January 2011

I noted the absence of a Harding quotation that might have been included, one that history has recorded as a landmark quote, with its essence credited to another President, John F. Kennedy. It is: “In the great fulfillment, we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it, and more anxious about what it can do for the nation.” The quote, taken from Harding’s keynote address to the Republican Convention in 1916, may be seen carved in granite at the Harding Home in Marion, Ohio.

IN “THE MOST SCANDALOUS PRESIDENT” (July/August issue) Carl Sferrazza Anthony lauds President Harding for his enlightened attitude toward members of minority groups: “Harding’s appointment of Albert Lasker as head of the Shipping Board was the first ever high-profile appointment of a Jew.” Lasker was not, however, the first such appointee. Some years earlier, in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Oscar Straus of New York the Secretary of Commerce and Labor. As Roosevelt’s biographer William H. Harbaugh recounts: “Before he appointed Oscar Straus … he besought the advice of the respected banker and pillar of New York’s civic-minded GermanJewish community, Jacob Schiff. Later, at a banquet of prominent Jews in honor of Straus, Roosevelt emphatically exclaimed that he had not even thought about Straus’s religion when contemplating his appointment. But Schiff, whose hearing was failing, bungled the cue. ‘Dot’s right Mr. President,’ he exclaimed. ‘You came to me and said, “Chake, who is der best Jew I can appoint Segretary of Commerce.”’”

On November 19 William M. Tweed, the deposed boss of New York City’s monumentally corrupt municipal government, was convicted on 204 misdemeanor counts of approving fraudulent invoices. The invoices in question accounted for only a small fraction of the twenty million to two hundred million dollars that Tweed and his associates had stolen from the city between 1865 and 1871. The conviction culminated a four-year campaign to bring Tweed to justice that had been led by two men: George Jones, the publisher of The New York Times (which proudly proclaimed itself “ THE ONLY REPUBLICAN JOURNAL in the City of New York”), and Thomas Nast, the cartoonist whose wicked caricatures in Harper’s Weekly were a constant torment to Tweed. Tweed had unsuccessfully offered both men large bribes to leave him alone.

In November, at the prompting of the famous inventor Thomas A. Edison, the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service considered using poison gas—the deadly scourge of the recently concluded World War—for a much more humane purpose: easing the suffering of trapped animals. A New York City banker and animal lover had asked Edison if it would be possible to dispatch creatures caught in steel traps with a quick jolt of electricity. The Wizard of Menlo Park replied: “I do not think it commercially practicable to combine electricity with a trap. … It would be more practicable to have the movement of the trap break a container filled with deathdealing war gas. This would be easy and practicable as well as inexpensive.”

Besides Truman’s stunning upset, 1 the 1948 race is remembered for having two serious minor-party candidates, Strom Thurmond of the States’ Rights Democrats and Henry Wallace of the Progressives. Thurmond, campaigning almost exclusively in the South (though he did receive 7 popular votes in New Hampshire and 374 in North Dakota), appealed to white Southerners’ resentment of Truman’s and the Democrats’ civil rights measures. Wallace, while endorsing a broad spectrum of liberal and leftist causes, most strongly advocated a softer line toward the Soviet Union.

On November 2 President Harry S. Truman was returned to office by the voters, defeating Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York in the greatest upset in the history of American presidential elections. The famous Chicago Tribune headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN , held triumphantly aloft by a gleeful Truman the morning after, is the most famous of the inaccurate predictions that preceded the election, but far from the only one. Virtually every publication and “expert” had taken a Dewey victory for granted.

Dewey Defeats Dewey The Also-Rans Swords Into Plowshares Dept. Boss Tweed Goes To Jail

mail@americanheritage.com. Honoring Harding Honoring Harding Honoring Harding No Second Acts?

The transportation revolution of 19th-century America, and the opening of its interior heartland; the advent of large corporate enterprise, and the growing power of the profit motive; the building of the earliest railway systems, and the arrival from England of two steam locomotives, the first ever seen in the Western Hemisphere; the initial success of one of these, and its enormous fame thereafter; the unknown fate of the other, followed by its virtual disappearance from the historical record . . .

And . . . the recent recovery of a small mahogany box, intricately carved and symbolically shaped to the form of a coffin: in effect, a memento mori. Here are the ingredients of a compelling “railway mystery” that has resisted solution for more than a century and a half. Until now.

Let the box unfold the story.