been fragile for many years, declined rapidly in September 1922 and she relied ever more heavily on the quackish and eccentric homeopath "Doc" Sawyer whom she and Warren had brought with them to Was.h.i.+ngton from Marion. While she was convalescing she summoned the popular psychologist Emile Coue to the White House and daily repeated his mantra: "Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better."

The First Lady also requisitioned the Department of Justice agent Gaston Means to act as her spy and messenger. Bemoaning Harding's blindness "to the faults of his friends," she said that her role was to s.h.i.+eld and guard him. Means said that she asked him to investigate Attorney-General Harry Daugherty, Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, Secretary of War John Weeks-and Nan Britton, a young woman from Marion whose childhood crush on Harding had developed into a pa.s.sionate adult affair.

Means thought little of his new employer, calling the First Lady paranoid, desperate, deluded and-perhaps most cut tingly of all, for the rigidly elegant Florence-overdressed. He said she was increasingly dependent on the advice of a string of astrologers and psychics; the secret duties she required of him included retrieving indiscreet letters she had written to a fortune-teller he called Madame X. Means ridiculed Florence's faith in Madame X's declaration that she was a "child of destiny."

Before Harding accepted the Republican candidacy another spiritualist, Madame Marcia, had predicted disaster and sudden death if he became President, and Florence was determined that she would protect her husband from this fate. It was typical of what William Allen White described as Harding's "courtier thieves, Rasputins, drunkards, [and] harem favorites" that Madame Marcia also gave advice to Roxie Smith, Jess Smith's estranged wife; that Gaston Means's direct boss was Harry Daugherty-whom Mrs. Harding had asked Means to investigate; and that Florence's links to both had been established through Evalyn McLean.

Charlie Forbes's transgressions were the first to be made public. In February 1923 the Senate voted to investigate the "waste, extravagance, irregularities and mismanagement" at the Veterans' Bureau. Harding refused to believe that his friend had betrayed his trust until Florence convinced him it was true. Then he summoned Forbes to the White House and almost throttled him, screaming, "You yellow rat! You double-crossing b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

By the time the investigation began, Forbes had fled the country. His probably innocent legal adviser, Charles Cramer, shot himself in the head in his bathroom, either horrified at the crimes Forbes had committed or racked with guilt at his own complicity. The suicide note Cramer had left for the President disappeared; no investigation was ever made into his death. Forbes was fined $10,000 and imprisoned in a penitentiary for two years.

In May, attention turned to happy-go-lucky Jess Smith. He was excluded from the cozy poker evenings he had once so enjoyed in the White House and ordered to change his ways. Herbert Hoover thought Daugherty had warned Smith that he was on the point of being arrested. On 30 May, Smith was found with a bullet in his head at the home he shared with Daugherty. Although his death was presented as suicide, many people, including Gaston Means and Evalyn McLean, believed he had been silenced. Conveniently, none of his papers were discovered.

The following month the Hardings set off on an official tour of the Rockies, Alaska and the West Coast. For once, the McLeans were not invited to attend them. Earlier that spring, Alice Roosevelt Longworth had told Florence about what she called Evalyn's kindness in allowing the President to use Friends.h.i.+p to entertain "women friends from Marion"; by this she meant Nan Britton. Evalyn's betrayal wounded Florence deeply just at the time she most needed a friend.

Throughout the trip, both Warren and Florence were ill and seriously worried about the escalating allegations of misconduct. Death and bad luck seemed to hang in the air: three journalists died when their car crashed into a canyon; a tram collision was narrowly avoided; their train engineer was killed in a landslide. Harding was only able to muster up his customary energy and good spirits when pretty girls were around. To calm his nerves he played bridge day and night with exhausted aides. "My G.o.d! This is a h.e.l.l of a job!" he said to the journalist William Allen White. "I have no trouble with my enemies . . . But my d.a.m.ned friends, my G.o.d-d.a.m.n friends, White, they're the ones that keep me walking the floor at night."

