[This has been a particularly crazy last year/decade/eternity, but it’s not the first nutty presidential campaign and election. 100 years ago was certainly another, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of 1924 election contexts, leading up to some reflections on this year’s electoral results!]
On how the
Harding administration’s scandals expanded in the year after his death, and how
they didn’t ultimately matter much in the election.
Beginning with
the 1840 election and William
Henry Harrison’s particularly abrupt death just one month after his
inauguration, and continuing through the 1960 election and the
Kennedy assassination, every twenty years the president who triumphed in that
campaign ended up dying while still in office. The majority of those deaths
were due to assassinations (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy), but
there were also three who died of natural causes: Harrison in 1841, FDR
in 1945, and, on August
2nd, 1923, Warren Harding from what was likely cardiac
arrest but was called at the time a cerebral hemorrhage that had followed an
“acute
gastrointestinal attack.” Harding was on a
train and boat trip across the Western U.S. at the time (known by the
evocative name the Voyage
of Understanding), and apparently sometime in the course of the trip asked
his Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover (who later
wrote about the conversation) what a president should do if is he aware of
a scandal inside his administration that has not yet come to light.
According
to Hoover, he advised the president to publicize such a scandal; we’ll never
know if Harding would have done so had he lived, but one thing is for certain:
major scandals related to his administration did indeed emerge in the year after
his death, amidst his
former Vice President and newly sworn-in
President Calvin Coolidge’s reelection campaign. The most prominent such
scandal was Teapot
Dome, which involved illicitly awarded leases to federal lands; investigations
began two months after Harding’s death and continued into early 1924, with
Harding’s Secretary
of the Interior Albert Fall eventually serving prison time for his role. Just
a couple months later, the Senate voted to open up another investigation, this
time into Harding’s Attorney General
Harry M. Daugherty; those investigations
began in March 1924 and continued for the next few months, eventually
resulting in the conviction of and prison time for another former Harding
official, Alien
Property Custodian Thomas W. Miller (although Daugherty escaped with a hung
jury). Those weren’t
even the only scandals, but they were more than enough to dominate headlines
for much of 1924.
You’d think
that those election-year scandals would have affected Calvin Coolidge’s campaign—he
had been part of the Harding administration (it’s second-highest ranking
official, no less), had assumed the presidency upon Harding’s death and
maintained much of the administration’s structure, and was running for
reelection amidst all these stories about his former boss’s multi-layered corruption.
At the very least, you’d think he’d have to constantly distance himself from
Harding, as Al
Gore did from Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal throughout the 2000
campaign. But from what I can tell, Harding’s scandals were largely treated by
the press as separate
from Coolidge and his campaign, and they don’t seem to have significantly shifted
the
eventual voting patterns (which closely mirrored the 1920 election, with a
third-party thrown in about which I’ll write more in a couple days). Part of
the reason is likely that the economy was in very good shape, which always benefits
an incumbent seeking reelection. But I’d say it also reflects an early 20th
century reality that has changed drastically in the last 100 years—that vice
presidents were seen as quite distinct from the president (as we'll see in tomorrow's post as well), and given space to
define their own campaign as a result.
Next 1924
contexts tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other elections you’d highlight, or thoughts on this one you’d
share?
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