The Rolling Stones Come to America

 An excerpt from my book

BRITISH INVASION '64

Published in 2023 by BearManor Media

It's tempting to say that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were destined to make music together.  They met as seven-year-olds in the same classroom and were close friends for the next four years until Michael (as Mick was then known) and Keith moved on to different schools, and lost contact with one another.  Seven years after that, in 1961, the two 18-year-olds found themselves waiting on the same train platform, sort of recognizing one another, but neither making the effort to reintroduce himself.  But then, Richards noticed Jagger was carrying record albums by Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters and was astonished; he didn’t know anyone else who loved the Chess Chicago blues musicians the way he did.  The two young men then began talking in earnest, and each discovered that the other was no dilettante fan . . . they were both serious devotees in their love of American R&B and the blues.

Soon enough Keith (who played guitar) and Mick (who sang) began jamming with other friends, and it wasn’t long before the duo and their new roommate, multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, found their way into Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, and began playing London clubs.  A few months later, Jones was looking to form his own blues group, and while Jagger and Richards weren’t initially on his list of people to join his band, they more or less fell into it soon enough.  Pressed for a name for their group, Jones glanced at the Muddy Waters record he was holding in his hands, and he saw a song title that appealed to him.  “We’re the Rollin’ Stones,” he proclaimed to the world[1].

They began woodshedding in clubs throughout England, and by early ’63 the classic line-up . . . Jagger, Richards, Jones, bassist Bill Wyman, and drummer Charlie Watts . . . had set.  A residency at London’s Crawdaddy Club generated buzz about the Stones being a powerful live act, and they soon attracted the attention of Andrew Loog Oldham.  Perhaps best described as equal parts wunderkind and hustler, Oldham was only 19 years old in 1963 (younger than any member of the Stones, in fact), but he had already established himself as a freelance rock music publicist, having worked for the Beatles, as well as handing the promotions for American folk artist Bob Dylan when he came to the UK earlier that year.  The Beatles had taken a shine to the young go-getter and encouraged him to pursue his interest in managing a band.  By many accounts, it was the Beatles themselves who suggested that Oldham go and see the Rolling Stones, whom the Fab Four had already met, and enjoyed attending their shows at the Crawdaddy.  Catching one of their performances that May, Oldham immediately saw the potential for the group to be a huge success, and he convinced them to let him be their manager.

Working tirelessly, Oldham launched a one-man marketing campaign that elevated the reputation of the Stones in London, and quickly brought them to the attention of Decca Records[2].  Their debut single that summer, a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On”, made it to a respectable #21 in the UK.

A chance meeting between Lennon, McCartney, Jagger, and Richards, as both duos passed one another on a London sidewalk, led to a suggestion by Lennon that he and his songwriting partner had a half-finished tune that he thought would sound great if done by the Stones.  Repairing to a nearby pub, John and Paul put the finishing touches on a Bo Diddly beat number called “I Wanna Be Your Man”.  The two Stones happily accepted it, rushed into the studio, and the band made it to #12 on the chart with the song.

Having observed that Lennon and McCartney must certainly be earning a fair deal of money from their songwriting, Jagger suggested that the band try working on some original material as well.  The result was an instrumental dubbed “Stoned”, which was the B-side to their second single.  Rather than list all the band members’ names as the songwriters, the tune was credited to the pseudonymous “Nanker Phelge”, a nom de plume which would be employed in the future for songs that were not written solely by Jagger and Richards.

To hype his band, Oldham promoted them as the “Anti-Beatles” (a tactic which the Beatles themselves found amusing, and which they happily encouraged.)  Noted journalist and author Tom Wolfe best described the public personas of the two bands thus: “The Beatles want to hold your hand, but the Rolling Stones want to burn down your town.”  And while Brian Jones and Keith Richards[3] could be considered heartthrobs, the band on the whole were deemed fairly unattractive by pop music standards . . . which is precisely what they wanted.  The group’s very lack of conventional good looks was a key to their image as “bad boys”.  As one female fan (speaking for many) gushed, “They’re so ugly, they’re beautiful!”

 

 

The 'anonymous advertiser' of this magazine ad was almost certainly Andrew Loog Oldham

 

Not quite ready to place a self-penned song on their next A-side yet, their cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” was their next release, and it took them into the British Top Five.  Significantly, it skirted close that spring to the American Top 40, which prompted Oldham to book a brief US tour for his band for June.

Upon their arrival in New York City, they were met by 500 screaming girls . . . a significant number of whom had allegedly been hired by Oldham to give his band a Beatles-level welcome to America[4].  Also hired was New York disc jockey Murray “the K” Kaufman, the self-declared “Fifth Beatle”, who was joined at the hip to the Stones during their stay in the city so as to show them around town, gin up press coverage, and have them guest on his radio show.  The bandmembers found Murray tackily tedious, but there was one good thing that came from their compulsory affiliation: they heard him play a new R&B song by the Valentinos (a.k.a. Bobby Womack and his brothers), “It’s All Over Now”, and the band decided to cover it for their next album.

Their tour kicked off, appropriately enough, in San Bernadino, California, which is the final stop name-checked in “Route 66”, a song which the Stones loved and covered on their first album.  This initial show set the pace for a tour often fraught with mishaps and hostility, as a young man was able to relieve a police officer of his pistol during the concert and fired it at the stage, narrowly missing Jagger before the assailant was wrestled to the ground!  Next, in San Antonio, the Stones found themselves booked for four performances at the Texas Teen Fair, alongside such acts as Country & Western star George Jones, as well as the Marquis Chimps.  Backstage, Keith Richards and Bill Wyman got into an angry confrontation with some disapproving cowboys, and afterward the two young Englishmen promptly went to a sporting goods store and purchased handguns for themselves, since local police were proving to be inept at providing them with proper protection.

