Political Chicanery

Warren G. Harding was the 29th President of the United States.  He followed Woodrow Wilson in the aftermath of World War I.  His time in office was called the “reign of normalcy,” which strikes me as ironic, since the present Trump administration has been labeled “abnormal,” and pundits have talked about not allowing it to become “normalized.”

Prohibition was in effect during Harding’s tenure.  Alcohol was prohibited by law.  But that didn’t prevent the President from sneaking out of the White House to a house on H Street where the Ohio gang (his cronies) hung out to play poker, smoke their big cigars, and drink the never-ending flow of illegal booze.  The law didn’t seem to apply to those who wielded power.  Has it ever?

When Harding took office the business people began to infest Washington.  The word was that you could do business with the government now—if you slipped a little on the side to the right man.  Oil men licked their chops—they had lobbied for Harding’s nomination at the Republican Convention for a reason.  Harding’s Secretary of the Interior was more than willing, for a price, to let “businessmen” develop the nation’s natural resources.  The scandals of this “reign of normalcy” were many and came to public awareness only after Harding’s death.

In the summer of 1923, Harding suffered ptomaine poisoning and then developed pneumonia.  On August 2, 1923 he died suddenly from what his physicians said was “a stroke of apoplexy.”  Harding was well liked by the nation.  The people were plunged into grief over his passing. The President’s body was placed on a train, which traveled across country from San Francisco to Washington DC.  All along the way, throngs of mourners gathered to see the train go by and pay homage.  A reporter for the New York Times  wrote, “It is believed to be the most remarkable demonstration in American history of affection, respect, and reverence for the dead.”  Speeches were made on the day of public mourning.  Bishop Manning of New York, speaking at the memorial service at St. John the Divine, said:  “If I could write one sentence upon his monument it would be this, ‘He taught us the power of brotherliness.’”  The dead President was called “a majestic figure who stood out like a rock of consistency.”  His vision, said others, “was always on the spiritual.”  

As he was dying, Harding “kept asking…the trusted reporters who surrounded him what a President should do whose friends had betrayed him.”  He knew what was going on in his administration, but tried to make his friends the scapegoats. The nation knew nothing about it—YET!  They soon found out.  They found that their hero, their man, the President of the United States, wasn’t all that they had thought him to be.