Charles R. “Bob” Forbes and his wife, Katherine Tullidge Forbes, achieved a life of normalcy after his release from Leavenworth. It was as if they had turned off a switch marked Fame-Thrill-Infamy and dimmed themselves out of public view for the next quarter-century. Meanwhile “Charlie” Forbes, his distorted mirror image, continued in press accounts, histories, and popular literature into the twenty-first century. The Harding scandals remained as moral tales, transportable to other times and political situations. Forbes published a long article soon after he left prison. But after that, as we’ll see, there was virtually no input into the continuing narrative of the Harding years from the man at the center of the Veterans Bureau scandal.
After his release from Leavenworth, Forbes testified on the problem of narcotics addiction in the Leavenworth penitentiary as a follow-up to charges he had made that drugs could be had by any prisoner who had the money to buy them. The US Department of Justice ordered a federal grand jury to be called in Kansas City, Kansas, in December 1927. Leavenworth Warden T. B. White and the regional federal narcotic agent also testified. This experience was, however, a footnote to his prison experience, not the start of a new career. Instead, Forbes spoke to reporters about his plans for a future flight to the South Pole with Dr. Frederick Cook, once Cook was released from Leavenworth. They expected to ship the plane as far south as possible and then take off for the pole, he said; two experienced pilots had already been identified. Reporters wrote down this tall tale. If only for a twinkling minute, Forbes was back in his old form.1
While Forbes was still in Leavenworth, two newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World, had commissioned him to write a feature story about the Harding administration to be syndicated by Pulitzer and the Press Publishing Company. He had pounded out his script on the typewriter he used when writing for the prison newspaper. Limits were drawn in the resulting article. There was nothing in it about the Veterans Bureau. He focused instead on descriptions of Warren Harding and his administration as he reportedly remembered them. Bob Forbes, an extrovert who had gone out of his way to blur his own past, assumed an eerie distance from his topic, as if he were a journalist who happened to have had access to the Harding White House. The article appeared on the front-page of major newspapers on Sunday, December 4, 1927, little more than a week after he left the penitentiary.2
The result was peculiar. Forbes’s messages were not the ones he said he had hoped to convey; notably, restoring Harding’s reputation. Rather, he drew on then-popular themes, such as those in the widely read novel Revelry by Samuel Hopkins Adams. The New York World made the connection explicit by telling readers in an editorial insert that Daugherty’s associate Jess Smith, whom Forbes mentioned, was “Jeff Sims” in Revelry, and reminding them that Sims was murdered (in the novel) because he “knew too much.” Forbes described a Harding who was betrayed by his friends without naming himself as one of the friends who was accused. Harding’s good qualities were weaknesses in public life, Forbes wrote, and would have destroyed him if he had lived. Forbes’s vivid, fluently written, frequently negative reminiscences of the Harding administration shored up existing concepts of the Harding administration as a gang of hard drinkers. By then, he may have been angry or simply not have cared. And he needed money. His fee was not revealed.3
The Veterans Bureau was an independent federal organization. Forbes seemed genuinely ignorant of other aspects of the administration and of what Harding did as president outside of social gatherings. His anecdotes about Harding, plucked as if from a pack of cards, were of a man who was depressed and easily fooled, a poker player offering alcoholic drinks, and, in one case, an accessory to an overtly illegal activity. That was Harding’s attendance, with other officials, at a party given by newspaper owner Ned McLean when a smuggled-in film was shown of the famous fight between heavyweights Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier (in July 1921). Dempsey won. It was illegal to transport a boxing film across state lines. Another vignette was of Christmas Day 1921, when Carolyn Votaw phoned Forbes to “come on over” to the White House because “Wernie wants to talk to you.” (Carolyn used her nickname for her brother.) Forbes found Harding alone in his office: “This is a hell of a Christmas,” Harding said, as he chewed tobacco and Forbes smoked a cigarette. Forbes asked what the matter was. Harding: “Everything is the matter.” Later in the day Forbes met Sawyer, who told him that Warren and Florence Harding had “a hell of a row this morning.” On another occasion Harding wept as the two men sat on a bench in the gardens of the White House: “he told me how unhappy he was and how empty his life had been.”