Next came the undisputed highlight of the American visit, as the Stones arrived in Chicago (where, unfathomably, Oldham had not booked any concerts for them).  There, they spent a full day in the heart of Chicago blues, the Chess Records studio, where they recorded no fewer than six songs (including “It’s All Over Now”), and in between numbers they downed copious amounts of whiskey with their heroes, Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry.  The latter was particularly pleased that the Rolling Stones were cutting one of his songs on this day, “Around and Around”, as he had begun receiving royalty checks for his compositions that were covered by the Beatles and other British acts and was always happy to add to the tally.

Back on the road days later, the group played Excelsior, Minnesota; Omaha, Nebraska; Detroit, Michigan (where the local promoter bungled things so badly, there were less than 500 paying fans in a 14,000 seat arena); Pittsburgh and Harrisburg in Pennsylvania; and then finally back to New York City for two shows at Carnegie Hall (which, between hosting the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and the Dave Clark Five on stage in 1964, was making the venerable old venue as well known to the younger set for rock and roll as it was to elder generations for classical and jazz music).  By the end of their third week in America, the Stones were glad to be headed back home at last.  But if the touring was not always enjoyable, they did have the happy experience of recording at Chess. 

Yet there was also a bit of a controversy which flared up amid the tour.  Shortly after first arriving in California, the Stones made their US national television debut on ABC’s The Hollywood Palace.  Similar in format to The Ed Sullivan Show, the Palace featured a variety of acts each week, from dancers and comedians to circus acrobats and . . . increasingly . . . rock and roll bands.  Unlike the rival show over on CBS, this one had a different host each week.  For the episode which aired on June the 6^th, the host was singer and actor Dean Martin.  The controversy erupted over the tenor of the jokes which were written for Martin to deliver when introducing the Rolling Stones.  Although fairly innocuous (“I’ve been rolled when I was stoned myself” played into Martin’s on-stage drunkard persona; “You know all these new groups today, you’re under the impression they have long hair . . . not true at all, it’s an optical illusion.  They just have low foreheads and high eyebrows” is a joke that could have been applied to virtually any of the British bands), Martin seemed to reveal some personal condescension when, after the band’s set, the host turned to the camera and blandly said, “Aren’t they great?” and rolled his eyes upward.

As uproars go, this was a relative tempest in a teapot.  But it exposed division along generational lines, as teens saw it as a mean-spirited attack on what they cared for, and their parents tended to find it as a funny denunciation of these ridiculous longhaired so-called ‘musicians’.  The divide would only widen in the years to come.  And in the meantime, Andrew Loog Oldham could only delight in the publicity it generated.

However, there was one more positive event that took place during the band’s sojourn to America.  London Records, Decca’s American subsidiary, took it upon itself to try and bolster the chart power of the Rolling Stones in the US, so they selected a song from the group’s debut album, “Tell Me” (the very first Jagger/Richards-penned tune to be recorded), and put it out.  It instantly attracted airplay, and within a few weeks it peaked at #24, the first appearance in the American Top 40 by the Stones.

A mere two weeks after London released “Tell Me”, Decca rush-released “It’s All Over Now” from the Chess session as the group’s next worldwide single.  It was their first Number One in the UK, and a big hit in several other countries, but it only made it to #26 in America . . . perhaps because it was competing for airplay that summer with “Tell Me”.  Still, it gave the Rolling Stones two concurrent Top 30 hits in the US and set the stage for greater success to come.

Bedraggled and somewhat disillusioned with America, the Stones returned to Britain, but perhaps with the satisfaction of knowing they had left discord, bewilderment, and mania in their wake; all-in-all, the Rolling Stones’ manifesto writ large.

 

 

BRITISH INVASION '64 is available at Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, or may be ordered from your local bookseller from BearManorMedia.com 

 

 

---

[1] “Rollin’ Stone” was written by Waters and first recorded by him in 1950.

[2] Once again, there are compelling accounts that the patronage of the Beatles played a key role in the early development of the Rolling Stones.  As legend has it, the fact that Decca had so brusquely dismissed the Beatles when the band auditioned for the label in early 1962 (“The Beatles have no future in show business” said the rejection letter) had become common knowledge in both Liverpool and London, and as the band soared to new heights with EMI in 1963, Decca, and in particular its head Dick Rowe, became the butt of many jokes in the music industry.  George Harrison thought it unfair that Rowe was being ridiculed so relentlessly, as the Beatles on reflection agreed that their audition wasn’t very good, and they didn’t blame Decca for declining to sign them.  Wanting to do Rowe a good turn for all the grief he was enduring, Harrison reportedly took him aside when they were both appearing on a television program, and he suggested that Decca give a listen to the Rolling Stones.  Rowe did, he liked what he heard, and he signed them up.  With the tremendous success of the Stones in the years to come, Rowe’s rejection of the Beatles was soon forgotten.

[3] At least in 1963.

[4] More legitimate were the several dozen teenaged girls who stormed the lobby of the Astor Hotel later that day as the Rolling Stones were checking in, forcing the band to take refuge in a linen closet while the police swept the fans out of the building.

 An excerpt from my book

CARY GRANT: TAKING THE LEAD

published in 2022 by BearManor Media.

***

("The Awful Truth" was made in 1937 for Columbia Pictures, written and directed by Leo McCarey, and starred Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, and Ralph Bellamy.)

