by Harry Truman
The other way in which Grant showed his lack of ability as a president was when he set up his cabinet. I don’t think there were any good men in Grant’s cabinet or at least not many. I don’t know a lot about his cabinet members because I’ve never read their histories; I’ve never tried to keep up with them because I didn’t like what they did, and I never went into it very carefully. I do know, though, that the first thing Grant did was appoint two of his old buddies from Galena, Illinois. One of them died during Grant’s first year in office, which wasn’t anybody’s fault, but the other one found that job so hard that he resigned right away. Then Grant appointed a banker as secretary of the navy, and the man tried it for three months and quit because his duties in Washington were taking too much time away from his real interest, making money for himself. And then Grant made a big-time contractor his secretary of the treasury, and the fellow had to resign after just a few days because his business activities were in obvious conflict of interest with his official activities.
The result of all this, of course, was an administration so corrupt that it held the record until Warren Gamaliel Harding came to the White House and brought his poker-playing cronies along with him. Officials in the Navy Department gave contracts to manufacturers based on what they received in kickbacks and not because the manufacturers had more experience or bid lower than others. Officials in the Department of the Interior gave land to speculators on the same basis. Officials in the Indian Bureau ignored the needs of the Indians and practically sold trading posts on every street corner. Grant’s own brother-in-law got into trouble when it became known that he was giving Jay Gould, the financier, inside information so Gould could pull some Wall Street coups and cut him in, and a couple of cabinet members and five federal judges had to quit or be thrown out and possibly jailed for fraud and for accepting bribes and a lot of other things. And there was also a terrible depression during Grant’s administration.
Despite all this, Grant still managed to get himself elected for a second term. He even did better than the first time; his opponent was Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, who was favored by both the non-Radical Republicans and by the Democrats, but Grant received 3,596,745 votes and 286 electoral votes to Greeley’s 2,843,446 votes and sixty-six electoral votes. Well, Grant was a colorful figure, except that he was only about five feet six inches tall. The black vote was crucial to his second election. He was elected by an overwhelming majority of the black vote. All the black vote went for him; I think it was something like 700,000 votes. If it had not been for that, he would not have been elected, but those votes fulfilled the objective of old Thad Stevens and the rest of his people. They wanted to keep the Radical Republicans in control of the government of the United States, and they succeeded up to 1877.
But there’s no question about the fact that if it hadn’t been for the black vote, Grant wouldn’t have been elected, and by 1877, the people began to get tired of the Radical Republicans just like they do any organization that stays in too long. Grant thought a little about running for a third term, but the Democrats had gotten control of the Congress in the middle of his second term, which I guess he considered handwriting on the wall, so he quit and even almost admitted that some of the corruption and the bad management was his own fault. “It was my fortune, or misfortune,” he said, “to be called to the office of chief executive without any previous political training. Under such circumstances, it is but reasonable to admit that errors of judgment must have occurred.” Those sentences might even be the most noticeable presidential understatement of the nineteenth century.
The two men who had a try at the office after Grant were Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden was the former governor of New York and had become famous because he was the man who broke up the Tweed Ring, and you can tell how people were beginning to feel about Grant and the Republicans by the fact that, even though Tilden wasn’t all that well-known around the country, and Hayes was a handsome fellow with red hair and blue eyes, and had been a popular general in the Civil War, it was Tilden who got a majority in both the general and electoral voting. Tilden got 4,284,265 votes to Hayes’ 4,033,295 votes, and as for the electoral margin, Tilden ended up with 203 votes and Hayes received 166. But the Republicans weren’t going to give up all that easily, even though they no longer had Grant to do their bidding, so they claimed the electoral votes in Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina, saying that a lot of black men had been prevented from going to the polls and that Hayes would have taken those states if the voting had been on the level. There was some question about whether or not Hayes would accept this interpretation of events since he was a rigidly moral man who prayed on his knees each morning and sang hymns each night. (He and his wife were also strict teetotalers, which I don’t admire all that much because I think a drink now and then is good for some people provided they don’t overdo it. His wife was known as Lemonade Lucy because she prohibited liquor at the White House, and Hayes’ last official act as president was to ban the sale of liquor at Army bases.) But Hayes looked the other way, and though the Democrats could have objected and demanded a recount or something, Tilden decided not to do this. Tilden was an old bachelor anyhow and never worked very hard, and when the time came for him to make a decision on the dispute, he just said, “Oh, well, there’s no use fighting for it. I don’t care anything about it, anyhow.” Then he repeated Henry Clay’s famous statement — he would rather be right than president. Incidentally, I never thought much of that statement. Why not try to be both?
Grant then had one more shot at the presidency himself. He was invited by some foreign governments to tour their countries, and he and Mrs. Grant went on a trip through Europe and Asia that lasted for three years. Everybody liked the glamour of heads of states in those days, and I think Grant visited them all; he met with Queen Victoria and Pope Pius IX and a lot of other people. There were parades and reviews, and he rode a horse and he wore the insignia of a four-star general, which was the highest rank there was in those days, and I think he enjoyed it very much.