Forbes did not say in this telling, or anywhere else, what his own feelings were toward life, or examine his own doubts and failings. His reminiscences gleam mysteriously through a series of prisms: what actually happened; what Forbes remembered happening; and what he wrote when recalling the incident. He did not mention the role of Florence Kling Harding in her dedicated work for veterans or her generosity in inviting the newly arrived Kate Marcia Forbes to write about her and the White House and gave no hint as to why relations between Forbes and the First Lady apparently soured (at about the time Dr. Sawyer was attempting to stop the sale of government supplies at Perryville), or whether Forbes viewed the rift in their relationship with regret. The First Lady was Harding’s “strong-minded and ambitious wife,” who had propelled her husband to the presidency.
According to the article, Secretary Fall tricked Harding in the transfer of the oil leases, and Secretary Daugherty, the “evil genius” of the Harding administration, knew all about it. Daugherty came in for special opprobrium: he corrupted Jess Smith, used cronyism to select judges, decided pardons (many of which were for bootleggers) on the basis of the influence and pocketbooks of their friends; tampered with the office of the Alien Property Custodian, Thomas W. Miller; and put money in his own pocket. Describing himself as a “drinking man,” Forbes said his best liquor came from Daugherty’s supply, delivered under the protection of the Department of Justice to a house on H Street owned by Ned McLean. There was drinking in the private quarters of the White House, which while not illegal was not an ideal example for the populace. Mrs. Harding instructed the president’s valet: “Brooks, mix the Colonel a cocktail.” Harding kept whiskey at his home in Marion, Ohio, in the bottom section of the sideboard in the Harding dining room, with a backup supply stored at Sawyer’s White Oak Sanitarium and at the Marion Club. Forbes described a poker party on a steaming-hot day in the White House library with Harding, the host, at one end of a rectangular table, and Will Hays (the postmaster general) at the other, accompanied by Albert Lasker (chair of the Shipping Board), Harry Daugherty, Mr. and Mrs. McLean, and Colonel Forbes, while Mrs. Harding, a nonplayer, sat with them. Lasker took off his coat, revealing wide red suspenders. Hays and Forbes won the game and pocketed their winnings.
And what of the late General (Dr.) Charles E. Sawyer, Harding’s White House physician and health and welfare policy adviser? Here is Sawyer pressuring Forbes to provide a well-paying job at Perryville for the husband of Sawyer’s lady friend, who then became Sawyer’s spymaster, and Sawyer enlisting an unnamed assistant director (most likely Dr. Hugh Scott) to frame Forbes by placing several bottles of whiskey from the Perryville depot in a closet at his home, which Forbes found and sent back. Sawyer wreaked havoc in government departments. He was a “vain, strutting little creature” who “fancied that he had a great attraction for women,” and visited Harding every morning to “feel the President’s pulse and to advise a new brand of pills.”
Forbes did not explain why others believed he was one of Harding’s betrayers, but he did offer a response to criticism he said he had received for failing to testify at his trial. The answer was that his testimony would lead to unhappiness in the lives of others who were “victims of Elias H. Mortimer’s villainy” and that his innocence had been fully proved. He said nothing about his relationship with Mortimer and how he got into such a mess, though he could plainly see what happened to others who tangled with Mortimer and his ilk. Hence his statement that his good-natured friend Tom Miller, who was prosecuted with Daugherty, had been imposed on by “shrewd men who knew what they wanted and who wove about him a net of companionship for ulterior purposes.” The effect at times was to taunt readers to disbelieve him: in claiming, for example, that he could produce a witness who was still in government service, who overheard his conversation with President Harding on the occasion when, rumor had it, Harding allegedly grabbed him by the throat, and could attest that the conversation was “extremely friendly”; yet he offered no clue as to who this witness might be. Similarly, he said he had lunched at the White House after he left the Veterans Bureau and had advised Harding on this occasion not to go to Alaska on what would be his final trip. A date (even an approximate date) would have made this statement much more plausible, as Forbes must have known. He was writing as the journalist he had become in prison, tailoring his prose to his audience. And in this, he was successful.