From the outset of McCarey’s assignment to the project, chaos seemed to reign, although McCarey remained very much at the center of the vortex and was seemingly actively encouraging it as a necessary part of his creative process.

Harry Cohn expected his writers to work at the studio so that they were close at hand if he needed to see them.  But Viña Delmar refused to even step foot on the lot, so she and McCarey either wrote together at her home, or else when they desired a change of scenery, they would drive over to Columbia, park outside the gates, and write from the front seat of the car.

All the same, once filming commenced, McCarey seemed to discard a good deal of what he and Delmar had written, and instead would spend the morning scribbling new lines, often on whatever scraps of paper he could find, and then assemble the cast and crew to shoot the scene.  The actors, having only a scant amount of time to learn their new lines, were flummoxed . . . Grant in particular.

Grant’s entire filmmaking experience had been within the structure of the Hollywood studios.  That meant that the script would be ready in enough time for the actors to memorize their lines.  Once on the set, they would usually rehearse a scene several times exactly as written, and then it would be shot.  Everything was done on a strict timetable, and although films frequently did go over schedule, there was never any question that each day’s work would begin at a set time, and work would continue uninterrupted until the scheduled end of each day’s shooting.

Yet now here was McCarey, often letting his cast and crew sit idle each morning while he scribbled away at that day’s pages, laughing at what, as yet, remained his own private jokes.  Or else he would sit at the piano on the set of Lucy’s penthouse apartment, playing songs, largely to amuse himself.  Even after a few productive hours of filmmaking, he often dismissed his cast and crew for the day at 3:00, rather than the customary 6:00 PM.

Cohn had informants everywhere, and he was growing increasingly exasperated by the reports he was getting about his expensive new director’s work habits.  Finally, he stalked down to the set, where he found McCarey entertaining the visiting Harold Lloyd.  The mogul angrily barked that all visitors were to vacate the set immediately, and Lloyd departed . . . followed immediately behind by McCarey, who went home and refused to return to the lot until Cohn apologized to him, to the cast and the crew, and wrote a letter of apology to Lloyd.

To the astonishment of anyone who knew Harry Cohn, the studio head did just that, however begrudgingly.  In spite of his frustrations with McCarey, he recognized that the director was something of a genius, and geniuses were invariably difficult.  More importantly, McCarey had a track record of producing profitable films, and that was what mattered most to Cohn.  The mogul could swallow his pride . . . at least this one time . . . if it meant getting a box office hit.

By the end of the first week, Dunne had gotten over her perplexity and was taking McCarey’s eccentricities in stride, and Bellamy had concluded the director was a “comedy genius” and began thoroughly enjoying himself.  But Grant was growing increasingly panicked, so much so that he finally wrote a memo to Harry Cohn entitled “What’s Wrong with This Picture” and offered to pay Columbia $5,000 to let him out of the film.  Shown the memo by Cohn, McCarey was so offended by his lead actor going behind his back this way, that he offered to kick in another $5,000 of his own money to be rid of Grant.

Cohn refused to release Grant.  For one thing, it would have cost time . . . and in Hollywood time was money . . . to find another suitable actor.  But furthermore, the studio head had seen the first few days of footage McCarey had shot, and he liked what he saw.  Harry Cohn once famously said, “I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad.  If my fanny squirms, it’s bad.  If my fanny doesn’t squirm, it’s good.  It’s as simple as that.”  And McCarey’s film wasn’t making his fanny squirm.

Things were tense on the set between director and star when filming resumed, but eventually the relationship improved between McCarey and Grant.  In large part this was because Grant was finally grasping what his character was about, and he therefore became more comfortable in the role, and gave up the fear that he was ruining his career with this film.  He was also greatly enjoying working with Dunne and Bellamy.  Furthermore, the actor respected that McCarey encouraged him to improvise, as Norman McLeod had done on Topper, and the director was an appreciative audience for Grant’s humor, often bursting out laughing at the actor’s ad-libs.  As filming continued, more than one person on set observed that Grant’s performance as Jerry Warriner . . . charming, witty, warm, zany, somewhat devious . . . seemed to reflect more and more the personality of the film’s director.

For his own peace of mind, Cohn made a point of steering clear of McCarey’s set.  But as the scheduled end of the shooting arrived, the mogul’s curiosity got the better of him.  To his chagrin, as he entered the sound stage one mid-afternoon, he found the director mixing cocktails for his cast instead doing any filming.  Cohn’s temper flared, but McCarey instantly calmed him by announcing that they were toasting their completion…they had just shot the final scene.  Not only had the director brought the film in on time, but he was $200,000 under budget as well!  Cohn happily accepted a drink and toasted them all.

Only at this point was the method of Leo McCarey’s madness obvious.  His constant rewrites and the lack of a finished script was his way of keeping his actors mentally fresh and to prevent them from growing too comfortable (and bored) with the script.  By frequently placing them off-balance, he knew they would be unable to fall back on any of their casual acting tricks and give anything less than a completely sincere performance.  It also added a frantic air to the acting that bolstered the film’s comedy.

The actors were often first learning each scene on the day they shot it.  McCarey would rehearse them multiple times, but in a loose fashion, allowing Grant, Dunne and Bellamy to play around with the language and smooth it out in their own speaking styles, and of course welcoming improvisation.  By the time it came to shoot the scene, the actors had creatively invested themselves into it, and they knew the scene’s beats intimately, even if the dialogue might undergo some spur of the moment alterations.  As a result, it was rare that McCarey didn’t get what he wanted in the first take.

