SMOKE AND MIRRORS

I miss the old smoke filled rooms – sometimes. In the old days there were no passionate amateurs willing to bring on a political doomsday, just to muck things up. The process was dispassionate, calculated and handled by people who saw politics as a job, aided, of course, by political writers who supplied the passion in print. From such combinations, legends were born, such as this one I shall now relate.

On April Fools Day, 1920, bland faced Ohio political manager Harry Daugherty (above) was hastily packing his bags in his room at the old Waldorf Astoria hotel on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Into the room sauntered two reporters seeking a quote. 

They taunted Daugherty on his boastful support for the turgid and mediocre Ohio Senator, Warren G. Harding (above) for President.  Nobody else thought Harding stood a chance. Just who were these senators that Daugherty claimed would support Harding at the Republican Convention, come June? 

When Daugherty refused to take the bait, the reporters suggested he must be expecting Harding to win the nomination in some hotel back room with a small group of political managers, “reduced to pulp by the inevitable vigil and travail” of a deadlocked convention. 

Daugherty said nothing, so a reporter suggested further that Daugherty must be expecting the managers to collapse about 2:00 A.M. in a smoke filled room. Weary of the dialog, Daugherty responded off handedly, “Make it 2:11,” grabbed his bags and rushed out to catch the train back to Ohio.

The reporter turned that conversation into this quote, which he stuck into Daugherty’s mouth; “I don't expect Senator Harding to be nominated on the first, second or third ballot, but I think we can well afford to take chances that about eleven minutes after 2 o'clock on Friday morning at the convention, when fifteen or twenty men, somewhat weary, 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 can afford to abide by the result.”

And amazingly, that is almost exactly how it really happened. Except that the back room was a suite of meeting rooms in Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel (above) at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Balboa, room numbers 408 through 410, with Room 404 set aside as the reception room.

The suite had been rented by Will Hays (above), the big-eared big-talking “mighty little ear of corn” from Indiana.  He was the Republican National Chairman, and had hopes of being President himself in 1920. And maybe the greatest compliment you can pay the professional politicians of that era is that they did not let Will Hays become President.

The Republican Convention that June was officially taking place 9 blocks south of the Blackstone hotel, in the old Chicago Coliseum (above) on South Wabash Avenue. This cavern had been home to every Republican Convention since 1904. It is worth noting that the building had originally been constructed to house a prison, Richmond’s Libby prison, bought lock, stock, and barrel by a Chicago candy millionaire and shipped north to form the centerpiece of a Civil War Museum. The museum went bust in 1899, and the owner “re-imagined” the space as a public meeting center.

It was into this den of iniquity that some 2,000 delegates and their alternates marched on Tuesday 8 June  1920, sixty years after Republicans had first met in Chicago to nominate William Seward for President, but instead chose Abraham Lincoln. It was an ominous bit of history to consider if you were General Leonard Wood or Illinois Governor Frank Lowden, as they were considered the front runners for the 1920 Republican nomination.

The dour faced Lowden (above) wanted to be president so badly that when both houses of the Illinois state legislature voted to abolish the death penalty, he had vetoed the bill, proving again that politicians are even willing to kill to win a few votes.

In contrast, Leonard Wood (above) had few political skills. He was a Medal of Honor winner who had then graduated medical school and then risen to Army Chief of Staff, and had even won the New Hampshire primary. And while little Will Hays had not entered any of the twenty primaries held that year, he still had hopes that Wood and Lowden would deadlock, and the convention would turn to the little Hoosier to break the tie.

The convention (above) finally got down to the balloting on Friday evening, 11 June , and immediately things started looking up for Hays. On the first ballot Wood led with 285 votes, Lowden showed 211, Senator Hiram Johnson, of California, a Teddy Roosevelt progressive, was third with 133 votes. Far behind was Governor William Spool of Pennsylvania with 84 votes, followed by New York’s Nicholas Butler with 69 votes and Ohio’s favorite son, Senator Warren G. Harding, who had lost in the Indiana primary and could muster just 65 votes. Six other candidates held the remaining 132 delegates.

