4 March 1921
The most corrupt US President anyone had ever seen* takes office.
Perhaps realising the power of domesticated mammals to distract from bad news, he introduced the first celebrity pet to the White House the following day. Warren G. Harding, you see, is remembered (if at all) for the Teapot Dome scandal, in which the US Navy’s oil reserves were leased at knock-down prices to oil companies who didn’t have to bid competitively.
(In a story replete with silly names, the reason for the scandal’s name was that the oil was near a rock formation in Wyoming known as Teapot Rock, which looks nothing like a teapot — although, to be fair, it apparently lost its ‘handle’ and ‘spout’ to wind erosion.)
Absurdly named Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall mysteriously acquired a ‘loan’ and other goods to the value of over $500,000 from the companies (about $7.5m now), and paid off some tax that had been in arrears for about a decade. Fall went to jail, but Harding didn’t get into trouble, because he died in office halfway through his term.
Whether Harding intended to preside over such corruption, and knew that the Airedale terrier Laddie Boy would provide him with good coverage, is not known. However, Harding had been a successful newspaperman in Ohio before he got into politics, so he knew publicity. The dog duly went to fundraising events with the First Lady, golfing with the President, and attended cabinet meetings, sitting in his own chair.
The New York Times and Washington Star ran ‘stories’ on the dog “almost daily”, and he got so famous that — in LitHub’s words — Harding “had a thousand miniature likenesses of Laddie Boy produced, and he gave them to supporters as souvenirs. These tiny Laddie Boys are now highly prized collector’s items.”
(‘Laddie Boy’, incidentally, is indeed a horrific name, but it could have been worse. The G in Warren G Harding stood for ‘Galamiel’.)
Anyway, Airedales became popular among ‘ordinary’ Americans, and toy companies tried to acquire the right to produce stuffed, plush Laddie Boys. Oddly, for a man presiding over an administration that put profit before principle, Harding consistently turned these opportunities down.
When Harding dropped dead on a speaking tour, poet Edna Bell Seward composed a poem which was set to a tune and sold as sheet music under the title Laddie Boy, He’s Gone. It contains lyrics which could, to this day, work as a highly effective emetic:
As you wait — brown eyes aglisten –
For a master’s face that’s gone –
He is smiling at you, Laddie,
From the peace of the Beyond.
Mind you, powerful people do have a track record of making appallingly sentimental posthumous use of their pets…
Anyway, Warren G’s widow Florence gave the bereaved hound to Secret Service agent Harry L. Barker, and sculptor Bashka Paeff melted downover 19,000 pennies collected by newsboys to fashion a statue of him which is now owned by the Smithsonian, but is not on display. I can’t imagine why.
Oh, perhaps I can.
Laddie Boy only made the news again when he died in 1929, and was buried in Massachusetts.
*A note about that point at the top. You’ll notice I wrote ‘had’ ever seen, not ‘has’. Five decades later, of course, Richard Nixon’s administration famously asked Harding’s to hold its metaphorical beer.
And 43 years after he left office… hooooo, boy.