 

***

 Cary Grant: Taking the Lead is available in paperback, hardcover, and eBook at BearManorMedia.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and Amazon.com

 

Extraordinary Courage

 December the 7th of 1941.

On that day of infamy, there were countless acts of heroism, both small and large.

Although caught utterly by surprise, the American sailors and soldiers instantly sprang into action. They managed to down 29 Japanese Zeros and sank 5 Japanese mini-subs. The ferociousness of the American defenses was one of the factors why Admiral Chuichi Nagumo opted to not launch a follow-up attack on Pearl Harbor, sparing the remaining American ships from destruction.

(Of the 67 ships in the Japanese attack armada on December 7th, the U.S. Navy would go on to sink 66 of them during the war.)

Perhaps the most famous act of heroism on that day...quite probably the greatest...came from Doris "Dorie" Miller. He was a cook and laundryman aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia (such menial tasks were among the only jobs allowed to black seamen in that segregated era of the military). When the attack began, his ship was hit by seven torpedoes, but although gravely damaged, it remained afloat.

Miller was sent to assist at an anti-aircraft gun, but when he arrived at his post he discovered that the gun had been destroyed by a torpedo blast. He then went to help carry the wounded to safety, dodging strafing bullets from the Japanese planes. After having helped move the West Virginia's mortally wounded Captain to a safe place, Dorie was then assigned to assist feeding ammunition to an anti-aircraft gun.

However, finding it unmanned, Miller took control of the gun himself, although he had no training whatsoever on the weapon. A white officer, seeing Dorie at the gun, rushed over to help him by feeding him ammo belts. In spite of bullets, explosions and flames all around him, Miller continued firing until he was all out of ammunition, and is credited with shooting down up to six Zeroes.

The West Virginia was by this point too badly damaged to remain afloat, and it slowly began to sink. Rather than escaping the ship for his safety, Dorie went to work carrying wounded sailors out of harm's way, often braving burning oil-slick waters to do so. He refused to leave until the order was finally given to abandon ship.

For his actions, Dorie became the first African American to be awarded the Navy Cross, the Navy's highest honor. He was brought back to the United States to go on war bond tours, but eventually resumed active duty in the Pacific.

On November 24, 1943 his ship, the carrier U.S.S. Liscome Bay, was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine in the Battle of Makin. After Navy relief efforts picked up all of the survivors, Doris Miller was declared Missing in Action on December 7, 1943...two years to the day after the Pearl Harbor attack. Later in 1944, he was officially declared Killed in Action.

 

Dorie didn't live to see his Navy desegregated, or to see men and women of his skin color elevated to the highest ranks of officers.  But his act of sheer heroism in the face of the gravest of danger...proof positive that heroes come in all colors...helped spur the drive to end "Jim Crow" in the U.S. military, and that came to pass in just a few short years after Miller's death.

To honor Dorie, the Navy first named a frigate, the U.S.S. Miller, after him.  Once that was finally decommissioned after long service, it was announced by the Biden Administration that the next scheduled nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, due to set sail in 2029, will be commissioned as the U.S.S. Doris Miller.

"For distinguished devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and disregard for his own personal safety during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii, by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. While at the side of his Captain on the bridge, Miller, despite enemy strafing and bombing and in the face of a serious fire, assisted in moving his Captain, who had been mortally wounded, to a place of greater safety, and later manned and operated a machine gun directed at enemy Japanese attacking aircraft until ordered to leave the bridge."

 

 

Rolling the Dice

 

The Moulin Rouge is one of the most fascinating tales of the golden years of Vegas.

In the 1950s, black performers were more than welcome to sing and play on the stages of the various casino hotels. However, kowtowing to Southern high rollers, the casinos maintained a strict segregationist policy. Thus, 'colored' singers and musicians could not stay at the hotels, play in the casinos, eat in the restaurants, or even walk through the front door...they had to come and go through the service entrance in the back.

(When Ella Fitzgerald finally managed to secure a contract that allowed her to swim in the hotel pool, if nothing else, she had to do so alone, and when she was done, the pool was drained and refilled with new water for the white guests!)

This still being the era of 'separate but equal' (hah!), some African-American financiers decided to create a little equality for themselves, and they bankrolled the Moulin Rouge, a casino that catered specifically...but not exclusively...to black patrons.

It was an immediate success, for although this was still the era of Jim Crow, a black middle class was nevertheless emerging in America, with disposable income they were looking to dispose of, and the Moulin Rouge fit that bill perfectly.

At first the other casinos were thrilled with its success, as it took the pressure off of them from the likes of the NAACP to desegregate their own facilities. And it wasn't as if they were losing any money because of it...all of those black gamblers weren't even allowed in their own casinos.

But then their attitude changed.

One of the reasons why the hotels booked such high powered performers for their showrooms was because guests knew that after the shows, the likes of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Louis Prima would hit the casino floors themselves and mingle to all hours of the early morning. That helped ensure the casinos kept a large crowd at the tables and slots from midnight to dawn.

But with the Moulin Rouge boasting the likes of Count Basie and Duke Ellington on their stage, Sinatra and the others would decamp from their own hotels immediately after their own performances and head over there, usually to jump on stage for impromptu jam sessions. Word quickly got out, and white gamblers flocked to the Moulin Rouge to catch the action, leaving the casinos of the other hotels quiet and, ominously, not earning money.

This was not acceptable, and it would be stopped.

