Beyond Parody

By Paul Gray

THE OHIO GANG: THE WORLD OF WARREN G. HARDING by Charles L. Mee Jr. Evans; 248 pages; $14.95

The scene is the Oval Office of the White House, where Warren Gamaliel Harding is talking to a newspaper columnist. The eminent man says: "Oftentimes, as I sit here, I don't seem to grasp that I am President." The statement is too good not to be true. In fact, the entire Harding Administration is a humorist's despair; at a certain point, venality and incompetence simply transcend parody. Historian Charles L. Mee Jr. understands this. His brisk, hilarious retelling of the Harding saga resembles a series of blackout sketches. Facts are trotted out quickly, to speak and bray for themselves.

A genuinely amiable man, Harding rose swiftly in Ohio politics through his unswerving devotion to whatever his G.O.P. bosses wanted at the moment. He was nominated for the presidency in 1920 because the warring pols could not settle on any of the leading contenders. One Senator explained: "Warren Harding is the best of the second-raters." Disillusioned by the war and weary of Woodrow Wilson's high-road crusading, the voters overwhelmingly elected Harding. In the White House, he inaugurated twice-weekly poker games in the library and found a secluded closet for trysts with his mistress.

While the President fiddled, a number of his appointees diddled, in a truly baroque spree of systematic stealing. Attorney General Harry Daugherty was perhaps the most clever and rapacious. Daugherty shared a Washington house with one Jess Smith, a fellow Ohioan and a proven fixer and bribe taker. Smith granted favors and made promises that only the Attorney General could deliver, kept up to half a million dollars buried in a friend's backyard and walked around wearing a money belt filled with 75 $1,000 bills. When the jig was nearly up, Smith committed suicide. To thwart a Senate investigation, Daugherty declared his own records off limits and later resigned.

Then there was Albert Fall from Kentucky. When he was named Secretary of the Interior, Fall was more than $140,000 in debt and eight years behind in paying his taxes. He worked hard and successfully to get federal oil-reserve lands transferred to his own department, then had no trouble finding private drillers who were ready to deal. One of the tracts Fall exchanged for private favors was a spot in Wyoming called Teapot Dome. Meanwhile, Charlie Forbes, head of the Veterans' Bureau, was traveling about the country, letting contracts for federal hospitals. He was generous with the taxpayers' money, paying inflated prices to grateful builders and then pocketing the difference. Forbes also liked to sell Government surplus goods cheap and then restock empty warehouses dear. The buyers, the sellers and Forbes all profited handsomely.

The corruption spread. Even Harding began to notice the borborygmic rumbles coming from his overstuffed subordinates. By then it was too late to avert scandals, although Harding did not live to suffer them. He died, apparently of a heart at tack, perhaps complicated by simple bafflement. Today, in a more cynical age, it is hard to believe that so many officials could plunder so brazenly. Mee's version of this gaudy time is light and entertaining. It may also, if the reader wishes, be taken as cautionary.

--By Paul Gray

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.