1920 (31 page)

But these were not the only people following along with Rosenberg on that historic occasion. “To increase audience,” says an undated and unattributed “KDKA History of Broadcasting and KDKA Radio” found in the archives of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library, the first of such institutions to
be endowed by the late philanthropist, “Dr. L. W. Chubb—then manager of the Radio Engineering Department and one of the little band of pioneers—was delegated to install a receiver and loudspeaker system, using two horns borrowed for the occasion from the Navy, in the main ballroom of the Edgewood Club, a suburban Pittsburgh community center where many Westinghouse people and other local residents gathered.”

According to some reports, there were times that night when the American election results shot through the air as far as Canada.

Harding, expecting victory, had already written his acceptance speech. He provided a copy of it to KDKA, which did not yet have the technological ability to broadcast Harding's actually reading it—and so it was “read on the air [by Rosenberg] while the new President was speaking in Washington.”

AS HARDING PREPARED TO TAKE
over for Edith Wilson's ailing husband, radios began to overflow the shelves of stores, all kinds of stores, and just as quickly to vanish until a new shipment came in. Immediately recognizing the power of the new medium, Harding believed that the government should assume control of it, and he and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover and a few others met informally to draw up regulations and assign frequencies. Broadcasters were called to Washington for meetings; if they wanted a frequency, they accepted the government regulations, most of which were technical in nature, only a few of which had to do with content.

In a matter of months, the talking box, as some were now calling it, would revolutionize the way Americans spent their time—creating new patterns of family life; new styles in everything from music to conversation to attires; new hobbies and diversions; new attitudes toward the events of the world, which were now announced by radio more quickly than newspapers could print them; new strategies in political campaigning and decision-making; new tastes in entertainment and, in the process, the creation of new kinds of celebrities, from announcers and singers to faddists like marathon-dancers and flagpole-sitters.

The talking box would more seriously and enduringly influence society than any invention before it. By 1922, 576 radio stations were broadcasting
in the United States, and most of their listeners had earphones clamped to their heads, as speakers were not yet in general use.

But radios were. Or at least they were on their way. Americans bought about 100,000 of them in 1922. The following year, the number leaped to 500,000; and the year after that, in 1924, a third of all money spent for furniture in the United States went for the purchase of radios. After another two years, in 1926, the number of radio stations had surpassed 700, virtually covering the nation with their signals—think of them as invisible tracks—as, some years before, railroads had covered the nation with their visible tracks. As the latter had monopolized transportation in their heyday, so had the former begun to monopolize communication.

As for KDKA, having gotten off to such a good start with the Harding-Cox Show, it went on to achieve an overwhelming number of firsts. Among them:

The first regularly broadcast church services and the necessary remote pickup.

The first regular broadcast of baseball scores, first play-by-play baseball and football, first blow-by-blow boxing, first heavy-weight championship and first World Series.

The first market reports from which grew the first complete farm service and, later, the first barn dance.

The future for barn dancing on radio seemed unpromising from the start, and in fact it was not long before KDKA dropped the program, one of American broadcasting's first ratings casualties.

NO OTHER EVENT OF
1920 would have more of an effect on the future than the birth of radio, which was in turn the birth of American mass media. No other invention would lead to more other inventions, such as television, that had similar effects, only to a more powerful degree. No other product of the era could possibly be called “the electronic equivalent of the Model T,” one that “middle-class consumers could afford and that would eventually transform society.”

Nor could those relatively few people who listened to the election returns on what they thought of as something of a toy, a device for those who had ten dollars of discretionary income with which to play, have imagined what lay ahead for the country as Harding, his victory assured, began to think about the henchmen with whom he would surround himself for what, surprisingly, would be less than a single term in office. During that time, Harding's cronies became the least savory bunch of Americans ever to occupy the country's most prestigious address.

R
EPUBLICANS, AND EVEN SOME DEMOCRATS,
believed that Harding might well have been the most presidential-looking man ever to inhabit the White House. He was also one of the most likable—short on ego, long on cheerfulness, a friend of those on both sides of the aisle as a member of the United States Senate, in which he served but a single undistinguished term before becoming the nation's chief executive. Gray-haired, stern-visaged, clear-eyed, stiff-chinned, ruggedly constructed, almost always attired in a three-piece suit of modest hue and equally modest tie, Harding was the first American head of state for the media age, in which, of course, he played a starring role. As has often been said, he was the chief executive from central casting. It was not meant as a compliment.

The problem was that his reality did not match his appearance. “In the end,” writes biographer Robert K. Murray, “it was the quality of Harding's mind, as much as any personal habits or character traits, which limited his effectiveness as president. … Actually, Harding had a good mind but he simply made little use of it.”

He certainly gave it the day off when he wrote his Inaugural Address. One of the least memorable ever recited, it began with an attempt at eloquence that left careful listeners shaking their heads.

“When one surveys the world around him after a great storm, noting the marks of destruction and yet rejoicing in the ruggedness of the things which withstood it, if he is an American he breathes the clarified atmosphere with a strange mingling of regret and new hope. … In the beginning the Old World scoffed at our experiment; today our foundations of political and social belief stand unshaken, a precious inheritance to ourselves, an inspiring example of freedom and civilization to all mankind. Let us express renewed and strengthened devotion, in grateful reverence for the immortal beginning, and utter our confidence in the supreme fulfillment.”

