On a beautiful Friday morning, March 4, 1921, two men settled into the back of a luxurious open limousine outside the White House in Washington, DC. Democrat Woodrow Wilson, in his last day in office after eight years as president, sat on the right-hand side, where the stroke-ravaged left side of his face was less visible to spectators; Republican Warren G. Harding, president-elect sat on the left, looking sun-bronzed and healthy from a Florida vacation. The sun shone out of a cloudless sky, but the temperature was a few degrees above freezing. Both men wore winter coats and black silk top hats. The convertible top of the automobile was folded neatly down behind the two riders, framing them like a ceremonial ruff. They were about to demonstrate the peaceful transition of leadership in American democracy—no matter what disruptive currents surged beneath the surface—by riding in procession along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, where Harding would be sworn in as the twenty-ninth president of the United States and would deliver his inaugural address. The two men barely knew each other except by political reputation, and that was mutually negative.1
Woodrow Wilson was a member of a white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant social elite whose members chatted with one another at exclusive New York clubs, weddings, funerals, and college reunions. His face was long, forehead noble, hair smoothly parted; he carried his clothes well. He had been governor of New Jersey before assuming the presidency and president of Princeton before that. He had earned his PhD from Johns Hopkins University, studying congressional government. He had been outmaneuvered and outplayed in negotiations with his more wily and self-interested French and British counterparts (Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd-George) at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, but even his most severe critics there admired his aristocratic bearing and “finely cut” head and features. When animated and in good health, Wilson was lively, enthusiastic, charismatic, and playful, a man of keen glance and winning smile. At other times, his seriousness was enhanced by the habitual rimless pince-nez that perched across his nose, substituting for more substantial eyeglasses.2
Warren Harding came up in the scrappy, deal-making world of entrepreneurship and practical politics in Republican-proud Ohio, where he published and edited the Marion Star and firmed up his political career, serving stints as a state senator and lieutenant governor before becoming a US senator. Harding, with a profile that could be imprinted on a Roman coin, was both complimented and belittled by the oft-quoted comment that (at least) he “looked like a president.” He was known for being kind, watching baseball, playing poker and golf; for his open manner, resonant voice, and nonconfrontational disposition. He had found it useful to downplay his abilities. Harding was a skilled practitioner in the arts of persuasion, cooperation, compromise, and conciliation and, when advisable, deflection of attention from the subject at hand. His strategic intelligence, judgment, and people skills tended to be underrated. He ran for election as the Republican candidate for president in 1920 against Democrat James M. Cox in a brilliantly organized campaign and won 60 percent of the popular vote. Broadway star Al Jolson wrote the words and music for the Republican campaign song, “Harding, You’re the Man for Us,” and organized actors to campaign for Harding, including, among many others, movie stars Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks.3
Among other changes, the change in administration was a change in personal styles. Wilson was a Presbyterian, Harding a Baptist from a family that later became Seventh-day Adventists. Harding’s sister Carolyn married an Adventist missionary, Heber H. Votaw, whom Harding made superintendent of prisons. Racism figured in both Wilson’s and Harding’s stories, but for quite different reasons. In 1920, Harding was the target of accusations that he had “Negro blood” through an African American great-grandmother, a politically damaging assertion at the time. Federal agents seized virtually all the copies of the accusing pamphlets, but the issue remained as a potential scandal. (Almost a century later, after speculation that Harding could be celebrated as the first black president of the United States, DNA testing found the rumors to be without foundation.) Wilson showed the D. W. Griffith movie The Birth of a Nation (1915), an overtly racist film that included hooded white members of the Ku Klux Klan as heroes and African Americans as villains to an invited audience at the White House and made no critical public comments on it.
Wilson had met and married his second wife while in office. The married Warren Harding had had an affair with a married friend, Carrie Phillips (proved by letters that surfaced in 1973), in his hometown of Marion, Ohio. In 1919, he fathered a love child with Nan Britton, a woman in her early twenties who had had a crush on him since she was fourteen and at school in Marion, where Harding’s younger sister Abigail was her teacher. According to Britton, their affair continued while Harding was in the White House. Florence Kling Harding had a son from an earlier relationship and legitimated that relationship by a formal divorce. But these matters were not generally known in 1921. A scandal is only a scandal when made public.4
Woodrow Wilson’s public image and his recent tragic life formed an essential backdrop to Harding’s projected image as he took over. Lacking Senate approval of the League of Nations in 1919, Wilson had decided to get the support of ordinary voters by taking his message out across the nation. Illness defeated him. He could not complete the arduous cross-country train trip he had undertaken and returned to Washington. A major stroke in October 1919 left him incapacitated and confined to the White House. Though his mind was clear and he could walk very slowly with a cane by the time of Harding’s inauguration, he was still physically and emotionally impaired. His left arm and leg were weak, and his eyes readily dropped tears. It was this man, not the vigorous leader of earlier years, who rode to the Capitol in March 1921. Helped from his wheelchair at the White House he was lifted into the backseat of the limousine. On request, photographers put down their cameras during these transitions.
