the gang’s still here
by Douglas Messerli
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee The Gang’s All Here (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1960)
Like Harding, Lawrence’s and Lee’s Ohio senator Griffith T. Hastings,
name comes forth in the smoke-filled rooms of the Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel as
an alternative to candidates (in 1920, General Leonard Wood and Illinois
Governor Frank O. Lowden) who have Republican Party members deadlocked.
Engineered by Walter Rafferty and other cronies in Lawrence and Lee’s play (in
1920 by Harry M. Daugherty) Hastings is elected and fills his major
governmental posts with his “Ohio gang.”
In the play Hastings is presented as a man modest enough to admit to his
limited capabilities and honest enough to claim that he is not up to the
position; but through the intervention of his friends and strong-willed wife
(who Hastings and others describe as “The Duchess,” Hastings, despite his
misgivings, determines to run.
Once he is locked away within the presidential quarters, however, he
hasn’t a clue how to begin governing, hiring on the spur of a moment a man
employed to oversee his transition, and demanding the immediate presence of his
cronies, who quickly fill his ears with speedy decisions concerning the issues
with which he is now forced to grapple. In only a few weeks after becoming
President, we see him sneaking away from the White House to play poker with his
cronies—now all political advisors—and ready to sign on nearly any dotted line
put before him.
Strangely, the only honest man surrounding him is Bruce Bellingham, the
interim assistant he has hired. Bruce, along with Hastings’s wife, Frances,
attempts to warn him away from his gang—his own Attorney General, Secretary of
the Navy, Secretary of the Interior, and Head of the Veterans Bureau. By this
time, however, Hastings has become so dependent upon their advice that he has
no one else to whom he can turn and fires Bellingham, the only one willing to
tell him the truth.
As the Hearn committee begins investigations, it becomes clear that
Hastings must act; as he attempts to query the honesty of members of his own
cabinet and staff, Rafferty reminds him that he has knowledge of Hastings’
sexual affairs which he’s willing to reveal. Rafferty’s moral jingoism, his
long justification for his immorality, reminds one of Harry Lime’s argument
with his friend Holly Martins in Carol Reed’s film The Third Man of ten years earlier:
He [Sam Cavendish] can afford
morality. He’s rich enough. I’m not.
Neither are you. The “land of
plenty” for everybody except a politician,
who sticks his head through the hole
in the canvas and lets the
goddamned free press sling mud balls
at him. He can’t run his business
like a business, because it’s never his business. It belongs to the blessed
American public that doesn’t give a
hoot in hell until some poor bastard
gets his pinky caught in the cash
register! Name me the job that demands
more and pays less than serving the
American taxpayer. The Customers’
Man can screw ‘em blind on the Big
Board. That’s o.k. The Oil Boys
can simmer the fat out of the
ground, the Real Estate Sharks can bank
a six-month million—everybody gets
rich except the poor ass of a “Public
Servant.” (Straight at Hastings) And you’ve got the gall to scream because
a few of your friends are smart
enough to do exactly what everybody
else in the country is doing.
In the context of Rafferty’s
argument, the actual president Harding’s campaign slogan—“Return to
Normalcy”—seems bizarrely appropriate.
Harding clearly knew his presidency had
been destroyed by the scandal, and in 1923 set out across the country to boost
his own ratings on what he described as a “Voyage of Understanding.”
Understanding for whom, one might ask: the electorate or himself? In Lawrence
and Lee’s version it is Hastings who comes to the “understanding,” ultimately
seeking the resignation of Rafferty before drinking a deadly medicinal
concoction left behind in his Surgeon General’s bag. Harding’s illness was
simply attributed to food poisoning—and his death soon after to a heart attack.
At least Hastings dies with some recognition, with some sense of dignity.
The published volume of The Gang’s
All Here begins with a short piece by the playwrights published in the New
York Herald Tribune of September 27,
1959, warning the public to take the lessons of their play to heart in the
upcoming elections. That election between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy
was even more fateful in several respects than the 1920 race between Harding
and the Democratic nominee James A. Cox. One candidate of the 1960 race clearly was a man (particularly in his later
administration) with a notorious gang—the other a man with a notorious family.
Lawrence and Lee’s work functions as a terribly old-fashioned drama, and
creaks in its historical underpinnings. Given that the 1960 election, for the
first time, depended heavily upon television news coverage as opposed to the
simple workings of backroom politics, the play seems particularly
old-fashioned. With a cast that included E. G. Marshall, Howard Smith, Melvyn
Douglas, and Jean Dixon the stage theatrics must have been almost magical; but
reading it in 2003, the dramatic action seems to be missing.
What struck me most, however, as I read this play was that in terms of
politics little has changed. The gang is still with us. President Bush won the
2000 election, in fact, by machinations that Rafferty and company could not
even have imagined. The three R’s with which Bush and Cheney now control our
country—Rove, Rumsfield and Rice—far more than those basic areas of learning,
Reading, Writing, and ‘Rithmetic—serve the President as a gang whose personal
agendas far surpass those of Harding/Hastings’s petty greed. Lawrence and Lee
ask a naïve question, but one that should not be glibly answered by Americans
today:
If
the man we fondly X’d in a voting booth turns out to be
a
struggling incompetent, whose fault is it? The President’s?
….It’s too easy to blame the gang around him, because oppor-
tunists are always waiting to fill any governmental vacuum.
Perhaps the real trouble lies in our own reluctance to think
about history except on that
November Tuesday
Los Angeles, October 6, 2003
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