Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) has the dubious distinction of finishing last in most polls of presidential greatness. Elected to the White House in 1920, he lasted three scandal-plagued years before his sudden death from a stroke in 1923. Of himself, Harding supposedly said, “I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.”
Born in Ohio, Harding made his fortune in the newspaper business before getting involved with Republican politics in 1899. He was elected to the United States Senate from Ohio in 1914 and won the GOP’s presidential nomination in 1920. Promising a return to normalcy after World War I (1914–1918), Harding won the election in a landslide.
As president, Harding raised eyebrows by hosting poker nights and drinking parties at the White House at a time when alcohol was illegal. He also filled his cabinet with unqualified cronies from Ohio, several of whom were later caught abusing their offices.
The most famous example of corruption during Harding’s tenure was the Teapot Dome scandal. In the scandal, Harding’s secretary of the interior, Albert Fall (1861–1944), was caught accepting bribes from oil companies in exchange for lucrative leases on federal lands in the West. In the fallout from the scandal, Fall became the first cabinet officer sentenced to prison for official misconduct. He went to jail in 1929.
Although President Harding himself was never accused of corruption, and some of his defenders claimed his weakness was simply trusting old friends, he was criticized for using poor judgment in his selection of government officials.
In 1923, with new wrinkles of the scandal beginning to emerge in Washington every day, Harding got as far away from the capital as he could, paying a visit to Alaska. On his way back, Harding stopped in San Francisco, where he fell ill and died on August 2, 1923.
1. The Teapot Dome scandal took its name from a parcel of land in Wyoming that had been leased to cronies for oil drilling without a competitive bid.
2. In 1884, Harding bought a tiny Ohio newspaper, the Marion Star, which he turned into a profitable enterprise that also provided a platform for his political career.
3. Harding’s home state of Ohio was nicknamed the Mother of Presidents, having produced eight presidents. However, since Harding, no Ohioan has been elected president.
After the defeat of American forces in the Philippines in 1942, 76,000 soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese were forced to march across the island under horrifying conditions in a gruesome wartime atrocity known as the Bataan Death March.
Japan had invaded the lightly guarded American territory of the Philippines toward the beginning of World War II, just after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, and cornered the combined American and Filipino force led by General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964). Boxed in on every side at the tip of the Bataan Peninsula, the soldiers on the island ate ponies, lizards, and monkeys to survive. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), who considered MacArthur too important to lose in a hopeless battle, ordered him to Australia. Several weeks later, on April 9, 1942, the tattered remnants of the defending army finally surrendered to the Japanese. For the American military, the surrender of the Philippines was one of the lowest points in the early stages of the war, before the tide began to turn against imperial Japan.
On the sixty-five-mile march that ensued, the American and Filipino prisoners were given no food or water and killed if they lagged too far behind. By some estimates, about 10,000 of the soldiers taken captive died en route to the prison camps.
After forces led by MacArthur reconquered the Philippines on July 5, 1945, the US military hunted down the Japanese officers responsible for the atrocity. The Japanese commander accused of organizing the death march, Masaharu Homma (1887–1946), was tried as a war criminal and executed by firing squad, although doubts over his guilt surfaced later. April 9, the anniversary of the surrender, is now a national day of remembrance in the Philippines.
1. The American public only learned about the Bataan Death March three years after the fact, when American prisoners escaped from the Japanese and exposed the atrocity.
2. Although Homma was executed for the crime, evidence later emerged that one of his underlings, Colonel Masanobu Tsugi, was probably directly responsible for the march.
3. The unlucky commander of US forces after MacArthur’s departure from the Philippines, Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright (1883–1953), became the highest-ranking officer captured by the Axis and spent more than three years in captivity. After the war, he was promoted to full general and received the Medal of Honor.
In the early twentieth century, it was illegal in most states to publish information about birth control, and the vast majority of American women had little or no access to contraceptives. Starting in 1914, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) waged a long, lonely battle against censors and hostile church leaders to legalize contraception and provide women with information about their reproductive choices. Although still considered controversial for her embrace of eugenics, Sanger’s lifelong commitment to empowering women made her one of the pivotal figures in the history of twentieth century medicine and women’s rights.
Sanger’s belief in birth control—a term that she invented—stemmed from her personal experiences as a nurse tending poor women in the slums of New York City. Unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, Sanger felt, robbed women of control of their own lives and forced them to resort to dangerous and illegal back-alley abortions. In 1914, Sanger started a newsletter, The Woman Rebel, to spread information about birth control.
The newspaper immediately fell afoul of censors, who considered the publication obscene, and Sanger was forced to flee to England to avoid arrest. She returned in 1916, and the charges against her were dropped. Later that year, she opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn and became a leading spokesperson for nationwide efforts to repeal anti-contraception laws. In 1921, Sanger founded the Birth Control League, which became the Planned Parenthood Federation in 1942. In the late 1920s, she also became a supporter of eugenics, a controversial theory that social ills could be eliminated through selective breeding and the sterilization of “undesirables.”
