Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (17 page)

He was nineteen when he first bought shares in the paper, later winning the remaining shares in a poker game. His innate deviousness made him an excellent poker player. Tall, handsome, dignified looking, he stood out in any gathering, and knew it. But he was not what he seemed: the ultimate hollow man, he looked more impressive than he was. “No man could be as much of a Roman senator as Harding looked,” Mark Sullivan wrote in
Our Times
. According to the
Saturday Evening Post
, Harding “needed only a toga to complete the illusion he had come out of the ancient world.”

Florence Kling was the daughter of the richest man in Marion. She was 31 and already had a daughter by a first marriage when she married Harding, then 26. His marriage was no love match but a calculated move on his part, a social as well as a financial stepping-stone. She was tall, plain, and square-jawed, “lacking any kind of charm.” Although she dressed expensively, flaunting a wilting kind of femininity, she had huge hands and moved awkwardly. She had also inherited her father’s dictatorial manner and “his determination to get what he wanted out of life.”
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Her household servants, and Harding himself, lived in constant terror of her incessant nagging. Because of her imperious manner, she was known in Marion as The Duchess, and the nickname stuck, right through to her White House years. Not surprisingly, the Hardings’ sex life did not last long, and they had no children — for Harding, a bitter disappointment. His personal charm was considerable: in early middle age he turned into a consistent, if somewhat lazy, sentimental philanderer.

As editor and owner-publisher of a small-town paper, Harding was well placed to enter state politics. “His conception of political progress was to make no enemies,” a friend noted. Partly for this reason, he became a valued member of the Republican party, then, in Ohio, dominated by forceful, unscrupulous “Tammany Hall” type personalities such as George “Boss” Cox and “Fire Engine” Joe Foraker, who ran the state like a private preserve. Harding showed little interest in the world at large: “Books did not enter into his scheme of life in any important sense. . . . He cannot fairly be called illiterate, although some of his verbiage, when he strives to attain the impressive, furnishes a sad example of the grandiloquently inept,” a local newspaperman wrote. The beginning of his speech for Taft as presidential nominee in 1912 (Taft would lose to Woodrow Wilson) — “Progression is everlastingly lifting the standards that marked the end of the world’s march yesterday and planting them on new and advanced heights today” — is a fair example of his rhetoric, which reminded H. L. Mencken, the great satirist and social critic of the time, of a “string of wet sponges” and “dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.... It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.” “It is so bad,” he wrote, “that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.”

His amiable, conciliatory record in state politics, combined with his impressive good looks and statesmanlike (if spurious) “presence”
singled him out as an above-average player, so much so that the Ohio Republican party machine encouraged him to stand as a senator. “It costs such a lot of money to live in Washington,” Florence Harding told a
Marion Star
employee. “If he was only a corporation lawyer and could pick up a lot of business on the side, I'd say yes. But he couldn’t do anything there. No: I don’t know as we can afford it yet.”
³
Harding did finally make up his mind and went to Washington in 1915, as senator for Ohio — and immediately regretted that he had not done so earlier. The Senate, as he discovered, was the most congenial club in the world for pleasure-loving, sports-loving extroverts such as himself. He enjoyed himself immensely, especially when The Duchess was not around, and failing health kept her in Marion most of the time. George B. Christian, his confidential secretary and devoted friend, writing later about these “six years of happiness,” shrewdly noted that “He didn’t like being a Senator, he liked being in the Senate.” Voting records show his attendance was sporadic, to say the least. He was far more often on the golf course, in the Senate bar, in a poker game, or out chasing women than in the chamber itself, and “his contribution to legislation was practically nil.” Like other Ohio Republicans, Harding was a consistent supporter of Prohibition only because it was a sure-fire vote-getter. But though “politically dry,” he was a steady drinker.

