Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [50]
Albert Fall loudly protested his innocence, claiming that the large sum of cash he admitted having received came not from Edward Doheny or Harry Sinclair but was a loan from Ned McLean. He had not, he swore, been given “one cent on any account of any oil lease or upon any other account whatsoever.” But McLean, although he was willing to write Fall a predated check to cover the money, could not be prevailed upon to testify on his behalf in court. Pleading ill-health, he refused to come to Washington from Florida, where he was spending the winter, and finally confessed that he was lying. Fall was convicted of conspiracy and bribery and sentenced to a year in prison—the first Cabinet officer in U.S. history to be jailed.
Sinclair was acquitted of bribery charges but served a double term in 1929 for contempt of the Senate (he had refused to answer the investigating committee’s questions) and for contempt of court (he had offered at least one member of his jury a car “as long as this block” if he voted to acquit him). In 1924 Will Hays was asked by the Senate investigating committee how much Sinclair had given the Republican Party and replied $75,000; four years later, asked again, he revealed that there had also been a loan of $185,000 which he had not disclosed because he had not been asked about “bonds.”
Further unpleasant disclosures continued to emerge. Having failed to persuade Harding’s family to pay her a $50,000 settlement, in 1927 Nan Britton revealed in The President’s Daughter not only that Harding was the father of her eight-year-old daughter, but that the child had been conceived in Harding’s Senate office. In The Strange Death of President Harding, published three years later, Gaston Means claimed that Jess Smith had been murdered and that Florence Harding, pushed to the edge by Warren’s womanizing, had killed her husband. Others put forward theories about Harding having committed suicide.
Evalyn McLean saw the political scandals of Harding’s administration as being on an epic scale, with herself and her husband as its protagonists. “What happened to us all was just about as tragic as if each one, instead of only I, had worn a talisman of evil,” she wrote many years later, referring to the Star of the East. “Some died, one probably was killed [Jess Smith], one is blind, some went to jail; I suffered humiliation, and Ned lives on, a fancied fugitive, in an asylum where he pretends, with characteristic slyness, that he is someone else who does not know McLean.” In the early 1930s one of Ned’s fellow inmates was Zelda Fitzgerald, with whom he reportedly used to dance the hokey-kokey.
It was a sign of the moral lethargy of the times that the public was more hostile towards the men who scrutinized the Harding scandals than towards the perpetrators of them. The senators investigating the oil scandals and the Department of Justice under Daugherty were labeled “assassins of character,” “mud-gunners” and, worst of all, unpatriotic. People muttered darkly about a socialist conspiracy to bring down America.
Nothing could challenge the national sense that the Republicans were the only party fit to govern. As their collectively apathetic attitude to Prohibition showed, many Americans were only too happy not to probe too deeply into difficult truths that would interfere with their complacent enjoyment of 1920s prosperity. What they were really interested in was not politics but “motion pictures, baseball, prize fights, automobiles, dress, murder and divorce.” Harding’s taciturn Vice President, Calvin Coolidge—conveniently free from any whiff of implication in his predecessor’s shortcomings—was re-elected in another Republican landslide in 1924. His supporters sang,
When we get to Washington, home, sweet home,
We won’t give a darn for the Teapot Dome!
Henry Ford and his Model T, available in any color “so long