Wilson’s prewar administration had extended the regulatory role of the federal government through the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, and introduced an income tax. He had also segregated federal offices by race (white and black). After he took the United States into World War I in April 1917, Wilson oversaw powerful new federal agencies to mobilize, redirect, and manage resources for war, then brought the nation through war to the Armistice (ceasefire) in November 1918, and on into international discussions for peace. The Treaty of Versailles, formally ending World War I, was signed on June 28, 1919. The proliferation of executive agencies during the war, following previous expansion in the executive functions of the federal government, was followed again by the dissolution of many but not all of the wartime agencies after the war. Two that continued were the US Shipping Board and its shipbuilding business, which was still gearing up production when armistice was declared; and the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, which managed the postservice benefits of World War I military veterans. Even with what was left, the federal government was a huge, unwieldy collection of centers with specialized missions, some of which duplicated or overlapped with others. The incoming Harding administration was faced with two generic questions on the “administration” part of the Harding agenda: (1) the size and complexity of the executive and (2) its authority versus Congress. The first was represented by proposals for government efficiency, accountability, and reform—an agenda that echoes into the present. The second centered on how Congress would exercise its legislative and investigative roles as a check to a powerful executive.
Observers regarded Harding from a wide variety of perspectives, both before and after the inauguration. It was not that he was a chameleon—his behavior and his policies were quite consistent—rather, he evoked varying responses from different quarters. For the highly educated idealist, Harding was ill-educated and directionless, a small-town American with small-town capabilities and less-than-perfect manners. In contrast, his successful maneuvering to get elected suggested a man who was shrewd and goal directed. Washington social doyenne Alice Roosevelt Longworth famously proclaimed Harding a “slob.” The less aristocratically born, wealthy social leader Evalyn Walsh McLean, wearer of the Hope Diamond, disagreed. Her Harding, a loyal friend, was a “stunning man,” despite his habit of chewing tobacco, “biting from a plug that he would lend, or borrow,” and not caring “if the whole world knew he wore suspenders.” The socialist politician Eugene V. Debs was an inmate at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta in March 1921 for promulgating socialist views during the Great War; Wilson had not pardoned him. Harding released him on December 24, together with twenty-three other political prisoners, declaring, “I want him to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife,” and invited him to the White House for a chat on December 26.5
The opinions of eminent Americans who supported Harding, advised him, and served in his cabinet were positive overall. Multimillionaire Andrew W. Mellon accepted Harding’s invitation to become secretary of the treasury; approved of Harding’s platform of “normalcy,” “honest money,” “sound finance,” and freeing business from undue regulation; and worked hard to resolve the financial crisis of 1921 as the nation reeled under the impact of the national debt (incurred by the war), the collapse of wartime demand, unacceptably high unemployment, and a chaotic tax structure. Although Mellon was cool toward Harding, whom he would reportedly not have employed in his own business, he enjoyed the trust Harding placed in him. Harding, in turn, considered Mellon inadequate as a politician. Herbert C. Hoover, Harding’s secretary of commerce (and a future president), praised Harding for standing up to bankers when he demanded supervision of their foreign loans; standing up to the steel industry when he pressed for the abolition of the twelve-hour day and seven-day week; and vetoing an overly stringent farm bill. Hoover gave Harding a mixed personal review, which included after-the-fact disapproval of Harding’s poker-playing “cronies”—a loaded word denoting socially unacceptable acquaintances. But he also recalled: “Harding encouraged me in everything I wanted to do. I never knew him to give a promise he did not keep.” Harding’s administrative style was to choose people he thought would do a good job and let them get on with it.6
Albert D. Lasker, who achieved fame and fortune in the advertising business but took a two-year stint as head of the troubled Shipping Board at Harding’s request, considered him “a man of utmost integrity, a man to whom you could unbutton your thoughts and your soul.” (Harding told Lasker, “You are the only, single, solitary man I have around me that doesn’t want something.”) Charles G. Dawes, a successful Chicago banker, was sufficiently impressed by Harding to create (in June 1921) the first federal budget and standardize business methods across federal departments. His assessment of Harding: “Deliberate, when time is not the essence of decision, he has the quality of almost instantaneous action when it is.” For Dawes, Harding was the “ideal chief of the business machine of the government.” He sought strong, decisive leaders and expected them to exercise initiative, making it clear over his first year in office that his goal was not a weaker government but a better one. The restoration of normalcy in the world “must come through the initiative of the executive branch of Government,” he told Congress in December 1921.7
