Edgar Awards Countdown: Crooked
the one about corrupt Jazz Age Attorney General Harry Daugherty
In the weeks leading up to the Edgar Awards ceremony, I’ll be reading and and reviewing the six books nominated for the “Fact Crime” category. This is the fourth installment; you can read about the Polly Klaas kidnapping here, cryptobros here, and the Murdaugh case here.
After the hyper-recent takes on the Murdaughs I discussed last time on the Edgar Awards Countdown, it was a bit of an adjustment to orient myself towards Crooked: The Roaring 20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, a Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scandal by Nathan Masters. And the length of that subtitle gives you a hint about what you’re in for reading the book: it clocks in near 400 pages (including notes). But as I’m closing in on page 500 of The Power Broker and am not even halfway through, Crooked almost felt like a breezy snippet of historical true crime.
I came into this read knowing *checks notes* that’s right, NOTHING, about
the Harding administration, including the president’s death halfway through it;
what precisely The Teapot Dome scandal was;
how J. Edgar Hoover rose to become arguably the most powerful man in America in the mid-twentieth century.1
Having finished Crooked, I have confident cocktail-party-level knowledge of all of the above, and that’s not even the A-plot of the book! Masters is interested in Harry Daugherty, Harding’s kingmaker and attorney general, and the truly breathtaking level of corruption he and his longtime companion2 Jesse Smith engaged in with impunity during the early 1920s. We’re talking bribery, fraud, conspiracy, graft, and witness intimidation. One Western senator with a grudge, Burton Wheeler, made it his personal mission to take him down. The investigations and trials initiated by Wheeler, and the retaliatory attacks Daugherty launched to try and discredit him, comprise the story.
And it’s quite a compelling one! I wouldn’t call the prose or pacing riveting, but the depth of Masters’s research and commitment to detailing the intricacies of the scandal results in an immersive and informative read. Though he doesn’t explicitly make the case for this story’s relevancy in today’s political climate (except, arguably, in that subtitle), a story about a corrupt political figure who believes his social and economic privilege places himself above the law, and the difficulty of employing civic and legal institutions to bring him down, certainly resonates with *gestures broadly at everything*.3 Also, I kid you not, when Senator Wheeler was a third-party candidate for vice-president in the 1924 election, during campaign appearances he would drag out an empty chair to stage a one-sided harangue of Daugherty. Reader, I screamed.
However, there are also notable differences from today due to the social mores and media environment of the time. For example, at one point Senator Wheeler successfully “disappears” for twenty-four hours: a feat Governor Mark Sanford would have liked to have accomplished in 2009.4 I felt almost nostalgic reading the moments in the narrative detailing real consequences for ignoring a congressional subpoena, and the public blowback for personal attacks and unfounded accusations feels almost quaint in the age of “Sleepy Joe,” “Tiny D,” and “Birdbrain.” However, I do feel some comfort in knowing that there have always been narcissistic bullshitters in American politics. And though Daugherty doesn’t get the legal comeuppance Wheeler was hoping for, his reputation and career were destroyed by the revelations the senator unearthed.
My one lingering question is Masters’s treatment of Daugherty’s relationship with Jess Smith. The book opens with Smith’s death by suicide, presumably to protect Daugherty, and their relationship, personal and professional, seems to have enabled and indexed most of the illegal activity of which Daugherty is accused. The two were extraordinarily close for decades, yet Daugherty refuses to publicly discuss him. As Masters puts it,
He did not dare come before the [congressional] committee and explain how it was that the man who ate with him, slept with him, was his constant companion, nearer and closer to him than his own wife, how it was that that man could graft a million dollars and he not know about it.
I am of two minds about how to write about Daugherty and Smith. On the one hand, it seems pointless and irresponsible to speculate on whether they were lovers. On the other, the homophobic climate of the 1920s could explain some of Daugherty’s actions and reactions before and after Smith’s death. Masters argues that this event is notable because it was the first salacious scandal that coincided with the rise of a newly ubiquitous and voracious press. I can’t help but think that same cultural environment impacted the way Daugherty and Smith felt they had to frame their relationship.
But this isn’t that book, and that’s just fine. I wouldn’t call Crooked a captivating page-turner, but it certainly gives attention to an under-reported but crucial matrix of crimes in American political history.
Read if you like: paperwork movies5, Law & Order, the dark underbelly of the Roaring Twenties, the congress parts of The West Wing
Yes I did see that biopic, and I still couldn’t have told you.
Term used intentionally and with care. More on that later.
He does mention how Daugherty and Wheeler were later represented in popular culture: Daugherty on Boardwalk Empire and Wheeler ranging from an anti-semite in Philip Roth’s alt-history The Plot Against America to the inspo for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Hiking the Appalachian Trail? Anybody?
Can you explain to listeners what a paperwork movie is?
BRANDON TAYLOR: I had this realization, like, last year that I really love movies where people are, like, doing paperwork, where they're, like, walking down a hallway carrying folders. They're, like, shuffling through papers to find an answer.