CHAPTER 28
A New President, A Changing World
Now that her husband was getting her finances under control, Mary decided, as she tended to do every so often, to reorganize the household and simplify her life. Her first move was to hire a personal maid for herself and her mother, to make sure that their clothes were always pressed, Mary’s fabulous hats neatly set on hat stands, her shoes properly treed. She set a regular weekly schedule for her manicure, shampoo, and wave. She resumed her demon housewife role, inspecting her pantries, running an exploratory finger over furniture and woodwork to make sure that no housemaid was lagging on the job. She’d just got everything nicely regimented when fate hurled another bombshell, this one via the Republican National Committee.
Nineteen twenty was again a presidential election year. Woodrow Wilson was in no shape to run again, the Republicans were determined to win this time. In June, two equally worthy candidates were deadlocked. Frank O. Lowden was the brilliant young governor of Illinois, a reformer with an independent mind. Gen. Leonard Wood was a Congressional Medal of Honor winner with no political experience but plenty of popular appeal; Theodore Roosevelt and Colonel Procter, the Ivory soap king, were both backing him.
The Old Guard, headed by Sen. Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania, the single most powerful and most corrupt Republican party boss in the country, wanted neither Lowden nor Wood. What the Republicans wanted, and were determined to get, was an obedient party hack who could present a plausibly statesmanlike appearance, reel off a stirring oration without saying anything of substance, and do as he was told. After due consideration and a keen scrutiny of the field, Penrose selected handsome, genial Warren G. Harding, then senator from Ohio, as his man.
Harding himself was reasonably honest, and able enough to have worked his way up from the proverbial humble beginning through state government to the U.S. Senate. This was where he wanted to be. He had no further ambition but to improve his golf game, to play poker with his cronies as often as possible, and to play other games with certain obliging ladies about whom his wife was not supposed to know. The senator wasn’t much for work; he liked to “bloviate,” sitting on his front porch back in Marion, spitting tobacco juice over the railing, chatting about nothing in particular with any neighbor who happened along. Harding was afraid of responsibility, he didn’t think he was fit to be president, and wasn’t. In short, he was all that Boies Penrose could have wished for.
Anybody interested in the wheeling and dealing by which Warren Gamaliel Harding, after an abysmal start, won the nomination and the office should read Francis Russell’s remarkable biography, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, published by McGraw-Hill in 1968. Suffice it to say that, despite his protests and even his confession to Penrose’s sidekick, Sen. Jim Watson of Indiana, that his blood pressure was 185 and he had sugar in his urine, Harding was doomed to be president. His mentors planned his campaign. They knew better than to let him run loose—too many genuinely qualified candidates were already barnstorming the country. Harding must stick to his own front porch and let the country come to him.
This was showmanship of the highest order, or the lowest, depending on one’s political point of view. Anyway, it worked. There were glitches to be ironed out, of course. In September, Mary Roberts Rinehart, a Republican like her husband, got a telegram from the National Committee. The party had suddenly remembered that women were now enfranchised, it might not be a bad idea to put a female-oriented plank in their platform. Would Mrs. Rinehart come to Marion as one of a party of big, broad, forward-thinking women and help to introduce plans for a department of public welfare?
How could she refuse? Mary traveled with Mary Flinn Lawrence, who was already making her mark in Pennsylvania politics. They planned to spend the night in Columbus. Little did they know how many other forward-thinking women had the same idea. They wound up sleeping on cots in a hotel’s sample room. In the morning it was on to Marion, where they met up with Colonel Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Longworth, Mrs. Gifford Pinchot, wife of a former chief forester in the Department of Agriculture, Ruth McCormick, daughter of Senator Hanna and married into a rich and influential family; along with some others whose names Mary didn’t mention in her memoirs.