Throughout her career, Sanger was frustrated by the scarcity of birth control options for women. As early as 1912, she had dreamed of a “magic pill” that could be used for contraception. In search of better options, Sanger helped finance medical research that led to the invention of the birth control pill, which received FDA approval in 1960. Shortly before Sanger’s death, the United States Supreme Court invalidated laws against birth control in its landmark Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) decision, fulfilling one of her lifelong goals.
1. In her youth, Sanger saw her mother die at age fifty after eighteen pregnancies, including seven miscarriages.
2. Because it was illegal to sell contraceptives in the United States, most were marketed under euphemisms, most commonly “feminine hygiene.”
3. The diaphragm was the most reliable form of birth control available to women in the early twentieth century, but it had to be smuggled in from abroad.
Press baron William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) may be most famous today as the model for Charles Foster Kane in the 1941 movie Citizen Kane. During his lifetime, however, Hearst was one of the most powerful men in the country, capable of influencing public opinion and even starting a war by using the chain of major metropolitan newspapers under his ownership. Hearst, along with rival Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911), invented the modern American newspaper business and built the first successful newspaper conglomerates.
Hearst was born in California to a wealthy father who had made his fortune in mining. The young Hearst attended Harvard but was expelled after sending personalized chamber pots to his professors as a prank. He took over a small San Francisco newspaper, the Examiner, that was owned by his father. By adopting an unapologetically populist tone, Hearst turned the Examiner into the city’s leading rag.
Hearst soon expanded into other markets. He bought a newspaper in New York City, the Journal, in 1895, which put him in direct competition with Pulitzer’s World. At a time when papers were the dominant source of news for most Americans, the two vied for readers in the nation’s biggest city by improving production quality and printing ever more outrageous and titillating articles. The tabloid-style journalism of the era is known as “yellow journalism,” a name derived from the Yellow Kid, a popular comic-strip character that appeared in both papers.
The most notorious example of Hearst’s yellow journalism came during the run-up to the Spanish-American War (1898), when the Journal and the World both printed lurid stories about supposed Spanish atrocities. The articles inflamed public opinion and may have contributed to the US decision to go to war.
In 1941, he tried unsuccessfully to stop the release of Citizen Kane, but the unflattering portrayal of the fictional Kane in the movie now dominates Hearst’s public image. Hearst Newspapers remains under the ownership of William Randolph Hearst’s heirs today and publishes the San Francisco Chronicle, the Houston Chronicle, and many magazines.
1. One of Hearst’s granddaughters, Patty Hearst (1954–), was kidnapped in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a domestic terrorist group, and participated in bank robberies after being brainwashed by the organization. She served prison time, but her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter (1924–).
2. Hearst briefly employed Stephen Crane (1871–1900), the author of The Red Badge of Courage (1895), as a war correspondent.
3. One of Hearst’s most well-known features was Krazy Kat, by the cartoonist George Harriman (1880– 1944), which ran for decades and is regarded as one of the most influential newspaper comic strips ever.
Arguably the most famous sporting venue in the nation, Yankee Stadium opened in 1923 as the home to the New York Yankees major league baseball team. At the time of its construction, the stadium was the largest ballpark in the nation and was regarded as an architectural marvel for its three-tiered design. In the decades since, dozens of championships have been decided on the field of Yankee Stadium, in both baseball and professional boxing, making it one of the most fabled locations in all of American sport.
When it first opened, the stadium was considered a major gamble by the Yankees’ ownership. In the early 1920s, the future of professional spectator sports in the United States seemed uncertain at best, due to a game-fixing scandal involving the 1919 Chicago White Sox that had tarnished major league baseball’s reputation. In addition, New York had three professional baseball teams—the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Giants—and some critics wondered how the Yankees planned to fill 58,000 seats at their new park in the Bronx.
However, thanks to the star power of Yankees slugger George Herman “Babe” Ruth (1895–1948) and baseball’s rebounding popularity during the Roaring Twenties, Yankee Stadium was a huge success and inspired a wave of imitators. In addition to its role as the home field of the Yankees, the stadium was home to several of history’s biggest boxing matches, including the first-round victory of American pugilist Joe Louis (1914–1981) over the German fighter Max Schmeling (1905–2005) for the heavyweight belt in 1938, a bout that acquired geopolitical overtones due to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s support for Schmeling.
