Books: Kiss Me, Harding

THE SHADOW OF BLOOMING GROVE:

WARREN G. HARDING IN HIS TIMES by Francis Russell. 691 pages. McGraw-Hill. $12.50.

Writing an exciting biography about Warren Gamaliel Harding is like filming a chase sequence with a wooden Indian. Harding’s instincts were all for posture. Like a suntanned Roman, he struck his Midwest Ciceronian pose and held it, occasionally delivering himself of the sort of speech that instantly self-destructs upon reaching the brain.

Francis Russell, historian of Sacco and Vanzetti (Tragedy in Dedham), keeps his camera circling the 29th President of the United States and sometimes almost creates the illusion the body is twitching with life. Manfully he rates Harding as “an astute and able Ohio politician” and “above all, a kindly man.” But he is up against one of the great political still lifes of modern times. The personal portrait that emerges reveals a man notable mainly for his mediocrity of mind and spirit—a rather lazy fellow for whom somebody else always had to open the door when opportunity knocked.

Substitute First Baseman. Even as a boy out of Blooming Grove, Ohio, “Winnie” Harding went in for nothing much more strenuous than tootling his B-flat cornet in the band. After five minutes of shucking corn, he gave it up for good, “saying it was too hard.” At Iberia College—now Ohio Central College —his main interests were “debating, writing, and making friends,” desultory preparation for the desultory professional floundering that followed.

Moving to Marion, Ohio, young Harding dabbled in teaching, browsed briefly over law books, sold insurance, played his cornet at the roller-skating rink, and rode the bench as substitute first baseman on the town’s ball club. He also began to master perhaps his most highly developed skill: draw poker.

Backing into the newspaper business as a $100 investor in the nearly defunct Marion Star, Harding built it into a modest moneymaker, Russell claims, though apparently it was Harding’s wife Florence (the “Duchess”) who strong-armed both the newspaper and the man into success. A virago of a woman five years older than her “Wurr’n,” she was the one driving masculine principle in her husband’s life—the force that thrust him upward out of the comfortable country editor’s chair in which Harding liked to slump in a “digestive trance” after lunch.

Harding floated into the Ohio senate, then the U.S. Senate, borne on waves of alliteration: “Progress is not proclamation nor palaver,” he orated when delivering the nominating speech for Taft in 1912. “It is not pretence nor play on prejudice.” He based his own progress on one cardinal rule: Don’t “offend anybody.” Half awesomely, he was described as “the greatest exponent of standpatism the state ever had.”

After the 1920 Republican Convention, which chose him over two abler candidates, Major General Leonard Wood and Illinois Governor Frank O. Lowden, Harding became the compromise candidate to end all compromises. He was, at best, the man nobody really hated—the legendary two-o’clock-in-the-morning choice of political bosses horse-trading in a smoke-filled room.

Closet Drama. In retracing a political career that began in near nonentity and ended with death and the Teapot Dome oil-lands scandal, Francis Russell can do little but confirm this familiar myth—in detail. Yet even in his notorious sex life, Harding comes off as curiously passive. He was the pursued rather than the pursuer in his relations with his Lolita doll Nan Britton, a doctor’s early-blooming daughter who decorated her bedroom with Harding photographs when she was 14. Later, one night in 1919, she conceived his daughter in the Senate office building and subsequently, as she told it, made love with him amid the footwear in a White House closet. Even in dealing with his most enduring mistress, Carrie Phillips, a restless American wife right off the pages of Main Street, the President appears to have been fumblingly defensive. She and her gullible husband went on trips with Harding and the Duchess. Harding had other women, including a widow neighbor in whose bathroom his toothbrush was once innocently pointed out to newsmen. But he was no more a great lover than a great statesman. His notion of a real courtship gift was a five-pound box of chocolates.

In a lawsuit brought by Harding’s heirs, Russell has been restrained from reprinting sections of his letters and love poems to Carrie. As a result, some lines in the book are left suggestively blank. Russell leads up to them with come-on phrases: “His sensuality struck depths he was unaware of in himself.” But readers should have no great expectations, if Nan Britton’s quotes from Harding are any sample: “Oh, dearie, tell me it isn’t hateful to you to have me kiss you!”

In the circumstances, it is little wonder that Russell so often hustles the strong-minded Duchess front and center or strays to little political vignettes—the best things in the book—of men like Cincinnati’s “Boss” Cox, President Maker Mark Hanna, and the swarm of half-cynical, half-naive grafters who operated in the Harding power vacuum. Harding was a man to whom other people happened, and all of these people did their part in putting his body in a Marion mausoleum—he died, probably of apoplexy, on Aug. 2, 1923, two years and five months after his Inauguration—leaving his reputation in the mud of Teapot Dome.

“Leave Me Alone.” Chronicling the tragicomedy of Harding’s days and nights, Russell seems to examine his personal life as thoroughly as it can be or ought to be examined. It was hardly Harding’s fault, however, that his main asset as President was a rugged, craggy, confidence-inspiring face. The usual explanation of why Harding became President is the U.S. longing to return to “normalcy” after World War I. But, as Herbert Hoover shrewdly put it, the word normalcy really expressed little more than that “leave-me-alone” feeling that everyone gets after a fever. A country is supposed to get the leaders it deserves. The ultimate scandal of the Harding years may rest with a body politic that could possibly find him the best available choice for the highest office in the land.