The Strange Deaths of President Harding
Ferrell, Robert H.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Strange Deaths of President Harding" Resurrecting Harding The Strange Deaths of President Harding Robert H. Ferrell University ofMissouri Press 208 pages /$24.95 REVIEWED BY Florence King The parallels are...
...Mencken admitted he voted for Harding...
...Once firmly embedded within the liberal New Deal coalition, their political allegiance today is up for grabs, and they are more likely than not to vote Republican if the alternative strikes them as excessively "liberal...
...The older Daugherty invited the younger Smith to share his apartment, launching what sounds suspiciously like a master-slave relationship...
...The most incredible book was The Strange Death ofPresident Harding (1930) by Gaston B. Means, called by J. Edgar Hoover "the greatest faker of all time...
...She never could produce any of these letters, having destroyed them, she said, out of discretion...
...He was the "Typical American," a gregarious booster from a small Midwestern town who graduated from a cow college and had neither the time nor the inclination to read books—all the things his elite despised...
...Harding invariably has placed last in presidential ratings, trailing even Millard Fillmore...
...The Strange Deaths of President Harding is a scrupulously researched and vividly told overview by Robert H. Ferrell, emeritus professor of history at Indiana University, who demolishes or casts doubt on most of the accusations and suspicions surrounding America's twenty-ninth president...
...But it's his way of answering the question that's unusual...
...Mencken, who called The American Spectator • December 1996 73 Harding "a third-rate political wheel-horse, with the face of a moving-picture actor, the intelligence of a respectable agricultural implement dealer, and the imagination of a lodge joiner...
...Freedman's story begins in the teeming slums of New York, where the Democratic political machine known as Tammany Hall won immigrant loyalty by operating "a virtual social-service bureaucracy, endowing the poor with shoes, coal, summer outings, Christmas dinners, and leverage with the landlord and beat cop alike...
...I have always had a certain fondness for Mrs...
...What accounts for this epochal political transformation...
...It was neurotic insecurity, Dr...
...He also proves, conclusively and hilariously, that Nan's book was ghostwritten by an ex-minister engaged in selling stock in a Mexican gold mine...
...Today's elite, enamored of government Ober alles, regards Bill The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved From Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond Samuel G. Freedman Simon & Schuster / 464 pages / $27.56 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan Explaining his refusal to endorse George McGovern back in 1972, the AFL-CIO's crusty, ex-plumber president, George Meany, denounced the Democrats as the party of "acid, amnesty and abortion...
...By contrast, "as the party of Yankees and bankers, the GOP did not exactly court the immigrant, ethnic constituency...
...In her book she claimed she continued her affair with Harding, who wrote her letters promising to marry her...
...With the help of a little-known memoir published in 1959 ("Dear Mr...
...As soon as he entered his suite he fell headfirst across the bed, where he would die three days later of what his doctors called "apoplexy," the old name for stroke and a common mistaken diagnosis in an era when cardiology was in its infancy...
...7 scandals, but Ferrell's account of it, based on papers recently made available, suggests a murky personal reason might have prompted it...
...Ferrell, author of III Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust, is on his surest ground with the poison rumor...
...A former Burns detective who had worked in Harding's Justice Department, Means conned a writer from the true-confessions magazines to ghostwrite his book...
...Silly...
...The Story ofFifty Years in the White House Mail Room, by Ira R.T...
...In so doing, he has chronicled liberalism's rise and fall in one of its key constituencies...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Resurrecting Harding The Strange Deaths of President Harding Robert H. Ferrell University ofMissouri Press 208 pages /$24.95 REVIEWED BY Florence King The parallels are intriguing: a big, white-haired, womanizing president with a shrouded medical history, an aggressive First Lady with an interest in spiritualism, a scandal-ridden administration, a mysterious suicide, and a shelf of tell-all books...
...Smith shriveled visibly, Dr...
...According to the papers of White House physician Dr...
...Moreover, Nevins had once worked for the Dayton editor, James M. Cox, who ran against Harding in the 192o presidential election...
...errell is at his best when he dissects the "debunkers" of the 1920's, the media elite of an earlier time who did to Harding what their descendants did to Nixon and Reagan: The debunkers had what a later generation would call a hidden agenda...
...In Cheyenne crowds stood in a dust storm, in Chicago they filled the freight yards until the train could not move...
...Harding's elite looked down on them and harbored, says Ferrell, "a refusal to believe that ability at politics is a mark of intelligence...
