American Experiment (235 page)

Already some party leaders were counseling compromise between the Taft-Hughes leadership and the Senate Old Guard, but most of the potential nominees seemed to be lined up with one side or the other. Could a compromise candidate be found who was not a cipher? Some wondered
if Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding would fill the bill. The Ohio senator had always been a party man—as a most partisan editor of the Marion
Star,
as an Ohio politico and officeholder, and as a conciliator who yet in 1912 had stuck with the party nominee, Taft, against the usurper back from Africa. Elected to the Senate in 1914, in Ohio’s first experience with the statewide direct primary and the direct election of senators, he had served a term distinguished mainly by his ability to win friends in all Republican factions.

But it was—it would always be—too easy to caricature Harding, as a mere glad-hander, an easygoing, fun-loving, poker-playing politician, a small-town man with a small-town mind and outlook. Although brought up in a severe and pious home—or perhaps because of it—he had a reputation as an occasional cutup, hard drinker, womanizer. He had no convictions, it was said, no set of principles, no quality of leadership. His mind, somebody would quip, was like stellar space—a huge void filled with a few wandering clichés. At least he had the becoming virtue of modesty. He did not, he wrote a friend, “possess the elements of leadership or the widespread acquaintances” essential to the “ideal leadership of our Party in 1920.”

Such was the basis of the legends that would sprout about Harding—that he did not want to be nominated for President, that he made no effort for the nomination, that he was the pawn of corporate interests seeking power, that he was a country yokel, a dumbbell, a spread-eagle orator who liked to “bloviate,” doze in his office, or relax around the poker table with his Ohio cronies.

In fact Harding had convinced himself by the summer of 1920 that he wanted to be President, that he would at least be better than the other hopefuls, and that he must work for it. While his friend Harry Daugherty made the rounds asking otherwise committed delegates to make Harding their second or third choice at the convention, he campaigned in several states. Harding was barely able to stave off an invasion by Leonard Wood in the Ohio primary, however, and he was shellacked in Indiana. By the time the first ballot was held at the broiling June convention in Chicago, Harding was far behind the front-runners, Wood, Lowden, and Johnson.

What happened in Chicago that June was simple in essence and complex in mechanics. The three front-runners deadlocked in ballot after ballot, while the steaming delegates, sometimes politicking in temperatures over 100 degrees, grew more and more weary and impatient. Late in the week, a group of senators who considered themselves the real leaders of the party gathered at the Blackstone Hotel to see if they could resolve the stalemate. It looked like a Senate cabal—Reed Smoot of Utah was there,
and James Watson of Indiana, Medill McCormick of Illinois, Henry Cabot Lodge and former senators Crane and Weeks of Massachusetts. But this was no cabal, with an agreed-on strategy. All through the evening politicians drifted in and out of the smoke-filled Blackstone suite, pouring themselves drinks, sending up small trial balloons, bickering and dickering. Someone said that the room seemed like the Senate in miniature, with Lodge sitting back in his chair and biting off brief comments, while the others indulged in what one senator, stalking off, called a “footless conversation.”

The senators continued to ruffle through possible dark horses “like a deck of soiled cards,” in Francis Russell’s words, but however many times “the political cards were shuffled and dealt and discarded, somehow the Harding card always remained.” Senators who knew Harding had little respect for his intellect, his convictions, or his qualities of leadership. But he came from a pivotal and symbolically important state, he was the right age at fifty-five, he
looked
like a President, and above all he was a party man who would follow the Republican senators’ lead on policy, especially on the League. He seemed perfectly to fill the party slot. Still, the few stalwarts remaining in the Blackstone suite came to no final conclusion—essentially they agreed to give Harding a run for his money for a few ballots the next day, and if the Ohioan did not click with the delegates, to try some other compromise possibility.

That evening Harding was not sitting in a hotel room awaiting the call to greatness. He was roaming the Blackstone corridors, unshaven, unkempt, liquored up a bit, buttonholing any man he could meet. Gradually word leaked out to reporters—and to Harding—that he was the group’s trial horse. Next day, many of the senators in the “cabal” stuck to their earlier commitments over several ballots. But the delegates, eager to go home, knew that Harding now more than ever was “available.” Slowly they edged toward him, as Daugherty scurried around the convention floor calling in those second-chance promises, while the fading front-runners desperately tried to patch together a stop-Harding coalition. No one would run as his rival’s running mate. On the tenth ballot the man from Marion went over the top amid a burst of enthusiasm and relief.

