The most famous of the scandals that centered around the Little Green House on K Street was the Teapot Dome Scandal. It would leave the biggest black mark on the Harding Administration’s sullied historical reputation, if you overlook the president’s insatiable appetite for affairs.
But this scheme, which involved bribery, control over a large portion of the U.S. oil reserves, and a corruption trial that would land the secretary of the interior in jail, was just the tip of the iceberg of the goings on at what could be known as the playboy mansion of the Harding administration.
In 1960, history professor Sidney Warren described the house as “part brothel, part speakeasy,” and it would become infamous as the location where the personal and business dealings of some of Harding’s closest friends-cum-political appointees reached their sordid peak.
But just as all presidencies eventually come to an end (Harding’s only 30 months after his inauguration due to an untimely death), the fun also came to an abrupt halt for the revelers on K Street. When the dirty dealings of the Teapot Dome Scandal fell under Senate scrutiny, the formerly secret headquarters of the Ohio Gang began to get some unwanted attention. Just imagine the scene: a row of upstanding Senators all beginning to scratch their perfectly coiffed, early 20th-century beards in puzzlement as one witness after another called before them during the Senate investigation drops the same name: “the House on K Street.”
Harding was an unlikely president. He wasn’t the Republican Party’s frontrunner or second choice during the 1920 primary. It took 10 ballots for Harding to emerge as the victor, but he did just that as party members deadlocked in a split vote behind the leading contenders, opening up a path to victory for the Ohio Senator. Harding went on to win the election in a landslide on his campaign for “a return to normalcy.”
Maybe it was this personal sense of “normalcy” that drove him to engage in a system of cronyism the likes of which this country had never seen before or since when he took up his position in the Oval Office. He moved all his best buddies into positions of power, and his clique from home became known in D.C. as the “Ohio Gang.”
As historian Kevin Kruse told The Atlantic, “[Harding] felt woefully under-qualified for the job, and that set in motion a chain of events that set him up to be one of the worst presidencies in history. He was nervous about it, so he surrounded himself with old friends from his hometown, who themselves were unqualified for the jobs they held and many of them corrupt.”
These new political appointees may not have been qualified to run the country, but they had the president’s ear and they wielded their power shamelessly. But official jobs, power, and access to all the good stuff (in the case of Prohibition: booze) is only the first step, as every gang knows. In order to really embrace your position, you need a clubhouse.
On March 4, 1921, Harding was inaugurated as the 29th President of the United States and he officially took up residence in the White House. Just shy of two months later, two recent transplants to D.C., Howard Mannington and Jess Smith, rented a house at 1625 K Street NW that would become known as “The Little Green House on K Street.”
In a 1931 article, The New York Times described the house where many of the Ohio Gang’s transgressions took place: “No humble painted shack is ‘the little green house on K Street.’ Three stories high, with fifteen rooms, it was ‘little’ only by comparison with its city surroundings. Built of limestone of slightly greenish hue, ivied, it was ‘green’ only in contrast with the stately old mansion of red brick and modern business blocks of white stone.”
This main player at the helm of this house of ill-repute was Harry M. Daugherty, Harding’s presidential campaign manager who was installed as attorney general when his boss became president. The two men on the K Street lease were intimately connected to Daugherty. Mannington had served as the Ohio manager for the Harding campaign and was a close personal friend of Daugherty’s, while Smith was the attorney general’s right hand man.
Because of its connections to the attorney general, the Little Green House on K Street became something of a sordid satellite office for the Justice Department. In no small part thanks to the goings on there, the law enforcement agency earned the nickname “the department of easy virtue” during the Harding Administration.
It was at this stately address that a mix of the corrupt practices that would personally enrich the merry band of state-sponsored gangsters and the bad behavior that would entertain them and their newfound power and wealth took place.
The Ohio Gang and their friends would meet at the house to play poker, indulge in illegal liquor (which always flowed freely thanks to their connections), and throw around new “business” ideas. It was here that affairs were had and that a bacchanalian air reigned. Allegations were even thrown around that the house was the site of an orgy or two.
“Here a bonanza business went on in selling immunities from government prosecution of various kinds, handing out government appointments, pardons and paroles for criminals,” Professor Warren wrote in 1960.
In 1940 in The New Yorker, Wolcott Gibbs notes that “corruption is generally a dismal subject, but there was something dreamy and absurd in all the doings that centred [sic] around the Little Green House on K Street.”
He describes some of the more hedonistic and indulgent aspects of the gang’s activity, calling out “Charlie Forbes, who made two hundred million dollars stealing sheets; Jeff Smith, who occasionally amused himself by sending out letters over the signature of the President of the United States; Ned McLean, who was given ‘a code, a little card, and a badge’ and allowed to masquerade as a Secret Service man to the delight of his perpetually childish heart; the elaborately sinister Gaston B. Means, Jap Muma (of the old Ohio mumas), Fall, Daugherty, Sinclair, even the Chief Executive himself, gaily slipping thirty dollars for services rendered into the top of a young woman’s stocking.”
If the fun has to end, it’s best to do it in salacious style. In this case, the Little Green House on K Street and its tenants were taken down by the Teapot Dome Scandal, which would live on in infamy as one of the biggest corruption scandals of any presidential administration.
The country was riveted as witness after witness with close ties to the Harding administration were called to take the stand before the Senate inquiry. In a particularly apt turn of events, it was a bombshell named Roxie Stinson, the ex-wife of Jess Smith, who had died in mysterious circumstances nearly a year before, who gave some of the most entertaining and damning testimony. She gladly spilled the tea.
The New York Times reported that, “For two hours she told of mysterious ‘deals,’ involving pardons and permits to withdraw liquor, alleged speculations in oil and secret conferences in most of which she contended the Attorney General had a part.” She detailed deal after deal that her ex-husband had told her about. She described the table-sized suitcases full of liquor that he had ferried to the house and the large sums of money involved in different transactions. Her testimony was told “without embarrassment and with a surprising grasp of detail,” according to The Times, and she wasn’t afraid to name names.
The men at the heart of the matter, of course, denied involvement in any wrongdoing. Mannington protested that Stinson “talked too much,” while Daugherty went so far as to claim “I never saw the ‘mysterious green house on K Street’ and was never in it.”
For the most part, the Ohio gang got away scot free, at least those who weren’t mysteriously killed. Only one man, Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, was punished for corruption and, even then, he was only sentenced to a year in jail.
But maybe they didn’t all go unpunished. After all, these were men who had flown very close to the sun. They had experience power. They had accrued gobs of money. And they had enjoyed all the liquor they could want in a country where alcohol was prohibited.
Then, Harding died and the country moved on. The men who had once risen so quickly from obscurity to become the machers of D.C. were quickly relegated to irrelevance. All they were left with were memories of what one can only imagine were their best years at the Little Green House on K Street, especially after their one-time party headquarters was demolished in 1941. Well, memories, and most likely some fat stacks of cash that they had squirreled away in between tips and drinks.