As a President, James Buchanan sucked – there’s no doubt about that – but while he did little to avert impending disaster, even his harshest critics have to concede that he didn’t start any civil wars, either foreign or domestic. Similarly, while Franklin Pierce was certainly an abysmal failure as an expansionist, at least he didn’t stagnate the economy, and you can’t really hold bungling Reconstructioner Ulysses Grant accountable for an ally-alienating foreign policy.
But those guys were from the 1800s, you say, and things were different back then. What we need is an example of Executive Suckiness from the 20th century, someone a little more familiar with graft and corruption as they’re practiced here in the Age of Petroleum – you know, the kind of person who could shake hands with Jack Abramoff and not wince.
If that’s the case, you’re in luck, for it just so happens that I know of such a Preznit. If you’ll step into the Cave of the Moonbat, I’d be happy to babble a little about Warren G. Harding...
Historiorant: Regular visitors to the Cave might recognize the subject of tonight’s moonbatification to be something other than the promised Early Modern Afghanistan; if you’re tuning in especially for that, I beg your indulgence and ask you to consider this a "We Interrupt This Broadcast." Given recent stirrings in the Justice Department, as well as the impending indictment of Interior Department hack Steven Griles, the story of the Harding Administration and the Teapot Dome Scandal suddenly became both timely and time-sensitive. We’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming shortly.
Teapot Dome is being moonbatified at the suggestion of one of Daily Kos’ premier muckrakers, Land of Enchantment the Pombo-Slayer, who pointed out some great research currently being done regarding Griles’ connections to convicted felon Jack Abramoff and influence-peddling at Interior. The linked diaries LoE sent were by mbw, and they are fantastic. Please click on the links at the end of this diary to ensure you’re up to speed on the eerie similarities between Harding-style executive branch ineptitude and that displayed by the current defiler of the White House.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention that I’m not exactly the first historioranter here to make the connection between Bush’s suckiness and Harding’s. Over the past 2 years, no fewer than 22 diaries have been tagged similarly to this one; here are the DKos search results for Harding, Teapot Dome. The October 25, 2005, diary by the Lincoln-ly named Wide Awake entitled Seeing It Through: Lessons from Another Scandal offers a great side-by-side comparison of the incompetence of the two administrations.
Peas in a Pod
They have more than scandal-ridden administrations in common, these two. Harding was born of a well-to-do couple of Ohio doctors (in 1865), and his father eventually gave young Warren a job at a weekly newspaper he happened to own. As a scion of the ultimate insider family, Connecticut blueblood Bush, of course, as, has been entitled since birth to a silver spoon, but has shown himself unable to follow the simplest of business models to make a profit. So it was that while Bush was provided job opportunities by his father’s buddies in the form of Arbusto Oil, and subsequently proved himself unable to find oil in all of Texas, at least Harding did his job at The Argus well enough to start climbing the ladders of the Ohio Republican political machine.
Historiorant: One might also mention that Ohio Central College in Iberia, while a fine institution of higher learning, ain’t no Yale...
Rather than turning to cocaine and booze to avoid dealing with work and socialization-related stress, Harding let it get to him. At 24, he had a breakdown, and wound up spending a few weeks at the famed sanatorium at Battle Creek, Michigan (q.v. The Road to Wellville). When he returned home, he quickly and good-naturedly fell back into both the dog-eat-dog world of Ohio politics, joining all sorts of civic organizations, booster clubs, and, of course the Freemasons. He also displayed something of a penchant for coining phrases, but here again, this should not be confused with The Decider’s seeming delight in torturing his native language: Harding’s "bloviation" is actually kind of clever, while Bush’s "nookulir" is just stupid.
Instead of having a professional baseball team handed to him as a toy, Harding bought a newspaper of his own, and turned it into a Republican rag in the middle of highly Democratic Marion County. The competition caused him to run afoul of Amos Hall Kling, who owned another of Marion County’s newspapers and was none too happy that a young whippersnapper of a Rethug was muscling in on his territory. Further pissing off the elder Kling, Harding married the man’s older woman/single mom/divorcee daughter in 1891. Florence Kling Harding went on to become one of those real-force-behind-the-throne First Ladies, a wife whose business sense and flair for interpersonal politics propelled her husband to a level one step past the line drawn by the Peter Principle.