Forbes’s article had a wide circulation. Newspapers that did not carry the full text referred to it, pulling out generic points: “Harding Duped by ‘Ohio Gang’ Says Forbes. White House Poker Party Described” (Chicago Tribune); “President ‘Betrayed by His Friends,’ Says Convicted Man’s ‘Memoirs’” (Los Angeles Times). These messages sold newspapers and were not an unfair summary of what Forbes said. The New York World reported that the article caused considerable comment in official and social circles in Washington, with particular interest in Forbes’s comments about Sawyer, who was appointed brigadier general by President Harding in the face of resistance from regular army officers and became a “sort of a bull in a china shop.” Clerks in more than one department in which Sawyer was “meddling” had reportedly hissed at him as he walked the corridors. Several senators seconded Forbes’s description of Harding as a man caught up in the self-interested agendas of others. According to Senator Lee Slater Overman, Democrat of North Carolina, who described himself as Harding’s friend: “The Forbes story is remarkable in that it tallies with the reports we used to hear around the Capitol and in hotel lobbies while those various escapades of prominent men and women of that Administration were taking place.” Quite so. Harry Daugherty remarked, “I have not personally seen the article and of course have nothing to say.”4
Because this was the most Forbes ever said in print about Harding and the social milieu of the White House, his article was to be widely used as a source for historians. With its publication, Forbes’s participation in public life was done, except for a few sightings over the years, as we’ll see. He had arrived in Washington in 1921. He retired from view as 1928 was about to begin.
As a topic, however, the Harding scandals remained in the public eye. The oil lease (Teapot Dome) hearings resumed in the Senate in January 1928, with Albert B. Fall as mouse on a treadmill. (He was convicted in October 1929 for accepting a $100,000 bribe from oilman Edward L. Doheny for leasing naval oil reserves at Elk City, California, to a Doheny corporation.) After President Coolidge announced that he would not seek the presidential nomination in 1928, old stories gained force and new ones rippled to the surface. In one, Harding signed the transfer of the oil reserves when he was drunk. The former (maladroit) Governor of Puerto Rico, E. Mont Reily, appointed by Harding, suggested that Forbes had effectively killed him: he “broke the president’s heart and thus brought him to an untimely death.” Later, loud-mouthed detective Gaston Means, after a stint in the Atlanta Penitentiary, accused Mrs. Harding of poisoning her husband. She was a “bitter, calculating, determined woman,” Means wrote, who confessed and said “I have no regrets.” A book by a young woman from Marion, Ohio, Nan Britton, added to the flames by describing her affair with Harding and the birth of their daughter Elizabeth Ann. Britton reported that “six burly New York policemen” and the agent for the Society for the Suppression of Vice, brandishing a warrant, had seized the plates and printed sheets at the press, but these had been returned to complete the process after a magistrate’s decree. As Harding’s reputation went, so did those of his discredited cronies. Images of devious fraudsters and corrupt administrations merged with those of dangerous crooks. Gangster Al Capone, one of the principals of a crime syndicate that supposedly generated $75 million a year (in 1920s dollars), left Chicago for a recuperative stint in St. Petersburg, Florida, with the message, “I’ve been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor. … I’ve given people the light pleasures, shown them a good time. … Say, the coppers won’t have to lay in the gang murders on me now.”5
Oil was a “new devil god,” wrote observer William Allen White: an industrial force that raised fortunes and encouraged speculation, powered factories and machines, and fed the urge for new, faster automobiles. In February 1928, the Senate arrested the chairman of the board of Standard Oil of Indiana for refusing to answer its questions, which he considered irrelevant. Senator Gerald P. Nye, Republican-Independent, of North Dakota warned a Boston audience that the oil scandal was the “most flagrant example” of the use of money to control the American government. Recriminations flew. Democratic Senator James A. Reed of Missouri (no relation of Senator David A. Reed, who chaired the Veterans Bureau hearings) charged President Coolidge with malfeasance in office, for protecting the “arch criminal” Harry Daugherty, acting at the “bidding of selfish interests,” and sitting “mum as an oyster,” while Fall, Denby and other senior officials ran roughshod over government.6
No one wanted to be associated with members of the Harding Gang. In March 1928, Secretary of War Dwight F. Davis released a list of certificates his department had sent everyone who had been awarded army decorations since the time of the Civil War. Forbes’s name was listed for his Distinguished Service Medal. One immediate conclusion was that he had been given the medal while in prison; others maintained that he should receive a “medal of dishonor” or the government should go to the “last extreme” to wrest the medal away. Secretary Davis parried with a political excuse: Forbes’s medal was awarded during the last Democratic administration. The now-convicted Tom Miller was working his way through the appeals courts. Though part of his argument was that he could not be convicted of conspiracy when his alleged coconspirator Harry Daugherty had been acquitted, Miller’s conviction was upheld unanimously by the US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.7
