The Book of Bastards (14 page)

Born and raised in upstate New York and the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, John D. Rockefeller was mild-mannered and an avid churchgoer who neither smoked nor drank during the entirety of his long life. The son of a God-fearing mother and a wastrel father, Rockefeller learned much from the examples of his parents. His mother instilled in him a strong work ethic and a deeply religious and moral streak. His father showed him what happened to people not willing to work hard; several of his businesses failed before the younger Rockefeller was out of his teens.

Rockefeller got the message. No one during his long life ever called him “lazy.”

On the other hand Rockefeller did not confuse his personal Christian morality with business ethics. He and his nineteenth century robber baron contemporaries were convinced that “capitalism” and “competition” were mutually exclusive. Rockefeller and his peers profited mostly by eliminating competitors, not by outselling them.

Rockefeller made the majority of his money in oil. By 1895 he controlled (directly or indirectly) ninety-five percent of the world's oil reserves. In the 1870s, he wiped out the competition in Cleveland and formed Standard Oil Corporation (muckraking journalists dubbed it “the Octopus”). Like Wal-Mart today, he was able to command a pretty hefty discount in his shipping costs because he ordered and sold goods in such bulk.

Mere discounts didn't satisfy him for long. Rockefeller decided that he wanted to pay even less than the cut-rate that his main hauler, the Pennsylvania Railroad, was charging him at the time. So he bought his own railroad and went into business against them. In turn, the Pennsylvania Railroad tried to compete with Rockefeller. His former partners on the railroad board purchased several oil refineries and began producing their own oil.

But Rockefeller was indeed the Wal-Mart of his day. He bought out the oil pro-duction interests of his railroad competitors and forced them to sign contracts charging him far below the actual cost of carrying his oil. Things just got worse after this for the owners of the Pennsylvania Railroad; Rockefeller's draconian contracts and steep profits eventually forced them to fire thousands of employees in order to make ends meet.

By the 1890s, Rockefeller had become the wealthiest man in the world. He was the first billionaire in history, and he controlled most of the oil production on the planet. Is it any wonder that reforming President Theodore Roosevelt targeted Rockefeller's Standard Oil? Though he labeled it an anti-competitive “trust” operating as a monopoly and worked to dissolve Rockefeller's power, Roosevelt didn't succeed in breaking up Standard Oil during his presidency. But he did get the wheels moving. What he began during his administration
was
completed in 1911 when the U.S. Supreme Court found Standard Oil in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and ordered its dissolution.

Rockefeller even made a killing in the resulting stock sell-off. Worse still, he lived to be nearly one hundred, rich till the day he died, even though — as he had his entire life — he continued to give ten percent of everything he earned to his church.

Late in life Rockefeller followed in Carnegie's footsteps and began to donate more and more of his vast fortune to philanthropic causes. Rockefeller money almost singlehandedly built the University of Chicago.

As if that makes up for all of the misery the guy caused in the interim!

William Lorimer was born in England and emigrated to Chicago as a boy. He had little formal education, but he could have earned a PhD in the workings of inner-city politics. He lost just two elections during his long career; it's said that he never won any one of them fairly. Lorimer was nothing if not a typical boss of the times: a machine politician and ward heeler in the tradition of New York's Tammany Hall who helped pave the way for Chicago's formidable twentieth century Daly Machine.

After moving to Chicago with his family in 1870 young Lorimer jumped into union organizing, real estate, and eventually, politics. He built both his career and his machine on his ability to deliver votes to politicians and his knack for landing public jobs for the illiterate urban poor in return for those votes. Lorimer's loyal constituents elected him to Congress as a Republican for four terms between 1894 and 1902, even though he had few qualifications for governing. The
Chicago Tribune
's editorial board pointed this out in an Op-Ed piece it ran on Lorimer: “He knows considerable about carrying primaries, but he knows no more about political, industrial, or social subjects than does a hole in the ground which doesn't care what goes down it.”

If any of this fazed Lorimer he didn't show it. Instead he ran in 1909 for what would one day become Barack Obama's U.S. Senate seat. Since U.S. Senators were still elected by state legislatures at this point, Lorimer only needed to influence about a hundred people to vote for him. So he did what came naturally.

He bribed them.

When word of Lorimer's payoffs for the Senate seat broke out in the press, the Senate focused an intense investigation on the contentious election results. The inquiry's resolution and subsequent debate did nothing to hide the ugly truth: “Corrupt methods and practices were employed in his election, and that the election, therefore, was invalid.” The Senate then put teeth to its resolution (a rarity if ever there was one) by reversing the election results. Lorimer plagued every Republican Party member he could think of for assistance, protested in the Senate, and pleaded with President William Howard Taft. But it was all for naught. The Senate officially removed him on July 13, 1912.

Lorimer returned home to a hero's welcome in Chicago, where he attended a public meeting sponsored by his political machine, and literally wrapped himself in the American flag. He denounced reform-minded newspapers like the
Chicago Tribune
— the ones who spearheaded the investigation into the ways of his machine. Lorimer claimed that his foes were corrupt and that he was blameless. Ending the speech to thunderous applause, Lorimer vowed to return to national office at the next opportunity.

