Inaugurating coolidge, p.19
Inaugurating Coolidge, page 19
Harding stated to the country that his administration would not recognize Russia. He also reminded the country of his “success of the maintenance and furtherance of our traditional policy of friendship and utterly unselfish helpfulness to our sister republics in the Western Hemisphere…. It cannot be unseemly to say that the proof of their confidence and the assurances of their reciprocated friendship are matters of especial gratification.”12
I would be insensible to duty and violate all the sentiments of my heart and all my convictions if I failed to urge American support of the permanent court of international justice. I do not know that such a court will be unfailing in the avoidance of war, but I know it is a step in the right direction and will prove an advance toward international peace for which the reflective conscience of mankind is calling. Why should there not be a court of this character with the most cordial American support? We originated the moderm suggestion of such a tribunal and have been advocating it for years. We have proclaimed in behalf of its establishment again and again. Its origin is no hindrance, because its inspiration, growing out of conditions which we ourselves were unable to contrive, need be no less noble. Our own concern is not with the beginning. Our interest is in the end to be attained.13
He ended the speech with words from his heart. “My own sincerity of purpose has been questioned because I do not insist that we shall accept the existing World Court precisely as provided. Personally, I should vastly prefer the policy of submitting all controversies in which we are concerned to the court as it stands today as against any other agency of settlement yet devised. As President, speaking for the United States, I am more interested in adherence to such a tribunal in the best form attainable than I am concerned about the triumph of Presidential insistence. The big thing is the firm establishment of the Court and our cordial adherence thereto. All else is mere detail.”14 The speech would hit the newspapers in the morning. Those who supported its release dared hope that the response from the president’s enemies would be somewhat muted.
In the absence of the chief executive, the White House loses a bit of its sparkle. No formal cabinet meetings are held, the presidential china stays locked up in secured hutches in the absence of state dinners, and politicians tend to shy away, as the one person who can grant them favors is not in residence. However, the White House is not dead at these times; it is kept alive by the numerous cooks, ushers, maids, secretaries, and valets who call it their workplace every day.
When the chief leaves on a presidential tour or vacation, that becomes the optimum time to do repairs, make requested changes, and give the home a thorough cleaning. With the president and First Lady off to Alaska and the West, executive secretary Rudolph Forster and chief usher “Ike” Hoover (no relation to Herbert Hoover) decided it would be a great time to make some major changes to the executive mansion.15
Both men had been fixtures at the White House since the turn of the century: Hoover since the time of Benjamin Harrison and Forster since William McKinley’s administration. Their positions in the White House, the trusted relationships each had forged with all the presidents they had served, invested them both with the power and authority to make such decisions with minimum presidential approval.
Ike Hoover was a 19-year-old engineer working for the Edison Company when Congress decided to install electricity in the White House as part of a project of electrification for the State, War, and Navy Departments located next door.16 Hoover’s crew installed a massive generator for the building, buried the wire in the ground, and connected it to switches inside the president’s home. Hoover remembered that “the [President Benjamin] Harrison family were actually afraid to turn the lights on and off for fear of getting a shock…. I would turn on the lights in the halls and parlors in the evening and they would burn until I returned the next morning to extinguish them.”17 Once Hoover wired the electric appliances, converted the gas chandeliers to electric, and made the White House accessible to run on electricity, his job ended and he prepared to pack up and start another assignment. However, he wrote that “the Harrisons were all much interested in this new and unusual device that was being installed; so much so, that we got quite well acquainted with them.”18 Hoover had been told he would not be needed after May 15, but the next day he received an offer of full-time employment as White House electrician. He accepted the offer and became, “like the electric lights, a permanent fixture.”19
He rose to the position of White House usher under McKinley and helped plan that assassinated president’s funeral services at the White House. Due to his organizational flair and his extraordinary dapper, diplomatic and, most importantly, discreet traits, President William Howard Taft promoted him to chief White House usher. He managed the White House staff, state functions, and private, diplomatic and executive affairs with ease. He managed the arrangements of four weddings: Alice Roosevelt to Nicholas Longworth, Eleanor Wilson to William McAdoo, and Jessie Wilson to Francis Sayre, as well as President Wilson’s own second marriage to Edith Bolling Galt. He traveled twice to Europe with President Wilson to handle the traveling president’s executive retinue and managed the extravagant homes and palaces in which Wilson stayed. After Wilson’s stroke in 1919, he became part of the cabal that hid Wilson’s real condition from the world.