"Government, after all, is a very simple thing." – Warren G. Harding
The 29th President’s view on the complexities of politics was called out by Justice Frankfurter, who added, "There was never a more pathetic misapprehension of responsibility than Harding’s touching statement." This might be compared to Bush’s "Bein’ the Preznit is hard work" – which, taking into account the devolution of the general state of the English language in the 80+ years since Harding’s term, effectively says the same thing – and might elicit the same kind of sympathetic, pitying assessment from rueful voters. Bush and Harding share a similar lack of experience in government prior to their respective elevations to the Presidency, which gives one possible explanation for why both wound up approaching such heavy responsibilities with such stunning naïveté.
official presidential portrait via whitehouse.gov
At least Harding had held a few elected offices prior to campaigning for the Presidency: He was an Ohio State Senator, then Lieutenant Governor, around the turn of the century, lost a race for the governor’s mansion in 1910, and won a U.S. Senate seat in 1914. Emerging as a dark horse candidate in a deadlocked Republican nominating convention in 1920, Harding pulled off that rarest of American political stunts and became the first sitting Senator to be elected President.
Harding was up against Democratic Ohio Governor James Cox, and the race between them was viewed as a referendum on 20 years’ worth of progressivism. In this, the pendulum was swinging in Harding’s favor: business interests and social conservatives wanted to roll back the clock to the days of Ronald Reagan William McKinley, since it was McKinley’s untimely assassination (is that redundant? – u.m.) that had brought rogue Repub Teddy Roosevelt to office – leading to two decades of presidential support for unions, busting trusts, and pie-in-the-sky, 14-point dreams.
Harding did have some skeletons in his closet, but these were quietly dealt with by the Republican machine that closed ranks around him. A long-term mistress (and wife of a friend) was sent on an extended vacation in Asia, while the Ned of the family his brother-in-law, who had recently married a divorced Catholic, was sent with his new (papist) bride to Europe for a while (having Catholic ties, even relatively distant ones, was seen as a political liability in those days, as the Ku Klux Klan, which was waxing powerful in the post-WWI era, targeted white Catholics as readily as they did black Protestants).
Weird Historical Sidenote: Harding’s mistress, who became the recipient of monthly hush-money payments from the RNC, is the only person known to American history to have successfully extorted a party apparatus (as opposed to individual officeholders, thousands of which have probably paid off ex-lovers, et al). The real dirt on their relationship won’t come to light, however, until 2023, when an injunction granted at the request of Harding’s heirs to suppress publication of his love letters, and books like Francis Russel’s The Shadow of Blooming Grove won’t have big blank spaces where the blockquotes should be.
Amiable Boobs
Harding readily admitted that he didn’t have the intellectual horsepower to go it alone, and promised that were he to be elected, he would surround himself with the best men in their fields as his advisors (heard that one before? – u.m.). His most appealing qualification for the job was that he "looked Presidential," and his platform had all the earmarks of a man who does not regard "the process" with any degree of depth:
"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...."
whitehouse.gov
The Dems tried to fire back - William Gibbs McAdoo called Harding's speeches "an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea" (ibid.) – but Harding had Wilson-weariness and establishment support on his side. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone all backed his candidacy, and in the first election to feature extensive coverage in the newsreels, he had the support of Hollywood, which was then a stridently conservative place. Mary Pickford, Lillian Russell, Douglas Fairbanks, and Al Jolson all came out in favor of the front-porch-campaigning Harding.
Harding garnered a reputation as an "amiable boob," a nice guy who could easily have the wool pulled over his eyes. Years of good-ole-boy backslapping had taught him how to present a good public image, and he was a gifted speaker (though not ad-libber), but he was helped in both these areas by his wife, who used her newsie skills to present the photogenic Warren in a much better light than any of Cox’s old-school spinmeisters could do for their boy. It’s in terms of PR that Harding can be seen to be most unlike The Decider, who has proven easy to dupe because of his middling intellect, and was likely the sort of kid who pulled the wings off flies
Finally, Harding recognized the advantages presented by getting in on the ground floor of society-altering legislation, and so got behind the ratification of the 19th Amendment early on. Women were finally granted suffrage in August, 1920, and a couple of months later, their votes tipped the returns to the first 60+% landslide in the nation’s history. (Historiorant: Just goes to show you what can result from being in step with the times; remember that the only way Furious George won his first Presidency was by allowing 9 people to vote twice) He was further assisted by large-scale defections of traditional Democrats like Irish and German-Americans, who had lingering axes to grind from the war years and regarding the Treaty of Versailles, and though both major-party candidates hedged on joining the League of Nations, Cox was the one that was saddled with party affiliation.
Election Map via Wikipedia (copyright info here); note that colors are reversed from those to which we’re accustomed – Harding was heart and soul a Republican
Weird Historical Sidenote: Harding is the only U.S. President to have been elected to office on his birthday (November 2). Watch and wait until 2088, when your resident historiorantologist next has the opportunity to duplicate this feat.
