• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

This willingness to put Harding’s needs before her own was evident in the public sphere. Friendly, easy-going Harding never put anyone’s back up or said no to anyone—his razor-sharp wife decisively did it for him. As bold as she was abrasive, Florence relished political battles. Her secretary described Warren looking on with admiring pride as she took on opponents like Henry Cabot Lodge.

But while Florence’s tenacity and drive in part compensated for her husband’s weaknesses, like him she was a poor judge of character. They were no match for the band of unscrupulous cynics who saw in the laid-back President an unparalleled opportunity to get rich quick. When the Hardings moved into the White House, wrote the popular historian Frederick Allen in his 1931 review of the 1920s, “blowsy gentlemen with cigars stuck into their cheeks and rolls of very useful hundred-dollar bills in their pockets began to infest the Washington hotels…[and] the oil-men licked their chops.”

For all his skirt-chasing, Warren Harding was a man’s man, a member of fraternal and civic societies, a lover of cards and golf, whisky and women, and his administration reflected his interests. He created, said Alice Roosevelt Longworth (daughter of former President Theodore Roosevelt and a prominent Washington hostess), “a general atmosphere of waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on the desk, and the spittoon alongside”—and, with his “girlies,” as Longworth said he called them, “put the White House closets to a whole new range of uses.”

Harding’s informal, guileless style made his intellectual inadequacies hard to disguise. The year he took office, he confessed to a journalist that he was having trouble coming to terms with the complexities of his new duties. “I don’t know what to do or where to turn in this taxation matter. Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don’t know where the book is, and maybe I couldn’t read it if I found it. And there must be a man in the country somewhere who could weigh both sides and know the truth. Probably he is in some college or other. But I don’t know where to find him. I don’t know who he is and I don’t know how to get him. My God, but this is a hell of a place for a man like me to be!” He put his hand to his head, smiled at his own discomfiture, turned and walked heavily away.

Harding’s initial response was to form a cabinet to compensate for his deficiencies. He was persuaded to give the State Department to the respected lawyer Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican presidential candidate for 1916; he brought in the efficient and progressive Herbert Hoover, who had served under Woodrow Wilson during the war, as Secretary of Commerce; his commitment to business interests was underlined by his choice of Andrew Mellon, the aluminum magnate, as Treasury Secretary. These men were experienced and reliable.

Less popular was Harding’s decision to appoint to the Attorney-General’s office his closest political ally, Harry Daugherty, as a reward for his long-standing support. Under his aegis the Justice Department became known as the Department of Easy Virtue. Daugherty was the most prominent member of what came to be known as the Ohio Gang, a group of trusted friends (many from Ohio days) with whom Harding played whisky-soaked poker sessions through the night in the private rooms of the White House with the Duchess beadily serving the drinks.

Harry Daugherty and his sidekick, Jess Smith, lived in a house two blocks from the White House on H Street (overlooking Lafayette Square, a notorious gay cruising ground) from where Daugherty conducted most of his Department of Justice business. Both men were devoted to Daugherty’s invalid wife, Lucie, who had remained in Ohio. Harry loathed Jess’s ex-wife, Roxie, although Jess remained close to her. They were, said one friend, “partners if ever two men were.” Daugherty declared Smith was “indispensable to my personal comfort”; Smith worshipped Daugherty