One afternoon Harding asked Herbert Hoover, who was with them on board their s.h.i.+p traveling south from Alaska, to join him in his cabin. "If you knew of a great scandal in our administration, would you for the good of the country and the party expose it publicly or would you bury it?" he asked. Hoover replied, "Publish it, and at least get credit for integrity on your side." Harding "remarked that this method might be politically dangerous. I asked for more particulars. He said that he had received some rumors of irregularities, centering around [Jess] Smith, in connection with cases in the Department of Justice. Harding gave me no information about what Smith had been up to. I asked what Daugherty's relation to the affair was. He abruptly dried up and never raised the question again."

Harding came down with a bad attack of food poisoning as the presidential entourage continued southwards. By the time they had reached San Francisco it had developed into pneumonia and he died, either of a heart attack or a stroke, on the evening of 2 August. He was fifty-seven. Florence, utterly dependent-as she had been for years-on the unreliable advice of their quackish personal physician, "Doc" Sawyer, refused to permit an autopsy. This led to wild speculation that she had poisoned her husband to prevent him being implicated in the scandals swirling around him. Perhaps Hoover's a.s.sessment was closest to the truth. "People do not die from a broken heart," he wrote of Harding's death, "but people with bad hearts may reach the end much sooner from great worries."

One consolation for Harding would have been that he was never implicated in the corruption of his so-called friends-his only crime seems to have been that he was too loyal to them to suspect what they were up to-and that when he died and was buried it was as one of America's best-loved presidents. Millions of bareheaded mourners queued alongside the train tracks as his coffin thundered back across the country towards the capital, quietly singing his favorite hymns.

Granite-like, Florence Harding returned to Was.h.i.+ngton with her husband's body. After his funeral, having made her peace with Evalyn McLean, she went to stay at Friends.h.i.+p. There the two women burned all the Hardings' private papers. Over the bonfires, Florence said to Evalyn, "Now that it is all over I am beginning to think it was all for the best." Within a few months, the kidney disease that had plagued her for fifteen years persuaded her to return to her home town of Marion. She died there just over a year after Warren in November 1924.

Revelations of the corruption of Forbes, Smith, Daugherty, Fall and Sinclair, among others, continued throughout the 1920s. In 1924 Daugherty managed to avoid cross-examination by a Senate committee on the grounds that his personal relations with the Hardings made it impossible for him to give evidence-either by using them as a s.h.i.+eld or trying to implicate them in his own corruption. Coolidge, Harding's successor, stepped in and forced Daugherty to resign, but he was never tried for any crime.

Albert Fall loudly protested his innocence, claiming that the large sum of cash he admitted having received came not from Edward Doheny or Harry Sinclair but was a loan from Ned McLean. He had not, he swore, been given "one cent on any account of any oil lease or upon any other account whatsoever." But McLean, although he was willing to write Fall a predated check to cover the money, could not be prevailed upon to testify on his behalf in court. Pleading ill-health, he refused to come to Was.h.i.+ngton from Florida, where he was spending the winter, and finally confessed that he was lying. Fall was convicted of conspiracy and bribery and sentenced to a year in prison-the first Cabinet officer in U.S. history to be jailed.

Sinclair was acquitted of bribery charges but served a double term in 1929 for contempt of the Senate (he had refused to answer the investigating committee's questions) and for contempt of court (he had offered at least one member of his jury a car "as long as this block" if he voted to acquit him). In 1924 Will Hays was asked by the Senate investigating committee how much Sinclair had given the Republican Party and replied $75,000; four years later, asked again, he revealed that there had also been a loan of $185,000 which he had not disclosed because he had not been asked about "bonds."

Further unpleasant disclosures continued to emerge. Having failed to persuade Harding's family to pay her a $50,000 settlement, in 1927 Nan Britton revealed in The President's Daughter The President's Daughter not only that Harding was the father of her eight-year-old daughter, but that the child had been conceived in Harding's Senate office. In not only that Harding was the father of her eight-year-old daughter, but that the child had been conceived in Harding's Senate office. In The Strange Death of President Harding The Strange Death of President Harding, published three years later, Gaston Means claimed that Jess Smith had been murdered and that Florence Harding, pushed to the edge by Warren's womanizing, had killed her husband. Others put forward theories about Harding having committed suicide.