Bring in the Cronies
He might have had a good speaking style, but don’t think for a minute that Harding was a great deal more erudite than Our Dear Leader. Poet e.e. cummings’ reaction to hearing of Harding’s passing in 1923 was, "The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.". God of Punditry H.L. Mencken, of course, was even more vicious, and was so during Harding’s lifetime:
"He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. 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 sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."
via Wikipedia
To cover for these deficiencies, Harding allowed the guys who had tapped him for the presidency in a smoke-filled back room in Chicago to dole out the sweet rewards of victory. Though not all hailed from Harding’s home state, several of them did, and so they became known as the "Ohio Gang." Harding played poker and golf with them, and was apparently blissfully unaware that any time they weren’t physically in his presence, they were looting the Treasury and lining their own pockets with bribes.
Here’s a partial Rogue’s Gallery of some of Harding’s sycophants:
Albert Fall – Secretary of the Interior, later intimately associated with the Teapot Dome Scandal (moonbatified shortly)
Jess Smith – aide to Attorney General Harry Daugherty, committed suicide after helping to Ollie-ize a bunch of his boss’ incriminating documents
Charles Cramer – aide to Veteran’s Bureau founder Charles Forbes, also committed suicide after being convicted and sentenced for his role in his Forbes’ illegalities
Charles Forbes – total dirtbag who skimmed money destined for vets of the Civil-, Spanish-American-, and First World Wars while running illicit alcohol and drug rings and accepting kickbacks. Convicted of fraud and bribery; sentenced to two years in jail
In the end, it was probably Harding himself who came up with the best way to describe the snakepit of Republican misadministration his White House had turned into:
"I have no trouble with my enemies, but my damn friends, my God-damned friends... they're the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!"
ibid.
Of Teapots and Domes
A couple of the guys mentioned above played leading roles in the scandal that would become, Iraqdebacle-like, the legacy of Harding’s presidency. It’s either ironic or telling that both criminal embarrassments have their roots in oil, but whereas Bush’s scams are centered around getting Americans killed in the sands of a far-off land, those of Harding’s confidants involved the reserves beneath an oddly-named geologic feature in central Wyoming.
Back in those days, the oil-dependent Navy maintained its own reserves of discovered-but-not-yet-pumped-out crude. Teapot Dome was one such location; Elk Hills and Buena Vista Hills, in beautiful Kern County, California, were two others, but all three fell under the purview of Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby. Secretary of Interior Fall convinced Denby to sign the reserves over to his Department, then quietly leased out the rights to exploit them to Harry Sinclair or Sinclair Oil (then known as Mammoth Oil) and Edward Doheny of Pan American Petroleum. Technically, the leases themselves were legal under the General Leasing Act of 1920 – the law that broke the camel’s back was the fact that over $400,000 dollars made their way into Fall’s hands as a result. With an arrogance of near-Bushian proportions, Fall would later describe these as "personal loans at no interest."
Fall’s spate of conspicuous consumption in late 1921 prompted folks at the Wall Street Journal to start looking into the Secretary’s sudden move into the realm of the nouveau riche, and on April 14, 1922, the WSJ published its findings. Though angrily denied by Fall, the Senate promised to look into the allegations by setting up an investigative committee. Robert La Follette of Wisconsin was placed in charge of what he probably assumed would be a whitewashing job, but his concerns that something might truly be amiss deepened when his office underwent a Watergate-style ransacking.
Clearly indicating the level of importance the legislature placed on executive oversight (even back in those days...), La Follette essentially handed over the investigation to the committee’s least senior member, Montana Democrat Thomas Walsh. Not one to shirk his duties, Walsh doggedly looked into the allegations for the next two years, and in so doing was frequently stymied by disappearing paperwork and all the other sorts of administrative errors that tend to crop up when powerful friends of Presidents are being investigated. Finally, just a few days before he was about to throw in the towel in 1924, Walsh discovered a track Fall had forgotten to cover: evidence of a $100,000 no-interest personal loan from Doheny. The fallout from that bit of evidence would become headline fodder for the rest of the decade, and would form the core of W.G. Harding’s legacy of suckiness in office – a legacy unequalled until the appointment of G.W. Bush by Supreme Court fiat in 2000 had had a few years to play out its disastrous results.