When the delegation arrived, they were startled to find the street and the Harding lawn, which had been covered with limestone chips to keep it from turning into a morass, packed with women from every state in the Union. The Hardings were informal and folksy. They offered Mary’s group the hospitality of the house, a plain but solidly built two-story dwelling. After Harding became state senator, its once-simple porch had been replaced by a far more impressive one that ran the length of the house, was supported by Ionic columns in pairs, had an ornate railing, and ended in what Francis Russell described as a “rounded protuberance” that suggested a bandstand.
Mary washed her face and powdered her nose in a small upstairs bathroom, then joined her party on the porch. The rounded protuberance made an effective podium for the big, handsome man with the silvered hair and the golden voice. Regrettably, the bright sunlight didn’t do much for his wife. Florence Kling DeWolfe Harding had never been much to look at; her most attractive attributes had been a strong mind and a rich father. The Duchess, as her husband called her, was older than he and showed it. The broad ribbon choker she wore did little to hide the crepiness of her neck. According to Mary, though, on this day the pride and hope that shone from behind the wrinkles in Mrs. Harding’s face made up for her lack of feminine charm.
Senator Harding made the expected speech. All the women applauded, even though some of them might not have understood everything he said. Few listeners ever did. He had a tendency to let rhetoric overcome coherence, and to garble his words. It was through one of Harding’s linguistic gaffes that the bastard word normalcy has by this time managed almost to oust the legitimate normality.
Mary also spoke. Being no orator, she thought she must have made little if any impression. She had her picture taken standing between the two Hardings, she said she looked rather frivolous. She dined that night with a Marion neighbor of the candidate’s and was taken to the train by a Colonel Forbes, who was slated to take charge of the new Veterans’ Bureau if Harding won the election. Had Mary but known, this brief encounter was soon to bring about a startling change in the Rinehart family’s life.
Perhaps it was time for a change. Alan had got over his cowboy phase and gone back to his studies at Harvard; Ted was with him as a freshman. Mary was not feeling well. She was worn out from the hectic life she’d been leading for far too long, but she couldn’t make herself slow down. Every so often she would suddenly be wracked by a ferocious burst of pain and have to be given a shot of morphia, which sent her mind spinning off into grandiose daydreams.
Then she made the terrible mistake of going with Samuel Goldwyn to a sneak preview of the movie that had been made from the scenario hurriedly scrabbled together after the excellent one written in Pittsburgh had been so cavalierly rejected. The film was every bit as awful as Mary had anticipated. As she left the theater, her ailing gall bladder, the source of the pain, put on its own smashing grand finale.
She didn’t remember much after that except something about an ambulance and being rushed into an operating room. Stanley Junior was holding her hand, Dr. Rinehart was rushing in from Pittsburgh. Mary knew she was going to die and didn’t much care. She felt like an old crone, she was too tired to fight any longer, but she did hate to worry her husband and sons. She tried to send them some kind of last message via the hospital staff but somebody clapped an ether cone over her face. She knew the routine; she breathed deeply, felt herself rushing into the light at the end of the tunnel. This, then, was death.
No, actually it wasn’t. By July, Mary was convalescent enough to be taken to the ranch in a Pullman berth. For days and days, she was content to sit on the cabin porch gazing idly at the mountains in the distance and the chipmunks playing around the cabin, soaking up the peace. Mary had al
l the time in the world now, time enough to think about the things that counted, to realize how sorely out of balance her life had become. She resolved to forget about that offer from the Ladies’ Home Journal, to write less, to keep out of the moving-picture studios, to quit rushing madly around on so-called important assignments and then, stricken by guilt and homesickness, rushing madly back to her family.
Turning down the Journal did bother her a little. The magazine would have provided an ideal forum from which to air her opinions on alien registration, on adequate child labor laws, on family planning, on the jazzed-up, profligate, pleasure-chasing lifestyle that some Americans mistook for modernity. She could have talked about how active participation in wartime pursuits had changed women’s attitudes about themselves and the lives they wanted to lead, had disproven the outdated thesis that marriage was women’s only meaningful goal, homemaking and motherhood their only occupations worthy of respect. But other writers were saying these things too. Why not just let them?
