33 - 1920: harvey grooms harding
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How Capitalists Rule/33
The Republocrats Series
Part 33:
1920: HARVEY GROOMS HARDING
By Vince Copeland
The election of 1920 was viewed in some quarters as a belated referendum on World War I. There had in fact been an attempt in Congress to hold a referendum before entering the war. It was called the "Ludlow Amendment" after the representative who introduced it. But it failed to pass. The war for democracy did not include any democratic decision to fight the war.
However, the repudiation of the Democratic Party at the polls in 1920 (by an 8-million vote plurality for the Republicans!) was a belated anti-war statement. The plurality for Warren Harding was the largest any president had ever received up to that time. It was all the more remarkable considering Harding's character and competence--or rather, incompetence.
The Democratic candidates, James Cox for president and Franklin Delano Roosevelt for vice president, might easily have been as popular as Harding. But in the postwar letdown, they suffered the same fate as khaki uniforms and songs like "Mademoiselle from Armentiers."
Franklin Roosevelt was a "big navy" man who had served as assistant secretary of the navy under Wilson. No one could miss the symbolism of this. His kinsman Theodore Roosevelt had served in exactly the same capacity before becoming governor of New York State and then vaulting into the presidency by way of the vice presidency. Thus FDR's ambition must have been plain for all to see. His slate lost the election, however, and he had to take a slightly different route before ultimately capturing the presidency in 1932. But he too would first become a governor of New York.
James Cox, the Democratic candidate for president in 1920, was an Ohio politician and, like Harding, was closely connected to Big Oil. He was backed to some degree by Thomas W. Lamont of the House of Morgan. This seems to have been on the basis of Cox's support for the League of Nations, about which Lamont, unlike the majority of his colleagues, was quite enthusiastic.
Before the Republican convention, the big money had been inclined to bet on the candidacy of General Leonard Wood. But Wood proved to be a slender reed. He got himself involved in a scandal over government confiscation of alien property during the war. At least one of his partners in the deal went to jail.
HARVEY'S PREDICTION COMES TRUE
So the Republicans settled on Warren Gamaliel Harding (just as George Harvey had predicted a year earlier). Harding was a U.S. senator from Ohio with even closer connections than Cox to the Rockefellers and Big Oil. Where Wilson had been able to pretend to be anti-monopoly and anti-Wall Street, no such pretense was possible--or even desirable--as far as Harding was concerned. He exuded capitalist prosperity.
While a number of Morgan people gave strong support to Harding, he probably reported more regularly to the Rockefellers via the Sinclair Oil Co. Morgan partners Henry P. Davison, Thomas Cochran and Dwight Morrow gave several thousand dollars each to his campaign, as did several Guggenheims, William Boyce Thomson (a big copper man and Morgan ally), and Charles M. Schwab. But so did some big millionaires behind the Rockefellers and the Sinclairs.
Of course, the most memorable event of the Harding administration was the so-called Teapot Dome oil scandal involving navy-owned wells and Sinclair Oil.
It was Will Hays of Sinclair, by the way, who made the virtuous ruling that no Republican campaign contribution above $1,000 would be accepted. The above-named donors and many others obeyed this ruling by making thousand-dollar contributions several weeks apart totaling $10,000 or more. They also had several members of their family contribute, thus creating a large amount of family values for Harding. (Hays was later to become the arbiter of purity in the motion picture industry.)
GEORGE HARVEY--AGAIN
George Harvey played approximately the same role in this campaign as the old president-makers--Whitney, Hanna and Roosevelt--had earlier, but not nearly as forcefully. Nor did he have to. The big parties were more demoralized now, at least so far as independent action and popular will were concerned, with the Democrats suffering the same malaise that had afflicted the Republicans in 1912. Furthermore, politics was beginning to be more diffused among a larger number of multi-millionaires than before, but not so diffused that the biggest moguls of finance were deprived of having the last word.
In a way, Harvey was even bolder--or more impudent--than the other king-makers. As a well-known Democrat, he could not be a delegate to the Chicago Republican convention of 1920. But the center of strategic discussion, according to his biographer, was his suite at the Blackstone Hotel. Considering his 1919 prediction about Harding, his performance at the Blackstone acquires a special significance.
His colleagues in choosing the candidate were Henry Cabot Lodge, then quite famous as the leading U.S. senator in opposition to the League of Nations; Medill McCormick of the Harvester and newspaper McCormicks; Reed Smoot of Utah; James Wadsworth and William F. Calder of New York State, the former a huge land holder; Joseph Grundy, a fabulously rich businessman of Pennsylvania; and Senator Boise Penrose, Pennsylvania political "boss," plus several of his senatorial confreres.
Concealing his real motive for refusing to give the nomination to General Wood, Harvey complained that there were still thousands of women who were singing "I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier." Wood was also accused of buying some delegates to the convention. That would hardly have been much of an obstacle for Harvey.
