The Incredible Era
by [Houghton Mifflin, $.3.00]
MR. ADAMS’S biography of President Warren G. Harding is well-named, for the racy and true story which he has to tell possesses elements of complete incredibility. It is the tale of an amiable, well-meaning, easygoing politician exalted to a position for which he was ill-equipped and then betrayed by those whom he had trusted. As a newspaper editor in Marion, Ohio, Harding was happy, greeting his neighbors, enjoying his pleasant vices, unworried by too much responsibility. Fate gave him power, but made him pay the penalty for his moral weaknesses.
Adams’s book is a personal rather than a political history — and rightly so. If the author devotes much space to Harding’s alleged Negro ancestry and amorous indiscretions, it is because these matters loom large in the latter’s career. Not much is said about political and economic conditions in the 1920’s, for Harding left almost no mark upon them except to bring about the abandonment of the twelve-hour working day. Mr. Adams has a gift for entertaining narrative, and one episode follows another like the successive scenes in a drama of deterioration. Around the chief actor hover the sinister figures of Harry M. Daugherty and his childlike satellite, Jess Smith; of the suave Forbes and the unscrupulous Fall and other less conspicuous offenders. At times we seem to be dwelling in an illusory, amoral world, in which all standards of conventional decency are ignored — as, for example, when, during the Prohibition Era, a President of the United States drank and served highballs in a White House bedroom. At the end, when Harding dies mysteriously in San Francisco, he is clearly not the villain but the victim of the tragedy. Kindly, gullible, bewildered, overwhelmed by the burden of it all, with a majestic exterior concealing an irresolute heart, he is more to be pitied than censured. Mr. Adams does not disguise the fact that the Presidency has never sunk so low. The book had to be written, and it is highly moral, for the sinners are usually punished. But no American can be proud of the record which it reveals.
CLAUDE M. FUESS