Perhaps the best summary of Harding that was made during the time he was president was by well-known Washington journalist Mark Sullivan in July 1922, after plenty of time to observe him. Sullivan remarked on two of Harding’s important characteristics: On one hand, he was a “real politician” with a gift for telling stories, creating an atmosphere, and raising a laugh. On the other, he “made the impression of a cool capacity.” He needed all the coolness and capacity he could summon. The year 1921 was distinguished by postwar malaise, discontent, disillusion, a “kind of fretful sullenness,” the sense of living in a “cock-eyed” world. Drinking and flouting the liquor laws, weak moral character, suspect status as an immigrant or alien, wartime corruption, sexual freedom, greed, lackluster government, and stereotyped messages from the culture at large wove together, fanning fears for the moral fabric of the nation. Woodrow Wilson had won the war; Warren Harding was left with its effects.8
Wilson’s negative views of Harding stemmed at least in part from Harding’s membership on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which opposed Wilson’s commitment to the new League of Nations, more specifically, American participation in it. For Wilson, the League of Nations was a necessary vehicle for establishing lasting peace; quite simply, it was the right thing to do. For his international efforts, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. However, in the United States, foreign relations meant fostering advantageous trade, not bailing out failing nations. The war had fostered exclusiveness, self-interest, and a narrowly defined “Americanism.” The Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Henry Cabot Lodge, revised Wilson’s document to provide safeguards to block perceived threats to American independence, and these “reservations” were a possible vehicle for negotiation, but Wilson would not budge. At a meeting of the committee at the White House in August 1919, Harding asked what Wilson meant when he said that moral claims outranked legal claims with respect to the league and relationships with other nations—not an unfair question, though Wilson thought he had already explained this satisfactorily. Afterward, Wilson described Harding to cabinet member David F. Houston as having “a disturbingly dull mind … it seemed impossible to get any explanation to lodge in it.” He had not changed his opinion since. Houston, who had studied political science at Harvard, took a similar view of Harding’s “mediocre mind and ordinary standards of thinking.” In another observation, this time on Harding’s style of leading from below through consensus rather than setting directions from above, Wilson asked, “How can he lead when he does not know where he is going?” The idealistic preacher and the practical politician could not (or would not) understand each other. Wilson was a man of his class, working for “the faith in which I was bred and which it is my solemn purpose to stand by until my last fighting day.” Harding was a man of his class, too, mobilizing effort in the trenches of politics and seeking divine guidance through the Psalms of David and passages in the Gospels; and “there’s still wisdom in the sayings of old Solomon.” Warren G. Harding had studied at a small Ohio college. He was not a member of the university-educated upper class.9
For journalists and cartoonists writing about a people “tired of men with burning convictions” and “more or less afflicted with moral shellshock,” Harding was a gift. Negative views of government or the war had been banned during wartime. Afterward, official Washington offered numerous opportunities to be sardonic, superior, or satirical. Woodrow Wilson aimed to “make the world safe for democracy” but was felled by the forces of democracy at home. Warren Harding rode in under the banner of a “return to normalcy” when there was no such thing. Writers embraced the idea that Americans were living in a fictional world—like characters in a novel or a movie. Senators moved in a “region of fictions,” a popular pundit observed: “They represent the Republican party, when there is no Republican party, no union of principles, no stable body of voters, no discipline, no clear social end to be served.” The Democrats were no better, a squabbling band of sectional interests. The art of “ballyhoo” (salesmanship or showmanship) was a fruitful theme; particularly, ballyhoo as a distinctive feature of the nation’s commercialized national press, fed by ubiquitous press agents. The papers were “an escape, a thrill, an opiate,” their stories given “trade-mark identification” to make them similar to the human interest story in a confession magazine. Dramatic stories—murder, adultery, arrests, betrayals—sold newspapers and upped their advertising revenues.10