The American press covered his trip so enthusiastically that, when the 1880 elections came along, a number of people at the Republican convention thought he’d make a good candidate again. Hayes obviously didn’t stand a chance for reelection because the depression had gotten even worse during his administration, and he’d done a number of things that were unpopular even though they might have been good for the country, including withdrawing troops from the South and trying to reform the civil service and get rid of some of the corruption. (One of the things Hayes did was fire Chester A. Arthur from his job as collector of the Port of New York, a political-plum kind of position because the collector controlled about 1,000 jobs at the Custom House and also got a very large salary from his share of fees collected. Arthur had been appointed by Grant, and Hayes wanted him out because Hayes was trying to make the civil service totally nonpolitical. But the move was unpopular because Arthur was well-liked, and of course, later became our twenty-first president.) Hayes also said he didn’t want a second term anyway, so it looked as if Hayes might be out and Grant back in again, but a deadlock developed between Grant and a man named James G. Blaine, and the nomination finally went to James A. Garfield. It was a sad turn of fate for Garfield, as you know if you remember your history, because he was shot, just four months after taking office, by a disgruntled office-seeker named Charles J. Guiteau, and died, after suffering for eighty more days, on September 19, 1881.
Grant went into business after that, taking his life savings - about $100,000 - and opening a Wall Street banking and brokerage firm with a man named Ferdinand Ward, and with one of Grant’s sons as a partner in the company. Grant’s savings would have been enough to support him in those days, but there’s always been some sort of a feeling among some professional military men that the obtaining of a lot of money is the most important thing in a man’s life. They graduate as lieutenants and go on through the military setup and
they become socially conscious, and being socially conscious, they’re very anxious to have the wealth to back it up. You can’t really blame them for that; it’s the system that causes it, and their salaries are not large enough to support the condition to which they think they’re entitled. They’re not all that way, of course; there have been a great many who have no ideas in that direction, and I can name two particularly. One of them was Robert E. Lee, and the other was George C. Marshall. Marshall certainly doesn’t belong in that group, and there are dozens of others who don’t, men who were very much interested in the welfare of their country and not their own personal welfare. But Grant was one of those who wanted a lot more money than he had, even though what he had was enough, and this venture was another disaster. Grant didn’t know anything about Wall Street and how the Stock Exchange worked in that day, which was wide open and had no regulation whatever, and Ward was a crook. It wasn’t long before other people had everything that Grant had, and a lot more besides, and Ward went to jail.
Grant then went to work and wrote his memoirs. He was broke now, and he had cancer and knew he had only a short time to live, so he worked on his manuscript every minute he had the strength for it, because he wanted to earn some money to leave for his family’s support. He finished his manuscript about a month before he died, and a magazine ran his memoirs in serial form, and Mark Twain bought the book rights as a patriotic act and published the memoirs in book form. Twain later delivered $500,000 to the Grant family, which made the family okay, but Twain spent the rest of his life working to pay off the debts he acquired in financing the publication.
BENJAMIN HARRISON WAS our twenty-third president, and he’s next on my list. I tend to pair up Benjamin Harrison and Dwight Eisenhower because they’re the two presidents I can think of who most preferred laziness to labor. They didn’t work at all. Harrison was a general in the Army of the United States and in the Civil War, and he just wanted to retire as a general, just as Eisenhower did. Harrison was the grandson of a former president, of course, William Henry Harrison. But old William Henry Harrison had been in command at the Battle of Tippecanoe and two or three other battles in the Northwest and in the War of 1812, and he insisted on riding to the White House on a white horse and in his uniform and no overcoat on a cold day, and a month later he was dead of pneumonia. Benjamin Harrison was a member of one of the two families that had a family connection with the presidency for two or three generations, the other family being the Adamses, so there was some hope for him, but he got into office and spent his time like a retired general, and the only thing that’s remembered about him today is that he had a $1 billion Congress during his term in office. I don’t know what people would have said if they had had a $70 billion Congress like today. Anyway, Harrison came into office in 1889, after Cleveland’s first term, and then the voters turned Harrison out and put Cleveland in again, and there’s not much else you can say about Harrison except that he was president of the United States.
I didn’t give much space to Benjamin Harrison, as you see, and I’m not going to give a lot more to Warren Gamaliel Harding. His administration was the most corrupt in our nation’s history, and it was a lot worse than Grant’s because there’s no question about the fact that Grant took no part in the corruption that was going on all around him and received no personal gain from it. I think that’s probably also true in the case of Harding, and so do most other people, but it’s by no means a certainty.