...One of the many taken in by it was Herbert Hoover, Harding's secretary of commerce, who read it in manuscript and told a friend it described "many things which are not known...
...When Harding vomited, it put the words "food poisoning" on the wire, and that, as later events would prove, was enough...
...Their hatred of Harding was as passionate and unrelenting as the adoration of today's cultural elite for Bill Clinton, yet the two presidents are practically clones...
...72 December 1996 • The American Spectator z Plenty of letters were written, but all by Nan and none of them discreet...
...Claiming to have been a frequent White House visitor on intimate terms with the late president and his wife, Means's account presents a power-maddened Mrs...
...After the bulbous Taft and the wizened Wilson, the man who "looked like a president" had stirred their spirits and won their hearts...
...They did not like any American president of their generation and did not mind if they tore reputations to shreds, in gentlemanly prose if possible, in humor if that suited them, but with no real effort to search out the truth...
...Her name was Nan Britton...
...Martin's...
...Behind these tactics it might be said that they did not much like, not to mention admire, the American people, and considered democracy an impossible form of government...
...One day, however, the attorney general was displeased with Smith and spoke harshly to him: "If you do not discontinue your seeming assumptiveness and do nothing to change your ways down at the Department of Justice, and in and outside of Washington, you will have to cease to live with me and move out of this apartment...
...Immigrant America's fidelity to the Democrats was further strengthened by the 1928 presidential candidacy of Alfred E. Smith, "who personified the historic alliance of the Tammany Hall machine The Righting of America A Generational Saga 74 December 19 96 • The American Spectator...
...If that reminds you of someone you know, try the suicide on Memorial Day, 1923, of Jess Smith, who was found on the bedroom floor of the apartment he shared with Attorney General Daugherty...
...He collapsed as the train neared San Francisco, but loath to let people see him being carried, he insisted on donning morning dress and walked unaided up the steps of the Palace...
...Although Democrats and Big Labor have long since kissed and made up, many Northern, urban, working- and lower-middle-class Catholics have been unwilling to return to their political roots...
...Smith's suicide was the only hint Harding had of brewing administration•4 Ferrell shows that Nan was blackmailing Harding, and after his death tried to put the screws on his sister as well...
...So far, so good...
...More rejections followed as Daugherty and others in the administration, put off by Smith's overbearing behavior and wild partying, cooled toward him and eased him out of official functions until he was sunk in self-loathing...
...A giddy teenager when Harding was editor of the town paper, Nan had developed such an intense crush on him that her father had seen fit to warn him about it...
...In 1919 Nan gave birth to Elizabeth Ann Christian, ostensibly conceived in Harding's Senate office...
...Instead of citing polling data and conducting endless interviews, Freedman has written a multi-generational history of three American families—Polish, Irish, and Italian—from their turn-of-thecentury immigrant origins to their current state of relative affluence...
...The simplest explanation is that Harding was a Republican whose cultural elite were all Wilsonians, whereas Clinton is a Democrat among McGoverniks and worse...
...Harding, who was seriously ill with the nephritis that would kill her the following year...
...Harding's reputation will never be completely restored, but Ferrell has done a superb job of debunking his debunkers and ferreting out facts from the tangle of calumny that no other historian has thought worthy of attention...
...Boone believed, not political malfeasance, that led him to shoot himself...
...Like Thomas Edsall's Chain Reaction or Arthur Schlesinger's The DisJosEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...
...But if we add rumors that the First Lady poisoned the president, that he was sterile, that he had Negro blood, and that he signed over government oil leases to his cronies while drunk, we realize this is not the politically correct, calorie-counting White House of current ill fame but that of Warren Gamaliel Harding three-quarters of a century ago...
...a word of praise or expression of appreciation from Daugherty would cause Jess to 'purr' happily...
...The 58-year-old president was actually a prime candidate for a heart attack, says Ferrell, and showed all the signs during the western trip...
...Why the different reactions...
...in San Francisco after a cross-country train trip to Tacoma, where he boarded a Navy ship for Alaska...
...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...Another difference is timing...
...Speaking in a voice "like the purring of a female tiger, intent, threatening," she tells him: This is the age of woman...
...That is the question former New York Times reporter Samuel G. Freedman sets out to answer in The Inheritance...
...Joel T. Boone, Smith was pathetically eager to perform chores for Daugherty...
...White, says Ferrell, was jealous that another small-town newspaper editor had beaten him to the White House...
