Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties and Today's Culture Wars
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Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties and Today's Culture Wars
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Overview
Jesus and Gin is a rollicking tour of the roaring twenties and the barn- burning preachers who led the temperance movement—the anti-abortion crusade of the Jazz Age. Along the way, we meet a host of colorful characters: a Baptist minister who commits adultery in the White House; media star preachers caught in massive scandals; a presidential election hinging on a religious issue; and fundamentalists and liberals slugging it out in the culture war of the day. The religious roar of that decade was a prologue to the last three decades. With the religious right in disarray today after its long ascendancy, Jesus and Gin is a timely look at a parallel age when preachers held sway and politicians answered to the pulpit.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780230110021 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/03/2010 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 734,531 |
| File size: | 416 KB |
About the Author
Barry Hankins is professor of history and graduate program director in the history department at Baylor University. He holds a B.A. in religion, an M.A. in church-state studies from Baylor, and a Ph.D. in history from Kansas State University. He lives in Waco, TX.
Read an Excerpt
Jesus and Gin
Evangelicalism, The Roaring Twenties And Today's Culture Wars
By Barry Hankins
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2010 Barry HankinsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-230-61419-2
CHAPTER 1
WARREN HARDING AND THE MORAL AMBIGUITY OF THE ROARING TWENTIES
Scandal was part of what made the 1920s roar, and no one set the tone more than America's first Baptist president, Warren G. Harding (1921– 1923). He wore his religion loosely and his morality not at all. Neither made him particularly typical of public figures of the era, but this combination of religious and moral indifference symbolized an anything-goes decade. Although the criminal misdeeds of his cabinet and his own personal immorality came to light only after his death, they symbolized what the religious culture warriors of the Roaring Twenties feared most—a society that was losing its moorings, adrift in a sea of ethical chaos. For the devout, Harding was exactly what one should expect when religion lost its central place in the culture.
ALL THE PRESIDENT'S WOMEN
In 1964 author Francis Russell traveled to Harding's hometown of Marion, Ohio, doing research for a biography. After getting to know the townsfolk, Russell was taken to lunch at the Harding Hotel, where lawyers and businessmen gathered frequently. In the course of conversation, Russell heard that a Marion attorney named Don Williamson possessed a box of Harding letters that he had found while serving as the executor of the estate of Marion resident Carrie Phillips after she died in 1960. Williamson took Russell to his home and let the author read the contents of the secret archive, which turned out to be love letters from Harding to Phillips. Once Russell pieced together the story, it became clear that Harding had had an affair with Carrie for 15 years and that while cheating on his wife with Carrie, Harding had been cheating on both with Nan Britton.
Carrie and her husband, Jim, were the Hardings' friends. Jim owned a dry goods store in Marion and had married Carrie Fulton from the nearby town of Bucyrus in 1896, when he was 30 and she 21. By all accounts Carrie was a beautiful and vivacious young woman. In 1905, when Jim Phillips was ailing, Harding assisted in sending him to the Battle Creek (Michigan) Sanatorium, which was run by the health-conscious Seventh-day Adventist J. H. Kellogg, the inventor of corn flakes. By that time, Harding was Ohio's lieutenant governor, serving office in the state capital of Columbus. While Jim Phillips was in Battle Creek convalescing and Harding's wife was recovering from a kidney operation, Harding dropped in to check on Carrie, who was still grieving the loss of her son, who had died the year before. Harding and Carrie Phillips fell in love.
The affair lasted until 1920, when Harding ran for president. During the election campaign, the Republican Party helped keep the affair secret by sending Jim and Carrie on a cruise to the Far East and paying them $20,000 plus a monthly stipend as long as Harding was in office.
