Herbert C. Hoover

by Peter Cates

Herbert C. Hoover

The 31st president Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964) heavily criticized FDR’s New Deal policies and increasing big government spending; he stated the dollar decimal point was “wandering around among the regimented ciphers trying to find some of the old places it used to know. ”

In res­ponse, FDR launched fishing investigations into Hoover’s four years (1929-1933) but came up with zero.

As a one term president before the four terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hoover’s most serious blunder was his glaring lack of sensitivity to the nationwide collapse of businesses, and to the horrific unemployment and near starvation of millions during the early years of the Depression, continuing to believe that private enterprise , local charity, etc., would suffice.

Sadly and ironically, it was Hoover who led relief efforts in Europe after World War I to save many millions there from starvation.

Herbert Hoover was born to Quaker parents in West Branch, Iowa, on August 10, 1874; was orphaned at ten and raised by uncles and aunts; showed initiative and self-reliance during these early years, entering the then newly-founded Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California, in 1891, at the age of 17, where he totally supported himself; earned degrees in engineering; and, through his success as a mining engineer, became a millionaire by the age of 40.

Hoover met his wife, the former Lou Henry (1875-1944), while attending Stanford and they had two sons, Allen and Herbert Jr., both of whom pursued careers in engineering.

After leaving the White House in 1933, the Hoovers settled down in a mansion in Palo Alto. When Mrs. Hoover died in 1944, the former president moved to a suite in New York City’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and assumed the role of an elder statesman and advisor, when asked, to both Republicans and Democrats until his own death at 90 years old.

Hoover was shunned by FDR but welcomed back to the White House by both Truman and Eisenhower who asked him to set up a group known as the Hoover Commission to help with food distribution in Europe after World War II and to help eliminate government waste in the U.S.

Interestingly, during the 1920s, Herbert Hoover and his wife would dine frequently with the Roosevelt’s and moved in the same social circles.

Delmore Brothers

Delmore Brothers

Recommended listening and accessible on You­Tube is a ten-inch 1945, 78 rpm re­cord on the King label by the Del­more Bro­thers who were outstanding early country singers and guitarists. The two selections are Midnite Special, and Why Did You Leave Me, Dear?

Calvin Coolidge

by Peter Cates

Calvin Coolidge

The 30th President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) had the kind of wife in the former First Lady Grace Goodhue Coolidge (1879-1957) who was a rarity when it came to truly being on the same page as her husband. She catered to just about every whim in him possible, although Cal had such a calm balanced unflappable personality and may not have given into whims very often.
The seven pages devoted to Mrs. Coolidge in Christine Sadler’s book America’s First Ladies abound in choice anecdotes and quotes, especially in its first three paragraphs:

Grace Goodhue Coolidge

“After Grace Coolidge became First Lady in the middle of a hot August night in the Plymouth, Vermont, farmhouse of her father-in-law, she went back to bed and slept easily. Not many women could have accomplished this feat, but then nobody else was married to Calvin Coolidge; the little red-headed president who always looked as if he smelled something burning and who never spoke to anybody if he could avoid the experience.

“If Grace had not been an unusual woman she never would have married Coolidge in the first place, and her mother, for one, could never see why she did. But Grace and her merry father, Captain Andrew I. Goodhue, a steamboat inspector for vessels plying Lake Champlain, always understood the Coolidge appeal. She was the completely happy wife, and that was the secret of her phenomenal success as First Lady.

“Grace had found an extra kerosene lamp for the dramatic swearing-in rites so that anxious reporters, who rushed to Ply­mouth after news of the unexpected death of President Harding, could see what they were writing. She watched with interest while a telephone line was strung up by emergency crews. But at around two-thirty in the morning, after the hullabaloo connected with becoming president was over, it would never have occurred to her not to accompany her husband back to bed. Nor would he have permitted such deviation from the norm. And naturally she would go back to sleep if he ordered her to do so. “

So begins, on August 3, 1923, the almost six years Coolidge would serve in the White House and ones bombarded with challenges:

The scandals of Harding’s cabinet.

The rise of the Ku Klux Klan from very low numbers to 4 million members by 1924 and the increase in lynchings.

The rise of bootlegging gangsters, and not just in Chicago, due to the “Noble Experiment of Prohibition and the naïve belief of its supporters in the perfectibility of human beings.”

The sometimes violent reactions of big business, government and society itself to any form of non-conformity, not just with progressives, socialists, free-thinkers and any other individuals whose world views deviate from their norms.

The wild partying and increasingly “loose” morals to be found at social gatherings of what’s been termed the “Jazz Age.”

The frantic speculations on Wall Street.

And finally, in a strange cause and effect manner, a terrible disillusionment with the traditional values and hopes that had sustained the country since the American Revolution, especially among veterans returning from the bloodshed of World War I.

Coolidge responded much of the time to these challenges with a hands off leadership style, admittedly disastrous in certain respects, but he did keep a close eye on events.

He also may have had a problem with narcolepsy and reportedly slept 12 hours a night while still needing a four-hour nap; these figures might be slightly exaggerated, even as H.L. Mencken did not help with the real truth about Coolidge’s sleepiness by such comments as the following – “Coolidge’s chief feat was to sleep more than any other president…The itch to run things did not afflict him; he was content to let them run themselves.”

