Warren G. Harding: A Scandalous Presidency
Warren G. Harding was a scandal plagued chief executive
On Historic America’s new Millionaires, Mansions & Moonshine tour, we talk about the presidency of Warren G. Harding and how scandal plagued it was. Wanna know how bad things got when Warren was in the White House? Today’s article paints the picture.
President at the beginning of Prohibition, Harding was the most scandal plagued executive in the nation’s history but he died of a heart attack and never completed his first term. He loved playing cards and drinking whiskey in the White House with a group referred to as the “Poker Cabinet”. It included Attorney General Harry Daugherty, and Secretary of War John W. Weeks (who lived at one of the stops on our tour). During a game of high-card, Harding bet and lost a set of White House serving china from Benjamin Harrison’s Administration.
The president served liquor freely in the present-day Yellow Room to his guests. Alice Roosevelt Longworth – a regular at poker – said first lady Florence Harding mixed the drinks. "No rumor could have exceeded the truth. . . . [T]rays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey stood about," she remembered. Declassified FBI reports show Harding was drunk on whiskey during an Oval Office confrontation with railroad leaders amidst a 1922 strike negotiation.
President Harding’s stock of bootlegged liquor was procured by Daugherty henchman Jess Smith. Through the Justice Dept., Smith accessed whiskey supplies confiscated by Prohibition agents. What Harding didn’t use was set aside for parties at the "Love Nest," a small house which Smith & Daugherty rented to conceal their gay trysts (complete with a pink taffeta bedroom).
Harding also had the destructive habit of writing love letters to his many mistresses. These notes exposed his administration to multiple blackmail attempts. Jess Smith took the lead in paying these women off with a specially earmarked blackmail fund. Additionally, Smith bribed Washington Post editor Ned McLean with booze and hush money to silence critical coverage of Harding in the press.
Jess Smith was the man who paid off Harding’s multiple mistresses
There is a particularly salacious story that emerged from this era of Harding hush money payments that may or may not be true (depending upon the historian you ask). It concerns a woman named Grace Cross who was an aide to Harding during his time in the Senate. She had an affair with Harding, ultimately slashing his back with a knife when the relationship soured. When Harding became President, Cross threatened to go public with their love letters and talked openly about her ability to identify the ‘birthmark’ she’d given the president. After a failed attempt to frame Cross with a phony affidavit claiming she was a liar and blackmailer, Smith approached Cross’s friend, Bertha Martin (a local bootlegger who sold whiskey to embassies) for help. Martin agreed on condition that she was given the job of society editor at The Washington Post. Smith set it up with Ned McLean. In exchange, Martin took Cross to lunch, asked to see the letters, then snatched them away and bolted from the restaurant. She was made society editor and still managed to stay friends with Cross, vacationing with her in Europe, courtesy of Smith’s secret blackmail fund.
Months later In 1923, Jess Smith was found in his room; his head in a trash can, a bullet in his brain. In her society section, Bertha Martin tarred Smith as a tortured homosexual - his death was labeled a suicide. Many believed Daugherty or another administration official had Smith killed because he knew too much. Dressed in her fur coat, and decked out pearls and white gloves, Martin was later discovered with her head in an oven, another alleged suicide. What a grisly coincidence!
Want to know more about Harding’s scandalous administration? You should take our tour!