Having scored a resounding victory for the Republican Party in the 1928 election, Herbert C. Hoover was sworn in as president on March 4, 1929, a rainy day. Calvin Coolidge had left the country in apparently good order. “There was a remarkable simplicity about Coolidge that is still attractive,” historian Robert Ferrell has remarked about his presidency, “and it helped him in his moves upward politically.” But Coolidge did not understand the market speculation that was evident to those who looked for it. The New York stock market crashed in October 1929. A cascade of actions swept the economy toward collapse: rapidly rising unemployment, plunging stock values, loans called in and businesses retrenched or closed, and banks stressed to failure as individuals panicked and pulled out cash. If the business of America was business, as the famous Coolidge quote would have it, the nation was rapidly headed toward failure. Fears of insurgency, class warfare, communism, and revolution joined prospects of economic chaos. Senator David A. Reed (of the Veterans Bureau hearings) was heard to remark, in the fearful climate of the early 1930s, “If this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now.”8
Forbes had moved with his third wife, Katherine Tullidge Forbes, to California, where he became involved in oil politics at the local level. His birth family remained remarkably cohesive; in 1929, all three of his surviving siblings plus himself and his widowed mother lived within the sprawl of Los Angeles County. In Pasadena, automobiles packed bustling streets and used-car lots were full. Forbes was a proprietor of a gas station, Raymond Service, at 193–95 North Raymond Avenue. His brother-in-law, Harry Judkins, was manager of an auto accessories business. California was overproducing gasoline, and the big companies, such as Sinclair, were forcing down retail prices at the pump. In March 1929, Forbes unveiled his plan to the press to consolidate seventy independent gas stations in Pasadena—the first such merger in the United States, he said—as the first step in forming a national organization with a common code of ethics, designed to develop mass purchasing power. Forbes was president—and back to thinking big. The Los Angeles Times reported that the organization had already received its first shipments of oil and gas and that the goal was to prevent a price-cutting war in the future. No connection was made between businessman Forbes and Colonel Forbes from Washington, DC, at least immediately. But that is all that is known. Press coverage disappeared, and so did Forbes. When his mother died in 1931, Colonel and Mrs. Forbes moved back east.9
Albert B. Fall, the prime target of the national oil scandal, published his version of the Harding scandals in 1931, and Harry M. Daugherty published his version in 1932. Fall’s fifteen-part newspaper series on the Harding administration, coauthored with Magner White of the San Diego Sun, appeared in daily installments from mid- to late July 1931. Fall’s version of Warren Harding was of a sentimental man who tended to follow “instinctive intuitions” and nearly always overestimated the abilities of his closest friends. Fall said that he had declined Harding’s wish to make him secretary of state, that Navy Secretary Denby had initiated the oil lease transfers, and that he, Fall, had been ignorant of the scale of the oil deal, “astonishingly innocent.” Then “the whole thing flamed.” Yes, Fall had accepted a loan of $100,000 from Edward Doheny, plus other help from Harry Sinclair, and stupidly wrote a “false letter” about the loans when he had a high fever and was on narcotics. Doheny lent him money because he was grateful for his support of American oil production in Mexico when Fall was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Carranza government had confiscated American properties in Mexico in 1917; Fall “went to bat” for American firms as a “matter of high American principle” and saved their investments; and Doheny, a very old friend, had been the largest of the oil investors. In short, the $100,000 had nothing to do with the naval oil reserves.10
Harry Daugherty jumped into the fray with collaborator Thomas Dixon with a book that was so misleading and self-serving that it was, and has continued to be, widely discounted. A contemporary reviewer summed it up nicely: “From its pages there emerge two men [Harding and Daugherty] viciously and wrongfully attacked by their political enemies, uncomplainingly sacrificing themselves for the good of their country.” Daugherty’s Forbes was “handsome, genial, plausible and very popular,” particularly with the ladies, not dishonest, but “not big enough for the job,” and not to be trusted. Forbes’s article was a “vicious tirade against me.” Of all experiences in the White House, Daugherty wrote, the one with Forbes was “the only one that cut Harding deeply.” However, the alleged incident on which this was based happened in January–February 1923, when Daugherty was incapacitated, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and in danger of a stroke, and he was still unable to work in March and April. At least some of his memories were false.11
On the basis of what each of the three memoirists claimed, there was no common cause or camaraderie among them such as might be expected from imputed members of a “gang.” Fall saw Daugherty as his enemy, as did Forbes. Each plowed his own administrative domain: Forbes with regard to veterans’ services when organization was fractured and demand was at its peak; Fall wrapped up with conservation disputes and the contentious question of oil leases; Daugherty struggling, for better or worse, with questions of law, order, prosecutions, and civil rights. Daugherty had the most concern about sanitizing his reputation, Fall took the loftiest stance, and Forbes seemed careless of how he was viewed.
