One Summer: America, 1927

Harding. A memorial in the shape of a mighty rotunda had been erected in Harding’s home town, and dedication was set for 4 July. As a sitting president of the same party, Calvin Coolidge was required by tradition and etiquette to perform the dedication, but with so much unsavoury scandal swirling about he refused to go. In consequence, the dedication was postponed more or less indefinitely – a serious humiliation for the Harding family. (Eventually, in 1931, it was dedicated by Herbert Hoover, who would go, it was said, to the opening of a drawer.)
    Instead Coolidge celebrated 4 July – which also happened to be his fifty-fifth birthday – by remaining in South Dakota, where he was having the time of his life. In recognition of all the publicity he was generating with his trip, the state of South Dakota presented him on his birthday with a cowboy outfit and horse. Named Kit, thehorse was charitably described as ‘spirited’. It was in fact all but unbroken. The president, who was by no means a horseman, was prudently kept well away from it. Instead his delighted attention was focused on his other main present – a cowboy outfit consisting of a ten-gallon hat, bright red shirt, capacious blue neckerchief, chaps, boots and spurs. Coolidge retired to put it all on and emerged clankingly, and a little clumsily, in the full regalia a few minutes later. He looked ridiculous but very proud, and posed happily for photographers, who could not believe their luck. ‘Here was one of the great comic scenes in American history,’ wrote Robert Benchley in the New Yorker that week.
    Coolidge loved that outfit and wore it for the rest of the summer whenever he could. According to lodge staff, he often changed into it in the evening after his more formal day’s duties were done, and for a few hours ceased to be the most important man in America and instead was just a happy cowpoke.

C HAPTER 15
     

     
    WHILE PRESIDENT COOLIDGE amused himself as a cowboy in the Black Hills, across the country, and far beyond his present range of interests, four international bankers were quietly laying the groundwork for the collapse of the stock market and the Great Depression that followed. That wasn’t their intention or expectation, of course, but that was the effect of it.
    The men in question were: Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Sir Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England; Hjalmar Schacht, head of the Reichsbank in Germany; and Charles Rist, deputy governor of the Banque de France. For men of such importance, they were a rather odd quartet. One was dying, one was strange, one was a future Nazi, and one was quite normal but of little consequence in the present circumstances.
    They gathered at the Long Island estate of Ogden Livingston Mills, a rich Republican who had recently been beaten (indeed, heartily clobbered) by Al Smith in the race for governorship of New York. As a kind of consolation prize, Mills had been made undersecretary of the treasury in Washington. He would eventually succeed Andrew Mellon as treasury secretary – ironically, just in time to deal with the mess now being set in motion by his well-meaning but misguided house guests.
    The bankers must have felt quite at home, for Mills’s vast and blocky mansion looked more like a central bank than a comfortable residence. Surrounded by formal gardens, it occupied a prime spot on the ‘Gold Coast’, a privileged stretch of north-western Long Island where some six hundred great estates commanded the rolling hills and deeply indented coastline of Nassau and western Suffolk counties. Nearly all of America’s wealthiest families – the Vanderbilts, DuPonts, Astors, Whitneys, Morgans, Hearsts, Fricks – had weekend places there. Some of these homes were immensely grand. Otto Kahn, a banker, had a castle with 170 rooms, including a dining room that could seat 200. The grounds included an eighteen-hole golf course and private zoo. Feeling his backdrop lacked grandeur, Kahn had his own small mountain built. Other Gold Coast owners bought and razed entire villages to improve their views and at least one had a public highway gated to stop common people from wandering on to the beach at the foot of his grounds.
     
    The Mills estate was only about ten miles from Roosevelt Field and more or less directly on the flight path of all the recent Atlantic flights. Commander Byrd and his team had flown over in the America just two days