The wartime Committee on Public Information had shown how efficiently public opinion could be developed and manipulated. Its title was a good one for control of news and opinions and firing up patriotism. The committee’s expertly managed wartime propaganda machine, based on the latest advertising and communications techniques, drew on talented writers, actors, illustrators, and others. Its campaign to sell war bonds included standardized four-minute pep talks delivered by trained speakers in the nation’s ubiquitous movie theaters. Sales messages permeated America’s postwar culture of consumerism. Stock characters and emotive themes influenced the public’s views. A serious study of public opinion explained that humans view reality in terms of stereotypes, including familiar plots and unifying themes, through stories invented and transmitted in social settings, which become what “everyone” believes. The dismal chaos of the modern world was more manageable when viewed through common prisms. Newspapers, tabloids, plays, movies, and popular songs circulated stereotypes: the romantic hero, the gangster and the mob, the flapper for whom “anything goes,” the corrupt government official, the wicked wife, the predatory male driven by sex and the liberation of the “id,” the “rough-and-ready hail-fellow-well-met, who is anybody’s match at a story-telling contest.”11
Warren Harding was the “modern type” of what is meant as “typically American”; namely, “the Square head, typical of that American whose artistic taste is the movies, who reads and finds mental satisfaction in the vague inanities of the small town newspaper, … who has his car and his bank account and can sell a bill of goods as well as the best of them.” Sinclair Lewis published a best-selling novel, Babbitt (1922), along these lines. In 1921, F. Scott Fitzgerald worked on a play, The Vegetable: Or, from President to Postman, based on stereotypes (the president, the postman, the general, the flapper, the bootlegger). His play opened in Atlantic City on November 19, 1923, but closed almost immediately. The timing was awkward, not long after Harding’s unexpected death, and farce was not his métier, but the play includes a very funny spoof of a rambling, “bloviating” Harding speech. Elsewhere, Harding was the “the oldest of stage heroes, Everyman”; his interior secretary Albert B. Fall, was a “stage sheriff of the far West in the movies.” Their selves were to vanish behind these alternative realities. That was to be true of Charles R. Forbes, too, when he accepted Harding’s gift of a job and came to work in Washington, DC.12
Warren Harding arrived in Washington on March 3, the day before the inauguration, in the early afternoon by special train from his hometown of Marion, Ohio, accompanied by supporters and friends. He talked Pennsylvania Railroad officials into speeding up the trip by traveling nonstop between Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore, Maryland (a “first” in the railroad’s history), and thus arrived half an hour earlier than expected. He and his wife were met at Union Station by Vice President-Elect Calvin Coolidge and his wife, Grace, and other official greeters, backed up by a cheering crowd. Two hours later, while Harding was engaged in a round of meetings with visitors and newspaper correspondents at the Willard Hotel, a vanload of Harding belongings arrived at the main entrance of the White House while the Wilsons were still in residence. A reporter described these as tagged boxes and bundles, some labeled “President,” some “Hon. W.G. Harding,” some “President-Elect.” They included his golf clubs.
At a meeting with fifty or so reporters, Harding firmed up the image of accessibility and friendliness he hoped to maintain as president, a contrast with Wilson’s remoteness. He reminded them that he was “just a newspaperman myself” and asked for their cooperation. He came off well. As one reporter put it, “It is a mighty solemn affair to see the greatest and most powerful government the world has ever known turned over to new untried hands. And it was impossible not to feel a great gratitude that the hands were the big, rough capable hands of this slow, sweet, big Middle Westerner.”13
There was much to do. The Republican Party was riven with competing constituencies and conflicting views, including those of the crusading “America-first” conservatism of Senator Hiram Johnson of California, the belligerence of Senator William E. Borah of Idaho, and the Progressive outlook of Senator Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette, Sr., of Wisconsin. One of Harding’s main tasks was to keep the party together to ensure that needed legislation was actually achieved by a Republican congress and a Republican president. Harding expressed his aspirations for a more peaceful, satisfying life at home, which might be achieved in unexpected ways, and it largely was, eventually, and via rising prosperity—but not until the administration of Calvin Coolidge. In 1921, it was impossible to define as normal a world swept by periodic waves of political hysteria. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had overseen anticommunist raids and arrests during the Red Scare of 1919, in which vast and evil conspiracies seeking to overthrow the government were conjured, civil liberties dismissed, and Americans were encouraged to spy on their neighbors. Under prohibition enforcement bribes and offers of bribes were commonplace and conspiracy and corruption spread insidiously. “Undesirable aliens” and even native-born Americans (such as socialist leader Eugene Debs, who was born in Indiana) had been imprisoned for the expression of “un-American” ideas.
