… And Some Were Saved (February 1965 | Volume: 16, Issue: 2)

… And Some Were Saved

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Authors: Francis Russell

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February 1965 | Volume 16, Issue 2

In his somewhat sardonic book of political sketches, Masks in a Pageant, William Allen White had a chapter on Warren Gamaliel Harding in which he recorded incidentally one of Harding’s “primrose detours from Main Street.” It had come to garish light in the summer of 1920, when the Republican presidential candidate returned to Marion from his nomination at the convention in Chicago. Local pride had laid out a triumphal way from the railroad station through the town center to the Harding house on Mt. Vernon Street with its bandstandlike front porch that was to serve as the motif of the coming campaign. White columns topped by gilt eagles lined the route at regular intervals, and every storefront bloomed with red, white, and blue bunting—every storefront but one. That uncompromisingly bare building belonged to a merchant of the town with whose wife Harding had had an affair some years earlier. The merchant—unnamed by White—had found out, and though he had condoned the relationship, the absence of decoration was his mute revenge.

That liaison was one of the many things I had marked in my notebook to ask about when I first arrived in Marion on a late October afternoon in 1963 to begin work on a biography of President Harding. Marion is a small city with nothing to distinguish it from any other town in the central Ohio plain but the columned marble drum of Alexandrian immensity at its outskirts that is the Harding Memorial; that, and the mystery still attaching to the name of the most disparaged of American Presidents. To see the cylindrical white marble bulk looming out of the flatness at the end of a long day’s drive I found a little disconcerting. It had been raining all along the die-straight road from Columbus, but the rain had stopped as I reached the Marion limits and the cloud rack was breaking up in a violent-hued sunset in the west. I stopped at a parking inlet in the road and walked up the long macadam walk to the memorial, its marble still glistening in the wet. Curious an architectural amalgam as it was, it managed somehow to be harmonious. An outer ring of columns without fluting was what I suppose would be called Tuscan. This was balanced by an inner ring of smaller Ionic columns, and within that inner ring an unroofed garden area spread out, with two polished dark granite slabs marking the graves of Harding and his wife, whom he called “the Duchess.” The combined columns represented the then forty-eight states of the Union, but as I walked round the colonnade I could count only forty-six, f counted them twice to be sure. Later I was told that the Harding Memorial Association had run short of money before the memorial drum was completed and had skipped the last two columns, hoping that no one would notice.

The Hotel Harding—another memorial of sorts a mile beyond in the center of the city—seemed almost empty. In