Mr. Bryson opens Chapter 14 with: "For Warren G. Harding, the summer of 1927 was not a good one, which was perhaps a little surprising since he had been dead for nearly four years."
Mr. Bryson's book, while focusing on the major events of 1927... Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic, Babe Ruth and the Yankees, the Sash Weight Murder Case...also provides background as to what the era was like by also revealing what was going on a few years before 1927. What set the table, so to speak.
In Harding's case, it was how he was unlikely to even be expected to be the Republican nominee for president in 1920. And after the election that Harding won with the greatest plurality of the times, how he pretty much acted stupidly in office, allowing those around him to pilfer the public treasure chest.
Harding died in office, in 1923, after only serving 29 months. Mr. Bryson summarizes:
Harding's death was so well timed, in terms of escaping scandals, that it was widely rumored that his wife poisoned him for the sake of his reputation. Her behavior following his death was certainly curious: she immediately began destroying all his papers and wouldn't allow a death mask to be made. In addition, she stoutly refused to give permission for an autopsy, which is why the cause of death has always been uncertain.
Talk about achieving a code of silence. Mrs. Harding was well ahead of the times.
So, with a death in office, the vice president takes over. In this case, Calvin Coolidge, who would finish the term and then win the election of 1924 in his own right.
The Teapot Dome scandal was the most famous of the Harding administration. It involved the sale of oil leases to public land by the Interior Secretary Albert Fall to oil executives for favorable "loans" back to Mr. Fall.
The scandal was conceived during the Harding administration, but unraveled over time, with court cases that went into 1929. 1927 was a bad year for Harding, posthumously, because it was then that the Supreme Court ruled that the leases had been obtained fraudulently, and a book came out about the love child Harding had fathered.
Albert Einstein studied gravity, but sex and money have been the driving forces on Earth, before, then and now.
Harding it seems fathered a child with his mistress, Nan Britton, 31 years his junior. The baby girl, Elizabeth Ann, was born in 1919. Harding supported his mistress, and the baby, even as his political stature rose. But, he also continued the affair, with assignations in the White House in a cloak room outside the Oval Office. Ms. Britton wrote about these in her book, "The President's Daughter," finally published in July 1927.
True to the chapter's opening sentence, 1927 was not a good year for Harding, despite having died nearly four years earlier. He may as well have been buried in the doghouse.
My father didn't pass down any opinions of Harding, his, or that of others. My father was 12 in 1927, and did witness the ticker tape parade for Lindbergh. I'm thinking he skipped school that day, Monday, June 13th, but he never said.
The only politician I can assign posthumous enmity to (so far) is John V. Lindsay, New York City's mayor from 1966 through 1973. And I'm hardly alone, although we are starting to check out.
There was a terrific snowstorm in February 1969, dumping 15 inches of snow in the city. Drifts of course were higher. We lived in Flushing, in the borough of Queens, and were particularly affected because Mayor John didn't get the plows out. The city in general was crippled, but Queens was hardest hit. Nothing was plowed. We and the rest of the neighbors literally shoveled the street out and exposed the fire hydrants. And good thing, because our upstairs tenant fell asleep on the couch while smoking and nearly burned the place down. Damage was extensive, but the fire department was able to get through because of our collective snow removal efforts. Smoke inhalation was the worst anyone suffered.
The story went that Ralph Bunche, the Under Secretary General for Special Political Affairs at the U.N., living in the Kew Gardens section of the borough got his street plowed after he complained. Where he was going with only his street plowed is not known. Queens County, then, and now, is a maze of streets, avenues, lanes, boulevards, drives, places, roads and parkways that adhere to absolutely little pattern or regimentation. It's London.
So, Mayor John V. Lindsay basically got a snowstorm named after him. To this day his name brings recognition if you're discussing inept snow removal.
Last month I was in a Queens butcher shop, Karl Ehmer, buying what are to me the world's greatest frankfurters, and there, on their flat panel TV screen was either a live, or a taped press conference on NY1 coming from City Hall, with the freshly elected Mayor de Blasio trying to defend himself against poor snow removal on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, keeping schools open during a blizzard, his dislike of charter schools, his emphasis on speed limits and cracking down on jaywalking. He was having a tough time of it.
Comments from the business side of the counter from the staff basically accused the Mayor of being an "a-hole." (Why people torture themselves with TV news is beyond me, but here they are doing it to themselves at work.)
One woman, perhaps a co-owner of the place was old enough to understand my comment, to no one in particular, "Bring back Lindsay."
She just shook her head, and flatly said, "Oh, Lindsay." Forty-one years since Lindsay was mayor, and 14 years since he passed away, she still didn't think he was good idea either.
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