...Boone noted, and thereafter became subdued and withdrawn...
...The first book to advance the poison theory was a 1926 novel, Revelry, by Samuel Hopkins Adams, about a president who accidentally poisons himself when he takes the wrong medicine and then decides not to tell his doctors, choosing a martyr's death to escape his political scandals...
...The biggest difference is the change that has come over the elite's opinions of politicians...
...silent awestruck masses who remembered the funeral procession of the Unknown Soldier two years before,when Harding had presented the very picture of a noble Roman...
...2. William Allen White, editor of the Emporia, Kansas Gazette, called Harding a "he-harlot," and repeated in print the rumor that he had signed over oil reserves while drunk...
...4. Alice Roosevelt Longworth uttered the deathless, "Harding was not a bad man, he was just a slob," but some thought she was consumed by the belief that another Ohio politician should have been president: her husband, Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth —who, Ferrell adds, drank up all of Harding's liquor...
...The Teapot Dome scandals changed the perception, and Mrs...
...But stroke victims don't die instantly, and Harding did, of a massive coronary...
...The Harding debunkers quoted each other—and Nan Britton—over and over until their undocumented claims entered the national consciousness like a computer virus...
...As for her famous claim that she and Harding used a White House closet for their amours, Ferrell unearths Secret Service files showing it to be impossible...
...His obloquy has been total and seemingly beyond the reach of revisionist rescue, but now relief has arrived...
...Smith), Ferrell shows that she was blackmailing Harding, and after his death tried to put the screws on his sister as well...
...The other was shellfish, always the chief suspect when someone gets sick...
...Harding because her maiden name was Florence Kling, but now, thanks to Ferrell's sympathetic portrait, I like her husband as well...
...Ferrell suggests he did so to guarantee himself four years' worth of column material...
...Indeed, Freedman ends up largely echoing George Meany's indictment: The liberal agenda has been hijacked by counter-cultural elitists who have nothing but scorn for traditional American values...
...Ferrell's rogues gallery includes: 1. H.L...
...Harding no doubt was tempted by the warning because Nan had a well-established reputation among the townsfolk for being "fast...
...Their arrangement began when Daugherty's invalid wife entered a hospital and Smith's wife of one year divorced him...
...his legs under the bed, a bullet through his temple, and his head in a wastebasket (he had evidently fallen forward into it...
...Overwhelmed by the presidency, he had sought to banish fears of inadequacy with frenetic "busyness" until he was exhausted, yet refused to admit it for fear of sending down the stock market Now the western trip wore him out, the turning point coming in a Seattle motorcade when he pumped his arm up and down for hours as he tipped his hat, straining a heart that his doctor afterwards discovered was enlarged...
...Harding died on August 2, 1923, in the Palace Hotel FLORENCE KING'S latest book is The Florence King Reader (St...
...Harding intent on poisoning her husband in the cause of feminism...
...Harding's presidency coincided with the publication of Main Street and Babbitt, and it was his misfortune to fit both...
...For the first time in American history, a woman shall be recorded as a real factor—a power—and not have to go by that insipid and uninteresting and moth-eaten title: First Lady of the Land...
...One was the coffin that the White House doctor had ordered placed in the ship's hold—not for the president but for Mrs...
...His funeral train is the one we never hear about...
...Clinton and his ilk as the architects of their fondest dreams...
...This voyage was memorable for two macabre reasons...
...Harding's death in 1924 opened the floodgates of calumny...
...Smith worked for Daugherty and was involved in his bribes and banking irregularities, but he also lived with him...
...04 uniting ofAmerica, The Inheritance is one of those books in which a liberal takes a close look at conservative arguments and discovers that they are not nearly as evil or irrational as he had supposed...
...Born in 1896, she had grown up in Marion, Ohio, and had known Harding all her life...
...The child was adopted by Nan's sister and brother-in-law...
...3. Allan Nevins, the historian, worshipped Woodrow Wilson and was a passionate supporter of the League of Nations, which Senator Harding helped to defeat...
...Bycontrast, Bill Clinton is the atypical small-town American who went to the right schools, lives in an era that calls gregariousness "caring" and "reaching out," and stages photo-ops in bookstores...
...The success of the Adams novel prompted a bimbo eruption...
...Something very likely happened between them, but Ferrell believes it was less a case of Harding seducing her than of her pestering him until he weakened, and produces enough old hotel registers to dispute the assignations she described in The President's Daughter (1927...
Vol. 29 • December 1996 • No. 12
