Harding Hung

Into the great entrance hall of the White House last week tramped overalled workmen who began to bang and hammer on the left wall. Coming out of his cubby-hole office off the hall, Irwin ("Ike")

Hoover, chief White House usher, super vised the work, offered suggestions. From the right wall across the hall a luminous Calvin Coolidge in oils eyed the proceed ings coldly. When hooks were imbedded in the left wall, a large framed picture was swung up into position. The workmen went away. Usher Hoover returned to his office. The next time President Hoover passed through the hall he noticed that an official portrait of Warren Gamaliel Harding had been hung.

Custom requires the hanging of a President's portrait in the White House immediately upon his retirement or death. President Coolidge's picture was in place before March 4, 1929. When Harding died in 1923, Congress promptly appropriated $2,500 for a White House portrait. A British artist, Edmund Hodgson Smart, submitted a picture he had painted from life. One delay followed another. The Fine Arts Commission rejected the Smart portrait. After more delays Artist Francis Luis Mora of Gaylordsville, Conn, was commissioned to do another portrait of the late President, using photographs to get the likeness. It was the Mora portrait (see cut) that, seven years late, was hung without ceremony last week. No special lighting was provided. Only the name was inscribed on the frame.

Though a Harding picture was at last in the White House, the elaborate Harding Memorial at Marion, Ohio remained last week undedicated. Designed by Henry Hornbostel and Eric Wood of Pittsburgh, this Georgia marble edifice, costing $800,000, stands in the centre of a ten-acre landscaped tract. Forty-eight columns circle the tomb to which the bodies of the 29th President and his wife were moved three years ago. Honorary President of the Harding Memorial Association is Calvin Coolidge. Other officers include Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, John Hays Hammond, John Barton Payne.

President Coolidge never went to Marion to dedicate the Memorial. When Herbert Hoover became President, friends of Harding felt that he could and would not refuse to lead the dedicatory ceremony in memory of the man who first put him into the Cabinet, gave him his political start. But President Hoover has been as preoccupied as was his predecessor whenever the Harding Memorial was mentioned. The apparent reluctance of official Washington to honor Harding has stirred resentful mutterings in Ohio. Declared the Dayton Daily News (published by James Middleton Cox, Democratic presidential nominee defeated by Harding in 1920) in a recent editorial:

"While one member of Harding's Cabinet is now President and another is Chief Justice and yet another is Secretary of the Treasury, no word has ever come from any of these in defense of their much-attacked dead chief. ... A memorial to a dead President demands the attendance of a living President. Mr. Coolidge made long presidential trips but he was never able to get the time to travel to Marion to dedicate the Memorial to his old chief. The Hoover Administration is a year and more gone; and yet the Memorial at Marion awaits its official honors. Messrs. Hoover, Coolidge. Hughes and Mellon never disowned Harding while he was alive. Why this strange effort to ignore and forget him, now he is dead?"

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