While doing his research, biographer Russell learned that the Harding-Phillips affair was well known among the upper echelons of Marion society. Carrie had continued to live in Marion long after the death of both her husband and Harding. By the late 1950s she was living in squalor created by a mass of dogs she tried to raise for a profit, many of which were not housebroken. Before her death, a local judge appointed attorney Williamson as Phillips's guardian. Williamson had her placed in a home for the elderly then arranged to have the house sold and Phillips's belongings cataloged. That was when he found a locked box in the back of a closet that contained the many letters Harding had sent to Carrie. Some of the letters ran 30 to 40 pages, and many were written on U.S. Senate stationery while Harding was a senator.
Williamson believed that if he turned the letters over to the Harding family, they would be destroyed, so he kept them hidden until Russell came to town. After reading and cataloging the letters, Russell contacted the Ohio Historical Society, which set in motion a chain of events that lasted for years. The Harding Memorial Association was preparing for the centenary celebration of Harding's birth when trustees got wind of the letters. They persuaded a judge to create a Carrie Phillips estate consisting of the papers. A member of the Memorial Association board was appointed executor of Phillips's estate, which meant that the Ohio Historical Society had to relinquish the papers to the group most likely to destroy them. The agent of the Ohio Historical Society, however, had made a microfilm copy of the letters, which he then sent to American Heritage magazine in New York. When word leaked of the contest over the Harding love letters, the story became front-page news across the country. In some areas the coverage of this Republican scandal from the 1920s dwarfed coverage of the 1964 Republican National Convention taking place at the same time the story broke. Russell wanted to go forward with his biography, but the Harding family thwarted his plan to quote from the love letters by persuading a judge to issue a restraining order. After wrangling unsuccessfully for three years, Russell published his nearly 700-page book anyway, leaving blank lines where the direct quotations would have been and paraphrasing the content in his own words. Eventually, the letters ended up in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, where they are sealed until 2014, 50 years after Williamson gave them to Russell.
Emerging from Russell's story is a portrait of Harding as a hapless philanderer, more repulsive than evil. He simply did not seem have the moral fortitude to say no, either to temptation or to other people who prevailed on him. Even Harding's marriage appears to have been not so much a loving choice as an inability to resist the persistent importuning of Florence Kling. In 1880, at the age of 20, Flossie, as she was known, had eloped, pregnant, with her boyfriend, Henry DeWolfe. The marriage lasted four years before she filed for separation and divorce. She sent her son to live with her wealthy parents and took up piano teaching in an attempt to make ends meet. One of her students was Harding's sister, and when Florence met Warren Harding, she began to woo him with the same ardor she had hounded her first husband into marriage.
Harding was at this time the editor of the Marion Star newspaper. Flattered by the attention and affection Flossie Kling sent his way, it also could not have been lost on Harding that she was well connected, being from one of the wealthiest families in town. As Russell put it, once Flossie decided to have Harding, "he had no chance," and the same had been true of her first husband. Flossie was a forceful woman, and eventually Harding took to calling her "the Duchess." He tried to resist her, at least at first. On one occasion Florence met him unexpectedly at the train station when he returned from a business trip. Harding saw her out the window and exited the opposite side of the train, only to hear her yell, "You needn't try to run away, Warren Harding. I see your big feet." Eventually, he gave in and married her in 1891.
After entering politics in the 1880s, Harding moved steadily up the ranks of the Republican Party to lieutenant governor, Republican candidate for governor (he lost in 1910), and U.S. Senator before winning his party's presidential nomination in 1920. That year, following his victory in the election, three reporters were dining at the home of a Marion widow. The woman's eight-year-old daughter took the reporters on a tour of the house, pointing out the president-elect's toothbrush in the upstairs bathroom and reporting "He always stays here when Mrs. Harding goes away."
Today it would be hard to imagine the press not investigating and exposing the affair, especially after Harding became the Republican presidential nominee. If the story of the reporters seeing his toothbrush is true, however, it illustrates a kind of deference to elites that no longer exists. The reporters never followed up on the hot tip from the eight-year-old. Still, Republican Party officials feared the Phillips affair would come to light during the campaign, thus the Far East cruise and payoff to Jim and Carrie.