Back in the eastern United States, Bob and Katherine Forbes established homes in Washington, DC, and Boynton Beach, Florida; exactly when and how is unknown. A reporter recognized Forbes in Washington in August 1933—the first year of the Democratic administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, when new federal agencies were created in efforts to turn the economic tide. According to the press, Forbes denied rumors that he had received $17,500 from the garment trade for acting as their agent in negotiations with the National Recovery Administration (a short-lived effort to make cooperative agreements between government and major industries, ratified by negotiated trade codes). He said he had accompanied New York attorney Sidney Cohen, who represented the garment trades, to a meeting with NRA officials as “a friendly act to Cohen” and received no payment. Forbes was reportedly selling coffeepots to hotels and restaurants for a firm called Sensational Plans Company of New York. He volunteered the news that he had been gathering and organizing information for a book on his Harding days, which would be a sensation when published later in the year. Both of these stories deflected attention to New York—usefully so, if he was living in Washington. No book was ever seen.12
Katherine Tullidge Forbes reestablished connections with influential Democratic friends in Washington. She took and passed the federal civil service examinations, qualified to operate a Monroe calculating machine, and started as a statistical assistant at the newly formed Civil Works Administration (CWA) in December 1933. Apart from a brief gap after that agency was terminated in 1934, she worked for the federal government until she retired in 1957, mostly as a placement (personnel) officer at the General Accounting Office. No stranger would have recognized the retired army officer known as Colonel C. Robert “Bob” Forbes, an active member of the Chamber of Commerce in Boynton Beach, Florida (while also living in Washington), and Katherine T. Forbes, hard-working, well-connected, gracious civil servant, as the Forbes and Mrs. Mortimer portrayed in the Harding scandals. And so their lives continued, marked by work and play (sailing in Forbes’s case), visits with family and friends, joy and sadness, like the rest of us, through the 1930s and World War II.13
Charles Robert Forbes died in Walter Reed Hospital at the age of seventy-five on April 10, 1952, after a long course of cancer. Katherine Forbes organized a magnificent military funeral for the man who had put his career on the line and saved her from Mortimer’s mental and physical abuse. The funeral four days later began with a well-attended memorial service at the eighteenth-century-style Old Post Chapel at Fort Myer, next to Arlington National Cemetery. (Fort Myer was the base from which Forbes had deserted from the US Army more than half a century earlier. Since then, he had risen, fallen, and then risen again. He was home.) After the service, his coffin was carried to a horse-drawn caisson and driven in slow procession with other vehicles to ceremonials at the gravesite on a peaceful hill. Colonel Forbes was buried with full military honors, with escort and riderless horse, keening bagpipes, a resonant bugle sounding taps, and the finality of three volley shots firing a salute. Almost sixty years later his grandson Richard F. Barry recalled the funeral in detail, with, at the end, the removal of the Stars and Stripes from the coffin, its folding, and presentation to the widow, who then presented it to young Richard, telling him his grandpa would want him to have it. At least one influential Washingtonian, Leslie “Les” Biffle, secretary of the US Senate, known as the president’s “helpful pal and backstage fixer” in the Truman years (1945–1953), was noted at the reception following the ceremonies. Bob Forbes’s farewell was managed by Democrats.14
But “Charlie” lived on in print—a characterization that developed during the life of Bob, and then moved on beyond him. Historians and other serious analysts in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s accepted the betrayed president theme without question, with Daugherty and Fall as supportive stock characters: an ambitious lawyer entangled in politics and graft, from Ohio (where the phrase “Ohio Gang” embraced that state’s long-established Republican Party machine), and an arrogant westerner with frontier morals. Forbes’s image was more difficult to pin down but had the advantage of flexibility; he could be a dolt or an intelligent rogue, vain or slovenly, rough-necked or handsome, playboy or hick. He could be fixer Mortimer’s back-slapping crony, investigator O’Ryan’s crooked fool, debunker Will Irwin’s adventurer, Revelry’s high-living jester. A political scientist, writing in otherwise measured academic prose about federal health administration, burst forth with a colorful description when he got to Charles R. Forbes: “this drummer-boy-Signal Corps deserter-colonial public works executive-contractor-war hero,” also a “political-industrial adventurer” (1928). A historian referred to the novel Revelry as a “bitter but largely truthful depiction of the Harding regime under a thin veil of fiction” and stated that Forbes and his fellow conspirators looted the Veterans Bureau (1930). Frederick Lewis Allen, in what he called an “informal history” of the 1920s (1931), associated Forbes with scandals that were “juicier and more reeking” than the oil scandals. This “buccaneer of fortune” went on a “notorious junket across the country” to select hospital sites that had already been selected, while $200 million “went astray in graft and flagrant waste.” Morris Werner, in a valuable analysis of the Senate hearings on the major Harding scandals (1935), described Forbes as a “difficult, disorderly witness,” who “made every effort to blacken Mortimer’s character.” Allen quoted William Allen White’s comment that Harding was “almost unbelievingly ill-informed,” moved on to explain that Harding could not “distinguish between honesty and rascality” and was “ready to follow the lead of Daugherty or Fall or Forbes,” and referred to him as a martyred president, who may have committed suicide. White restated his views about Harding and Forbes in his biography of Calvin Coolidge (1938); namely, Harding’s “chief worry was his friends,” and he had denounced Forbes and expelled him from office. One account ratified or improved on a previous version, like elders recounting tales around a fire.15
President Hoover gave such accounts a sheen of respectability in his speech at the dedication of the Harding Memorial in Marion, Ohio, in June 1931. Honor demanded that he say something complimentary about the man he had served as secretary of commerce, but from whom he had distanced himself in the Coolidge administration; indeed, he had praised Coolidge for taking vigorous action against corruption and indicting the major malefactors. The best he could do was damn Harding with faint praise: “Here was a man whose soul was being seared by a great disillusionment. Warren Harding had a dim realization that he had been betrayed by a few of the men whom he had trusted.” He did not need to name the Judas-like friends, merely to declaim against the disloyalty and crime of betraying the public trust. Hoover had been near to Harding in his final weeks of life; thus, his assertion was taken as an accurate historical statement.16
Viewed from the economic deprivations of the 1930s, the Harding scandals belonged to a distinctly different, unreal period: the Roaring Twenties, prosperous, boozy, risqué, glamorous, corrupt, and dangerous. Repeal of national prohibition in December 1933 through the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment to the US Constitution pushed the allegedly booze-stoked Harding stories further into myth. Charles Forbes, Albert Fall, and to some extent Harry Daugherty lived on in public memory as folk villains surrounding a weak chief. Forbes was listed as an item in a historical “Mile Post” of notable events from the past. “Ten years ago today,” the Washington Post announced on March 1, 1934, “Charles R. Forbes was indicted on a bribery charge by a Chicago Grand Jury.” That was the entire message about him. He appeared in the company of two twenty-year-old items: armed Texas Rangers invading Mexico to reclaim the mutilated body of a Texas rancher, and the sixth arrest of “militant suffragette” Sylvia Pankhurst, in London, both in 1914. This squib about Forbes was an item that needed no explanation.17
The most-balanced interpreter of the Harding period in the 1930s was Washington political journalist Mark Sullivan. In June 1935, Sullivan looked for Forbes and other living participants in Harding’s twenty-nine-month administration, asking them to check facts and make suggestions on one of fifty sets of page proofs available for the sixth volume in his historical series Our Times, this one titled The Twenties. Forbes had done a vanishing act. Officials at the Veterans Administration (as the bureau was then called) told Sullivan they had no knowledge of his whereabouts. Official ignorance of where he was continued though the 1940s. After a Forbes seeker was turned away from the VA in May 1945, looking for Forbes’s heirs to settle an ownership question, someone in the office added an exasperated handwritten inscription on the file copy: “Col Forbes is not deceased! His Wash DC address is 2700 Conn Ave.”18
History belongs to the victors, it is said, but it also belongs to others who contribute to the records as history is being written, and those who keep their records for posterity. Charles R. Forbes, shucking off his past, consistently absented himself from the creation of his own public history. Mortimer had served as his chronicler at the hearings and at the trial, and Will Irwin had served those roles in between those two events. Harry Daugherty was to be a major interpreter of the Harding administration for Sullivan in the 1930s. Daugherty spent days with Sullivan and sent detailed letters, which remain in Sullivan’s archives at the Hoover Institution.