Already a legend was sprouting—that a cabal of determined, like-minded senators had gathered at the Blackstone with the single determination to make an obscure colleague their President, and their patsy. Weeks before the convention Daugherty, in a euphoric moment, had predicted to two reporters, in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, that “about eleven minutes after two o’clock on Friday morning of the convention, when fifteen or twenty men, bleary-eyed and perspiring profusely from the heat, are sitting
around a table ... at that decisive time the friends of Senator Harding can suggest him and can afford to abide by the result.” He might suggest Harding himself, Daugherty added brightly. And now the prophecy was resurrected, even though Daugherty had not attended the smoke-filled proceedings and the cabal had been far more a cloudiness than a conspiracy.

The truth was simpler and more significant—that the anti-League, conservative Republicans at the convention had wrested control from the old presidential leadership; that its leaders—primarily senators but including also national party leaders and local party bosses—had rummaged through their “soiled cards” and found their man; and that the actions of the first-cadre leaders in smoke-filled rooms had largely turned on their estimates of how hundreds of second- and third-cadre leaders on the floor of the stink-filled convention would react. Ultimately, Harding was the delegates’ choice—a party choice. And if anyone doubted the capacity of the rank-and-file delegates to work their will, they showed their power by brushing aside establishment candidates for Vice-President and nominating that law-and-order man from Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, as Harding’s running mate.

So, as the whole national party rallied behind Harding in its common hatred of Wilsonism, the Ohio senator sallied forth in his front-porch campaign as a party man, in the McKinley tradition. And it was as a party man that he harmonized the wings of his party, stuck to the party platform, and equated Republicanism with Americanism. The League continued to be the overriding issue. Every time Harding made a strong anti-League statement, he heard from internationalists like Herbert Hoover. When he softened his stand, Johnson and Borah descended on him like furies. Teetering back and forth, concealing his position behind clouds of platitudes, Harding skillfully held his party together until election day.

The Democrats too sought a candidate who could unite the party—and also exploit the Wilson heritage without being overburdened by it. For thirty-eight ballots McAdoo, Cox, and Palmer waged a stand-off battle at the party’s convention in San Francisco, until Palmer pulled out, Cox picked up a majority of his delegates, and the Ohio Democrat won by acclamation on the forty-fourth ballot. Refusing to desert their leader languishing in the White House, the party paid fulsome tribute to Wilson in their platform, endorsed his League, and reaffirmed Wilson’s New Freedom. But they would not renominate the President, who waited at the White House through ballot after ballot, hoping that the party might still turn to him. When word came to the President of Cox’s nomination Wilson burst into a stream of profanities and obscenities, according to his valet.
The President was hardly mollified by the choice for Vice-President of young Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had something of a reputation in Washington for being independent and a bit bumptious, but the delegates liked him for his youth and vigor—especially after his spirited seconding speech for Al Smith for President, during which FDR said that the Democrats’ choice would not be made in a hotel room at two in the morning—and above all they loved him for his last name.

So Cox and Roosevelt, backed by a dispirited party, sallied forth on their quest like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and with about as much objective chance of success. Almost quixotically—at least in the minds of hardened Democratic politicos—they resolved that they would campaign for Wilson’s League. The two men visited the White House.

“Mr. President,” Cox said, “I have always admired the fight you made for the League.”

“Mr. Cox,” said Wilson, “that fight can still be won.”

After a few moments Cox went on: “Mr. President, we are going to be a million per cent with you and your Administration, and that means the League of Nations.”

“I am very grateful,” the President said in a faltering voice. “I am very grateful.”

Cox and Roosevelt lived up to their promise, campaigning vigorously throughout the nation. Cox backslid only slightly on the League, saying that he would accept a reservation to Article 10 stating that the United States would not send its armed forces into action unless authorized by Congress in each case. But it was too late for compromise. Harding swept all the states outside the South, many of the far-northern states by two-to-one and three-to-one majorities. The omen of 1916 had been realized: the Democrats had been forced back on their shrunken base. And so had the omen of 1918: the Republicans now commanded top-heavy majorities in both House and Senate.