The Curse of the Zeros
Bumbling genially through his term in office, Harding only too late became aware of the Neocon Ohio Gang’s usurpation of his authority. For three years, the gains made progressivism were beaten back, the value voters of time catered to. A few highlights:
Harding and the boys provided the sort of moral example we’ve come to expect in our Republican officials; it was an open secret in Washington that they (like everyone else) were violating the Constitution – specifically the 18th Amendment – with great gusto and alcoholic cheer.
He appointed 4 Supreme Court Justices, whose Paleolithic interpretations of the legal code would besot the nation with a Harding hangover well into the next decade. On a gee-whiz note, Harding became the only President to give an ex-President a promotion, when he tapped William Howard Taft – who did turn out to be a bit more liberal than expected – to be Chief Justice (remember, this was back in the days when appointees were expected to have shown themselves capable of expressing an opinion, so having a public record like that included being President wasn’t so much of a liability as now)
Foreign policy-wise, the United States remained technically at war with Germany, Austria, and Hungary until July, 1921, when Congress passed a joint resolution that declared the war over (even absent a treaty like the Versailles one they’d earlier declined to ratify). While he did do some negotiating regarding post-war disarmament – even getting nations to agree on caps on their battleship numbers – he jerked around veterans in search of compensation for their time as citizen-soldiers. Eventually, the can was kicked down the road (over the vetoes of both Harding and Coolidge) in the form of an insurance policy due 20 years later.
In terms of business, industry, and labor, Harding pretty much gave the foxes the keys to the henhouses. Wartime economic controls were dismantled, tariffs were hiked, and unions were busted (literally). And through it all, the people closest to him were pulling the strings of some of the foulest deeds...
Finally getting a clue in June, 1923, Harding set out on his "Great Voyage of Understanding," an epic speaking tour that made him the first President to visit Alaska – only 56 years after we’d bought it – and during which he and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover tried to explain just where his administration had faltered. It was on his return through British Columbia that he fell ill, and was rushed to the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. There he developed pneumonia and other complications, and died on August 2nd, only 7 days after he’d first shown symptoms.
Weird Historical Sidenote: We all know how Markos feels about conspiracy theories, so I’ll just casually mention the basics of one of the ones surrounding the strange death of Warren G. Harding and leave it at that: Most sources list the ultimate cause as a heart attack or stroke, possibly related to food poisoning, but the reluctance of the Surgeon General (who was in the President’s touring posse) to perform an autopsy, coupled with the hour or so of private time his wife spent with his body while it lay in state – during which she was supposedly overheard saying, "My dear Warren, now they can’t hurt you anymore" – sit at the top of a circumstantial slippery slope...
Meanwhile, back in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, Calvin Coolidge’s father, a Justice of the Peace, administered the Oath of Office to his son, and the irresponsible train wreck of Republican administration that would lead so inevitably to the Great Depression continued unabated.
"Juggernaut" (1924) by C.K. Berryman (d. 1949); in every U.S. History textbook on Earth, but here’s the Library of Congress entry anyway.
...so the bad guys got what was comin’ to ‘em, right?
Wrong! Of course they didn’t – they were rich, connected, and the Republicans were in charge! Silly you!
Actually, a few of the principals did get in trouble. In 1930, Albert Fall became the first Cabinet member to serve jail time for crimes committed while in office – he got a year, and was fined $100,000. Harry Sinclair, who was the very picture of obstinacy throughout the lengthy investigations and proceedings, was convicted in 1927 of contempt and jury tampering. He was fined $100,000 and given a short sentence. Edward Doheny, whose sloppy record-keeping had led to all this, was acquitted of attempting to bribe Fall.
Weird Historical Sidenote: The trials stemming from Teapot Dome are likely the origin of the colloquial term, "fall guy."
Historiorant:
Is the Moonbat going overboard in comparing Bushco graft to that of Warren G. "Teapot Dome" Harding? I don’t think so – and perhaps you might not, either, if you check out the excellent and ongoing series by mbw on some Abramoff-related goings-on at...you guessed, the Interior Department! From most recent to oldest:
The Impending Griles Indictment: Cheney's Energy Tzar dumps Griles
The Impending Griles Indictment: Johnnie Burton in legal trouble too?
The pending Griles indictment: It's bigger than you think.
Legacies are tough things to escape, as Warren G. Harding apparently deduced and as George W. Bush is certain to learn. Bush, of course, has already spraypainted his name on the bottom of the list of effective Presidents with his unholy and failed stab at empire, but what will ensure his continued presence among the dregs is the way he combines the worst of other President’s attributes and makes them his own. Harding’s administration defined what a corrupt White House could look like; The Decider’s achievement is in combining that with, say, Lyndon Johnson’s enemy-picking abilities.