Forbes’s silence extended to the absence of his own records. Harding’s correspondence file with Forbes had reportedly been taken from the White House by Mrs. Harding and destroyed before the Forbes trial. Forbes took his personal files with him when he left the Veterans Bureau—a stack of papers five or six inches thick—and he must have had other documents. It is still possible some of these may emerge (scholarly detectives are always optimistic), but they were most likely discarded as he moved on with his life or thrown away after his and Katherine’s deaths. Katherine Forbes died in California in 1967 after having been disabled for several years. Her nephew Thomas H. Tullidge remembered accompanying his father, the George Tullidge who was once connected with Forbes’s failed import-export business, to clean out the Forbes storage unit in Washington, and objecting—to no avail—as his father tossed out files without examining what was in them. Sufferers are unlikely to keep reminders of unpleasant periods. Mark Sullivan summarized initial reactions to rumors about the Harding scandals: “Some cynically believed all. Others, their sensibilities wounded, hating to believe but unable to deny, refused to talk about them or listen to them.”19
Sullivan did the best he could with available sources. The former chair of the Senate committee on the Veterans Bureau, Senator David A. Reed, wrote forcefully to him along familiar lines: “Mr. Harding was a very poor judge of men and his blind loyalty to those whom he considered to be his friends was a horrible handicap to him.” And again: “I was with Mr. Harding when Dr. Sawyer brought back from Perryville conclusive evidence that Forbes was grafting in the crudest possible manner. Harding was in tears. He had completely forgotten that he had ever been warned about Forbes and the shock of his disclosure had nearly broken his heart.” Another respondent, Charles G. Dawes, supported his old friend, the late Dr. Sawyer, and praised his “initiative and consequent discovery of Forbes’s dishonesty.” Taking various views into account, Sullivan came up with a Forbes who was a breezy, glib go-getter, compounded of “animal energy and a shrewd workaday knowledge of applied psychology, which a decade later came to be known as ‘muscling in.’” Forbes was a superb “muscler-in,” Sullivan wrote. “To his skill in that art he owed his lone-handed capture of one of the best jobs Harding had to bestow.”20
This was a valiant attempt to acknowledge that the real Forbes must have been smart and in many ways effective, but in retrospect it, too, is unsatisfying. If Forbes had had a shrewd knowledge of applied psychology, he could have avoided the mess he ended up in. The problem was that he did not have the psychological insight to understand the motives of others, including those of Mortimer and Sawyer, whose motives were practically worn on their sleeves. If Forbes had muscled-in successfully for the job he wanted, he would not have served at the War Risk Bureau but on the Shipping Board or somewhere else more to his taste. Harding shoehorned him into the job. If the War Risk Bureau and the Veterans Bureau were such great jobs, where were the better-qualified candidates clamoring to take them? Why did Harding have to fall back on someone with Forbes’s limited experience, after failing to inspire a General Leonard Wood or a General Charles G. Dawes? Forbes did not see the job as a plum.
