The president who slept here
If you’re in the neighborhood this week, you might want to stop at the mountainous Route 40 Summit hotel – officially the Historic Summit Inn Resort. It’s an anniversary, of sorts. Ninety-nine years ago on July 2, the president of the United States stayed the night, along with his wife the first lady, aides, newsmen, and Secret Service agents.
Now, this particular president is not highly regarded. In fact, he is considered something of a flop. He’s best known today as a philanderer, a skirt-chaser He had a mistress or maybe two. A couple of years back letters surfaced that documented the chief executive’s bedding habits. He was quite the lady’s man.
While in office all of this was unknown. And even if it had been known, he might have remained popular. It was the Roaring Twenties. Flasks and short skirts ruled. It was a decade of drunken hijinks, of sexual escapades, of jazz, of speakeasies, of Gatsby. The swell times lasted until autumn 1929, by which time the president who slept at the Summit was six years’ dead.
If you haven’t guessed by now who this was, I’ll give you one more hint: Teapot Dome. Doesn’t ring a bell? OK, it was Warren Harding.
You may not think much of Warren Harding; indeed, you may not think of him at all. (It would be shocking if you did.) But he thought enough of us to visit, so we can at least acknowledge his presence. He was the president of the United States, after all. That means something, doesn’t it?
Maybe Harding doesn’t deserve all that much credit for sleeping amongst us. The Summit was on the way to where he was going. It was between. After leaving Washington, President Harding first motored north to Gettysburg, where he helped to commemorate the Civil War battle that took place there a mere 59 years earlier. (To put that in perspective, 2021 minus 59 years is 1962.)
From Gettysburg the presidential party headed west. His destination was Marion, Ohio, his hometown, where he would spend July 4th. So you see, Uniontown and the Summit were “on the way.”
Still, give the man credit. He didn’t have to stop here. In fact, he had every reason not to. Western Pennsylvania, including Fayette County, was racked by a miners’ strike in the summer of 1922. The reception that awaited Harding in coal country was uncertain. Hissing and booing were distinct possibilities.
Instead, the New York Times reported, the miners’ villages along the route of the presidential motorcade erupted bouquets of cheers for the president. Hundreds of people flocked to the Summit to greet the chief executive. Local people. People from Uniontown and environs.
As already noted, Warren Harding was a popular man. Teapot Dome and a scandal at the Veterans’ bureau would not surface for months yet. By the time they got up to gale force political winds, Calvin Coolidge was around to calm the rattled nerves of Republicans, and Americans in general.
Speaking of generals (hmm), riding in the presidential caravan was the most famous American general of the time, John J. Pershing, the commander of the U.S. forces which stormed the German trenches during the Great War, the First World War, “the war to end wars,” which we entered in 1917 and finished off in 1918.
In addition to Pershing, Pennsylvania governor William Sproul was along for the ride. The three men – Harding, Pershing, and Sproul – visited U.S. Sen. William Crow, bedridden and close to death at his Chalk Hill residence. (If you’ve been to the Christian Klay Winery, you know the place.)
Despite what you might think you know about Warren Harding’s lackluster conduct of the presidency, know this: he was affable. Beset as he was by troubles, you wouldn’t have known it had you been around to shake his hand at the impromptu reception which followed his arrival at the Summit. Warren Harding was all smiles.
Fresh from a White House conference on the coal strike, the president had plenty of reasons for gloom. In fact, with the coal strike and a railroad strike and administration bills stalled in Congress and various other matters running against him, the president was feeling overwhelmed
He told an acquaintance that it was impossible to spend much time in the White House “without inciting numerous complaints” from people. “I am frank to say that I came to a task which has proven vastly more difficult than I had been able to foresee.”
He longed for calmer times. He confided to another acquaintance that each afternoon at 3:30 his thoughts turned to the days when he was publisher of the Marion Star and hearing the rumble of the press churning out another day’s edition. “There never was a day in all the years I ran the paper that I didn’t get a thrill out of it,” he said.
Warren Harding, hapless or not, you gotta side with the man. He was one president who actually loved the press!
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.