Mencken did concede some good points – “His failings are forgotten: the country remembers only…that he let it alone. Well, there are worse epitaph for a statesman.”

Warren G. Harding

by Peter Cates

Warren G. Harding

The 29th former President Warren Gamaliel Harding (1865-1923) was born November 2, 1865, in Blooming Grove, Ohio, the son and oldest of 8 children of George Tryon Harding (1843-1928) and his wife, the former Phoebe Dickerson (1843-1910).

The father was basically a jack of all trades, including farmer, teacher, businessman, veterinarian and doctor who did receive a medical degree. He was also rather lazy and opportunistic but did provide help to his son from time to time while the two had a very close relationship.

A key experience in Harding’s childhood – when he was six years old, his father became part owner of a small town newspaper and little Warren worked as an errand boy for the printer and became quite fascinated with the sights, sounds and smells of the inner workings of a newspaper.

During later years, Harding would share fond memories of growing up on the farm and of rural life but he detested doing chores, much preferring socializing with his friends in town. And his ability to win friends and influence people manifested itself early.

Meanwhile Harding’s mother thought her son would make a good preacher, even though his grades were average, and got him admitted to Ohio Central College . He took to college life socially, did intermittent debating, played althorn in the school band and edited the yearbook but had no interest in preaching; he even admitted he didn’t know what he wanted to take up as an occupation.

After graduating from college in 1882 at the age of 17, Harding taught briefly, studied law and sold insurance ; nothing clicked there.

Meanwhile the family had moved from Blooming Grove to Marion where Dr. Harding was cultivating greater Ohioan opportunities for his medical practice. The son moved in with them, loved the social life of Marion as well and became a reputable manager of finances for the local baseball team and marching band.

Harding at age 18.

At 18 in 1884, Harding and two friends bought a struggling newspaper in Marion, the Star, for $300 and the mortgage on it. It floundered for a few years but managed to survive and Harding bought out the two friends.

The Star was at first politically neutral but eventually became a mouthpiece for Republican ideals, especially since the businessmen around Marion who bought ads were card carrying Republicans.

In 1891, Harding, at 26, married 31-year-old Florence Kling De Wolfe, a rich widow with a young son, and she helped him on the business end of the newspaper while he wrote the editorials and won even more friends and influence in town , particularly in calling Marion the finest small city in the state to raise a family.

In 1898, Harding won a seat in the Ohio State Senate and quickly became the most popular politician at the State House. Like all good politicians, he remembered everyone’s name, was a great poker player and could charm squabbling members of the Ohio Republican party into reconciliation with each other.

Due to a certain laziness, Harding was lacking in political expertise but soon made the acquaintance of Harry M. Daugherty, a shrewd lobbyist and political fixer who never won an election himself but could guide others to victory.

When Daugherty first saw Harding, he immediately sensed future presidential potential. Their immediately begun friendship got Harding elected as Lieutenant Governor in 1902.

But by 1904, the Ohio Republicans were engaged in unholy internal warfare and Harding refused to run again as he wished to distance himself from these divisions.

Another reason – the Democrats were dominating state politics, an occurrence usually as rare as hen’s teeth.

After losing campaigns for governor in 1910 and 1912 , Harding won election to Congress as Senator in 1914.

His Senate career in terms of achievement was not that good but he continued to exude phenomenal charm; Harding loved people and they loved him in return.

Warren G. Harding and vice-presidential candidate Calvin Coolidge won the White House by seven million votes over the Democrat ticket of fellow Ohioan James M. Cox, who had served two terms as governor, and his vice presidential running mate, former assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Harding and Coolidge campaigned on an isolationist back to normalcy platform while Cox and Roosevelt were supporting progressivism, social reforms and entry into the League of Nations, a forerunner of the United Nations. The voters were tired of anything international after World War I and wanted the normalcy and enjoyment of private life.

Volumes have been written about the scandals and corruption of Harding’s two-year presidency and his sudden death in a San Francisco hotel on August 2, 1923, at the age of 57, so, for reasons of space, I move on to a note of sympathy that his widow wrote to President and Mrs. Coolidge when their son Calvin Jr. died from blood poisoning at the age of 15, not long before she died at 64 from a kidney ailment: “No matter how many loving hands may be stretched out to help us, some paths we tread alone.”

Woodrow Wilson

by Peter Cates

Thomas Woodrow Wilson

The 28th president, Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), had been a professor of history and president of Princeton University before being lured into New Jersey Democratic party politics, and he soon found out that he enjoyed politics a lot . In the three-way race of 1912, Taft and Roosevelt split the vote among Republicans, thus assuring Wilson the White House.

A little more background: Wilson was the son of a Presbyterian minister, was born in Virginia but spent most of his childhood in Georgia where his father had taken another church position and moved the family.

He got degrees from Princeton and Johns Hopkins and studied enough law at the University of Virginia Law School and through home study to get admitted to the bar in Georgia where he practiced for a short period of time.