Harding's affair with Carrie Phillips ended as he campaigned for the Republican nomination in 1920, in part because Carrie suspected he was seeing other women. He was. In fact, he had been carrying on a torrid affair with Nan Britton for at least four years. In 1910, when Harding ran for governor of Ohio, Nan was in ninth grade. Her favorite teacher was Abigail "Daisy" Harding, Warren's sister. Nan became infatuated with Harding and hung his campaign photos on her bedroom wall. She placed one at the foot of her bed so he would be the first thing she saw after waking in the morning. Nan met Harding for the first time while on a Sunday afternoon horse-and-buggy jaunt with her elder sister, Elizabeth. Passing by the Hardings' house, they saw the candidate and the Duchess sitting on their porch and decided to double back to say hello. After idle conversation, mostly between Elizabeth and Mrs. Harding, Elizabeth exclaimed, "You know, Mr. Harding, Nan talks of nothing but you."
Over the next three years of high school, Nan attempted to catch the attention of Marion's most famous resident, even stopping by the Harding home as a 16year-old in 1914 when Harding won election to the U.S. Senate. In 1917 she moved to New York to attend secretarial school, and that year wrote a letter to Senator Harding. Beginning with the line "I wonder if you will remember me," she inquired if perhaps he might be able to employ her or recommend her for employment. Harding wrote back, "You may be sure that [I remember you], and I remember you most agreeably, too."
Shortly thereafter, Harding traveled to New York, called Nan, and told her to meet him at the Manhattan Hotel. After a morning of conversation in a hotel reception room, Harding invited the 21-year-old to his room, explaining that with vacancies scarce because of a business convention in the city, he had secured the last available accommodation in the hotel—the bridal suite. They were scarcely in the room when they began to kiss passionately, hesitating from time to time to discuss her secretarial skills and job prospects. Harding gave her $30 at the end of their liaison, the first installment on mistress upkeep that would last for the rest of his life.
Harding juggled the two women, along with the Duchess and his senatorial duties, from 1917 until 1920, when the pressure of a wife, two mistresses, and a presidential election campaign proved too much. Actually, the relationship with Carrie had long since run its course. Accusing him of having affairs with other women, she also ridiculed his presidential ambitions as he began angling for the Republican nomination. Carrie knew what the country would learn the hard way—Warren Harding was not presidential timber.
Had party officials known the rest of Harding's story, they would have arranged for two cruises, one for Carrie and her husband and a second for Nan, who was carrying Harding's child—not pregnant, but literally carrying in her arms little Elizabeth Ann, who had been born on October 22, 1919. For nearly two years Harding had been visiting Nan in New York and arranging for her to travel by train to meet with him while he was on a various speaking tours. During one of their New York trysts, a hotel employee tipped off the police that a 50-ish man, probably married, had a young woman alone in one of the rooms. Harding and Nan were still dressing when the officers burst in to arrest them. This was an age when adultery was not yet a private matter and could be grounds for state prosecution. Harding pleaded with the two policemen to let Nan go. "You can tell it to the judge," one of the officers replied. As the policemen proceeded to rouse the couple out of the room, one picked up Harding's hat and saw "W. G. Harding" embossed in gold lettering. Realizing they had invaded the room of a U.S. Senator, the instinctive deference to elites that marked the era kicked in, and the officer began to apologize. Harding and Nan packed up their belongings, and the officers escorted them to a side exit and let them go, but not before Harding tipped them $20. Out of their sight, Harding told Nan, "I thought I wouldn't get out of that under $1000."
As the affair intensified, Harding began arranging for Nan to visit him in Washington. She would take the train, register at a hotel, and slip over to the U.S. Senate building, where the couple would have sex in Harding's office. It was there, Nan would write later, that their daughter was conceived in January 1919. By late February she was sure she was pregnant and wrote Senator Harding with the news. They discussed "handling" the problem, but Nan was determined to have the baby. Harding had never fathered a child with the Duchess, and Nan was convinced Harding wanted this child, his first, as badly as she did. This was a delusion, of course, but Harding never pressed the issue of abortion, leaving the decision to her. She went to Chicago where her sister Elizabeth arranged a meeting with an abortionist. The doctor told Nan that she was quite frail for such an operation and that 13 weeks into a pregnancy made the procedure even riskier. On the advice of a friend, Elizabeth then concocted a potion that was said to induce miscarriage, but Nan decided she could not take it, writing later: "I could not bring myself to destroy the precious treasure within me."