Two million mostly young Americans who had been drafted and sent to fight in France were home, and they, together with another two million demobilized conscripts who had worked in the United States, competed with other laid-off workers for scarce jobs. Many, if not most, war veterans reintegrated into civilian life quietly and apparently successfully. Men who had been plucked from home and subjected to low-paying jobs and military discipline in the United States were understandably resentful when they saw workers in the private sector get high wages in the war economy. African Americans who had fought for their country faced continuing segregation at home. Needy and disabled veterans were angry and frustrated, even defeated, by the barrier-like red tape of applications between them and the federal benefits to which they were entitled. Bands of veterans suffering from tuberculosis wandered in Arizona and other mountain states looking for somewhere to be treated—high altitudes and dry climates being touted for improved health. Frantic families struggled to cope with a family member who had returned from the war with psychiatric problems, without having to consign him (for veterans were almost always men) to an unacceptable state or local mental asylum. A more general movement, led by the newly formed American Legion, pressed for a special payment to all veterans who served to compensate for wages they had lost by not being able to participate in the civilian war economy. This soldiers’ bonus was a controversial political issue inherited by Harding, with huge costs involved if granted, and it would not go away.
Still, the mood was festive in the nation’s capital as Harding arrived in town, even though there were fewer out-of-town visitors than there might have been because Harding had firmly squelched efforts by the inauguration committee to create an extravaganza of inaugural balls and over-the-top decorations. Extravagance was not the right message to send. The town looked good. Floodlights illuminated the Capitol’s great dome to magnificent effect, signifying the grandeur of official Washington, the authority vested by the Constitution in the US Congress and, not least, the promise of a stabilized new America powered by electricity. Illuminating the eastern sky, in competition to the lighting of the Capitol, a huge electric sign flashed the message, “Jesus, the Light of the World.” An on-the-spot reporter for the Los Angeles Times observed, “A stranger to our ways might be in doubt whether the impending event [the inauguration] was to be something Scriptural or something political, so equally do the lights shine.” It was not clear to anyone what the change of administration would mean. On the east front of the Capitol, shivering sightseers could hear the amazing acoustics of the new “voice magnifier” (loudspeaker system) being tested out for Harding’s speech on the morrow—the first inaugural speech to be recorded and transmitted by radio and the first that bystanders could actually hear. On Wilson’s inauguration for his second four-year term in March 1917, shadowed by the apparent inevitably of entry into World War I, a stiff wind blew his words away.14
Near the Potomac River, the great Lincoln Memorial was in its final stages of construction, with its phalanx of columns, one for each state, and massive statue of a godlike seated Lincoln looking out across the Reflecting Pool toward the Washington Monument. Three presidents, three wars, symbols in history: George Washington and American independence, Abraham Lincoln and the end of the Civil War; Woodrow Wilson and World War I, marking America’s involvement in a world war begun by others. And now there was a new president. But these were serious thoughts. This was a time to celebrate.