Now that she’d got her priorities straightened out, Mary began to perk up. Ted left a fishing rod lying on the porch one day; his mother eyed the tempting wand for a while, then inched her way over to it. She was still not able to walk much, so she crawled down to the stream in her nightgown and negligee, dragging the rod after her. When her menfolk came home, they found Mary back in her chair, bedraggled but cocky, with one small fish laid out at her feet.
One triumph led to another. Mary wasn’t supposed to ride but surely a little amble along a familiar trail on a thoroughly reliable horse couldn’t really count as riding. So one of the boys brought her a chair to mount from, another held the horse, and she was back in the saddle again.
The Eaton ranch worked its wonders, as always. Mary returned to Sewickley fully cured and eager to get on with her priorities. She finished up a novel called The Breaking Point based on Dr. Rinehart’s long-ago tale of an amnesiac. The case history that had inspired her first successful short story and launched her as a professional writer was still worth retelling, and she told it well. That done, she settled quietly to polishing up some of her travel articles; these would be published in 1922 as a collection called The Out Trail.
Now came a chance to test her new resolve to slow down. Actually it wasn’t much of a test; she was asked to report on the International Disarmament Conference in Washington for national syndication. After so many trips back and forth from Pittsburgh to the capital during recent years, this must hardly have counted as going away. Mary drove down in the car with her secretary and a full cargo of maps and reference books. They arrived in time to witness the burial of the Unknown Soldier. Mary saw the elaborate ceremony as a bitter farce, she could think only of the countless tragedies it represented. As the drumbeats rolled and the flags went by, she gave way to angry tears.
The conference opened the next day. Mary had no great expectations that a miracle would occur, but there was always a small hope that some good would come of all the talk. What came was about what she’d expected; after listening to three weeks of diplomatic bickering she gave up and went home. Not quite empty-handed, however. Colonel Forbes, the man who’d given her a lift to the station that night in Ohio, was now, as Harding had wanted him to be, head of the Veterans’ Bureau. He was eager for Dr. Rinehart to come to Washington and become his consultant on tuberculosis.
This would mean leaving the Bluff and changing the Rineharts’ whole way of life. Stanley Junior, now permanently settled in New York, liked the idea. Their transferring to Washington would bring his family nearer to him. Alan, always the adventurer, was all for the move. Ted was not—he didn’t uproot easily. Mary herself found the prospect rather exciting but Dr. Rinehart, the one who must cast the deciding vote, was none too keen. He’d long ago got over his resentment at what the Bluff had cost Mary in money and slaving to meet endless expenses. Now the big estate was home, and always would be, even when they came to speak of it in the past tense.
However, Dr. Rinehart knew that his career in Pittsburgh had peaked. There was no higher state position for him to attain. To employ his abilities on a national scale, to contribute his knowledge and skills to making life a little easier for those returning veterans who still needed and perhaps would always need medical care, would be a service worth some personal sacrifice. The doctor went down to Washington, had a long interview with Colonel Forbes, and accepted the offered position.
On Christmas morning of 1921, William the old retainer wore his red velvet Santa Claus suit for the last time. That afternoon the Rineharts held open house for their Sewickley friends and neighbors. They would come back, they kept telling their guests. But they never did. Ted and Alan eventually joined their elder brother in New York, and Mary found plenty to intrigue her in the intricate convolutions of capital society. Cornelia, poor woman, missed the Bluff terribly. Dr. Rinehart was unhappiest of all, and had better reason to be than he would be aware of for another year or so.
Warren G. Harding, when still a newly elected senator, had met Charles R. Forbes while he and the Duchess were on a fact-finding mission to Hawaii at the government’s expense. At that time, Forbes had been appointed by Woodrow Wilson to direct construction of a new naval base at Pearl Harbor. The reason why Wilson picked him seems never to have been explained. Forbes’s army record was a strange one. He had enlisted as a private in 1900, gone over the hill two months later, and vanished from sight for four years. In 1904 Forbes was restored to duty, apparently without so much as a tongue-lashing. In 1907 he was honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant. When the United States entered the war he went back in as an officer with the American Expeditionary Force and emerged as a colonel.