The mob bosses who ran the casinos also controlled such industry franchises as food and liquor suppliers. Suddenly the Moulin Rouge found itself unable to get either. And then city inspectors began showing up and hitting them with fines for previously non-existent code violations. And no one was willing to risk the LVFD not showing up if a fire were to mysteriously break out at the casino.

Seeing the writing on the wall, the Moulin Rouge shut down just a few months after opening, and with it went Vegas's first and only attempt at a black casino.

POSTSCRIPT: Having tasted some of the Vegas high life, African-Americans weren't about to let it slip away again, and they had some powerful white allies. If they couldn't have their own pie, they'd demand a slice from the others. Sammy Davis, Jr. told the casinos that if he was good enough to sing there, then he was good enough to stay there, eat there, and gamble there, too. Sinatra insisted that from then on, he would only perform for de-segregated audiences. Tony Bennett was told by one blatantly racist hotel exec that he "hoped" Bennett wouldn't hire any black musicians when he came to perform; Bennett reacted to this by promptly hiring Count Basie and his Orchestra to back him up. "That motherf*cker doesn't want to see one black face on stage?" Bennett said. "Well, now he's going to have to look at twenty of them!"

Most of the guys running the casinos were from the East, and they personally didn't have any real problem with letting blacks stay and play, but they understood the power of appearances, so they contrived to make it look as if they had no choice but to desegregate. "It would be really helpful if you could arrange some protest marches outside of the hotels," one mobster told Sammy Davis, Jr. He did just that, and the hotels promptly 'caved in', allowing people of color to come and leave their money in the casinos just as freely as any white person could. When bigots complained, the wise guys just shrugged their shoulders and said, "Whaddya gonna do? Our hands were tied."

In a sense, the Moulin Rouge was the spark that helped light the fire. It deserves to be remembered and honored.

Ted

 

He knew even as his landing craft hit the beach that something had gone terribly wrong.

 

He and his men were being deposited South of their intended landing spot on Utah Beach, further from their objective, and on a stretch of beachhead that offered little in the way of protection from German guns, other than the scattered steel anti-tank barricades that the Wehrmacht themselves had erected.

 

He wasn't even supposed to be there. No other officer of his rank was a part of the first wave of Allied invaders at Normandy. And at age 56, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. was far older than any of his compatriots (he and his son Quentin, an Army Captain, were also the only father and son to be a part of the invasion). He needed a cane to support his badly arthritic legs, and what he revealed to no one was that he was suffering from heart disease. But Ted, the eldest son of the 26th President, repeatedly requested to be allowed to go ashore in the first wave. He argued that his presence would steady the men, for they would know that if he was there sharing the danger, then maybe most of them would make it out of there alive.

 

He had been one of America's most decorated soldiers in the First World War, and had suffered grievous injuries in that conflict that should have kept him from ever wearing a uniform again. After that 'War to End All Wars', Ted became an isolationist, and when a new war erupted in 1939, he helped found the America First organization to try and keep the U.S. from joining the carnage. But as 1940 wore on and Norway, Belgium, Denmark and France fell like dominoes, and Britain desperately struggled to hold the tide against Hitler, Ted realized that America would have to get into the fight again at some point. So he pulled strings and got himself appointed to the Army once more.

 

As a commanding officer, Ted was tough and demanding, but also fair. He knew how to use humor to defuse a tense situation. And he was seemingly born without fear. His men not only admired him, but genuinely liked him. General George Patton would say that Ted Roosevelt was one of the bravest men he ever knew.

 

So there was never any doubt in his own mind that he would be there on Utah Beach, sharing the risks with his men. When his superior officer reluctantly approved his request, he was certain he was signing Ted's death warrant.

 

And now he and his men clung to what scant protection they could find as bullets rained down on them. To keep his soldiers from panicking, Ted's booming voice carried above the sounds of battle, regaling them with rousing tales of growing up with his illustrious father. Conferring with his staff officers, he concluded there was no way that the landing craft could be brought back to try and relocate them to their actual target site. The one thing they all knew for sure was that it was certain death to remain there on that beach.

 

"All right then," Ted's firm voice called out. "We'll start the war from right here!"

 

He led his men inland, slugging it out with the German's in brutal fighting. Eventually they were able to out-flank their original intended target and secure the entire area.

 

Asked years later what was the bravest thing he ever saw in war, General Omar Bradley said unhesitatingly, "Ted Roosevelt on Utah Beach."

 

Yet his was but one of 156,000 acts of bravery at Normandy. That's the number of Allied troops...American, British, Canadian, Free French, Australian, Dutch, Belgian, Norwegian, New Zealand, Czech, Polish, Rhodesian...who stormed the beaches. Some never made landfall, dying in the surf; others survived to war's end and lived long lives afterward. But each of them, one and all, were brave heroes.

 

Over the next five weeks, Ted raced across France to battle the Germans in a jeep dubbed the "Rough Rider", named for the volunteer regiment of Badlands cowboys and New York society swells that his father, Teddy, has assembled and led up San Juan Hill to victory in the Spanish American War of 1898. He was unaware that in mid-July, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower had just signed orders to promote him to Lieutenant General. For on July the 15th, Theodore Roosevelt's weakened heart gave way and went silent.

 

His fifth cousin, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, approved the awarding of the Medal of Honor posthumously to Ted in September.

 

#DDay

 

 

Reconsidering Warren G. Harding

 

Americans love to rank things…baseball homerun kings, party colleges, “Star Wars” films, and pretty much anything else you can think of.  And that, of course, includes Presidents.