One thing was certain, though, Harding told his fellow Americans: there would be no more incidents like the Wall Street explosion of September 16. Or, if there were, the culprits, the Reds or anarchists, would have been caught and sentenced by this time, with no mercy shown.

The applause, like the speech itself, was tepid.

Among the journalists listening to the new chief executive was the most uniquely readable of his breed that our country has ever produced. “He writes the worst English I have ever encountered,” said Henry Louis Mencken, of Harding. “It reminds me of a string of wet sponges. … It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps in.”

According to a poll of scholars conducted by Harvard College in 1948, Harding was the worst president the United States had ever had up to that point, twenty-ninth in a field of twenty-nine. By 2010, in a survey from New York's Siena College Research Institute, Harding's reputation had shot up to forty-first out of forty-three chief executives, with James Buchanan, America's only bachelor president, and Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor and the first president to be impeached, having fallen behind him. According to scholars Eugene P. Trani and David L. Wilson, Harding

did not provide moral leadership; he did not have much understanding of forces at work in the United States after the World War; he was not willing to use the federal government to ease adjustment after the war. … He sought to avoid controversy, even if it meant avoiding real problems. … [He] was an ineffective leader, who suffered both personal and political scandal. It is not surprising that historians rate Harding a poor president.

Perhaps, influenced by the right cabinet members and other advisers, Harding would have performed more admirably, exercised his mind more often. Instead, he surrounded himself with a horde of hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, poker-playing, perpetually scheming banditos known as the Ohio Gang. They were certainly not the first presidential associates to combine personal and political misbehavior, but they were without question the first to combine them to such extremes. The political misdeeds were mainly the doing of Harding's pals from back home, who reacted to the election returns like kids who found that the door to the candy store had been left unlocked and the cop on the beat was home sick tonight. They smoked, they drank, they chewed tobacco, and at least twice a week they played poker, with Florence Harding, the unattractive, barely sociable, and normally straitlaced wife of the president often sitting in herself. Poker, she admitted reluctantly, was her weakness.

Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was dubious of the Ohio Gang before they even had time to break their first law, and the more he saw of them, as Harding filled important government posts with one after another late in 1920, the more apprehensive he became. Hoover liked Harding, respected him for a variety of reasons. But, he believed, the president

had another side which was not good. His political associates had been men of the type of Albert B. Fall, whom he appointed Secretary of the Interior; [Harry M.] Daugherty, whom he appointed Attorney General; [Charles] Forbes, whom he appointed head of the Veteran's Bureau; Thomas W. Miller, whom he appointed Alien Property Custodian, and Jesse Smith, who had office room in the Department of Justice.

[Harding] enjoyed the company of these men and his old Ohio associates in and out of the government. Weekly White House poker games were his greatest relaxation. The stakes were not large, but the play lasted most of the night. … I had lived too long on the frontiers of the world to have strong emotions against people playing poker for money if they liked it, but it irked me to see it in the White House.

THE OHIO GANG'S FIRST CRIMINAL
deed was to be expected. It was the almost mandatory act of violating the Eighteenth Amendment. It didn't have to. It could have set an example of compliance to the law, or at least could have non-complied behind closed doors. Instead, the White House made no secret of its malfeasance, the edifice being stocked with more liquor than a city block of high-toned speakeasies, with shipments arriving in unmarked trucks under cover of darkness almost every night of the week. The Ohio Gang bought, or was given by shady friends who would later have favors to ask, only the best of alcoholic beverages.

Other than that, the first of the administration's scandals was the only one
not
involving a member of the Ohio Gang. But as a close friend of the president, Charles Forbes might well have been an honorary member. He knew well the members of the gang; he was also a close friend of the first lady, with whom he may have been the only male in Washington to grit his teeth and flirt at the same time. His reward for this proximity, and feigned affection, was being appointed head of the Veterans' Bureau.

He was a strange choice. As Murray writes, although he won the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Great War, “Forbes nonetheless had earlier once deserted the army and been arrested although never brought to trial. … Forbes's personal reputation among Republicans was unsavory. Neither [Republican National Committee Chairman Will] Hays nor Daugherty, the two men most responsible for party patronage, endorsed Forbes's appointment to the Veterans' Bureau. Daugherty told the president at the time that it was a mistake.” The attorney general would later turn out to be a mistake himself. As for Harding, he refused to be dissuaded, and eventually Forbes assumed his new duties.

Because of the Great War, veterans' hospitals were facing severe shortages of supplies, more than they had at any time since the Civil War. It was up to Forbes to refill the warehouses. It was, in fact, the first set of duties he faced upon taking office. Instead, he did just the opposite, not restocking the storage areas but temporarily emptying them. Declaring as “worthless” all manner of items that were actually invaluable to the care of his patients, Forbes sold them to accomplices at bargain-basement rates. Then he bought them back from dummy corporations for much more than they were worth, with Forbes and his allies pocketing the difference. As Harding biographer John Dean writes, “Forbes was indeed selling surplus supplies (sheets, towels, soap, gauze, winter pajamas, and the like), and at absurdly low prices, to private contractors in private deals.” Other goods that went straight from Veterans' Bureau storage to the black market were drugs, moleskin, medicinal liquor, “and even hardware and some trucks.”