Visitors who were getting chilled could find a movie as exciting as anything on the political scene—and backed dramatically by live musicians. At Crandall’s Metropolitan, F Street at 10th, The Scoffer was playing: “Seldom has the screen revealed such a torrent of power as surges through this masterful drama of man’s hate against man’s fear; woman’s perfidy against girl’s love, and scoffer’s skill against God’s might. A burst of vivid realism that mental weaklings will not enjoy.” At Loews Columbia, Mae Murray starred in The Gilded Lily: “The story of a greater love that arose from the ashes of an unworthy sacrifice.” Officer 666 was at the Rialto, and there was always Charlie Chaplin in The Kid, as well as other entertainments. There were no open bars because of the Volstead Act (Prohibition). A week before, in the biggest liquor raid yet in Washington, federal agents made fifty arrests—mostly hotel bellhops trading caramel-doctored alcohol as whiskey. Still, someone might know someone who knew where one could get a drink.15
Warren Harding had been busy between the election in November and the inauguration in March. First, a vacation with his wife in Brownsville and Point Isabel, Texas, with a party that included influential Washington socialites Edward “Ned” and Evalyn McLean. Then on to inspect the Panama Canal with two fellow US senators, following concern that the area had inadequate military protection. In Panama City, Harding pledged brotherhood with President Belisario Porras of the Panama Republic and turning his face from Europe declared his hope that the Americas, North, Central, and South, would be united peacefully in cooperation by which he meant through trade. Sailing home via Jamaica, he made similarly friendly comments to the British governor there, Sir Leslie Probyn. On arrival back in the United States at the naval base at Norfolk, Virginia, Harding’s welcome included a flight of army planes and seaplanes that accompanied his ship to the dock. A special edition of the Washington Post was parachuted down, and aerial photos flown back to the capital. Here were presidential trappings indeed for a man who was still a US senator. But that career was shortly to be ended.16
On December 6, 1920, Senator Harding spoke before the Senate for the last time as a senator and asked legislators to clear the legislative books, cooperate with him, be tolerant of one another, and “give the best that is in all of us.” Nice sentiments, but too much to expect. He discussed the issues facing the country, receiving applause from both sides of the aisle. He then left for his home in Marion, Ohio, where he conducted a series of interviews and discussions with Republican leaders, potential cabinet members, and, in his words, “the best minds and intellects in this great country.” Harding announced his new cabinet on February 21, 1921, but there were still ambassadorships and numerous other appointments to make. According to one report, there were 690,000 individuals on the executive rolls in December 1920, not including the military and judicial and legislative lists. Most positions were under civil service regulation, but 240,000 could be seen as potential patronage appointments for Republicans. Harding would be “the greatest job dispenser in the world.”17
The Harding cabinet was generally praised as an expert and dedicated group. In the light of what happened later, the two most problematic cabinet appointments were of Harding’s political supporter, Ohio corporate lawyer Harry M. Daugherty, appointed as attorney general, and Harding’s friend in the Senate, Senator Albert B. Fall, as secretary of the interior. Daugherty, then in his early sixties, garnered suspicion from the beginning. He had managed Harding’s successful campaigns for the Senate in 1914 and for the Republican nomination for president in 1920. (The campaign for the presidential election was run by Will Hays.) Broad chested, with a large nose in a plumpish face, sharp eyes, receding hair, and flashing smile, Harry Daugherty was known for his bulldog methods and his skills as a political operator, deal-maker, and schmoozer. When attacked, Daugherty stood his ground and swung back at his opponent.18
Albert B. Fall, also in his early sixties, was a more promising appointment. Former President Theodore Roosevelt described him as “the kind of public servant of whom all Americans should feel proud.” Herbert Hoover wrote Fall on his resignation from government in March 1923, well before charges of scandal circulated about the leasing of government oil reserves to corporate friends, that the department had “never had so constructive and legal a headship as you gave it.” Born in Kentucky, Fall was indelibly linked with New Mexico, where he had been a cowboy, a farmhand, a miner, and a prospector and where he learned to use and carry a gun. He passed the bar exam in New Mexico; developed a law practice based on Mexican ranching, mining, and development; and was elected to the US Senate as a Republican when New Mexico became the forty-seventh state in 1912. Harding recognized him as knowledgeable about Latin America and the American West and as a man with a first-rate personal reputation. With erect posture, gray-brown eyes, a straight nose, and an arrestingly bushy, well-trimmed mustache whose ends curled down each side of his mouth, Secretary Fall had an authoritative western look, which he cultivated by wearing a string tie and wide-brimmed black hat. He could have served as a character in a cowboy movie that starred Tom Mix as noble hero, with Tony his faithful horse.
Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby was a third cabinet member who ran into trouble later for his role in the Harding administration, specifically, for allowing (or not knowing about) the transfer of what became the infamous government oil leases from the navy to the Interior Department. In 1921, Denby, too, was regarded as a strong leader. Herbert Hoover described him as one of five cabinet members who “stood above the others.” Attacks on Denby were “among the cruelties of the times,” Hoover wrote; he was driven from the Coolidge cabinet by “political persecution and public hysteria.” Unfortunately for themselves, both Fall and Denby were to crumble when subjected to hard-swinging accusations of malfeasance by a Senate investigative committee. Denby resigned. Decisiveness alone was not enough.19
Outside of cabinet positions were many who deserved a lesser, but still prominent, recognition: men such as Scott C. Bone, who served as the campaign’s director of publicity in New York; E. Mont Reily of Kansas City, whose contribution seems mostly to have been his early and continuing enthusiasm for Harding; and Charles R. Forbes, for whom Harding had a special affection and respect. Harding had observed Forbes’s work as chief territorial development officer for the governor of Hawaii, had seen him in Washington when he gave testimony about Hawaii to congressional committees, had been in touch with him during the war and after, and appreciated his work for the primary campaign on the West Coast. He had risen in life by his own efforts—though exactly what those were no one knew. He lacked a pedigree, and that mattered as government was becoming more professionalized and American society more formally stratified by education and social class.