 

In particular, historians enjoy pretending that the largely subjective practice of ranking Presidents from ‘Best’ to ‘Worst’ is, in fact, an objective task.  Naturally, it’s anything but.  One historian may look at the accomplishments of, say, James K. Polk and consider them to be worthy of a high ranking, while another may look at the exact same criteria and place Polk low on the list.

 

When it comes to who is ‘Best’, though, it’s hard to argue with the usual results…it’s generally a toss-up between the Father of Our Country, George Washington, and the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln (although sometimes Franklin Delano Roosevelt slips into the top spot instead).

 

Likewise, few ever argue who lands at the very bottom of the list:  Warren Gamaliel Harding.

 

 

 

Harding has had a virtual lock on last place since historians began getting serious about doing rankings in the mid-20^th Century.  He invariably beats out James Buchanan, who in recent years has had not one, but two best-selling biographies that (spoiler alert) declare him the very worst of all time…"The Worst President” by Garry Boulard, and “Worst. President. Ever.” by Robert Strauss.  Harding beats out William Henry Harrison, who died just one month after taking office, and thus literally did nothing as President.  He even beat out Richard Nixon in the immediate aftermath of his resignation amid the Watergate scandal.

 

So if Harding keeps getting pegged as the worst, he must have been pretty bad, right?

 

Well, not really.

 

Don’t get me wrong, Warren Harding was not a great President, not by any stretch of the imagination.  But he was actually a pretty fair one, all things considered.  He did some good things, and even at times showed tremendous political courage.  He really ought to be given his due, so allow me.

 

Warren was born in 1865 in Ohio, to a family that traced its lineage to American colonial times.  Called “Winnie” by his family, he had what would appear to be the typical boy’s life in small town 19^th Century America; fishing, swimming, romping.  He played cornet in the town band.  Later, opponents would claim he was a poor student, but actually Warren did well at school.  He particularly excelled at literature and composition.  He had a lifelong love for poetry, and even as a young boy, he would delight adults by reciting poems from memory.  In school he developed an enthusiasm for debating.

 

Although both of his parents were physicians, the Hardings were not wealthy, so to make ends meet they also farmed.  Warren and his siblings had to be up before dawn for their chores, and then rush home after school to do more work on the farm.

 

All in all, it sounds a bit like idyllic Americana.  But there was heartache as well.  A couple of generations before Warren was born, one of his ancestors got into a feud with a neighbor, who retaliated by spreading the rumor that the Hardings were part negro; as time passed, in some tellings of the tale, they were actually light-skinned blacks who were passing for white.  The rumor clung to them, and as Warren was growing up, he had to often face it.  Some parents wouldn’t let their children play with those “colored” Harding kids.  And although Warren was gregarious and had many friends, still other kids outside of his circle would openly taunt him with cries of “n*gger”.  As an adult, he frequently and forcefully had to refute the claim when made by political opponents, but in private he was much less concerned about the possibility.  “Who knows,” he would indifferently say, “maybe one of my ancestors did jump the fence.”

 

Personality-wise, most people liked Warren immensely.  He was friendly and funny and eager to please…indeed, too eager.  His father once admonished him with, “Warren, it’s a good thing you weren’t born a girl, because you’d be in the family way all of the time.  You just can’t say no!”  Harding had a deep-rooted need to make people like him, which can be both an asset and a liability in politics.

 

Graduating from college at age 17 (not uncommon at the time), he first became a school teacher, a vocation which…even taking into account the Presidency…he later called the hardest job he ever did.  He then became an insurance agent, but soon found what he felt was his true calling: newspaper reporter.  But at the age of only 19, he stepped up from reporter to publisher, when he became the owner of a struggling paper, the Marion, Ohio Daily Star.  Legend had it that he won it in a poker game, but if so, more than likely his opponent intentionally lost the game, just to get the floundering and debt-ridden newspaper off of his hands.

 

Harding dove into the task of saving the paper.  He improved the quality of the reporting, personally went out to drum up advertising, and earned the loyalty of his employees by implementing the radical concept of profit sharing, which in turn encouraged them to do all they could to sell more papers.  One of his paper boys was Norman Thomas, much later the head of the Socialist Party in the United States, and while Thomas rarely had anything good to say about capitalists, he always spoke fondly of Mr. Harding.

 

Within a few short years, the Star was a rousing success, and Harding was a young man with a future, and he became involved in the Republican Party.  Although his part of Ohio was a Democratic stronghold, Warren managed to get himself elected to the State Senate, and a couple of years after that became the Lt. Governor.  And though he later lost his own bid to become Governor, he had well established himself as a popular public speaker, and traveled all across the state campaigning for Republicans candidates, addressing civic organizations, and meeting with other newspaper executives.  When he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1914, he won roundly.

 

Harding was, at best, an indifferent Senator.  He was present for less than one-third of the roll calls during his six years there, one of the worst records in the Senate, and offered no meaningful legislation.  He didn’t even take a public stand on the two major domestic issues of the day, women’s suffrage and prohibition.  Nevertheless, Harding loved being a Senator, being a part of the “club”, swapping saucy stories and dirty jokes with his fellow solons in the Cloak Room, or rounding up a few fellow Senators for all-night poker games.  It was really everything he ever wanted.

 

What he didn’t want was to be President.  And frankly, there was little chance of that.  The three frontrunners for the 1920 Republican nomination were General Leonard Wood, Illinois Governor Frank Lowden, and California Senator Hiram Johnson, and without a doubt one of them would be the nominee.  Still, Harding allowed himself to be named as Ohio’s ‘favorite son’ candidate at the convention; this was done largely for the prestige, which Harding felt would help him when he ran for reelection to the Senate that November.

