Abstract
On June 20, 1923, President Harding boarded a train west from Washington to begin what he hoped would be a “Voyage of Understanding.” Rumors of scandal had begun to circulate in the capitol, and the president’s advisers, mindful of the coming presidential election, wanted him out charming the voters. They hoped that contact with the public would recharge his vitality and that a visit to the West Coast and Alaska would distract the reporters from corruption in Washington. The presidential party boarding the train in Washington on that hot, humid afternoon included sixty-five people, of whom the majority were reporters, Secret Service agents, and secretaries, but Florence Harding, Speaker of the House Frederick Gillett, Secretary of Agriculture Wallace, and Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work also joined the party, as did two of Harding’s personal physicians. Hoover and his sons had left on June 15 for a brief fishing jaunt in the Sierras, after which Bert and Lou planned to join the group at Tacoma on July 3 for the trip to Alaska, where Hoover would meet with salmon fishermen and canners.1
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Notes
George Barr Baker to Hugh Gibson, July 2, 1923, George Barr Baker Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, California, Box 3, “Gibson, Hugh”; Eugene P. Trani and David L. Wilson, The Presidency of Warren G. Harding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1977), 172–73.
Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding and His Times (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 574–81
Robert D. Accinelli, “Was There a ‘New’ Harding? Warren G. Harding and the World Court Issue,” Ohio History 84 (Autumn 1975): 168–81.
Herbert Hoover, Memoirs: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920–1933 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 49
Matilda Atkinson Minthorn to Hoover, July 18, 1923, Hoover Papers, Commerce Period, Box 14, “Alaska, Hearings, Cases, Complaints, etc., 1923”; William C. Mullendore to his brother, July 25, 1923, William C. Mullendore Papers, Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa, Box 15, “Harding (Warren G.) Alaskan Trip, 1923, Correspondence and Diary”; Lou Hoover to Jennie Weed Mager, August 16, 1923, Lou Henry Hoover Papers, Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa, Personal Correspondence, 1921–28, Box 18, “Mager, Jessie, 1921–23”; Hal Elliott Wert, Hoover, the Fishing President: Portrait of the Private Man and His Life Outdoors (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2005), 119–24.
Trani and Wilson, PresidencyofHarding, 177–78; Mark Sullivan Diary, August 8, 1923, Mark Sullivan Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, California, Box 1. A heart attack caused by a blood clot in a coronary artery had first been described by a Chicago physician, Dr. James B. Herrick, in 1910, but his description of the disease had not been widely accepted by other doctors. Almost certainly, Harding’s physician, Dr. Charles E. Sawyer, a small-town homeopath, had never heard of it and probably would have dismissed it if he had. For an excellent account of Harding’s illness and death, see Robert H. Ferrell, Ill-Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 20–27.
Mark Sullivan Diary, August 18, 1923, Sullivan Papers; Box 1; Philippi Harding Butler Papers, Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa, p. 25; Coolidge, quoted in Robert K. Murray, “Herbert Hoover and the Harding Cabinet,” in Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce, 1921–1928: Studies in New Era Thought and Practice, ed. Ellis W. Hawley (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1981), 37.
George E. Mowry, The California Progressives (Chicago: Quadrangle ed., 1963), 278–88
Richard Coke Lower, A Bloc of One: The Political Career of Hiram W. Johnson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 213
Jackson K. Putnam, “The Persistence of Progressivism in the 1920s: The Case of California,” Pacific Historical Review 35 (November 1966): 395–411
Russell M. Posner, “The Progressive Voters League, 1923–1926,” California Historical Society Quarterly 36 (September 1957): 251–61.
Francis V. Keesling to James B. Reynolds, May 17, September 23, 1924; Keesling to William J. Tully, September 24, 1924; Keesling to William M. Butler, October 21, 1924; Keesling to George O. Muhlfield, October 21, 1924, all in Francis V Keesling Papers, Rare Books and Special Collections, Green Library, Stanford University, Stanford, California, Box 2, Folder 12, “Polit. Corresp. Out, 1924, May-Dec.” I have been unable to find any comprehensive, recent analysis of California politics in the 1920s to supplement Mowry, although William Issel and Robert W. Cherny do a good job for the Bay Area in San Francisco, 1865–1932 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)
Hoover to Coolidge, April 21, 1924, Hoover Papers, Commerce Period, Box 477, “President Coolidge, 1924 April”; Mark Requa to Hoover, March 29, May 2, 1924, ibid., Box 517, “Requa, Mark L., 1924 Jan.-May”; Hiram Johnson to Hiram Johnson, Jr., June 13, 1924, Hiram Johnson Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Part VI, Box 4, “1924 May-Sept.”; Francis V. Keesling to George E. Crothers, August 21, 1924, Keesling Papers, Box 2, Folder 12, “Polit. Corresp. Out, 1924, May-Dec.”; David Burner, “Election of 1924,” in History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Fred L. Israel, and William P. Hansen (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), 3: 2463–67.
George H. Nash, “The ‘Great Enigma’ and the ‘Great Engineer’: The Political Relationship of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover,” in Calvin Coolidge and the Coolidge Era: Essays on the History of the 1920s, ed. John Earl Haynes (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1998), 154–55.
A clipping from the Philadelphia Public Ledger, January 17, 1925, describing the Washington rumors is in Hoover Papers, Commerce Period, Box 6, “Agriculture: HH & Secretaryship of Agriculture Department, 1924—1925 & undated”; Nash, “The ‘Great Enigma’ and the ‘Great Engineer,’” 156–57; Robert H. Ferrell, The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 28–30.
David Cannadine, Mellon: An American Life (New York: Knopf, 2006), 362.
Robert E. Gilbert, The Tormented President: Calvin Coolidge, Death, and Clinical Depression (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).
Robert Sterling Yard to Ray Lyman Wilbur, April 9, 1919, Ray Lyman Wilbur Papers, Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa, Box 17, “National Parks, 1917–19”; Yard, The Book of the National Parks (New York: Scribner’s, 1921), 20–21
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© 2010 Kendrick A. Clements
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Clements, K.A. (2010). Alaska and Washington, 1923–1924. In: The Life of Herbert Hoover. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107908_15
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