Some months after Elizabeth Ann's arrival, Nan went back to Chicago to convalesce at her sister's apartment. She was living there in the summer of 1920 when the Republican National Convention convened in the same city and nominated Harding for president. In spring and early summer, as he moved steadily toward nomination, Harding warned Nan that it would become increasingly difficult for him to see her. He would be "shadowed" by the press, he said, and he gave her instructions to act naturally and ignore reporters who followed her. Still, he managed to slip away from the convention hall and across town to Elizabeth's apartment to see Nan. Elizabeth, her husband, and the baby would absent themselves so the couple could spend time alone. Nan spent much of her time that summer clipping newspaper articles about Harding while cooing to the infant beside her, "Your daddy's going to be president."
While Harding ran his "front porch" campaign from his home in Marion, Nan secured a job with the Republican National Committee in Chicago, where she joined unsuspecting office mates in stuffing envelopes and mailing posters for the Harding campaign effort. She also resumed contact with her old high school teacher, Harding's sister Daisy, who told Nan in a letter "You must be very happy working for your hero."
Ironically, the Democratic Party's main attempt to throw mud on Harding was the resurrection of the old rumor that he had "negro blood." The newspapers vetted Harding well, even telling the story of Mrs. Harding's first marriage to the miserable alcoholic DeWolfe, but they never learned the big secret of his life, and we can only imagine what might have happened had they found out that he had a "kept" woman and child. After reading several of the stories of Harding's private life, Nan recalled thinking "But they haven't got our story."
Trysts with Nan became ever more difficult after Harding was sworn into office in March 1921. The president decided it would be safer to smuggle Nan in and out of Washington than to rendezvous with her in New York or elsewhere. She made her first White House visit in June after the inauguration. Nan arranged her trip through presidential bodyguard Tim Slade, who picked her up at her hotel and escorted her to the White House. When Harding appeared, he instructed Slade to stay put while he took Nan through an anteroom and into his private office. Afraid armed guards outside the office window might see them, they repaired to a five-by-five closet off the anteroom. Harding then gave Nan a tour of his office, showing her the fireplace where he burned her letters after reading them. The closet trysts remained their custom until Harding's death.
Nan claimed that Harding promised to provide for her financially as long as she and Elizabeth Ann lived, but Harding died slightly more than two years after her first White House visit. In the summer of 1923 Harding embarked on a "Voyage of Understanding" tour of the West Coast. After becoming the first president to visit Alaska, he became ill en route to Seattle, Washington, and died suddenly a few days later in San Francisco. Nan spent the next four years attempting to scrounge up enough money to take her daughter back from her sister Elizabeth and support the child on her own. She briefly married a man who was involved in the shipping industry. When she learned his claims of wealth were exaggerated, she had the marriage annulled.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Jesus and Gin by Barry Hankins. Copyright © 2010 Barry Hankins. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Preface,
Chapter 1 Warren Harding and the Moral Ambiguity of the Roaring Twenties,
Chapter 2 Prohibition as Culture War,
Chapter 3 Jesus's Athletes,
Chapter 4 "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?",
Chapter 5 The Scopes Trial,
Chapter 6 Religious Scandal Right Next Door to Hollywood,
Chapter 7 Murder Trial in Texas,
Chapter 8 Black Heresy,
Chapter 9 Censorship and the Obscenity Wars,
Chapter 10 The Election of 1928,
Chapter 11 How the Roaring Twenties Set the Stage for the Culture Wars of Our Own Time,
Notes,
Index,