 

But Harry Daugherty had other plans.  He was an Ohio power broker and mentor to Harding since Warren’s early days in the state legislature.  Indeed, the first time he laid eyes on Warren Harding, with his broad chest, piercing eyes and Roman nose, Daugherty remarked, “Gee, he sure looks like a President.”  And as Harding’s political fortunes rose, that became exactly what Daugherty intended for him.

 

He was a savvy enough political operator to expect that Wood, Lowden and Johnson would battle one another to a standstill at the convention, thus leading the frustrated delegates to turn to a compromise candidate.  In fact, some months before the convention, Daugherty made one of the most perfect predictions of political prophecy ever, when he told a reporter, “I don’t expect Senator Harding will be nominated on the first, second, or third ballot.  But I think about 11 minutes after two o’clock on Friday morning of the convention, when 15 or 20 men, bleary-eyed and perspiring profusely from the heat, are sitting around a table, some one of them will say, ‘Who will we nominate?’  At that decisive time, the friends of Senator Harding can suggest him.”  And that is precisely what happened.

 

The party leaders called Harding into a closed door meeting, and asked him bluntly if there was anything in his past that could derail his candidacy.  He asked for a few minutes alone to think about it.  Without a doubt he thought about how the accusations of having negro ancestry would be brought up again.  He probably thought about how being President would inhibit much of the things he loved to do.  He quite likely through about Carrie Phillips and Nan Britton, just two of a number of women he had been having affairs with, and how having those relationships exposed would not only almost certainly cost him the presidency and any other political office in the future, but also end his marriage and humiliate the women involved.  After twenty minutes or so, he returned to the room, faced the men who could hand him the GOP nomination, and calmly said no, there were no skeletons in his closet.

 

1920 was the first election in which women were allowed to vote in all 48 states, and it certainly did Harding no harm that he had voted in favor of suffrage in the Senate…nor did it hurt that he was, by the standards of the day, an exceptionally handsome man.  He won by one of the biggest landslides in history, with a whopping 61% of the popular vote, and beat his Democratic opponent, James Cox, in the Electoral College by well over than three-to-one.

 

As was the tradition, Harding himself did no campaigning, instead limiting himself to making the occasional remarks from his front porch back in Ohio.  But he had plenty of surrogates crisscrossing the country making speeches and holding rallies for him, including Broadway star Al Jolson, who would croon a ditty written specifically for the campaign:  “We need another Lincoln/To do the country’s thinkin’/Mr. Harding you’re the man for us!”

 

Okay, we’ve reached the part where Harding goes to the White House.  This invariably is when writers focus on the scandals, as if that’s the only thing that constituted the Harding years.  In fact, the scandals didn’t come to light until after his death, and at the time, people remembered the brief Harding era as quiet and tranquil.  You should know about the scandals, so I encourage you to go elsewhere and look them up.  Start with Teapot Dome.  Right now, however, we’re going to talk about what Harding did right.

 

Harding was a sharp enough politician to know that he had to reward certain factions in the party for the work they did getting him elected, so he appointed some individuals to his Cabinet who might best be described as party hacks:  Albert Fall at Interior and Edwin Denby at the Navy Department.  But he balanced them with some truly outstanding choices for other posts:  former Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes as the Secretary of State, Andrew Mellon as Treasury Secretary, and Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce (“…and Undersecretary of everything else!”).

 

And while he had promised to pursue a much less activist presidency than the nation had seen under his immediate predecessors (Harding called it “Normalcy”, an entirely made-up word that nevertheless has found its place in our vernacular to this day), Harding was still quite active in a number of areas.

 

Here are some of his most notable accomplishments:

 

*  Like virtually every other American, he was horrified by the costs, in blood and treasure, of the Great War.  Seeking a solution to prevent any such wars from ever erupting again, Harding was a strong proponent for what would become a global agreement on arms limitations, which the U.S. hosted, and brought the great powers together to pledge to reduce their navies and pledge to seek negotiated solutions to conflicts.  Ultimately this pact failed to prevent World War II, but not for lack of good intentions and honest effort.

 

*  Recognizing the need to better coordinate government expenditures, Harding established the Bureau of the Budget (today known as the OMB), and imposed more efficient controls on Federal buying and selling.

 

*  During the war, President Woodrow Wilson had jailed a number of vocal critics of the conflict (and of his handling of it as the Commander in Chief).  Harding ordered the process begun to pardon those prisoners, and he personally expedited the release of Socialist Leader Eugene V. Debs so that he could be home for Christmas…but only on the proviso that Debs first come to the White House to meet with Harding (where they allegedly drank some bootleg whisky in the Oval Office).

 

*  When the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, it fell to Harding to negotiate a separate peace with Germany.  When the new treaty was ready to sign, Germany’s diplomats steeled themselves for a display of pomp and spectacle, where the United States would celebrate its triumph by humbling the defeated Germans; after all, wasn’t that what the European Allies had done?  But instead, looking to put the rancor of the past behind both nations, Harding refused to hold any elaborate signing ceremony.  Instead, informed that the paperwork was ready, he had it brought out to the golf course where he was playing, asked to come into a house along the fairway, and sat down at the dining room table, where he quickly wrote his signature.  “That’s all,” he said, and went back to his golf game.

