Book Review the Strange Death of President Harding
The Foreign Expiry of President Harding, by Gaston B. Means (Society Publishing, 1930)
I don't want to be coy with this review, so I will simply brainstorm past proverb that The Strange Death of President Harding is a dreadful book, and no one should read information technology… at least, not without considerable forewarning and forearming with real history. Written by Gaston B. Means and May Dixon Thacker, who first met Means when she was visiting prisons in furtherance of "good works," the book allegedly derives from Means' diaries, kept during the 1910s and 1920s. It is a chronicle of rampant invention and fiction, spewed forth past a man who seems to have an nearly psychopathic aversion to the truth. But what is actually interesting well-nigh this terrible book is the far-reaching touch it has had on twentieth century history.
The Foreign Death of President Harding revolves effectually events almost one hundred years in the past, events which took identify during the contentious Presidency of Warren Gamaliel Harding (1921-23). Harding was a Republican populist who beat out the Woodrow Wilson legacy candidate, James M. Cox, in the 1920 election. Harding was a paper editor from Ohio who had entered the U.Southward. Senate in 1917, although his Senate career was undistinguished, to say the to the lowest degree. Several leading newspapermen of the day, including William Allen White, were less than complimentary nigh Harding, who was said to be charming, but not over-gifted in the brain-box. Harding's years in office saw a number of minor policy successes, but Harding himself died in office on the cusp of several scandals, for which he did non survive to accept or deny responsibility. Harding, who was impressively popular for most of his tenure, was, upon his sudden expiry in a San Francisco hotel, mourned on a scale to rival the slain John F. Kennedy forty years later. All the same, within a few brusk months, his administration – now nether President Calvin Coolidge – was the subject of a series of accusations of impropriety and corruption (of which Coolidge had no part).
The 29th President of the United states of america, Warren 1000. Harding.
None of the accusations of Harding'southward complicity in the cases of abuse of office by members of his Cabinet (in the cases of the Interior Secretarial assistant Albert B. Fall and the Teapot Dome oil leases, the Veteran's Bureau abuses under Charles R. Forbes, and improprieties surrounding Attorney General Harry Daughtery) were ever proven. Nor were any of the personal attacks: of booze-soaked debaucheries, of profiteering by Harding and his cronies, and fifty-fifty of murder, e'er proven. These unsubstantiated attacks include those made anonymously by Samuel Hopkins Adams, author of the roman à clef entitled Carousal (1926),which purported to expose some of the scandals of the Harding Administration in fiction, and those of Gaston B. Ways in 1930. Only in 2015 were the 1927 allegations made by Nan Britton, a young woman from Harding's home town of Marion, Ohio, that Harding had fathered her child. Deoxyribonucleic acid testing of descendants of both families accept shown petty doubt that Harding was indeed the father, as Britton declared in The President's Girl.
Since the 1960s, Harding has also been known to have had an affair with Carrie Phillips, a married woman, in the early 1910s, and this dalliance has been the field of study of several books. But the view of Harding as a crook to rival Nixon (who was a cheat and has repeatedly been documented to have been such) has persisted to this solar day. In surveys, Harding is often ranked expressionless final among American Presidents in terms of favorability (including some, similar Garfield or William Henry Harrison, who served a scant few months before their deaths in office). Even so 2 members of his chiffonier, Calvin Coolidge (Vice President) and Herbert Hoover (Secretary of Commerce), went on to become President. No one would argue that Harding was somehow secretly a great President, but what seems to have been a posthumous smear campaign against him definitely tarnished his reputation, excessively and so. Something about these disconnected facts doesn't add up.
Into this mix, Means interjected himself like a fiery arrow of misinformation and salacious allusion. "Writer" Gaston B. Means was a liar, a thief, a crook, and likely a murderer, if we are to accept Edwin Palmer Hoyt'sSpectacular Rogue, a biography of Means, as a reliable source. Information technology has been strongly suggested that for Means to have had the level of intimate, all-hours access which he claims to have had: to the workings of government and to the White House, to Mrs. Harding, and to the President, it would take had to have been without the knowledge of the commanding officeholder of the White House security item, Col. Edmund Starling. Fortunately, Starling wrote his ain volume, and inStarling of the White Firm depicts Ways' book every bit a "fantastic web of lies." Starling continued: "Means turned the investigation of Daugherty into a vaudeville act, with himself as the star" (p. 218-19). In an earlier reference, Starling characterised Means as "a man who would not have been caught dead telling the truth" (p. 182).
