Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America

by Behr, Edward

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

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

  Nan Britton wrote at length about their liaison in a book published in 1927, including a description of “the night I became his bride” that had all of the elements of a Feydeau farce.4 They had checked into a hotel on Broadway “where his Washington friends had intimated to him that they had stopped under similar unconventional circumstances with no unpleasant consequences.” But no sooner had they made love than two men — detectives on the lookout for prostitutes — burst into the room. “They’ve got us!” was Harding’s reaction. “Let this poor little girl go,” he begged them. They told him “he should have thought of that before,” Britton wrote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  It was Jess Smith’s turn to step into the limelight. As Harding’s campaign manager, he came up with two deliberately low-key, singularly uninspiring campaign slogans: “Think of America first,” and “With Harding and back to normal.” They proved singularly effective. After the heady interventionist days of Woodrow Wilson, the trauma of the Great War, and the unprecedentedly violent coal miners’ and steel workers’ strikes of the previous year (as brutally repressed as the strike of Boston’s policemen, which had deeply shocked the public), America longed for a return to the good old days. The temptation to withdraw into a secure cocoon, as Charles Mee noted in The Ohio Gang,5 was irresistible, and the vote for Harding, implying as it did a refusal to get involved with cynical Europeans, legitimized the American withdrawal from the League of Nations. It also explained the subliminal attraction of Prohibition, with its promise of a return not only to sobriety but to social harmony in a refreshingly simple, family-oriented, church-dominated America.

  Although Jess Smith operated a campaign headquarters in Washington out of the shabby New Ebbett Hotel (Harding’s penny-pinching was legendary), he believed that Harding’s homespun, folksy image could best be projected by having him campaign mostly from his front porch in hi
s home town. It was Howard Mannington, another Daugherty crony — later a notorious deal-maker, bootlegger, and shady go-between — who handled the endless stream of visitors to Marion, with Harding putting on a convincing act as a loving family man and the incarnation of small-town America’s virtues and down-to-earth qualities. After visiting Harding in Marion, and watching Mrs. Harding sweep the front porch herself, Chicago Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson came away elated. “Where but in America could that happen?” he asked, prophesying that Harding would be “one of our greatest Presidents.” Nan Britton was told in no uncertain terms to stay away until well after the election.

  Harding may have fooled the public, but he didn’t fool himself. He discovered, very soon after his election, that the United States presidency, even in the less complicated world of the 1920s, required qualities he simply did not possess. He admitted the fact, semipublicly, time and time again. “I don’t think I’m big enough for the Presidency,” he told a judge after a round of golf. “Oftentimes, as I sit here, I don’t seem to grasp that I am President,” he admitted to a newspaper columnist. “I can’t make a damn thing out of this tax problem,” he said to an aide. “I listen to one side and they seem right, and then, God! I talk to the other side and they seem just as right and here I am where I started. I know somewhere there is a book that will give me the truth, but Hell! I couldn’t read the book!” When Arthur Draper, of the New York Tribune, returned from a trip abroad and sought to brief the President, Harding told him: “I don’t know anything about this European stuff. You and Jud [his political secretary, Jud Welliver] get together and he can tell me later. He handles these matters for me.” Harding was also famous for his malapropisms, as when, questioned about the (then alarming) 1.5-million unemployment figure, he replied that “the figures are astounding only because we are a 100 million, and this parasite percentage is always with us.”

  There were some able men in his administration, though on the financially archconservative side (Herbert Hoover; Andrew Mellon, a millionaire with extensive distilling interests; and an able secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes, later to be Supreme Court chief justice, who made up for Harding’s ignorance of the world at large), but they were outnumbered by mediocre Republican party hacks, dubious Ohio gang cronies, and downright crooks. Several (Secretary of War John Weeks and Labor Secretary John Davis among them) were there simply because they were poker-playing sycophants, but his most unsuitable appointment, by far, was that of Harry Daugherty as attorney general. Daugherty wanted the Justice Department and Harding owed too much to his kingmaker to refuse him anything — though he did balk at giving Jess Smith a cabinet appointment.

  It didn’t make any difference: Jess Smith moved into the Justice Department anyway, with an office (and a stock-market ticker-tape machine) across the anteroom from Daugherty. He had no clearly defined job, but he did have a secretary, unlimited access to Justice Department files, and a Bureau of Investigation badge, and was soon regarded as Daugherty’s second in command, an unofficial deputy attorney general. There was a constant stream of shady visitors in and out of Smith’s office. Thomas Felder — lobbyist, veteran member of the Ohio gang, bootlegger, and con man with underworld connections — practically used it as his own. So did Howard Mannington, now a prominent Washington bootlegger. Mannington was the Harding crony who had masterminded Harding’s “front porch” election campaign in Marion with his sidekick Bill Orr, a former journalist. In a later book, The Inside Story of the Harding Tragedy, remarkable for its lack of substance and self-serving, mealy-mouthed ingenuity, Daugherty made almost no mention of Smith and claimed that he had known nothing of his activities until too late. But he never did explain in the book why Smith had an office in the Justice Department across from his own anteroom and what he was doing there.

  Myron Herrick, the Republican party’s Ohioan elder statesman, did his best to prevent Daugherty’s appointment. “Harry Daugherty will wreck your administration,” he told Harding — and was packed off to Paris as ambassador. Later, but only after he had been forced out of his job, the New York Times would belatedly write that “from the first day, Daugherty had been a gross misfit as Attorney General.”