 

*  Proving there is life after the White House for ex-Presidents, he named William Howard Taft as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

 

*  The postwar years had become a Renaissance of sorts for racism in the United States, with the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan and the expansion of segregation laws, and not merely in the South.  It was not smart politics at the time for a politician to speak out against racism.  But Harding had never been a proponent of white supremacy (perhaps those childhood years being taunted as a “n*gger” helped him develop an affinity with people of color?), and when he was invited to receive an honorary degree at the University of Alabama, he saw it as the perfect opportunity to speak his mind. 

 

  Before a crowd of some 30,000 (white and black…in segregated seating, of course), the President said, “I want to see the time come when black men will regard themselves as full participants in the benefits and duties of American citizenship.  We cannot go on, as we have gone on for more than half a century, with one great section of our population, numbering as many people as the entire population of some significant countries of Europe, set off from real contribution to solving national issues, because of a division on race lines.”

 

  They may seem somewhat tame now, but those were the most radical words spoken in favor of racial equality spoken by any President since Lincoln.  And Harding said them on old Confederate soil.

  Tragically, although the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress at the time, Southern Democrats managed to use parliamentarian tactics and the filibuster to thwart Republican civil rights measures, including abolition of the poll tax and branding lynching as a Federal crime.  Just as sadly, it would be the last time when the GOP fully threw its full weight behind civil rights legislation and truly was the ‘Party of Lincoln’.  But for one brief moment, it looked as if Warren Harding could achieve it.

***

Whatever fears Harding had about having to relinquish his favorite pastimes in the White House never came to pass.  Although Prohibition was now the law of the land, illegal liquor flowed like…well, like liquor in the White House residence.  Harding kept on having his all-night poker parties, he’d often leave the office in mid-day to go catch a Washington Senators game, or after dinner he’d go to the boxing matches.

 

And he kept having affairs.  One long-standing rumor has it that he would slip into the closet off of the Oval Office with visiting young ladies (one can only assume it is somewhat spacious) and would emerge a few minutes later, as the lady in question adjusted her skirt and patted down her hair.

 

Most men who have served in the office don’t like being President very much.  For some, it was agony.  Very few…the Roosevelts, JFK, Reagan…loved it.  Warren Harding loved it most of all.  Being President was like every day is Christmas!

 

Well, not every day.  He knew he was in over his head, that he didn’t have the knowledge and the expertise to truly do the job as it needed to be done.  As he sighed in exasperation to his secretary one day, “Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind.  But I don’t know where the book is, and maybe I couldn’t read it if I found it!”

 

And eventually he began to hear about illegal activities within his Administration.  When he learned that the Director of the Veterans Bureau, an old friend of Harding’s named Charles Forbes, had been secretly selling off government property and under-providing for veterans’ hospitals, and was pocketing the profits, the President summoned him to the Oval Office, where he lunged at Forbes, wrapped his hands around his throat, and tried to strangle him!  Harding had to be pulled off of Forbes before the first case of presidential homicide was committed.

 

As other scandals began to emerge…including a growing number of perpetrators committing suicide, rather than face prosecution…Harding would pace the White House late at night, grumbling, “My political enemies I can deal with…it’s my political friends who will be the death of me!”

 

But he could still find his sense of humor even in the midst of mounting gloom.  Will Rogers wrote in his syndicated newspaper column how he had attended a function in Washington the night before and spent a few minutes talking with Harding:  “I told him I wanted to share the latest political jokes, and he said, ‘I already know them…I appointed most of them to office.’  I saw I could not match wits with this man, so I went home.”

 

In the summer of 1923, Harding decided to get out of the sweltering heat in Washington…and escape from his political problems…by taking a train trip across the country, and visiting Alaska (then still a territory, not a state).  People flocked to train stations and whistle-stops along the route, and Harding felt obligated to speak at each stop, quickly exhausting himself.  Already suffering from a heart ailment and high blood pressure (which the public did not know about), he grew weaker and developed a fever.  In San Francisco he took to his bed, and as his wife read to him, he suffered a stroke and died.

 

There were salacious rumors later that his wife, Florence, had poisoned him, either as revenge for his philandering, or else to spare him the grief of the emerging scandals.  The very idea is preposterous.

 

At the time of his death, the nation was thrown into a state of grief not seen since the assassination of Lincoln.  Harding’s popularity right up until the end had been tremendous; had the next election been held in the summer of ’23, Harding doubtless would have won by an even greater margin that in 1920.

 

But very quickly after that, Harding’s star began to dim.  Partly it was because with the full public revelation of the various scandals, and with his untimely death, Harding was unable to address the issues, or even defend himself.  Thus, it became easy for others to push blame onto him, even though there’s no evidence whatsoever that he benefited illegally in any way during his presidency.  At the very least, people began holding him responsible for appointing the guilty parties to their positions to begin with, and for failing to more closely monitor their activities.

 

Perhaps his fall from grace is best illustrated by Harding’s tomb.  Upon his death, the Congress appropriated a large sum of money for the building of a grand Greek-style memorial tomb in Ohio, and politicians in both parties fell over themselves speaking words of praise to the memory of the dead President.  But when the tomb was finally finished and dedicated in 1931, President Herbert Hoover attended, but virtually no other political figure of note found it convenient to be there.  And Harding’s reputation has been buried with his remains ever since.

 

Warren Harding probably should never have been President, but he was, and he made the best of it within his limitations.  Who’s to say the Leonard Wood or Frank Lowden or James Cox would have been any better?

 

In closing, let me share the words of Alice Longworth, the irrepressible daughter of Theodore Roosevelt:  “Warren Harding wasn’t a bad man, he was just a slob.”

 

And in its own weird way, I think that’s about the best compliment one could pay the man.

 Just a boy at heart