Rudolph Forster found himself on loan from the War Department to the White House as an executive secretary in 1897 when he was asked to stay and help for a few days. Within a few years, he had a presidential appointment as the executive secretary. An efficient, earnest, and esoteric man, he handled “much of the White House correspondence, attended all presidential press conferences, met and often mollified the nation’s mighty personages.”20 He handled the continuity of presidential administrations seamlessly, no matter what party came into executive power. He became a stand-in among those who wished to see the president but could not. He had the independence to conduct business for the president but never without knowing what the chief executive would want. He had been described as having
an orderly and well disciplined mind which made him intolerant of poor draftmanship and alert in the detection of errors in the sheaves of public papers which it was his duty to scrutinize before they were passed on for approval by the executive. He was unobtrusive, absolutely self-effacing and entirely unselfconscious.21
Harding had approved extensive repairs to the mansion before he left on his Western tour. They included replacing old carpets and some of the floors, as well as painting rooms in the family quarters and applying wallpaper where Mrs. Harding requested. As part of a cost-saving program, the government spent $10,000 to remove the anthracitic coal heating plant and hooking up the White House with the heating system of the next-door State, War, and Navy buildings. The new heating plant burned soft coal, which was about half the price of anthracite coal. The improvement would also eliminate the need for the full-time fireman who managed the White House furnace. Harding also approved the installation of a refrigeration system, which would cut down the ice bill.22 Hoover and Forster targeted the completion date for the end of August, and the workers paced themselves to finish by then. But now with the president sick but starting to feel better, a direct rail trip from San Francisco to Washington (rather than a cruise through the Panama Canal) could be scheduled any day, and Forster and Hoover urged the workers to pick up the pace.23 The installations needed to be completed before Harding returned to recuperate.
With their longevity and continuous service in the White House from administration to administration, both Hoover and Forster witnessed firsthand the murderous impact the presidency stamped on the men who held the office. Since McKinley’s assassination, whenever a president embarked on a trip outside the White House, neither man knew how, or if, they would return.
In 1901, McKinley visited the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. The itinerary would keep him in Buffalo for a few days and then he would return to the White House. However, on September 6, a crazed anarchist shot the president in the abdomen during a meet and greet. Eight days later, McKinley succumbed to his wounds in Buffalo and returned to the White House in a hearse.
The dynamic and energetic vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, took the presidential oath of office in Buffalo and inherited the presidency as the youngest man to enter it. While he fought off the strain of the presidential burdens he faced, at the end of his second term, contemporaries reported that “he lost much of his driving power before he left the White House, and he never regained it in full.”24
Woodrow Wilson, commander in chief of American forces during World War I, physically broke down after fighting the enemy and then fighting for peace. Never a healthy man, he suffered from nervous maladies for years. At the end of the victorious war, Wilson sailed to Europe twice to negotiate a peace treaty with the Germans. Once the Allies satisfied themselves and agreed to the terms they would give the Germans, Wilson returned to Washington to help secure Senate passage of the treaty. Facing stiff Senate resistance, Wilson took his fight to the people. Returning from California, he fell ill in Pueblo, Colorado, and Dr. Grayson canceled the rest of the tour. A few days after he returned to the White House, Wilson suffered a stroke, disappeared inside the White House for almost six months, and never fully recovered.
With Harding now lying ill in San Francisco, a movement that had gained momentum several years earlier after Wilson’s stroke became vocal again. A plan had been formulated—but never executed—to establish several “assistant presidents” to help ease the chief executive’s burden.
No one could ignore the crushing burden of the American presidency. If Harding did not survive this illness, the average lifespan of the past 10 presidents would be 61.9 years. The 10 presidents who preceded them lived to an average age of 68.5 years. The first six presidents reached an average age of 79.6 years.25 These statistics are even more dramatic when noting that the average length of life in America has increased, not decreased.26
The enormous growth of the country, from 13 colonies to 48 states, from four million people in Washington’s time to 120 million now, reflected a staggering growth rate. Due to the population explosion, both houses of Congress experienced a tremendous growth in their membership as the size of those legislative chambers were decreed by higher population numbers. After the Civil War, when focus turned away from states’ rights to a more centralized government, the federal machinery erupted and grew exponentially. Transitioning from an agricultural society, President Roosevelt established the Department of Commerce in 1903, and President Taft established the Department of Labor in 1913. Wilson established executive bureaus, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Immigration, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, and many others. Harding created the Bureau of the Budget as well as the Veterans Bureau and the General Accounting Office. All of these agencies, and many others, became the ultimate responsibility of the president. To oversee all of this massive executive machinery, the country still had, since Washington’s time, only one president.