Forbes’s exploits seem to have been legendary, some of them possibly more exploitation than exploit. He was a master at self-promotion. He must have spotted the Hardings as likely prospects, and he’d lost not a moment in attaching himself as tour guide and boon companion during their stay in Hawaii. Captivated by his personality and his skill at poker, Harding had never bothered to check out Forbes’s stories or examine his past record before making him head of the Veterans’ Bureau. Dr. Rinehart never dreaming that his country’s new president could have been so careless or so gullible, naturally assumed that Colonel Forbes was as dedicated as himself to improving the lot of sick and disabled veterans.
Forbes was dedicated, all right, but the only veteran he intended to serve was himself. Frederick Lewis Allen’s book Only Yesterday, first published in 1931 by Harper & Brothers, gives a hair-raising account of how the charismatic colonel managed to squander more than $200 million of government money during the two years he was head of the Veterans’ Bureau, junketing around the country, supposedly to find suitable sites for veterans’ hospitals, tossing out wads of money to any smooth operator willing to cut him in on a third of the take.
In 1926, Colonel Forbes would be tried for fraud and sentenced to Leavenworth Prison. At this early stage, it was still possible to mistake arrant piracy for bureaucratic bumbling. Even after Forbes resigned in disgrace, the pork-barreling would go on in the Veterans’ Bureau, as in most other departments of an administration that had turned into a vast, bottomless grab bag. Harding himself was not a crook, but he did have a magnetic attraction to good old boys who knew all the bad old ways of getting their hands in the till.
Some of the veterans themselves learned how to cheat. Mary served for a while on a committee investigating a rehabilitation program that had been formed to teach returned servicemen skills that would equip them for civilian jobs. They were given free instruction, free books, and a stipend of $100 a month until they had completed the chosen course. By failing to complete one course before signing up for another, they could keep the gravy train running overtime. Mary’s committee turned up veterans who had thus wangled themselves into twenty or more different courses. She cited one diligent student who had acquired a smattering of subjects that ranged from dentistry to playing the pipe organ.
Like the o
ther consultants in the Veterans’ Bureau, Dr. Rinehart found himself being given plenty of responsibility but no real authority. He was determined to staff his tuberculosis hospitals with fully competent personnel; he worked out a comprehensive training program but it got lost in the shuffle, perhaps because there was nothing in it for anybody except the veterans. He doggedly put his plan back together and drove it through. Not long after the doctor had lined up a team of the best men in the country to lecture and instruct for nominal fees, he was informed that his project was too expensive and would have to be killed.
Eventually, Dr. Rinehart would be driven by exasperation to send in his resignation and open a private practice in Washington. In those early days, however, he was still determined to honor his commitment. Tuberculosis hospitals required a particular kind of environment, therefore he often had to go out prospecting for appropriate sites, continually dealing with politicians who pressured him to opt for locales that would gain them favor among their constituents but would not be desirable for the patients. These hunting trips took him away from home for as much as ten days at a time and happened far too often for Mary’s liking. Apparently she felt that one gadabout in the family was enough.
The Rineharts’ first Washington address was a service apartment at the Wardman Park Hotel on Wyoming Avenue. The floor above them was occupied by the old Pennsylvania party boss, Sen. Boies Penrose. No longer was Penrose the 350-pound hulk who’d bragged that his photograph had graced every brothel in Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, who’d been known to eat seven pounds of steak at a sitting and wash it down with a full quart of bourbon. His dissolute life had caught up with him. The Rineharts had not been in Washington very long when there was an obituary in the papers and a vacancy on the next floor, far better suited to their needs than the too-small apartment they were in. As soon as the necessary changes were made, they moved upstairs.
Had She But Known Page 27