Evalyn McLean saw the political scandals of Harding's administration as being on an epic scale, with herself and her husband as its protagonists. "What happened to us all was just about as tragic as if each one, instead of only I, had worn a talisman of evil," she wrote many years later, referring to the Star of the East. "Some died, one probably was killed [Jess Smith], one is blind, some went to jail; I suffered humiliation, and Ned lives on, a fancied fugitive, in an asylum where he pretends, with characteristic slyness, that he is someone else who does not know McLean." In the early 1930s one of Ned's fellow inmates was Zelda Fitzgerald, with whom he reportedly used to dance the hokey-kokey.

It was a sign of the moral lethargy of the times that the public was more hostile towards the men who scrutinized the Harding scandals than towards the perpetrators of them. The senators investigating the oil scandals and the Department of Justice under Daugherty were labeled "a.s.sa.s.sins of character," "mud-gunners" and, worst of all, unpatriotic. People muttered darkly about a socialist conspiracy to bring down America.

Nothing could challenge the national sense that the Republicans were the only party fit to govern. As their collectively apathetic att.i.tude to Prohibition showed, many Americans were only too happy not to probe too deeply into difficult truths that would interfere with their complacent enjoyment of 1920s prosperity. What they were really interested in was not politics but "motion pictures, baseball, prize fights, automobiles, dress, murder and divorce." Harding's taciturn Vice President, Calvin Coolidge-conveniently free from any whiff of implication in his predecessor's shortcomings-was re-elected in another Republican landslide in 1924. His supporters sang, When we get to Was.h.i.+ngton, home, sweet home, We won't give a darn for the Teapot Dome!

Henry Ford and his Model T, available in any color "so long as it's black." "so long as it's black."

6.

"THE BUSINESS Of AMERICA IS BUSINESS"

DESPITE THE CORRUPTION OF MANY OF THE MEN WITH WHOM Harding had surrounded himself, Calvin Coolidge's typically succinct 1924 campaign slogan, "Coolidge or Chaos," still appeared to reflect the political reality. All through the 1920s the Democratic Party, torn apart by bitter internal divisions, seemed out of touch and unelectable, competing against a party that spoke for middle America's hopes and aspirations. The Republican Party were seen to be making America prosper-and against that argument, the Democrats had no response.

Warren Harding (President from 1920-23), Calvin Coolidge (1923-28) and Herbert Hoover (1929-32) were all elected by vast majorities. All three believed in small, non-interventionist government; all three believed that the interests of big business were synonymous with the national interest-and therefore that business ought to be given what Coolidge called a "free hand." It was the age, wrote Malcolm Cowley, "when directors' meetings were more important than Cabinet meetings and when the national destiny was being decided by middle-aged bankers and corporation executives."

"What we need in America is less government in business and more business in government," declared Harding when appointing as his Treasury Secretary the austere banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon, the third-richest man in the United States after John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford. Mellon, heir to those nineteenth-century capitalists who believed that the rich were uniquely suited to arrange the affairs of the rest of mankind, resigned from fifty-one directors.h.i.+ps to take up his government post. He served at the Treasury until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1932, pursuing two objectives: to reduce public debt and to lower taxes. In both of these he was successful.

Immediately after the Great War, an economic downturn brought with it industrial action and striking workers, but business, supported by the government, stood firm. Supreme Court decisions in the late 1910s and early 1920s upheld the rights of industry over the rights of child workers and women, declaring it unconst.i.tutional for the Government to regulate labor conditions, and illegal for unionization or picketing to be mandatory. Trade unions were systematically undermined. In 1920 the president of Bethlehem Steel (an industry which had gone on strike across the nation the previous year) announced that he would not recognize a union even if 95 percent of his workers belonged to one. He was backed up by Harry Daugherty, the Attorney-General, who said that he would do all he could "to prevent the labor unions of the country from destroying the Open Shop."

Replacing unions, altruistic companies-it was thought-would look after their workers, providing them with health insurance, baseball teams and glee clubs. Successful businesses would share their profits with workers in the form of high wages. The worker could then encourage industry by spending and, if he were clever, could even buy his own share in it by investing in the stock market.

