How does someone learn to be deceptive, corrupt, wicked?
First of all, I have to hit you with a sidebar. And it involves being wicked.
As soon as most of us hear the word, we think of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. We associate the word “wicked” with her because of her nomenclature. But I am telling you now. She got a bad rap. Her real name was Betty Lou Iverson, and she haled from a place called Witsdefo Whetstone in the western portion of Oz. Anyway, her sister got killed in a terrible accident, and she wanted to get to the bottom of things. And so it began.
Anyway, when I mentioned deception and maliciousness, I was thinking about our presidents. It seems we’ve had several who were misguided during their service. Ill-intentioned. Those guys who got on the wrong side of things.
And with that, I was reading about the multiple scandals of President Warren G. Harding.
He did a lot of unscrupulous things, including paying hush money to mistresses, making secret payments for an out-of-wedlock child, and committing far-reaching corruption, which tainted his presidency.
Warren G. Harding won the White House in a landslide victory in 1920. He remained a popular president until his sudden death on August 2, 1923.
Oh, yeah. His death was a little strange. A lot of people today think something else may have happened besides the heart attack that apparently killed him. But nonetheless, at the time of his demise, he was in the presidential suite of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. His wife, Florence, was reading the “Saturday Evening Post” to him. The article in question was about Harding himself, and he appeared to be enjoying it because the last words he said were, “That’s good, go on.” And right then, he shuddered and dropped dead onto his bed.
But after he died, over the ensuing months and years, a whole big boatload of information came out about his numerous scandals. These included everything from hush money payments concealing extramarital affairs, a child born out of wedlock, and criminal activity by cronies he appointed to high office. His legacy began to become tarnished quickly.
And with all that? Harding, the 29th president, now sits way down at the bottom rungs of historians’ rankings of U.S presidents.
Some of his bad behavior included these items, among many others.
• Allegations of corruption arose around several members of the “Ohio Gang.” These guys were long-time political allies and poker buddies of Harding that he had appointed to his cabinet and other powerful positions. Harding’s pals took kickbacks and committed fraud on many levels.
• The Teapot Dome Scandal. Bribery, bribery, bribery, all around the oil industry. This was the biggest presidential scandal in all of history until Watergate.
• Harding’s secret sex life. He had seven mistresses and one long-term affair (15 years) with Carrie Fulton Phillips—the wife of one of his best friends from his hometown of Marion, Ohio. He paid out a lot of hush money to keep these women a secret.
• And then there was Harding’s out-of-wedlock daughter. Harding’s love life generated headlines in 1927 when another mistress, Nan Britton, revealed that he had secretly fathered her child out of wedlock. She met him when he was a Senator, and she was a teenager. By the time she was 20, Britton had entered into an intimate relationship with the 51-year-old senator. Britton wrote that Harding paid for her to live in a New Jersey house where in October 1919, she secretly gave birth to their daughter.
So many of our politicians engage in bad behavior. I would never dream of doing any of these things. Lying and cheating were against the rules where I came from, which is Ohio.
Ohio is where Harding came from. Same, same.
And with this revelation, I have absolutely no explanation for any of this.
But I suppose I’d rather be “wicked” from Oz than be wicked from Ohio.
I like a flying monkey, after all.
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“Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune
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“A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
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“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”
― John Steinbeck
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It’s hard being from Ohio. Wicked bad.
