President
Harding’s top cabinet appointments—Charles Evans Hughes as secretary of
state, Andrew W. Mellon the Pittsburgh aluminum millionaire secretary
of the treasury, Herbert Hoover secretary of commerce—were excellent.
But most of the other cabinet posts and several leading administrative
positions went to the gang. Harry M. Daugherty, a lobbyist by
profession, became attorney general; a senatorial friend, Albert B.
Fall, who looked like a ballyhoo-man at a country fair but served the
oil interests well, secretary of the interior; Will H. Hays, Harding’s
campaign manager, postmaster general. Of the local cronies, a former
county sheriff was appointed director of the mint, a Marion lawyer whose
financial experience was limited to a few months’ presidency of the
local bank became governor of the federal reserve banking system;
“Colonel” Charles R. Forbes, a chance acquaintance who, it subsequently
appeared, had deserted from the army, became head of the Veterans’
Bureau. A local doctor named Sawyer, who had helped Mrs. Harding (a
hypochondriac and believer in soothsayers and clairvoyants) was suddenly
jumped from civilian life to an army “generalcy,” as the President
called it, to be White House physician. A loutish fellow named Jess
Smith, valet-secretary to Daugherty, was given an office in the
department of justice and became the primary “fixer” of the
administration. Gaston B. Means, another hanger-on, was the gang’s
bootlegger while holding office in the department of justice. After
serving a term in the penitentiary (subsequent to Harding’s death) for
selling permits for “medicinal” whisky, Means disclosed that he had
collected the cool sum of $7 million in bribes from bootleggers, and
turned over the money to Jess Smith. But by that time Smith had
committed suicide and could not deny it.
Other
friends of the President were equally shady characters; there was never
so raffish a “court” as that of Warren G. Harding. And what a change in
the White House! In contrast to the jolly country-house atmosphere of
the Theodore Roosevelt administration, the sick-room smell of the latter
part of Wilson’s, and the good taste and republican elegance of the
future Kennedy administration, that of Harding’s was of the bar-room. T.
R.’s daughter Mrs. Nicholas Longworth, inadvertently straying into an
upstairs room during a state reception, found a recently vacated poker
table littered with cigar stubs, glasses, and partly empty whisky
bottles; and if she had explored below stairs she might have found a
young mistress of the President, brought in through a back door, waiting
for him in a cloakroom. To escape such respectability as Mrs. Harding
imposed on the White House, the President, of an evening, would steal
away to the home of Jess Smith or some other crony, to play more poker
and drink heavily.
These
were indeed the “hollow men” as T. S. Eliot characterized the postwar
politicians of the Western world. There was nothing in them but wind,
greed, and a certain low cunning.
— S. E. Morison