Jim's Mailings

Predictions about the Future

He who chooses to ignore the lessons of history is condemned to repeat it. JEO from rote history in school somewhere.
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Acton
"The supreme purpose of history is a better world."
Herbert Hoover
Is Our Children in Texas Learning? And If So, What?
from The New Hampshire Gazette Vol 248, No 25, September 10, 2004
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On taking their first, casual glance at the digital photograph submitted in evidence via e-mail, the Flag Police were only mildly shocked at seeing a state flag and a United States flag, flying on the same flagpole, with the state flag on top. After all, the flagpole is in Texas.
While the Flag Police wish to make it clear that they have no specific evidence that the Peacock Military Academy or any of its officers had any improper dealings with the Veterans Bureau, given the way Colonel Charles R. Forbes ran the Bureau, the presumption of innocence is a sketchy defense at best.
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Veterans hospitals at this time (1923) were, for example, paying inflated prices for goods like sheets, then selling them out the back door for pennies on the dollar. In a few short years Forbes and his cronies looted the Bureau of about $200 million. He was eventually found guilty, fined a pittance, and sentenced to Leavenworth for two years.

"My God, this is a hell of a job," said Harding of Forbes. "I have no trouble with my enemies. But my damn friends … my goddamn friends … they're the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!"

But, venal bastard though he was, one can't blame Col. Forbes for the way Urban Park flies its flags.
Samuel Eliot Morison p.932 The Harding Scandals and the Coolidge Administration
Note: I apologizing for injecting ancient politics on this page, consider it history.
"Jess Smith's suicide was the first indication that the Ohio gang had overreached itself. Shortly after, it was brought to the President's attention that his pal "Colonel" Forbes, director of the Veterans' Bureau, had been taking a cut on the building of hospitals and profiting from the sale of excess war materials. Forbes had to resign, and in March 1923 his principal legal adviser committed suicide. All this so worried President Harding that he decided to take a trip across the country and up to Alaska. Uneasy and depressed, he fell ill of ptomaine poisoning, then of pneumonia, and died of an embolism at San Francisco on 2 August 1923.
(Ref. Gaston B. Means "The Strange Death of President Harding.")
Now the oil scandals burst forth. A Washington correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch obtained the evidence, and Senators Thomas J. Walsh and Gerald Nye made it public. Albert B. Fall, secretary of the interior, with the passive connivance of Edwin M. Denby (a complete nonentity whom Harding had made navy secretary) entered into a corrupt alliance with the Doheny and Sinclair oil interests to turn over to them valuable petroleum deposits, which President Wilson had reserved for the navy. The Elk Hill oil reserve in California was leased to Doheny and the Teapot Dome oil reserve in Wyoming to Sinclair. In return for these favors they built some oil storage tanks for the navy in Pearl Harbor; but Fall got at least $100,000 from Doheny and $300,000 from Sinclair. The Senate investigation forced both secretaries to resign, the oil leases were canceled, and the government recovered $6 million. Criminal prosecutions sent Fall and Sinclair to prison for short terms, but the rest got off.
Other revelations besmirched the Harding administration. His appointee as custodian of alien property, who had sold valuable German chemical patents for a song, was dismissed from office and convicted of a criminal conspiracy to defraud the government. Harry Daugherty, who regarded the office of attorney general as an opportunity to reward friends and, it is said, to protect Harding from his friends, was dismissed for misconduct involving the illegal sale of liquor permits and pardons. A Senate committee found him guilty of these and other malpractices, but the jury that tried him could not agree. Aa Will Rogers remarked, it was hard to convince a jury of criminal corruption in those lush times, because most of the jurors secretly admired people who got away with it.