The Means book itself is terrible and almost unreadable, stylistically. It would accept been far less aggravating to simply put it down, were it not for the imminent train-wreck feeling that it gives the reader. Whether May Dixon Thacker was trying to capture Means' speech in her awful writing, whether she herself could not write, or whether the writing fashion was a deliberate selection for some unknown stylistic reason, Strange Death is a disaster of grammar, logic, and structure. It is hard to come across why information technology is written that mode… one is left thinking that perhaps it was because the authors just didn't know whatsoever better? Ways as well has a way of putting himself "on the spot" for fundamental events, which is quite remarkable and extraordinary… or rather, it would be, if it were true. Means likewise regularly talks virtually his "show" and "files" in about ridiculous volumes: sometimes files occupy "several suitcases," in other instances, he has "ii filing cabinets full." If any of this pulp documentation was ever given to Thacker, or anyone else, the paw-off has non been noted by history.
Why and so has Means been so often sourced past other authors of the day, and those who were to follow? Whatever they thought of him, certain Harding biographers and historians of the period take been quick to cite Means' book as evidence of Presidential and Administration misconduct, despite its wildly dubious and lurid nature. For every Starling who, whatever his natural inclination politically, tended to view men past their words and deeds, rather than by their party, there is a Frederick Lewis Allen (Only Yesterday) or Samuel Hopkins Adams (Revelry,Incredible Era) who finds the serendipitous lies of someone like Means to have merit enough, simply because they were there.
Gaston B. Means, posed during a 1924 court appearance.
To characteriseStrange Death as a web of lies is perhaps the all-time way to put it: Ways wove fact and fiction until they were almost inextricably linked, and it would take a real historian some considerable time and endeavour to adequately comment and analyse the lies. Much is still unknown about exactly how some of the events "described" past Ways unfolded, merely the impression that one takes abroad fromStrange Death and other books about the period is that Ways was an inveterate, compulsive, and chronic liar. And then when he appears to claim that Harry Daughtery and Jess Smith were lovers, is he lying? When he claims that Jess Smith was murdered "by the gang", what actually happened? What about when he claims – after numerous interviews that well-nigh certainly never happened – to have learned from Florence Harding that she, herself, murdered her husband, President Warren One thousand. Harding in a hotel in San Francisco on iii August 1923, what should nosotros call up? Florence Harding had died in 1924, and was therefore not present to respond to the libel. And although Harding'south death was surprising to some of his doctors of the 24-hour interval, information technology is now generally considered to have been acquired past years of hypertension and heart affliction. Should we recall that Means was imprisoned by the "gang" to ensure his silence, rather than that his imprisonment was a but sentence for his many and varied crimes?
In the last analysis, what should we believe inThe Strange Death of President Harding? I would advise one elementary measure: aught. Not ane damn discussion that tin can't be independently corroborated. And for those lazy "historians" (Adams, Russell, Mee, McCarthy and all the rest who have given Means so much every bit an ounce of credence), I call shame, because that's more than this lying waste of infinite ever, ever deserved. To whatever so-chosen historian who has ever washed more dismissed Means out of hand (except for Ferrell, perhaps, who takes Ways apart in no uncertain terms), I would say that Means has gotten the last express joy on you. I'm non kidding effectually here: Means was and is bad news, and people who can't grasp that are having serious problems with reality. Read this book for fun, or for misery, merely read Robert H. Ferrell'sThe Foreign Deaths of President Harding (note the plural) if you want something which is much more likely to exist the truth.
Finally, thinking about Ways, I constitute myself wondering… what has happened to his descendents? Afterward Ways finally died in disgrace in Leavenworth, , in 1938, what became of his line, of his wife and son? He concluded upwards in prison in north-eastern Kansas not for the lies he told, not for his collaborations with the Germans during the First World War, nor indeed his crimes under the Volstead Act, the murder, or annihilation else. No, Means was finally jailed for extorting money from Evalyn Walsh McLean while he pretended to help "detect" the already-dead Lindberg baby. I wonder if he has descendants, and if they hang their heads over his criminality, or if the family line has already died out? How long does the long, tarnished arm of a cheat hang over a family? Or, perhaps, accept they moved on? Everyone deserves a second chance, and I promise that the descendants of Gaston B. Means, should there exist any living, have taken theirs, and moved on.
Originally reviewed 28 July 2014.
If your marvel is piqued and y'all actually desire a copy of The Foreign Decease of President Harding of your very own, effort AbeBooks.com (links to the title direct).
For a more reliable history, which refutes the claims of some Harding detractors, y'all might consider The Foreign Deaths of President Harding, by Robert H. Ferrell, besides found on AbeBooks.com (links to the title direct).
For a biography of Gaston B. Means, you might consider Spectacular Rogue: Gaston B. Means, past Edwin Palmer Hoyt, also found on AbeBooks.com (links to the title directly).
Source: https://bibliomaneblog.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/the-strange-death-of-president-harding-by-gaston-b-means-a-critical-review/
0 Response to "Book Review the Strange Death of President Harding"
Post a Comment