It was during his early political apprenticeship in Ohio that two men far more flawed than he spotted his political potential, and became his faithful aides, fixers, and boon companions. The chief usefulness of Harry Micajah Daugherty, a lawyer and failed politician, was as a veteran insider, fully conversant with the devious workings of Ohio’s notoriously corrupt Republican party machine. Infinitely more cynical and manipulative than Harding, and aware, after his own abortive career in state politics, that his real talent was that of a wheeling-and-dealing, back-room boy
éminence grise
, he soon became indispensable to Harding as both mentor and strategist. Jess Smith, twelve years younger than Daugherty (they came from the same home town, Washington State House), began handling Harding’s financial affairs in the late 1890s. The pair would play a major role in the Prohibition saga, and the unraveling of the Harding presidency must be laid at their door.

Although both were unprincipled, utterly ruthless operators, temperamentally they were very different. Daugherty had married a beautiful local heiress, but their life together was joyless; her serious health
problems soon turned him into a devoted but harassed nurse. Their son, an alcoholic, was in and out of clinics all of his adult life. A secretive political operator, quick to take advantage of the weaknesses of others, he was also on the extreme far right of his party, obsessed with the “Bolshevik peril,” seeing communist conspiracies everywhere. Ideologically, he was a striking forerunner of Senator McCarthy — his smear techniques just as outrageous.

Jess Smith, a dandy, mother’s boy, dilettante store-owner, man about town, and inveterate gossip, was Daugherty’s devoted admirer, aide, and hireling. Almost certainly homosexual, Smith left his mother’s company only once in his life, to marry Roxy Stinson, a spectacularly good-looking redhead with a showgirl’s figure. It didn’t last, and Smith went back to his mother, but he and Roxy remained firm friends. Smith frankly admitted his lack of manly, physical courage to her, and she, in turn, became, in time, and after his mother’s death, a mother-surrogate and confidante. Smith’s timorous nature made him an ideal Daugherty foil — the cringing, subservient slave-buffoon to a dominant master. The Daugherty-Smith relationship, in its brutal intimacy, is reminiscent of the protagonists in Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
. In later years, Daugherty and Smith would live together in Washington, sharing first a house, then a hotel suite, sleeping in adjoining bedrooms with the door always open, for Smith was afraid of the dark. In many respects their relations mirrored that of J. Edgar Hoover and his lifelong friend Clyde Tolson.

Daugherty and Smith were so close to Harding that he could have no secrets from them. They knew all about his philandering, including his five-year liaison with an attractive married neighbor, Carrie Phillips. They also knew about his relationship with a twenty-year-old shop-girl, Nan Britton, which began in July of 1917 (Harding was fifty-one at the time) and continued long after their child, Elizabeth Ann, was born in 1920. Harding was well aware that were this liaison to become public knowledge it would wreck his political career, and there is no doubt Daugherty and Smith took advantage of the situation, turning an already inherently weak Harding into an unwilling accomplice of their crimes.

Nan Britton wrote at length about their liaison in a book published in 1927, including a description of “the night I became his bride”
that had all of the elements of a Feydeau farce.
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They had checked into a hotel on Broadway “where his Washington friends had intimated to him that they had stopped under similar unconventional circumstances with no unpleasant consequences.” But no sooner had they made love than two men — detectives on the lookout for prostitutes — burst into the room. “They’ve got us!” was Harding’s reaction. “Let this poor little girl go,” he begged them. They told him “he should have thought of that before,” Britton wrote.

I remember he told them that I was twenty-two years old and I, not realizing that he wanted to make me as old as he safely could, interrupted him and stated truthfully that I was only twenty. To almost every argument he advanced on my behalf they answered “You’ll have to tell that to the judge.” About that time one of the men picked up Mr. Harding’s hat. Inside was his name, in gold lettering, and upon seeing the name they became calm immediately. Not only calm but strangely respectful. . . . We packed our things immediately and the men conducted us to a side entrance. On the way out Mr. Harding handed them a $20 bill. When we were in the taxi, he remarked explosively, “Gee, Nan, I thought I wouldn’t get out of that under $1,000!”