When these scandals and others even less savory about Harding's personal conduct were ventilated, Calvin Coolidge was President of the United States, at the age of fifty-one. The first President from New England since Franklin Pierce, born in a small farming community in the Vermont hills, he had worked his way through Amherst College, become a lawyer in Northampton, Massachusetts, and ascended from the lower to the higher brackets of state politics. Good luck, and a firm stand in the Boston police strike of 1919, made him Vice President. A mean, thin-lipped little man, a respectable mediocrity, he lived parsimoniously but admired men of wealth, and his political principles were those current in 1901. People thought Coolidge brighter than he was because he seldom said anything; but, as he admitted, he was "usually able to make enough noise" to get what he wanted. Mrs. Coolidge was a handsome and gracious lady, without whom the formal parties at the White House would have been unbearably grim. She helped this clour, abstemious, and unimaginative figure to become one of the most popular American Presidents. "Silent Cal" by his frugality, unpretentiousness, and taciturnity seems to have afforded vicarious satisfaction to a generation that was extravagant, pretentious, and voluble. Actually, Coolidge was democratic by habit rather than by conviction, and his taciturnity was calculated — "I have never been hurt by what I have not said," is one of his aphorisms. He regarded the progressive movement since Theodore Roosevelt's day with cynical distrust. Consequently, although he had a moral integrity wanting in his predecessor, there was no change in political or economic policy between the Harding and the Coolidge administrations. Policies of high tariff, tax reduction, and government support to industry were pushed to extremes, and a high plateau of prosperity was attained.
Since the President exalted inactivity to a fine art, there is not much to say about his administration except in foreign affairs, which we have already mentioned, and the prelude to the Great Depression, which is to come. He gave no lead to Congress or the country, took it easy in the White House with a long nap every afternoon, and maintained a somewhat feeble health by riding a mechanical horse. He had no intimate adviser like Wilson's House or Roosevelt's Hopkins; the nearest was his personal secretary C. Bascom Slemp, a former Republican congressman from Virginia who was an expert "fixer" and saved his boss a lot of trouble by placating petitioners for favors and jobs. Coolidge and the men whom he and Harding appointed to the great federal commissions did nothing to stop or even discourage the wild speculation that was going on. His one positive achievement was to use the presidential veto. Congress overrode him and passed a veterans' bonus, but his vetoes of the McNary-Haugen Farm relief bills in 1027-28 killed that particular measure for subsidizing the farmers, and rendered them far more vulnerable than they need have been to the Great Depression. Income and inheritance taxes were reduced during his second term, but he signed the Jones-White Act of 1928 for doubling the subsidy to builders of merchant ships, and needled Congress into building some much-needed cruisers.
In the nineteenth century, revelations such as those of Harding's administration — the worst since Grant's — would have brought a political reaction; but Coolidge's personality restored the people's confidence in the Republicans; and Coolidge, like all Vice Presidents, eager to be "President in his own right," won the Republican nomination unanimously in 1924. The Democrats hanged themselves because their nominating convention in New York was deadlocked for 102 ballots between William McAdoo the "Dry" candidate, and Al Smith the darling of the "wets"; and the sordid story, including a Tammany claque in the galleries, went to the public over the radio. Finally the convention settled on a corporation lawyer, John W. Davis, with William Jennings Bryan's innocuous brother Charles as running mate in the hope of taking off the Wall Street curse. Progressivism rose from its grave in the shape of a new party called the Conference for Political Action. This was formed by farmer groups, disgusted liberals, and radicals from both parties, allied with the Socialists; it nominated Robert La Follette for the presidency, and polled 4.8 million votes — more than Roosevelt did in 1912 —but carried only Wisconsin. "Republican prosperity" had returned, the economy was booming, and with wheat back at $2.20 the farmers were no longer after politicians' scalps. Coolidge won 54 per cent of the popular vote, and 382 in the electoral college; Davis received little more than half Coolidge's vote, and 136 in the electoral college. The Communists, who now called themselves the Workers' party, under William Z. Foster, polled only 33,000 votes.
Transcribed without permission from "The Oxford History of the American People"

posted by James E. Opfell @ 6:27 PM