Scandal Quenched

J. Frederick Essary is Washington correspondent of The Baltimore Sun. Recently, he traveled south to Asheville, N. C, where the Southern Newspaper Publisher's Association was holding its annual convention. He went a knight from the Faery Queen to cleave off the ghastly head of rumor and of scandal. Said he:

"I wish that straight news--legitimate news--were the only product which proceeds from Washington, but I know that it is not, just as you know it. The Capital is the great germinator of gossip and of scandalous whisperings regarding the great and the near great. . . .

"For some reason wholly mysterious to me, more stories of an amazing character were told and believed regarding Woodrow Wilson than any other great American of my time. There has perhaps never been in Washington a high public official more rigid in his personal rectitude than the man now dead. . . . One of the most absurd of these rumors was to the effect that he had become violently insane.

"It was while these reports were current that a friend of mine from out of town walked with me past the White House. He told me what he had heard regarding the insanity of the President, but said that he had refused to believe a word of it until there had been pointed out to him a bedroom in the northeast corner of the house across the window of which iron bars had been placed. He solemnly directed my attention to these bars, undeniable evidence to his mind of the truth of the insanity story. . . .

"Those bars, I told him, had been across those windows since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. They were placed there when the Roosevelts made a nursery of the room and for the sole purpose of keeping the energetic young Roosevelt boys from precipitating themselves to their death on the concrete pavement below. I hated to spoil a good story, but what else was one to do?

"As for the Harding White House parties, they were innocence itself. The late President was one of the most companionable of men. He loved to have his intimate friends about him. And he loved a friendly game of draw poker. He played it not because there might be a little money involved. He played it because it was a form of relaxation which he most enjoyed. He played it as some people play bridge, or dominoes, or chess, or croquet. He played it without secrecy or apology. And he played it often and sometimes late. And yet these quiet little games have been made to appear, in some minds, as scandalous orgies staged in the official home of the very head of the Government itself."