The Temptress in the Tea Pot

It is safe to say that The Harding Affair won't generate as much interest as the latest book on Hemingway's romances, Hotel Florida, but the "steamy" love letters between Warren Harding and Carrie Phillips will go on display at the Library of Congress after having been sealed for the past 50 years.

Harding and Phillips were both married at the time, which would have made the letters much better news fodder back in the late teens than they are now. Harding ran successfully for President in 1920. He wanted a "return to normalcy" after WWI and what had been seen as the much too "liberal" Wilson administration. Such a torrid love affair would not have fit with the staid image he cultivated of himself, but seemed to be the one of the few things worth noting from his conservative life.

There were other affairs too, including one with Nan Britton, whose daughter she claimed was his. The GOP did its best to keep these juicy stories under wraps in the 1920 election. Nan was certainly the most fetching of the two, and 31 years younger than the Republican presidential nominee.

His administration was probably best known for the Teapot Dome Scandal, which ushered in oil influence peddling in the 1920s. However, his tenure was cut short by a stroke of apoplexy on August 2, 1923, just two-and-a-half years into his first term. There are conspiracy theories however regarding his untimely death. Maybe Baba O'Reilly should explore these in his next book "Killing Harding."

Harding was succeeded by the equally staid Calvin Coolidge, presiding over perhaps the least memorable period in U.S. Presidents, 1920-1932, with the election of Herbert Hoover in 1928. Big Business reigned supreme, with virtually nothing to regulate their interests, resulting in the worst stock market crash in history.

James D. Robenalt has certainly added a lot of intrigue to the romance. He claims that Phillips and her daughter became German spies during WWI, and may have conspired with Harding to keep him out of the Presidential race in 1916, as it was in Germany's interest to keep the US out of the war. Robenalt would like us to think that "counterfactual arguments abound" in the over 800 pages of correspondence between the two, but it strikes me as just a hook to read his book.

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Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

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