In a historical context, the success of Yankee Stadium presaged the growing popularity of sports as mass entertainment in the twentieth century. Starting in the 1920s, radio and television broadcasts made baseball accessible to a huge audience and turned players like Ruth—who became known as “the Bambino”—into national stars. By the end of decade, Ruth was making a higher salary than even President Herbert Hoover (1874–1964). (As Ruth explained, “I had a better year than him.”) Many cities now build a stadium or arena as the anchor of their downtown. Yankee Stadium itself, however, is scheduled to be torn down after the 2008 baseball season, fifteen years shy of its centennial.
1. Yankee Stadium is sometimes referred to as “The House That Ruth Built” for the Bambino’s role in the team’s success during the 1920s and 1930s.
2. Wrigley Field, the home of the Chicago Cubs, and Boston’s Fenway Park are the two oldest ballparks in the major leagues: Fenway Park opened in 1912 and Wrigley Field in 1914.
3. Schmeling was reportedly displeased with his portrayal as an Aryan superman in Nazi propaganda during the 1930s, and he supported Louis financially after World War II. The German boxer died a few months shy of his 100th birthday.
The playwright Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was born in Mississippi and grew up in an extremely troubled home. His father was a shoe salesman who abused Williams’s mother, and his sister, Rose, suffered from schizophrenia. His traumatic childhood provided the grist for many of Williams’s works—now among the most well-known American plays of the twentieth century—that probe the crippling emotional problems of star-crossed Southern protagonists.
One of Williams’s early plays, The Glass Menagerie, which premiered in 1945, is typical of his so-called Southern gothic style. Set in Depression-era St. Louis, the play unfolds in the small apartment of Amanda Wingfield, whose husband had abandoned her and their two children, Tom and Laura, long before the action begins. Despite her poverty, Amanda considers herself a proper Southern lady and hopes to introduce her shy and disabled daughter to a respectable “gentleman caller.”
Although he wrote more than thirty full-length plays beginning in 1930s, The Glass Menagerie was Williams’s first major success. Several other hit plays soon followed, including A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955, both of which won Pulitzer Prizes for drama. Themes of poverty, religion, and sex, along with the tragic figure of the “faded Southern belle,” appear frequently in Williams’s plays, seemingly inspired by the long-suffering women in his family and his own difficult upbringing.
In adulthood, Williams struggled with drugs and alcohol, and many critics believe the quality of his plays deteriorated later in life. At a time when even Broadway was hesitant to fully accept homosexuality, his private life became the subject of gossip and ridicule. In 1983, a month away from his seventy-second birthday, Williams died in New York after choking on a bottle cap in his hotel room.
1. Nicknamed “Tennessee” for his Southern drawl, Williams legally changed his name from Thomas in 1939.
2. The original 1947 stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire starred Marlon Brando (1924–2004) and featured Karl Malden (1912–), both of whom went on to act in the 1951 movie version. Malden and Vivien Leigh (1913–1967) each won an Academy Award for their role in the film.
3. There are still streetcar lines in New Orleans, but none go to the Desire neighborhood.
The epitome of cool masculinity to a generation of American men, Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) achieved his most lasting fame playing gangsters, cowboys, detectives, and broken-hearted lovers in the golden age of Hollywood. Immortalized thanks to his role as the embittered club owner Rick Blaine in the 1941 film Casablanca, Bogart went on to win the 1951 Best Actor Oscar for The African Queen, which costarred Katharine Hepburn (1929–1993).
Born in New York to a prosperous family, Bogart began acting in the early 1920s after he was expelled from prep school. Moderately successful, he moved to Hollywood in 1930 and was cast in dozens of gangster films, one of the decade’s most popular genres.
In 1941, Bogart’s breakout year, he played a private detective, Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon. An adaptation of the acclaimed 1930 novel by Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), The Maltese Falcon showcased Bogart’s trademark sardonic wit and hard-boiled cynicism. Like Rick Blaine, Bogart’s Sam Spade professed not to care about anyone but himself, but as the movie unfolds the audience learns he also has a hidden, sensitive side.
A bona fide celebrity after The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, Bogart made headlines in 1945 by marrying Lauren Bacall (1924–), his much-younger costar from To Have and Have Not (1944). He also became involved with politics, protesting the tactics of the House Un-American Activities Committee, a government inquisition that sought to root out the alleged communist menace in Hollywood. Bogart starred in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948 and made his last major film, The Caine Mutiny, in 1954.
Tragically, Bogart died at age fifty-seven of throat cancer after many years of heavy smoking. His legend, however, has only grown with the years. In 1999, he was named the twentieth century’s number one male star by the American Film Institute.
1. Bacall and Bogart costarred in two other films, The Big Sleep (1946) and Key Largo (1948).
2. Bogart was parodied posthumously in the movie Play It Again, Sam (1972), written by and starring Woody Allen (1935–).
3. A stretch of West 103rd Street in New York City, near where Bogart grew up, was named after the actor in 2006.