On the second ballot Wood gained just ten votes, while Governor Lowden’s total grew by 40. But still nobody was close to the 439 votes needed to nominate. General Wood reached his peak on the fourth ballot with 314 votes, then his support started to slip, and Governor Lowden beat him with 311 votes on the fifth ballot. Still, no one seemed to be gathering enough support to win it all. And the longer this went on, the less confidence actual voters would have in the eventual choice. So the professionals stepped in and the convention adjourned for the night. The negotiations shifted to the infamous fourth floor rooms at the Blackstone hotel.

Actually political junkies were meeting all over Chicago that night, but Hays’ rooms at the Blackstone got all the publicity because that was where Associated Press reporter Kirke Simpson was working. He was there to cover Harry Daugherty, because, as you have seen, Harry was always good for a quote, even if you had to spoon feed it to him.

Also present was George Harvey, who ran Harper publishing, and Republican Senators Wadsworth, Calder, Watson, McCormick and Lodge, Utah Senator Reed Smoot, political fixer Joe Grundy, and Lawyer Charles Hillers, counsel to the R.N.C., as well as his client, R.N.C. Chief, Will Hays. Their problem was that none of them could agree upon who the party should rally around, either.

It was, by general agreement, the original “Smoke filled room”, and the 130 pound Hays was the host. Even though he neither smoked nor drank himself, Hays kept the cigars lit and the booze flowing “Neighbor”, he and once said to Herbert Hoover, “I want to be helpful.”  It was his natural instinct.

Harry Daugherty’s (left) natural instinct, on the other hand, was his drive for his man. He said of Harding (right), “I found him sunning himself, like a turtle on a log, and I pushed him into the water. “

Since the top three vote getters were not willing to compromise with each other, the Senators were now looking for “The best of the second raters.”, and Daugherty suggested that Harding was their man. There is no indication that anybody even mention Will Hays - not even Will Hays.

They dispatched a small delegation to Hardings’ room up stairs, and asked the stunned man in his pajamas if there were any embarrassing episodes in his past. Harding swallowed and said, “No”. He was lying, but that would not come out until Harding was long dead.

It wasn't as if the party managers issued orders and the party regulars fell in line. It would take five more ballots before the crowd at the colosseum would give up and hand the nomination to Harding. But as of 2:15 A.M., the decision has been made, just as Daugherty had predicted; if nobody seems to be winning, we will rally around Harding and make do.  What a way to pick a president! And it worked.

At 5 A.M. on Saturday 12 June, 1920, Kirke Simpston filed a story that included the following phrase, “Harding of Ohio was chosen by a group of men in a smoke-filled room early today.” And that is how the phrase "smoke filled room" entered the vernacular. The connotation became negative because after Warren G. Harding won in a landslide, he and his “Ohio Gang” - his buddies, including Harry Daugherty - moved to Washington D.C.  There, many of them ended up in jail, or disgraced, or at least spending a lot of the graft they had collected on lawyers.

Harding appointed Harry Daugherty (above) as his Attorney General. And after three heady years, Harry was forced to resign when his chief aide, Jess Smith, was caught taking kickbacks from bootleggers. Harry was taking kickbacks too, but the professional politicians decided not to prosecute him, the important thing was that he had retreated from public view.

Will Hays served as Hardings’ Postmaster General. But after only one year he smelled the impending scandals and got out.  In 1922 Hays took another job, running the Hays Production Code office, which set standards for on- screen morality in the Hollywood film industry. 

It was the Hays Commission which gave us forty years of married couples sleeping only in twin beds, no acknowledgement of drug use, no adultery in marriage without retribution, and endless stories with saccharin sweet "Hollywood" endings.  It was the Hays' Commission that turned Rhett Butler’s exit line as he walked out on Scarlet O’Hara into a major social crises, even though the line already appeared in one of the most widely read books in America, "Gone With the Wind".  

It seemed that Mr. Hays had built his entire career selling smoke and mirrors, and he was not going to get out of that business just because he had gotten out of politics.  But can you imagine what a disaster he would have been as President? 

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WRITING STORIES - The Lawless Early Days of Print

 

I doubt you could have missed the pair, seated in the Swan tavern on Fleet Street in London, that 28 March,  1716.  Last to arrive was the infamous publisher, pornographer and plagiarist Edmund Curll, a scarecrow of a man, tall and thin, splayfooted, and with gray goggle eyes that threatened to burst from his pale face like a cartoon character. He was so ugly no image of him survives.

