Warren G. Harding
Hello everyone. I hope you are all doing well during these unusual and trying times.
Now, back to Warren G. Harding...
1. Book Club Reading from 2016
In 2016 we read 1920: Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza. The author discussed the confluence of six men who were focused on the Presidential election of 1920. They were Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt. Death and illness eliminated Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, while the time was not ripe for Herbert Hoover and FDR. So Warren Harding, the unlikely candidate, became the unlikely President with the taciturn Calvin Coolidge as his Vice-President.
Perhaps we will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I next year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.–German_Peace_Treaty_(1921)
3. Another Book Club Read
In the first year of the Book Club we read Dark Side of Fortune by Margaret Leslie Davis. Of course the main event of Edward Doheny's life was his prosecution for attempting to bribe Harding's Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall. The famous bribery, linking these two men, is known to history as the Teapot Dome Scandal, although Doheny had nothing to do with the Teapot Dome Oil Field. Doheny's involvement was related to the Elk Hills Oil Reserve in the San Joaquin Valley. The results of the trials for bribery and conspiracy were the conviction of Albert Fall and the acquittal of Edward Doheny, although the trial left him a broken man.
Emerging as a powerful force in her own right was Carrie Estelle Doheny, wife of Edward. Her eye problems led her to endow the Doheny Eye Institute. Margaret Leslie Davis has written another book, The Lost Gutenberg. This is a must read for book lovers. "For rare-book collectors, an original copy of the Gutenberg Bible - of which there are fewer than 50 in existence - represents the ultimate prize. Margaret Leslie Davis recounts five centuries in the life of one copy, from its creation by Johannes Gutenberg, through the hands of monks, an earl, the Worcestershire sauce king, and a nuclear physicist to its ultimate resting place, in a steel vault in Tokyo. Estelle Doheny, the first woman collector to add the book to her library and its last private owner, tipped the Bible onto a trajectory that forever changed our understanding of the first mechanically printed book."-Amazon
