A Treasury of Great American Scandals Read Online Free Page A

least one year, a fact that rankled his mother no end. “To her proud spirit it is very galling awaiting the time when right of person and property will be restored to her,” Robert’s aunt Elizabeth wrote to him. The son had no intention of allowing more spending sprees, however, and kept a tight grip on his mother’s purse. It was only after she successfully petitioned the court that her money was released to her. In a letter to her “monster of mankind son,” brimming with resentment and lacking even a cordial salutation, Mary Lincoln demanded the return of everything she had ever given him:
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    Do not fail to send me without the least delay, all my paintings . . . also other articles your wife appropriated and which are well known to you, must be sent, without a day’s delay. Two lawyers and myself have just been together and their list coincides with my own and will be published in a few days. . . . Send me my laces, my diamonds, my jewelry. . . . I am now in constant receipt of letters, from my friends denouncing you in the bitterest terms. . . . Two prominent clergymen have written me, since I saw you, and mention in their letters, that they think it advisable to offer prayers for you in Church, on account of your wickedness against me and High Heaven. . . . Send me all that I have written for, you have tried your game of robbery long enough.
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    The letter was one of the last communications from a wronged mother to her treacherous son. They never reconciled.

6
    A Short, Ugly Story
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    In 1875 James Stephen Hogg, the first native-born Texan to become the state’s governor, named his daughter Ima.
    Enough said.

7
    With This Ring, I Thee Dread
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    President Harding’s father perfectly captured the essence of his son when he declared, “Warren, it’s a good thing you weren’t born a girl because you’d be in the family way all the time. You can’t say No .” It was the twenty-ninth president’s fatal flaw. His keen desire to please his friends, coupled with a chronic aversion to conflict, produced one of the most scandal-plagued administrations in American history, as Harding’s poker-playing pals used their positions to plunder the government. 1 Yet it was in his personal life that Harding’s debilitating weakness had its most withering effects.
    He was twenty-five when he married Florence Mabel Kling DeWolfe, a shrill, dowdy harridan who had pursued him relentlessly. A thirty-year-old divorcée, she was tall and mannish, and the handsome, patrician Harding never liked her. Once, when he was arriving in town by train, he saw her on the platform and tried to sneak off the other side. She spotted him, however, and shouted in her flat Ohio burr, “You needn’t try to run away, Wurr’n Harding. I see your big feet.” A stronger man would have kept walking. Wurr’n got worn down.
    It was a miserable marriage in which he submitted feebly to her domination. His grudging nickname for her was “the Duchess.” Her shrewish ways literally sickened him, driving him to seek refuge several times in Michigan’s famed Battle Creek Sanitarium, J. P. Kellogg’s crackpot resort featuring enema therapy. Inarguably, however, it was the Duchess who was largely responsible for his success. She oversaw the circulation of his Marion, Ohio, newspaper with crisp efficiency, increasing its revenues, and zealously plotted his unlikely political ascent. After his election in 1920 she reportedly said to him, “Well, Wurr’n Harding, I got you the presidency. What are you going to do with it?”
    Making his own contribution to this unhappy union, Harding engaged in two extended affairs. His first mistress was Carrie Phillips, wife of a longtime friend. The brazen Carrie would often strut down the street in front of the Hardings’ Ohio home, to the outrage of the scorned wife. A professor