Harding, like Grant, grew up in Ohio, and he entered the newspaper field as a reporter on the Democratic Mirror in Marion with a weekly paycheck of $1 per week. But he was such an outspoken and ardent Republican that he got himself fired, and this turned out to be a good break for him because his next move was to team up with two friends and buy another Marion newspaper, the Daily Star, which was dying, for $300. The two friends gave up soon afterwards, but Harding bought them out and turned the paper into a success, and he went on from there into politics, first as a state senator and then in the United States Senate.
Harding really liked his life as a senator in Washington, just as I did, and had no real interest in going any further, again like me. But most of Harding’s political career had been masterminded by a lawyer named Harry M. Daugherty, and Daugherty practically scared Harding into trying for the presidency by telling him that he’d never be elected to a second term as senator unless he drew more attention to himself by being talked about as a potential presidential candidate. Harding’s career as a senator certainly hadn’t been distinguished. As a young man in Ohio, he’d spent a lot of time playing poker and shooting pool, and he did a lot of the same thing as a senator. He was absent at nearly half of the roll calls in the Senate, and when he was around to vote, he voted in a way that he hoped would make him popular with other people in his party even when his personal convictions ran the other way. He was a heavy drinker and liked his liquor more than he should have, but he voted for Prohibition because he knew that’s the way his buddies wanted him to vote. He was a womanizer even though he was supposedly happily married, and later on, whatever was left of his reputation was tarnished further because of it, but he didn’t think much of women’s intelligence or of their ability as political thinkers. So he didn’t really like the idea of women voting, but nevertheless, he voted for it because he knew that would please the people who were important to him politically and socially. And he felt he didn’t stand a chance as a presidential candidate, but he tried for it because Daugherty told him to try.
He did poorly in three primaries: He beat General Leonard Wood by a small number of votes in his home state, but lost heavily in Indiana and practically went unnoticed in Montana. That made Harding and a lot of other Republicans sure that the much more sensible candidates would be Wood and Frank Lowden, the popular governor of Illinois. But neither Wood nor Lowden took the nomination after nine ballots at the Republican convention in Chicago, and a number of important Republicans began to think more and more about Harding. He was a very handsome man, he was pretty good at making speeches, and he’d always voted the way his friends and advisors wanted him to vote. But there was one big question, because rumors about his dubious personal life had begun to spread, and Harding was finally called in and asked if there was anything in his personal activities that might emerge and injure his reputation. Harding assured his questioners that there wasn’t, and he took the nomination on the tenth ballot with Calvin Coolidge as the vice-presidential candidate.
They were running against two first-rate Democrats, Governor James M. Cox of Ohio and a young fellow named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who’d been assistant secretary of the navy, but the Republicans won easily and with a bit of irony involved. Despite Harding’s only partially hidden indifference toward women everywhere except in the bedroom, it was the first time that women had the right to vote, and far and away the largest percentage of these votes went to Harding and Coolidge - some people said strictly because of Harding’s matinee-idol looks. Harding won in every northern state and even in Tennessee at a time when the South was solidly Democratic, receiving 16,152,200 votes to Cox’s 9,147,353 and 404 electoral votes to Cox’s 127. The 16 million-plus votes were twice as many as any previous presidential candidate had ever received in an election, and he probably would have received even more except that nearly a million non-Democrat votes went to the Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs, who was in prison at the time because he’d opposed our entry into World War I.
But the principal reason for Harding’s election, and his landslide victory, I believe, was the fact that Woodrow Wilson, the president before him, had been a great president, and a great president demands great sacrifices and many other things from the people. People just felt that they’d had enough of what was starting to be called, not in a complimentary way, “the Wilson idealism”; and when people elect a weak man to follow a great president, they think maybe they’ll have some relief from the pressures they have to go through when a great president is in office. I’ll sa
y more about that in my chapter on Wilson, but meanwhile, let’s leave it that the public was happy when Harding said he’d give us “normalcy,” which isn’t even a real word. That’s what he called it, but that didn’t mean a thing. If it meant anything at all, I guess, it meant to go back instead of forward. It meant that we became a sort of isolationist nation, because an evident attempt was made to discredit what Wilson had done in arranging a League of Nations, even though Harding, in his preliminary address, said that he was for the League of Nations. Then he did everything he could to break it up.
Harding’s cabinet looked pretty good; it included Herbert Hoover as secretary of commerce, Andrew W. Mellon as secretary of the treasury, Charles Evans Hughes as secretary of state, and Henry Wallace as secretary of agriculture. But it also included a man named Albert B. Fall, a former senator from New Mexico and a fellow who was known as being too friendly with oil and other special interests, as secretary of the interior, and included Harding’s special friend Harry M. Daugherty as attorney general. And anyway, the real heart of the government wasn’t in the White House so much as it was in a place at 1625 K Street, which was known as the Little Green House, where Harding and his cronies caroused and played poker and started to put together a lot of private deals.