Harvey was also in constant touch with Joseph B. Kealing of Indiana, who as liaison officer of the convention apparently could swing as many as 600 delegates' votes on a few moments' notice. ("George Harvey: Passionate Patriot," p. 276)
"There was," said Harvey afterward, "no popular explosion for Harding. There was little spontaneity. He was nominated because there was nothing against him and because the delegates wanted to go home." Not a great epitaph, even for a minor president!
GETTING WALL STREET'S BLESSING
While Harding was still president-elect, he called up Harvey in New York to get his okay on some Cabinet appointments. Harvey was delighted with the choice of Will Hays as postmaster general (at that time still the main lever for party patronage) and equally pleased with the idea of Charles Evans Hughes as secretary of state. And from some points of view the naming of Hughes was an excellent choice indeed. Harvey was similarly delighted with the appointment of Andrew Mellon as secretary of the treasury.
Harvey himself was offered the State Department, but he took the ambassadorship to England instead in 1921. He wrote letters to Harding on the merits of velvet pants versus knee britches at the Court of St. James. They were published in his biography.
His acceptance of the ambassadorship to Britain had its serious side, however. He, like practically all the U.S. ambassadors to London in the 20th century, was a trusted votary of big finance here. The following letter he received from the first John D. Rockefeller makes this plain, at least by hint and inference:
"Allow me to congratulate you on the news which reaches me ... of your appointment as Ambassador to Great Britain. I also congratulate our President on his wise judgment. You are entitled to the position. I join heartily with our citizens in expressing appreciation for the invaluable services you have rendered your country. I hear testimony not only to the good statesmanship you have shown, ..." etc., etc.
'JUST A SLOB'?
When Alice Roosevelt Longworth said that Harding was not a bad man, "just a slob," she was giving voice to a generation of Washington snobs and aristocrats. Today such frank talk is muted, and only paeans to good government are heard at party conventions and other political cathedrals of the status quo.
Harding was one of the few non-millionaire presidents of the 20th century. He came well draped with the tradition of using government to enrich the political office-holder. White House poker parties and small-time payoffs were the rule.
But his little helpers in big business were hard at work, too. As we said, he appointed Andrew Mellon secretary of the treasury and Charles Evans Hughes secretary of state. Mellon ran up the tax bill for the people of the United States and essentially shifted the war burden on to the masses and away from the big rich. Hughes, with great talent and constant effort, made the U.S. armed might felt all over the world, even though the war was well over. The accumulation of war debts and the campaign for "reparations" from Germany began about this time.
Mellon was one of the five or six richest persons in America, with control over Gulf Oil, American Aluminum, the Mellon Bank, and Koppers Coke, among others. In giving tax breaks to the rich, he did not forget his own case. He rebated a total of $404,000 to himself during his first four years in office. During the next four years, he had to fend off allegations of malfeasance in the first four. But he was so popular with the golden fraternity that he served under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover.
By the latter part of the Hoover administration, Mellon was under investigation by the U.S. Senate. Hoover solved that one by getting Mellon out of the country as ambassador to England. In the 19th century, it would have been considered a scandal even to give such a post to a person that rich.
But the early twenties were not all liquor and poker parties. The Washington Naval Conference of 1924 rearranged power in the Pacific in favor of the United States and laid the naval basis for the next war--with Japan. Charles Evans Hughes presided over the meetings for the United States and showed real talent for imperialist diplomacy.
Hughes showed his mettle with an iron-clad five-five-three treaty with England and Japan. The English and Americans agreed to make no more than five naval battleships apiece for each three the Japanese built. John Hay's Open Door treaty of 1899 had laid the diplomatic basis for this, but the Allied victory in the First World War was, of course, fundamental. Japan had practically sat out the war, but as an allied neutral. The problem for England and the United States was how to keep Japan leashed until such time as a war over the Far Eastern market for commodities and capital goods became inevitable.
1924: COOLIDGE AND DAWES
Calvin Coolidge became president in 1923 by virtue of Harding's death in office. He had been governor of Massachusetts and attained countrywide notoriety when he broke the Boston policemen's strike. This strike was particularly militant, with the police showing signs of solidarity with labor. Coolidge called in the National Guard.
The editorialists of the nation raved over Coolidge's "commitment to democracy" in a way that would hardly have surprised Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois. Altgeld had been politically destroyed after he protested Grover Cleveland's calling out the National Guard to break the railway workers' strike.
Governor Waite of Colorado was another one of those rare political figures who had alienated big capital. He actually enlisted the National Guard in support of the miners in a strike at Pueblo.
Coolidge was in the general lineup of Morgan politicians, as was his Democratic opponent, John W. Davies, who had been a lawyer for the great financial mogul. With the prosperity of the country now bearing a Republican label, it was a safe bet that the Morgans would win, and in fact they did. (They would have won with Cox and Roosevelt too. But not so definitively and having to share power with a few anti-Morgan elements in the big rich.)
Coolidge's level of intellect may be judged by the title of a series he wrote for a women's magazine: "Enemies of the Republic; Are the Reds Stalking Our College Women?" (Cited in "America's 60 Families," p. 159)
(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World, 46 W. 21 St., New York, NY 10010; via e-mail: ww%nyxfer@igc.apc.org.)
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