Each successive administration continued to develop this idea of "welfare capitalism." Easy-going Harding simply wanted to see everyone prosper; Coolidge believed that government functioned best as a "businessman's government"; Hoover, a former head of the Department of Commerce, campaigned on the message that the United States would thrive if business thrived. "Wealth creation," the pursuit of money for its own sake, was lauded as natural, even n.o.ble. Coolidge said, "Brains are wealth and wealth is the chief aim of man."

Businessmen were seen (and saw themselves) as creative, daring and public-spirited. Even Al Capone tried to promote an image of himself as an entrepreneurial benefactor rather than a hood. The American businessman had replaced "the statesman, the priest, the philosopher, as the creator of standards of ethics and behavior." By 1928, one-time progressives like the journalist Walter Lippmann had been converted to the new dogma. Businessmen, Lippmann declared, are "for once more novel, more daring, and in general more revolutionary than the theories of the revolutionaries."

Many flourished under this regime, but some groups were thrown into unrelieved poverty. Farmers, who had enjoyed 16 percent of the national income during the war years, by 1929 found themselves with a share of less than 9 percent. New methods of transporting, processing and storing food meant that wheat and corn prices dropped. Modern women in thrall to silk stockings and nylon no longer wanted to wear cotton and wool. Instead of raising profits, the increasing mechanization of farming created worldwide markets-and worldwide compet.i.tion. The value of farmland dropped by nearly a quarter over the twenties, while the value of town land doubled; bankruptcies and suicide rates among farmers rose. Feeling excluded from the country's new urban and industrial wealth, rural Americans bitterly resented the Republican single-interest Government. "Farmers have never been rich," said Coolidge flatly. "I don't believe one can do much about it."

Apart from in farming areas, from 1921 onwards the economy-and the parallel exaltation of business over the interests of workers-rose steadily. By the mid-1920s Robert and Helen Lynd recorded that in Middletown, which they described as "an aggressive industrial city" dominated by gla.s.s, metal and automobile factories, public opinion no longer sided with organized labor, and trade unions had all but disappeared.

Perhaps because industry was expanding rapidly, the workplace had become increasingly impersonal. Bosses took less time to get to know their workers individually and manual workers especially derived scant satisfaction from their labors. President Coolidge saw factory work differently. "Those who build a factory build a temple of wors.h.i.+p," he intoned. "Those who work in a factory, wors.h.i.+p there."

This glorification of "business methods" and the pursuit of "success" became almost a religion. Government and society reflected back at each other their rapacious zeal for making money. Clubs like the Rotarians, founded in 1905, and the Kiwanis, founded in 1915, promoted this aggressively optimistic idea of collective achievement, encouraging men to "sell themselves," to be "boosters not knockers," as a patriotic and spiritual duty. Women founded their own clubs with mottoes like "Progress," as often devoted to the improvement of their towns as their own social lives. In 1929 there were 1,800 Kiwanis clubs nationwide; 150,000 men worldwide were Rotarians by 1930. Even G.o.d was commandeered into promoting the new gospel. Jesus was said to have been "the first Rotarian." Henry Ford called machinery "the new Messiah."

Adman Bruce Barton's self-help book, The Man n.o.body Knows The Man n.o.body Knows, depicted Jesus as the "founder of modern business" and became the best-selling t.i.tle in the United States in 1925 and 1926. Barton, a minister's son, made Jerusalem sound like Sinclair Lewis's Zenith and Jesus a latter-day George Babbitt. Not only was Jesus a "go-getter" and "the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem" (no doubt because of his ability to turn water into wine) but he was also a great executive who had "picked twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world."

Selling in particular was seen as a distinctively American trait, a unifying characteristic in a country still searching for a sense of its destiny in the wider world. The journalist Mark Sullivan called "the pa.s.sion to sell . . . the impelling power in American life." An apocryphal story of the times told of a company said to give an annual banquet for its salesmen. Every year, the best performer would sit down to a lavish feast; the second-best achiever would be served the same dinner, but without oysters; and so on down the line to the least effective man, who dined on beans and crackers.