Such was the state of affairs when Harding took a needed vacation, before taking on the weight of the presidency.
Inauguration day came and went. The procession arrived at the Capitol with due pomp—cavalry, army vehicles, motorcycles, marchers, bands. Woodrow Wilson entered the Capitol through a side door to avoid climbing a formidable flight of steps, greeted people, and signed last-minute legislation in the President’s Room, next to the Senate chamber. Then, frail and having done his duty, Wilson declined to participate in Harding’s inauguration ceremony and was driven to his new home on S Street.
Among the bills Wilson signed on his last day in office was an act for an appropriation of $18.6 million for the construction of federal hospital beds for World War I veterans, a topic that was soon to figure prominently in the life of Charles R. Forbes. However, this 1921 law, the first Langley Act (Public Law 66-284), named after the Congressman John W. Langley whom Forbes had met in Hawaii, was passed long before Forbes became responsible for veterans hospitals. The new treasury secretary, Andrew W. Mellon, implemented the legislation. Because appropriate beds for the treatment of war veterans with tuberculosis were of urgent concern, Mellon sent for an expert in that field from his hometown of Pittsburgh, Dr. William C. White, and the two men added an expert in neuropsychiatry and two others on hospital and medical planning. The “White Committee” was to be an irritant for Forbes, and vice versa, in 1922. But of greater significance in 1921, this last-minute signing of legislation for war veterans signified two major problems for the new administration: first, the lack of a national system of hospital and medical services in the United States, into which war veterans could be absorbed and, second, that nothing much had been done for the provision of services that Congress had guaranteed for its sick and wounded warriors until frustration was evident on all sides.20
The Harding inauguration went well. On the platform built for the occasion over the steps of the Capitol’s East Portico, the new first lady, Florence Kling Harding, was animated, her glasses glinting in the sun. Harding was an emblem of vigor. United States Chief Justice Edward D. White administered the presidential oath of office. There was a fanfare of trumpets, and the US Marine Band played the national anthem. Then President Warren G. Harding delivered his speech in a strong voice, bareheaded, from time to time pointing upward with his right hand for effect. The loudspeaker system worked.21
His words were convoluted, but the message was understood: “When one surveys the world around him after the great storm, noting the marks of destruction and yet rejoicing in the ruggedness of the things which withstood it, if he is an American he breathes the clarified atmosphere with a strange mingling of regret and new hope.” He spoke of the war’s “delirium of expenditure. … Our supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way.” The themes were as expected: probusiness, administrative efficiency, lower taxes, sound commercial practices, concern for agricultural problems, greater operating freedom for business, American self-reliance in production eased by tariffs on imported goods, in favor of a draft in wartime, and belief in the “God-given destiny of our Republic.” Then the drive home to the White House, surrounded by the famed roan horses and cavalrymen from Fort Myer across the river—to the challenge of the real world.