Waiting for him like a spider on his web was one the greatest poets in history, the oft quoted and revered deformed genius Alexander Pope (above), with a Roman nose and a spine so twisted he stood barely four feet six inches tall from his stylish shoes to the top of the hump on his back. 

Curll (above, right) thought he had been invited to settle their disagreements. Pope (above, left) intended upon doing just that, by poisoning his guest's beer. 

Later Pope joyfully wrote a mocking obituary of his victim (above), under the name of an Eye Witness. It was titled   “A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison on the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll, bookseller...To be published weekly”. Curll was not killed, but he did projectile vomit until he wished his was dead. It was like a scene from Animal House. Ah, good times among the 18^th century London literati. 

Publishing was in its youth, as young as the internet is today, and just as chaotic, dishonest, unregulated, and unencumbered with a functional business model. 

In 1688 there were only 68 printing presses in London, all controlled by members of the Stationer's  Guild.  But in 1695 Parliament refused to renew that company's monopoly, setting off a decade of pure anarchy. 

Daniel Defoe (above) of "Robinson Crusoe" and "Moll Flanders" fame, noted, “One man studies seven year(s), to bring a finished piece into the world, and a pirate printer....sells it for a quarter of the price ... these things call for an Act of Parliament".  

In 1702 Defoe himself was fined and sentenced to be pilloried (above), but his fans threw flowers instead of rotten fruit. Then, finally, in 1710 Parliament obliged with The Statue of Anne - she was queen at the time - which created a 14 year copyright for authors. 

Still, six years later one author felt required to poison a pirate printer – by making him vomit for 24 straight hours, and then attacking him again in print with his obituary set to rhyme .

“Next o'er his books his eyes begin to roll,

In pleasing memory of all he stole;
How here he sipp'd, how there he plunder'd snug,
And suck'd all o'er like an industrious bug.”

Alexander Pope (above)  The Dunciad (1728)

Pope's public justification for the poisoning of  Edmund Curl was as revenge for embarrassing him in eyes of the smart and lovely Lady Mary Montagu (above). 

The morally pompous and socially inept poet Pope (above, right), so famous for his version of Shakespeare and translations of Homer that he was nicknamed “the Bard”, was smitten with the lady. They even maintained a correspondence.  And then Pope privately published one of her poems, under a pseudonym of course, since  nobility were not supposed to engage in actual writing or publication – it smacked of stooping to actually earning a living.  But copies of the ladies' poem were discretely passed about the English court. 

But soon, Curll was selling bootleg copies on the streets for 3pence, humilating the lady and by extension, Pope who had set her up for this dishonor. So Pope could claim he was defending the lady;s honor, and not his own when he poisoned Curll.

Pope then attacked Curll  again (among others) in an epic insulting poem, published under the title of “Dunciad”.  

Curll responded by pirating the poem about his own attempted murder, even publishing an annotated version, also called a “key”. Mocked Curll, “How easily two wits agree, one writes the poem, one writes the key”.

Of course, Edmund Curll was not quite the “shameless Curll” Pope portrayed – not quite. He was infamous for keeping a revolving stable of struggling quill drivers “three in a bed” in the “low-rent flophouses, brothels, and coffeehouses” jammed into Grub Street (above), just off the Fleet Street when his own offices were. 

Originally “grub” referred to the roots and insect larval uncovered when the street was originally scrapped out. Eventually the address was adopted as a badge of honor by the poverty stricken occupants (above), like the eventual great biographer Samuel Johnson, or Ned Ward, who considered his own profession as “scandalous...as whoring....”.

These grubs were hack writers, named after the ubiquitous horse drawn Hackney cabs that plied London's streets, going where ever their paying passengers demanded. 

Which usually meant, obscenity, which as today, always sold well, as did insults and visual attacks on the pompous and well to do - like Pope (above). The occasional advance, paid to a hungry writer was called a “grub stake”, and the pitiful meals they could afford were “grub”.  

The Irishman Jonathan Swift (above), eventual creator of “Gulliver's Travels”, grandiosely referred to this literary sub-culture as "the Republica Grubstreet-aria." But like Johnson, Swift was clever enough and lucky enough to eventually escape the life as a mere grub.