Other descriptions followed. Samuel Hopkins Adams, author of Revelry, came back to put a final gloss on how the Harding scandals were presented in the 1930s and beyond, in a history of the life and times of President Harding entitled Incredible Era (1939) and marketed as “the story of our Great Speakeasy Age and its rococo leader.” To provide some gravitas, he used the notes and help of a graduate student at Syracuse University, Harold F. Alderfer, who had chosen Warren Harding as his thesis topic. The assessments of the two men were close. For Alderfer, Harding was “no leader”; he “played personal politics all his life,” and although he tried to change he could not bring himself to “oust his former friends,” and Daugherty and Forbes were friends, linked together in the game of spoils. Adams cautioned the reader that he relied on hearsay as well as facts, but having said that, he was free to roam. Forbes was a “fine flower of Capital night-life,” who in Hawaii “cannily laid the foundations of a friendship that was to close in catastrophe.” Mrs. Harding was a dupe, who “fell for his camaraderie, his boisterous, high-pitched familiarity, his flattering hand on her arm and his jovial ‘Hello, Duchess. What about a little drink for a thirsty hombre?’” Charlie was known for “entertaining royally.” There was “glorious whoopee” on the western trip, including a swimming party in full evening dress. Harding’s disillusion because of Forbes’s betrayal drove him to make his final trip to Alaska. Harding “died in time,” relieved of his burdens.21
On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes bombed the active American base at Pearl Harbor, Forbes’s old workplace, precipitating American entry into World War II. With the upheavals and tragedies of a new war, it would be reasonable to expect stories of the Harding scandals to die a natural death, but they did not. They lived on as examples of corruption, greed, and dangers to the body politic, ready as a touchstone for subsequent scandals, elections, and presidential administrations. In 1948, a popular history defined the Harding scandals as warnings of new dangers of right-wing extremism, conspiratorial relationships among America’s leaders, and ever-present threats from gangs of crooks: Secretary Fall and the “boys from Ohio” were “as unsavory a gang of psychopaths and thieves as ever invaded a national capital this side of the Balkans.” Among them, “drunken Charley Forbes.” In 1952, a journalist questioned whether corruption was as bad under Harding as it was then and concluded that the 1950s were much worse because in the Harding scandals there was no “covering up,” no “tucking it under the bed,” but vigilance in federal affairs, with malefactors punished—and seen to be punished. And so the stories continued.22
Even when revisionist histories of Harding appeared in the later twentieth century and early decades of the twenty-first century, including those by Robert K. Murray and John W. Dean, the secondary characters were taken as given, except for the role of Albert Fall, who received attention through historical interest in the oil politics of Teapot Dome. An Internet search in 2015 repeated the old stories of Charlie Forbes as a “dashing playboy” who embezzled approximately $200 million selling hospital supplies, took kickbacks from contractors, and accepted a $5,000 bribe in the Drake Hotel, Chicago, and that Harding allowed him to leave the country to escape prosecution.23
President Hoover took credit for an “entire revolution” in veterans’ affairs, including the transformation of the Veterans Bureau into the Veterans Administration in 1930 by incorporating the separate National Homes for disabled volunteer soldiers and the Pensions Bureau into the new VA, with each keeping its special status—though this was a relatively simple piece of government reorganization compared with what Forbes had to do. Hines’s title changed to administrator instead of director. By the end of the Hoover administration in March 1933, 853,000 disabled, sick, and destitute veterans or their dependents were receiving federal benefits compared with 376,000 at the beginning of his administration.24
Like his two Republican predecessors, President Hoover resisted continuing pleas for full cash payment of the soldiers’ bonus, though laws had been relaxed to allow borrowing on the value of what was effectively a life insurance policy, payable on death or in 1945. In a now familiar story, in the early summer of 1932, a “Bonus Army” estimated at 40,000 veterans and their families arrived in Washington, DC, via truck and train, settling on the flats across the Anacostia River as they waited in vain for Congress to give them their full cash benefits. Settlers were forcibly removed by armed cavalry, tanks, and infantry of the US Army, led by General MacArthur and his aide Major Dwight Eisenhower—soldiers against former soldiers, soldiers against civilians, in a totally overmatched, small-scale civil war. “I can see the soldiers now, rushing here and there with torches,” a journalist remembered in horror: “The fire crackled and the flames rose and the smoke billowed upward.” Veterans finally received the $1,000 bonus (or what was left of it after borrowing against the certificate) in 1936. President Harding had chosen to build veterans’ services, including hospitals, as an alternative to the bonus. In the end, the veterans got both. The bonus issue was finally settled, while the veterans’ health system grew.25
After World War II, the Veterans Administration reorganized its hospitals, creating major affiliations between VA hospitals and medical schools that emphasized scientific research and education. In theory, by bringing veterans hospitals into the medical and technological mainstream, services to all veterans would be enhanced by providing them with the “best.” That was the creed of Colonel Forbes for services to veterans of World War I, when the most urgent long-term needs were hospitals for psychiatry and tuberculosis.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the US Department of Veterans Affairs operated more than 150 hospitals, 120 nursing home units, and 800 community-based clinics for military veterans, provided specialty training opportunities for a majority of US physicians and conducted major biomedical and health care research programs, plus other programs, in facilities located across the American subcontinent. That remarkable set of developments can be seen in the long-ago hopes, actions, and accomplishments of Colonel Forbes.26