Los Angeles business leaders read Harding’s message as a “Let’s Go” signal for commerce, including renewed hopes for the sagging movie industry. There was general optimism elsewhere as well. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon and Herbert Hoover at Commerce would not let the business community down. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, a former governor of New York, Supreme Court Justice, and 1916 presidential candidate, would stay on message. Indeed, Hughes built America’s international relations anew after its rejection of the League of Nations covenant, improved relations with Latin America, and directed and set the tone for the 1921–1922 international naval disarmament conference, which agreed to limits on the world’s five major naval powers. However, optimism had to be tempered with reality; too much could not be achieved at once.22
The opening of the white baseball season in Washington in mid-April, with President Harding throwing out the first ball for the Washington Nationals (a.k.a. Senators), was a festive occasion. The black baseball season, represented by the Washington Braves, began the following week. President and Mrs. Harding were accompanied to the game by Secretary and Mrs. Herbert C. Hoover, Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, and his associate Jess W. Smith, and Charles R. Forbes. The Senators lost to the Red Sox, 3 to 6. Forbes was a guest that evening at the White House, described by the Washington Post as a “long-time friend” of the president and Mrs. Harding, an accurate description. There was no reason for him to be described in any other way in the foreseeable future—unless President Harding maneuvered him into a highly visible, contentious job, and that seemed unlikely as bat struck ball at the start of the baseball season. In a humdrum job, he would just remain a White House friend. Instead, Harding was to push him into the spotlight by force of circumstance and political expediency.23
In mid-March, Forbes was mentioned in the newspapers as a possible member of the seven-man US Shipping Board, the organization established for the rapid production of wartime ships. On Armistice Day, only half of the 2,311 ships were completed. The rest were no longer needed, and the board’s new mission was liquidation without destroying the shaky domestic shipping industry by swamping the market with low-priced ships. Harding favored the creation of a Merchant Marine, but Congress resisted. Forbes had submitted a formal application for a position on the Shipping Board. His nomination file made a good case for him, and at first, he seemed a likely choice. However, Washington State put up a more favored candidate and in the end California won the West Coast slot—with a man Herbert Hoover called “unscrupulous and untrustworthy.” Forbes was reportedly offered a special mission for the Shipping Board in London but turned this down. There was humor in some stories about finding a job for Forbes, and venom. Politics as usual. Rumors from the West Coast claimed he was a carpetbagger who did not actually reside in Washington State. A telegram from Kate Forbes in Forbes’s Shipping Board dossier attested that her husband was a resident of King County, Seattle, and had owned the house on Vashon Island for seven years, and a deputy tax assessor on the island affirmed that he had “assessed Colonel Forbes in his own house” in 1919.24
Harding mentioned the position of governor of the Territory of Alaska when he informed Forbes of the difficulties in naming him to the Shipping Board. There was, he said, a “very strong contention between the conflicting elements in Alaska over the Governorship.” He was thinking of appointing an outsider to restore amity, and Forbes might be that man; “this might afford you a fine opportunity for constructive service and making a brilliant record.” As Forbes remembered it, he went to discuss the possibility with the new interior secretary, Albert Fall, who waxed enthusiastic about the possibilities for American business enterprise and pointed out desirable locations for development on a large map of Alaska. That evening Forbes dined with Harding, who raised the possibility of ambassador to Peru, but when he got back to his hotel after midnight, a visiting delegation from Alaska was there to congratulate him on the governorship and to lobby him further. Next morning Harding’s secretary, George Christian called to invite Forbes to lunch with Harding and told him that Fall had called with doubts about Forbes’s eligibility because he had served in Hawaii in a Democratic administration. Forbes declined the positions in Alaska and Peru and went to New York for a dinner with friends at the Yale Club.25
Rather than give up on Forbes on the basis of reasonable offers made and refused, Harding continued in his urge to get his protégé a place, thus offering a window into his tenacious personality and adding a frantic element to the proceedings. By then, it was late April. But, then, unexpectedly, an important job became vacant and needed filling. Harding propelled Forbes into managing the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, the federal agency for monetary payments, insurance, compensation, and disability benefits for World War veterans, working under an assistant secretary of the treasury. Decisions that affected dissatisfied war veterans were politically critical, and there was a need to move fast. Forbes had managerial experience and was a decorated veteran. He was not an unreasonable choice. But, then, after fourteen weeks, Harding was to launch him out on his own as director of a new, independent, consolidated Veterans Bureau, responsible for one of the largest budgets in the federal government. Thus, Forbes was set to become a lightning rod for criticism: first, in April 1921, because of demands on the Bureau of War Risk Insurance to provide timely and more effective services and, then on a larger scale in August, when three feuding government offices were brought together under his direction as the new US Veterans Bureau. In 1924, his name would become vilified, together with those of Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall, Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, and others, as a corrupt, betraying toady of a weak, blind-sided president.
Late in the evening of the Yale Club dinner, Forbes received a telephone call to return to Washington. Next morning White House physician Dr. Charles E. Sawyer met Forbes off the overnight train at Union Station with the White House car to take him to the president. Besides his clinical role, Sawyer was now Harding’s adviser on domestic health and welfare policy. Harding called in Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, to whom Forbes would report. Forbes was sworn in as director of the Bureau of War Risk Insurance.