In fact, Curll employed no more Grub Street warriors than any other Fleet Street baron. But he was particularly adept at supplying what the public wanted - licentious sex, and manufactured controversy. Curll paid grubs to engage in a “pamphlet war” - much like the Fox News' war on Christmas and on American democracy.

...as in the 1712 trial of Jane Wehham (above) for witchcraft - she was convicted and executed several times over on grub street and with much profit on Fleet street.

Curll also printed cheap pirated books that sold for a mere shilling, thus undercutting the actual author's authorized editions. Acknowledged one critic, Edmund Curll, “...had no scruples either in business or private life, but he published and sold many good books.”  The dirty and stolen books he published illegally paid for the good books he published legally. 

With Pope's urging, Curll was convicted of obscenity in 1716, and twice more in 1725. In 1726, Curll struck back by befriending the mistress of a Pope confident. 

She passed to Curll several letters in which the arrogantly moral Pope admitting to lusting after the Blount Sisters, Terresa and Martha. In one purloined missive Pope wrote,  “How gladly would I give all that I am worth, for one of their maidenheads.” Embarrassed and angered, Pope helped engineer yet another Curll conviction in February of 1727. 

This time the outrage could not be hushed up and the frustrated and exasperated royal court fined Curll and ordered him pilloried for an hour. At the mercy of the mob, Curll was spared the usual bombardment of rotted food and manure when, before he made his appearance, a pamphlet was read to the well armed crowd, claiming Curll was being punished for defending the recently departed Queen Anne. Thus misinformed, the mob threw nothing and after his hour in the block, carried Curll home on their shoulders. Pope was infuriated and determined to even the score.  Which was probably the real reason he poisoned Curll. 

One of Edmund Curll's most profitable ventures was what came to be called “Curlicisms”. When a well known figure died, Curll would advertise a forthcoming biography, and ask the public for any anecdotes about or letters from the deceased. Then, without validating the submissions Curll would hire a Grub street hack to string them together into an instant and usually inaccurate biography, creating what one potential subject described as “one of the new terrors of death.”

Curll had done this when the Duke of Buckingham died in 1721. But Buckingham had been a peer, a member of the House of Lords, and that body summoned Curll for interrogation. 

Curll was unrepentant, since it was not a crime to publish writings of a peer without their permission. So the Lords made it illegal, and in this Pope saw a new opportunity to again injure Curll.

In 1731 Curll announced a upcoming “Curlicism” of Alexander Pope, himself; “Nothing shall be wanting,” Curll assured his potential readers, “but his (universally desired) death.” Again Curll called for submissions and a mysterious figured identified only as “P.T.” offered letters written by Pope to the Lord of Oxford.  

In 1734 Curll published his vicious biography of Pope which quoted from the Lord of Oxford letters. The next year Pope published his own “Literary Correspondence for Thirty Years”, including the same letters to Oxford.  But the details in Pope's version did not match those published by Curll, as Pope pointed out when he alleged Curll had violated the privilege of a member of the House of Lords and worse, slandered the Lord of Oxford while doing it. The trap was sprung.

The only problem was, Curll again refused to repent. Called again before the Lords, Curll quipped, "Pope has a knack of versifying, but in prose I think myself a match for him.” And in fact as well. 

The Duke of Oxford (above) still had the original letters in his files and Curll was able to call them to be examined by the Lords.  Surprise! The texts of the originals did not match those supplied by the mysterious P.T.  So, asked Curll, where had P.T.'s inaccurate versions come from? Curll produced P.T.'s letters so the Lords could judge for themselves who was implicated by the handwriting. 

For a few days, the city of London, or that section that cared about such things, held its breath. And then an ad appeared in a small newspaper offering 20 guineas if P.T. would come forward to admit he had “acted by the direction of any other person.”  

P.T., of course did not collect the reward. And the ploy fooled no one – Pope had written the originals and the fakes and even the ad, and everybody knew it. The House found a political solution; since the published letters were fakes, the law had not been broken. Case closed, except Pope now had even more egg on his face.

Wrote Curll, “Crying came our bard into the world, but lying, it is to be feared, he will go out of it.”.

And so he did.  Pope died on 30 May, 1744, and Edmund Curll followed him in December of 1747.

Thus, Curll earned the last word. He described his relationship with Pope this way, “A fitter couple was never hatched, Some married are, indeed, but we are matched”.

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