In his relationship with Nan Britton, he was both infinitely devious and extraordinarily naive. He made elaborate travel arrangements for her before her pregnancy, smuggling her into his hotel room during dozens of out-of-town senatorial speaking engagements or official business trips to New York; making reservations under assumed names, but dining with her in well-known New York restaurants; going to popular New York plays with her in crowded theaters, running considerable risk of discovery — his chief concern neither the press nor public opinion but The Duchess. At the same time he wrote her forty-page love letters promising eventual marriage and an idyllic future together. He often smuggled her into his Senate office. “He told me he liked to have me be with him in his office, for then the place held precious memories and he could visualize me there during the hours he worked alone.” In January of 1919, she would later write: “... we stayed [in his office] quite a while that evening, longer, he said, than it was wise for us to do so, because the rules governing guests in the Senate offices
were rather strict. It was here, we both decided afterwards, that our baby girl was conceived. ...”

Harding, she wrote, seemed genuinely excited by the news, and looked forward to being a father. He loved children, he said, and had always wanted a daughter. This may have been another example of Harding’s deviousness, for he never allowed Nan Britton to show him their child, though once he became president she was frequently smuggled into the White House, where they made love in a broom closet adjoining his anteroom. She too obtained her share of perks: halfway through his presidency, $75,000 was appropriated to enable her, at length, to “investigate the raw silk market in the Orient.”

Following Woodrow Wilson’s stroke in office, both Harding’s nomination as Republican presidential candidate and his subsequent election campaign also had farcical undertones. At the start of the 1919 Chicago Convention, he was no more than a favorite son, a rank outsider. There were four main contenders, all of them far more worthy presidential material. Daugherty, Harding’s campaign manager, found it difficult to raise money and openly admitted, at its start, that “poor old Warren hasn’t a Chinaman’s chance.” But during the subsequent, increasingly deadlocked convention, Daugherty worked hard in smoke-filled rooms to convince the Republican party bosses that Harding was the ideal compromise candidate. Halfway through the proceedings, George Harvey, a prominent Republican and editor of the
North American Review
, asked Harding to “tell us, in your conscience and before God, whether there is anything that might be brought up against you that would embarrass the party, any impediment that might disqualify you or make you inexpedient, as candidate or President.” Harding said he needed time to consider his reply, but a short while later, almost certainly after consulting Daugherty, told him he was clean. As Harvey then told reporters covering the convention, “There ain’t no first-raters this year. . . . Harding is the best of the second-raters.”

By the sixth ballot, it became known on the floor that, thanks to Daugherty’s efforts and patronage pledges, Harding had become the choice of the party bosses. After the eighth ballot, which showed a steep rise in the number of votes for him, the cry went up: “Climb on the bandwagon.”

He finally made it on the tenth ballot, and his singularly down-to
earth reaction, on winning the nomination, was that of a born gambler, remarkable for its lack of cant or ethical content. “I feel,” he said, “like a man who goes in with a pair of eights and comes out with aces full.”

The party bosses were unaware of Nan Britton and her daughter, but they did know about his former mistress, Carrie Phillips. They offered her a deal: an immediate lump sum ($20,000) and a monthly allowance for as long as Harding remained president, as well as a world tour for herself and her husband. She accepted immediately.

It was Jess Smith’s turn to step into the limelight. As Harding’s campaign manager, he came up with two deliberately low-key, singularly uninspiring campaign slogans: “Think of America first,” and “With Harding and back to normal.” They proved singularly effective. After the heady interventionist days of Woodrow Wilson, the trauma of the Great War, and the unprecedentedly violent coal miners’ and steel workers’ strikes of the previous year (as brutally repressed as the strike of Boston’s policemen, which had deeply shocked the public), America longed for a return to the good old days. The temptation to withdraw into a secure cocoon, as Charles Mee noted in
The Ohio Gang,
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was irresistible, and the vote for Harding, implying as it did a refusal to get involved with cynical Europeans, legitimized the American withdrawal from the League of Nations. It also explained the subliminal attraction of Prohibition, with its promise of a return not only to sobriety but to social harmony in a refreshingly simple, family-oriented, church-dominated America.