Salesmen were the "angels and evangels" of Coolidge prosperity, persuading people not simply to buy what they needed-but what they hadn't yet dreamed they wanted. "Consumption is a new necessity," wrote the Lynds of mid-1920s Middletown. Shoppers, whose disposable incomes rose by nearly a third in this period, found they had extra money to spend on fas.h.i.+onable factory-made clothes, cigarettes and lighters, make-up and wrist-watches. Even children were given pocket money.

Everywhere there were what the Lynds described as "new urgent occasions for spending money." No one owned a radio in 1920; a decade later, 40 percent of all households had one. President Harding installed the first radio in the White House in February 1922. Over four million sets, at a cost of about $100 each, were sold between 1922 and 1925.

Installment-buying and new methods of providing credit removed the stigma from debt and allowed people to spend well beyond their incomes. By the second half of the 1920s, an estimated 15 percent of all retail sales were on credit. Half of household appliances and three-quarters of cars were sold on hire purchase in 1929. Accessible mortgages fueled a housing boom.

As well as more money, Americans had more leisure time. It was becoming more common to have Sat.u.r.day afternoon as well as Sunday off, and many workers began to enjoy an annual two-week paid vacation. More and more people were working in offices in towns, rather than in factories or on farms, and their hours were determined by electricity rather than daylight. Between 1902 and 1929 the electric light and power industry expanded nineteen times.

The gap between people's basic physical needs-food, shelter, clothing-and what they did to make a living grew ever wider. After a packaged breakfast cereal a typical American drove into town from his suburban home to begin work at a desk at eight-thirty rather than outside at sunrise. Families or groups of friends could now spend their electric-lit evenings playing mah-jongg (the craze of 1922), dancing to music on the radio or the gramophone, or going to the movies-all of which created a sense of belonging to a single American culture.

Following fads like mah-jongg, using new slang words or knowing the latest dance song "are absolutely necessary if one wishes to be like everyone else," explained a college newspaper. Changes in fas.h.i.+on were making it harder to tell the social cla.s.ses apart. Increasingly, the rich liked to look casual and approachable while the aspiring poor were spending as much as they could afford on clothing to demonstrate their social mobility.

This was a culture of extravagant consumerism as well as conformity: ma.s.s production, ma.s.s consumption, ma.s.s culture. A French professor, visiting the United States in Alexis de Tocqueville's footsteps in 1927, observed that, "In its pursuit of wealth and power, America has abandoned the ideal of liberty to follow that of prosperity."

In The Theory of the Leisure Cla.s.s The Theory of the Leisure Cla.s.s (1899), the sociologist Thorstein Veblen had explored human acquisitive and emulative instincts, arguing that expenditure and leisure are the ways men gain and display status. Conspicuous consumption (a phrase Veblen coined) was the wasteful use of resources or money to impress others; conspicuous leisure (another Veblen phrase) the wasteful use of time to demonstrate wealth. According to Veblen's ideas, aspiration and acquisition were unavoidable elements of the human make-up, and they were actively encouraged by the structure and ethos of 1920s society. "Everyone lives on a slope from any point of which desirable things belonging to people all the way to the top are in view," observed the Lynds of Middletown. (1899), the sociologist Thorstein Veblen had explored human acquisitive and emulative instincts, arguing that expenditure and leisure are the ways men gain and display status. Conspicuous consumption (a phrase Veblen coined) was the wasteful use of resources or money to impress others; conspicuous leisure (another Veblen phrase) the wasteful use of time to demonstrate wealth. According to Veblen's ideas, aspiration and acquisition were unavoidable elements of the human make-up, and they were actively encouraged by the structure and ethos of 1920s society. "Everyone lives on a slope from any point of which desirable things belonging to people all the way to the top are in view," observed the Lynds of Middletown.

Advertisers, studying the work of academics like Veblen, began educating the poorer cla.s.ses to imitate the buying patterns of the richer, appealing to Americans' newly discovered desires to be glamorous and envied. One Middletown girl stopped going to school altogether because her parents couldn't afford what she thought were the right clothes-without which she claimed she would have been neglected by the boys and scorned by the other girls. It was typical of the period that her parents apparently accepted her argument and allowed her to drop out.