But he was drawn back to academic life and taught at both Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania, and Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, after which he was offered a professorship at Princeton in 1890 .

Wilson wrote at least nine books and numerous articles; I highly recommend his five volume The History of the American People, published between 1901-1902, which I own and read most of, finding his narrative gifts superb.

After teaching there for 12 years, Woodrow Wilson was appointed president of Princeton, in 1902, and brought about a reorganization of the curriculum with an emphasis on campus life being one of serious study and not socializing. But he absolutely would not allow any African-Americans admission.

In 1910 Wilson was elected governor of New Jersey and served for two years before he was elected president of the United States.

Wilson had a world view mixture of Deep South Confederacy racism as a believer in segregation, progressivism when it came to such issues as workman’s compensation, regulation of public utilities and cronyism in government and, later in his presidency, internationalism in his pro-active participation in the Paris peace talks and his fight to establish the League of Nations. There is a vast amount of material on the pros and cons of his eight years in the White House, in particular his last two years after suffering a series of strokes.

Wilson was married first to Ellen Axson (1860-1914) who was studying art in New York City but gave it up to be a wonderful helpmate to her husband and gave birth to three daughters, Margaret, Jessie, and Eleanor.

Jessie married a Harvard professor Francis Sayre, Eleanor her father’s Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo, while Margaret remained single indulging her love of culture and beauty (a photograph shows her listening to records which resonated with yours truly on a very personal level.).

In 1915, Wilson met a widow Edith Bolling Galt (1872-1961), and initiated an ardent courtship; by December, they were married.

After Wilson’s incapacitating strokes, the country was pretty much being secretly run by the First Lady, Wilson’s physician Dr. Cary Grayson and his private secretary Joe Tumulty while Vice-President Thomas Marshall was kept out of the loop.

After leaving the White House in 1921, the couple moved to a house on S Street which has since become a tourist attraction.

On Veterans Day in 1923, the former president summoned enough strength to give a brief speech to people gathered in front of his house in which he stated:

“I have seen fools resist Providence before and I have seen their destruction, and it will come upon these again, utter destruction and contempt; that we shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns.”

On February 3, 1924, Woodrow Wilson died at the age of 67; his successor Warren G. Harding had passed away the previous August and been succeeded by Calvin Coolidge, who was among the tiny group of mourners at Wilson’s funeral held at the S Street residence.

William Howard Taft

by Peter Cates

William Howard Taft

The 27th former President William Howard Taft (1857-1930) had what might be considered the closest friendship possible with his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt. They more than frequently visited with each other, advised each other, encouraged each other, even rebuked each other.

Under Roosevelt, Taft served as Governor/General of the newly-annexed Philippines and, in a strange twist of fate, as Secretary of War at the same time; TR had so much faith in Taft that he used him as his personal roving ambassador at large (no pun intended with Taft’s well known obesity of over 300 pounds) and as a diplomatic mediator in setting up peace talks between the Russians and Japanese during their 1905 War.

When the 1908 Republican Convention occurred, Roosevelt, due to his own popularity with the voters, pretty much had control of its delegates, got his friend easily nominated as the front runner and a Republican president another four years in the White House, an achievement not to be achieved again until the Reagan/Bush years of 1980-1992.

An interesting anecdote in Christine Sadler’s 1963 book America’s First Ladies tells of a vicious blizzard of an ice storm that “tied up transportation all along the Atlantic coast, left thousands of inaugural visitors stranded on trains and roads leading into Washington, and temporarily halted the sending of telegrams. President Roosevelt said the storm was aimed at him and would abate when he got out of town, but Taft replied, ‘You’re wrong; it’s my storm. I always said it would be a cold day when I got to be president of the United States. ‘ ”

At the actual inauguration ceremony, Taft’s youngest son Charles brought along a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in case he was bored by his father’s speech; it proved to be a very interesting speech which 11-year-old Charles enjoyed immensely. The boy never even cracked his book and his father considered the boy’s attention a personal compliment.

Taft himself had always set his ambition on being Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court but his wife Helen (1861-1943) pushed him into politics and he lacked the will to resist her.

However, once in the White House, Taft, while still believing in Roosevelt’s policies, steered a more cautious middle ground between the traditional Republicans who detested Roosevelt’s aggressive “bull in a china shop” progressivism and the progressive Republicans who wished to continue where Roosevelt left off.

He also basically disliked the job, didn’t try very hard to achieve much and had an ultra-cautious Vice-President James Sherman (1855-1912) who made Taft seem like a radical progressive.

Meanwhile, the First Lady suffered a physical collapse and some paralysis of her facial muscles which left her an invalid most of the first year (She did eventually recover much of her health and lived to see oldest son Robert elected to the U.S. Senate in 1939.).

As mentioned in an earlier column, Taft lost in the three-way race of 1912 in which Roosevelt’s Bull Moose candidacy split the Republican vote and was quite happy to turn the White House over to Woodrow Wilson.

Finally in 1921, President Warren G. Harding (1865-1923) appointed Taft to his dream job as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court where he would do fine work, would swear in both Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover as president in 1925 and 1929, respectively, and would retire in February 1930, one month before his death from a heart ailment at the age of 72.