He never did. Instead he founded a bank that failed within a couple of years. Later he tried to wheedle a resource development deal with the Colombian government in the 1920s. He failed in that attempt too. He died in Chicago in 1934.

And it goes without saying that he never spent a day in jail.

Was there ever a more thoroughly educated American president than Thomas Wood-row Wilson? Holding a bachelor's degree in history from Princeton and a PhD in history and political science, Wilson also studied law for a year at the University of Virginia. He was a political progressive and a reform-minded Democrat. Yet this most “enlightened” of presidents also managed to be a bigoted racist who turned a blind eye to civil rights abuses in his own back yard.

Wilson was born in Virginia right before the Civil War and raised mostly in North and South Carolina. Had he billed himself differently, his attitudes about race would not be all that shocking in light of the age and region in which he grew to manhood. But Wilson portrayed himself time and again as an “idealist,” not a traditional schemer of a politician. America was, as he would state in one speech, a singular nation of high values:

After all, this is the man whose idealism brought America into World War I; he was the same man who went to Paris to negotiate the Versailles Treaty. The pact was intended to end that war, and Wilson's “Fourteen Points” program was supposed to prevent war by ending its causes: tyranny, economic imperialism, and so on. Wilson's fingerprints were all over the resulting document.

But Wilson's hands were also all over problems with race back home. From 1913 when Wilson took office to 1919 — the year he went to Paris — the number of blacks working in federal jobs slid steeply. This was no accident.

Many of the men Wilson nominated for his cabinet were like him: white, Southern, and deeply hostile to blacks and the notion of civil rights for all. As soon as they took office, members of Wilson's cabinet began segregating their departments. The separation included restrooms and drinking fountains, even though the offices had been integrated since the Civil War. When a group of black civic leaders visited Wilson to bring this to his attention and register their disapproval, Wilson shrugged off their complaints, saying that re-segregating federal service would eradicate “the possibility of friction” among federal employees.

With so many progressive reforms to Wilson's credit, including the Federal Reserve Act, farm subsidies and banking reforms, it's hard to reconcile his concern for working people (especially the working poor) with his antipathy toward blacks. However, this is the man who once termed the black vote “ignorant and hostile” toward white people and blacks themselves “an ignorant and inferior race.” Many beliefs from America's early years appear bigoted in light of today's more egalitarian notions, but even allowing for changing racial attitudes over time these are the words of a bitter racist.

And that makes progressive, “enlightened” Thomas Woodrow Wilson a bastard.

Harry M. Daugherty was a member of Warren G. Harding's “Ohio Gang” and U.S. Attorney General from 1921 to 1924. His time in the Attorney General's office was the most scandal-plagued in history up until the tenure of Alberto Gonzales. And Harding knew from scandal. Between his own rampaging libido and the thieving natures of the men he appointed to serve under him, his administration was riddled with as much controversy as the Grant administration.

Daugherty was an Ohio lawyer who ran most of Harding's campaigns after the turn of the century and helped engineer his nomination for the presidency in 1920. In return Harding appointed Daugherty attorney general; Daugherty didn't waste any time cashing in.

Word quickly got out in the Justice Department that Daugherty was open to bribes in return for favorable treatment. He was also involved in that largest and farthest-reaching of the Harding administration scandals, Teapot Dome. But Daugherty really made his name and his money through his “bagman” Jess Smith.

Smith served as an unofficial assistant to Daugherty, but his real job was to keep the president's women quiet about their extramarital affairs after Harding tired of them. Smith proved adept at “handling” Harding's castoffs, and Harding valued him for it.

Eventually Smith and Daugherty were rumored to be co-conspirators in the influence-peddling business. They also shared rooms in Washington, D.C.'s Wardman Hotel and whispers pegged them as gay lovers. But the truth was hard to confirm. Whether or not they were involved with each other, Smith
was
linked to a cash payoff from bootleggers seeking immunity from arrest and prosecution under the Volstead Act (the law that kicked off Prohibition in the United States). His position as a conduit soon became common knowledge, but Daugherty's identity as the true recipient of all this bribe money was kept a secret. Within a year of taking office as attorney general, Daugherty had even launched “investigations” into cases of purchased power in the Harding administration. These inquiries always came up empty, and Daugherty just got richer.

His influence didn't protect Smith from everything. Authorities not tied to his Justice Department boss started closing in on Smith. With threat of prison looming large, Smith committed suicide in 1923. Daugherty later wrote of his “roommate”: “I never recall this man without a heartache. I knew him in life as a loyal, lovable friend and good fellow. And I have not yet found it possible in my heart to think evil of him.”

As for Daugherty, he hung on as attorney general until replaced by Harding's successor, Calvin Coolidge, in 1924. Twice tried and never convicted on charges of fraud related to his time in office, Daugherty returned to Ohio and practiced law until dying in bed in 1941 at the ripe old age of eighty-one. He never spent a day in jail.