Walter F. Brown, an administrative assistant and supporter of President Harding, recommended the establishment of an assistant to the president or an “executive secretary,” who should be the president’s alter ego, someone whom the president could deputize to act for him.27 This assistant president should have four assistants, Brown said: an assistant in charge of personnel who “would deal with all except major patronage matters”;28 an assistant in charge of legislation who “would follow all legislation in which the executive might be interested, speak with the president’s voice at the Capitol and inform the president as to the merits of legislation that might come to him for approval”;29 an assistant in charge of publicity who “would keep the President informed with respect to public opinion by means of abstracts and clippings from public prints and otherwise and could collect material for use in the preparation of public addresses and papers”;30 and lastly, an assistant in charge of applications for clemency who “would read the official record in all such cases, digest the same, and then place before the President all the facts upon which a decision should be based.”31
Brown theorized, “Thus the executive secretary, with his staff of assistants, would be able to relieve the President from innumerable petty and vexatious details which impair his efficiency and impair his health.”32
Others, like Senator Walter Edge of New Jersey, suggested that the vice president take over some of the presidential duties, especially authority over the budget. The senator recommended that “a simple amendment could be written to existing law transferring budget administration to the Vice-President.”33 He used a business model to explain his position in that while there is a chief executive, there is also a chairman of the board or other officials to handle much of the business burden. As for the vice presidency, Edge further stated, “With all due regard and reverence to the office of Vice-President, it has today less constitutional responsibility than any other high office of the Government or any member of Congress. If through legislation the Vice President was made the financial officer of the Government, to him the Budget Bureau and department heads and even cabinet officers would come to discuss the financial affairs of the Government.”34
The problem that arises with Edge’s argument is that there have been many times in America’s history where there has not been a vice president of the United States. From 1865, when Andrew Johnson inherited the presidency due to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, through the administration of William Howard Taft in 1913, seven presidents have had, during a portion of their term, no vice president. During those 52 years, 20 years passed when the country, at various times, did not have a vice president. Since no mechanism existed within the Constitution to appoint a vice president, the office remained vacant until the next election.
Article 1, Section 3, Clause 4 of the United States Constitution reads, “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”35 It is the only duty prescribed to them. It could be unconstitutional for a vice president to assume any other powers except on the death of the president, and then it reads, “In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President.”36 While Harding did consent to Coolidge attending cabinet meetings, he in no way intimated that Coolidge would represent him in his absence. As a matter of fact, it was to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes that Harding gave the power to call cabinet meetings while he traveled westward, not Vice President Coolidge. This created a vague constitutional issue, as now the secretary of state, third in line to the presidency, could be considered more powerful than the vice president, who was next in line to the presidency. If Harding consented to give Hughes that power, would Harding be the only one who could rescind it? Was Hughes now an acting president?
And what about Secretary Hoover in California? What kind of authority did he have from President Harding? Hoover obviously had been making many decisions for the president in California and no one, not the other cabinet officials nor the president himself, stopped him from doing so. Was Hoover now an acting president? The country had three men filling the role of president and Vice President Calvin Coolidge was not one of them.
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1. “Sawyer Says President Had a Good Night,” Stocketon Evening and Sunday Record, July 31, 1923.
2. “No Spread of Pneumonic Condition,” Orange County Plain Dealer, July 31, 1923.
3. “Nation’s Leader Gains In Battle Against Illness,” The Richmond Item, July 31, 1923.
4. C.E. Sawyer, Ray Wilbur, C.M. Cooper, J.T. Boone, Hubert Work, “Official Medical Bulletin on President Harding,” July 31, 1923, 9:00 a.m. (Hoover Institution Archives: Box No. 19, Folder ID President Harding Death).
5. Herbert Hoover, “President Harding’s Last Illness and Death (Draft),” Au-gust 25, 1923, 12.
6. Ibid.
7. Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency 1920–1933 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 50.
8. “President Ill, Induced By Hoover To Give Out Foreign Relations Talk,” The Sacramento Bee, August 1, 1923.
9. Warren G. Harding, “Address on Foreign Policy and the International Court of Justice Intended for Delivery in San Francisco California,” July 31, 1923, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-foreign-policy-and-the-international-court-justice-intended-for-delivery-san.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Frederic Haskin, “Cost of Maintaining Home for President,” Roundup Record-Tribune, February 15, 1923.
16. Irwin Hood (Ike) Hoover, Forty-Two Years in the White House (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 3.
17. Ibid., 7.
18. Ibid., 6.