  Alice Roosevelt Longworth, ex-President Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, observed the new White House social scene with patrician distaste. Under Harding, visitors came in two categories. The run-of-the-mill guests were kept downstairs, where they were served fruit juice. But Harding’s cronies, and other privileged guests, were invited upstairs, where liquor flowed like water. On her first visit to Harding’s study, she wrote that Harding, she added, “was not a bad man. He was just a slob.” Had she been allowed to visit those parts of the Senate reserved for the select few, she would have found a similar ambiance. Part of the Senate Library had been curtained off, and had become “the best bar in town,” well stocked thanks to regular visits from ingratiatingly subservient customs officials bringing with them confiscated liquor.

  ... no rumor could have exceeded the reality: the study was filled with cronies (Daugherty, Jess Smith), the air heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey stood about, cards and poker chips ready at hand, an atmosphere of waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on desk, and spittoon alongside.6

  Harding was similarly showered with gifts of liquor. Because excessive overt flaunting of Prohibition rules was bound to attract attention, Ned McLean, the wealthy playboy son of John R. McLean, owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Washington Post, provided Harding with a safe house. This was the “little green house on K Street,” a short walk from the White House, where Harding’s cronies met, drank, played billiards and poker, and, behind Harding’s back, plotted their nefarious schemes. There was another, even safer house for Harding and his cronies outside town: a hunting lodge at Deer Park Creek, unknown even to The Duchess. All the while, the ritual of Prohibition was being ostentatiously observed. When the dreadnought Washington was launched in 1924, a congressman’s daughter broke a bottle of river water over its bow, and Dr. Charles Foster Kent of Yale was hired to rewrite the Bible, removing all references to wine.7

  The scandals of the Harding years came in quick succession. Under Woodrow Wilson, 13,000 post office jobs had been removed from patronage and placed under nonpolitical Civil Service regulations. Harding, under Republican pressure, annulled the ruling. The officials were fired, and the jobs parceled out to political appointees. But this was negligible compared to the scams Harding’s cronies indulged in with total impunity.

  Colonel “Charlie” Forbes was a close friend of Harding’s — perhaps the most constant member of his poker-playing circle of intimates. Harding appointed him Health secretary and head of the Veterans Bureau, a sizeable department with a $550 million annual budget. Forbes proceeded to asset-strip his own department with all the skill of a Mafia boss. Harding’s sister, Carolyn Votaw, who had married a Seventh-Day Adventist clergyman (Harding had appointed him federal superintendent of prisons), knew Forbes well, and introduced him to a friend of hers, a wealthy construction company executive called Elias Mortimer and his very pretty, ambitious wife Kate. There was a pressing need for veterans’ hospitals, and Mortimer promised Forbes huge kickbacks for every building contract awarded to his firm. Forbes let him see the supposedly secret rival bids. For every new hospital, Forbes got a cash payment of $50,000 and up. On the pretext of looking at possible sites, the threesome took expensive trips all over America, where Forbes was lavishly entertained (and also slept with Mortimer’s wife), with Mortimer footing the bill.

  Forbes milked the Veterans Administration in other ways. He paid hugely inflated prices for hospital land (up to $95,000 for sites whose market value was $17,000), splitting the difference with the sellers. He disposed of brand-new hospital equipment at token prices, in return for kickbacks, then replaced what he had sold for practically nothing with brand-new items for which the Veterans Administration paid hugely inflated prices, again getting a cut. In subsequen
t investigations he was shown to have paid ten times the market price for 35,000 gallons of floor cleaner and 32,000 gallons of floor wax — a hundred-year supply. In all he was shown to have squandered $33 million — or several hundred million dollars in current values.

  The trashing of the Veterans Administration became common knowledge. Harding duly learned of his poker buddy’s practices, and flew into a rage, but protected him from the law by sending him abroad on a spurious mission. Although Forbes was eventually sentenced (in 1925) to two years in jail and fined $10,000, his real problems only began after Harding’s death.

  Albert Fall, secretary of the Interior, another close Harding crony, was resourceful in other, more imaginative ways. He was an intimate friend of two oil tycoons, Edward Doheny and Harry Sinclair, both, hardly coincidentally, heavy contributors to Harding’s campaign fund. Before World War I, President William Howard Taft had ordered large tracts of oil-bearing land to be handed over to the U.S. Navy to ensure adequate supplies at the lowest possible cost. Thanks to a three-way scam involving Navy Secretary Edwin Dealey, Interior Secretary Albert Fall, and — in the wings — Justice Department Secretary Daugherty, the two oil tycoons ended up with most of the Navy’s priceless oil-rich land.

  As a first step, Navy Secretary Dealey (who later had to resign) had the site ownerships secretly transferred from the Navy to the Department of the Interior. Then Fall worked out a deal to hand them over to Doheny and Sinclair. There was a semblance of legality: in exchange for the land, Doheny and Sinclair were to build storage tanks for the Navy and provide the Department of the Interior with oil certificates (at favorable rates) to be used by U.S. Navy ships.

  These arrangements were not publicized, and there were no bids from competing oilmen — Fall invoking the overriding need for secrecy in “matters affecting national defense.” He himself received kickbacks amounting to several hundred thousand dollars, resigning shortly afterward to take up a well-paid sinecure in Sinclair Oil. The payoff was a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars that Doheny and Sinclair made out of the scam, known since as the Teapot Dome scandal.