The President’s life had settled down to a routine by the late fall of 1920. Each day he struggled to take a few steps, saw as many visitors as he could, perhaps took a drive. One of his pleasures was almost daily movies in a White House parlor. One day Ray Stannard Baker joined the President, Mrs. Wilson, and one or two others for a film on the President’s first trip to Europe.

The projector clattered and whirred, and suddenly, Baker remembered, “we were in another world; a resplendent world, full of wonderful and glorious events”—President Wilson sailing into Brest amid beflagged
ships and soldiers marshaled upon the quay, “smiling upon the bridge, very erect, very tall, lifting his hat to shouting crowds.” The film ground on: Wilson driving down the Champs-Elysées, Wilson crossing the Channel escorted by warships, Wilson riding down from Buckingham Palace with the King of England, “behind noble horses flanked by outriders flying pennants”—always amid bands and flags and shouting crowds.

The film sputtered and ended. The little company sat silent in the darkness for a moment. Then Wilson was helped to his feet. He turned slowly and shuffled out of the room, without a word.

H
ENRY FORD’S ROUGE PLANT
, a working day in the early 1920s.
A massive ship loaded with iron ore steams into a turning basin off the River Rouge, swings ponderously to starboard, and slides into a slip next to Henry Ford’s concrete holding bins. Hulett unloaders rumble down the tracks alongside the slip, pause, plunge their huge arms down into the ship’s hold, scoop out ten-ton bites of ore, and swing around to dump their loads into the bins behind. Within the day, the ore is rolling on bottom-dumping railroad cars from bins to blast furnaces; within hours, molten metal moves from furnace to foundry, to be cast into engine blocks, and to the machining rooms, where the engines pass through thirty or more machine-tool operations.

In the vast assembly rooms, vehicles begin to take shape as castings, pistons, axles, springs, and thousands of other parts and pieces flow into the central assembly line. Coming in at right angles are the conveyors feeding in the parts via buckets, belts, rollers, monorails, and “scenic railways.” A seven-leafed car-spring has passed through its own assembly line—punch press, bending machine, nitrate bath, bolt insertion, painting, inspection—before joining the central procession. Roofs, wheels, windows, bumpers are clamped into place. A tall, black Model T triumphantly emerges at the end of the long line. Kindled into life by a gallon of gasoline, the car roars off in a cloud of exhaust to a railway siding and the awaiting freight train. The whole process, from ore to car, has taken perhaps a day….

The men standing at the moving assembly lines and toiling in the rolling mill, powerhouse, blast furnaces, and foundry were considered the elite of American industry, well paid, well housed, well treated by a benevolent employer. Life at the Rouge was not easy. They were part of an army—75,000 men worked at the sprawling facility by 1926—and they were treated much like soldiers. Amid an ear-splitting roar, they fought their daily battle of production standing often shoulder to shoulder, absolutely dominated by the flow of work, just as the flow of work had been carefully adjusted to them. Each man had enough space to do his work, no more. Men did not move; only materials. Each work unit, wrote an admiring observer, was “a carefully designed gear which meshes with other gears
and operates in synchronism with them, the whole forming one huge, perfectly-timed, smoothly operating industrial machine of almost unbelievable efficiency.”

The whole plant seemed in motion as parts flowed from scores of tributaries into the mighty central stream. Men seemed in constant motion from the waist up as they drilled, inserted, bolted, clipped, plucked parts from small bins at their side, moved in a precise series of steps to an exact and demanding time sequence. Mass production, according to company doctrine, reduced the “necessity for thought on the part of the worker and ... his movements to a minimum.” Thus workers were expected to act as efficiently and automatically as machines. Plant bosses, on the other hand, were not only allowed to move about but required to. They were given desks without chairs so that they had to work standing up, or preferably on the move. Casual conversations were frowned upon. An air of anxiety hung over the whole place as workers labored and bosses scrambled to meet the company injunction—produce, produce, produce.