Chapter Fourteen

A Family Interlude

TIME MAGAZINE, which over the years kept a skeptical eye trained on Albert Lasker, concluded in the spring of 1923 that the Shipping Board chairman exerted an influence on President Harding that was both “striking” and “mysterious.”

Harding had two types of associates, said Time: official advisers and “playmates.” What was unique about Lasker, the Time reporter continued, was that he was both an adviser and a playmate. “Able in conversation, brilliant at storytelling, and fond of golf,” Time concluded. “Little wonder that he became one of the President’s best friends.”¹

Although Lasker’s friends scoffed at the notion of him exerting a “mysterious” hold on the president, he did indeed enjoy a unique influence at the White House—both with the president and his wife. He was a great storyteller, as Time noted, and had a talent for putting people—including the Hardings—at ease amid the intimidating trappings of the presidency. And, of course, he shared with the president three passions: poker, baseball, and golf.

As a senator, Harding had hosted a regular Saturday night poker game; as president, he played twice a week at the White House, with the game starting after dinner and lasting several hours. These were low-stakes games, intended to take Harding’s mind off the pressures of the presidency. Regular players included senators, cabinet members, Harding’s personal secretary George Christian, and Lasker.

Lasker also golfed with Harding several times a month when the weather permitted. He accompanied the president on a golfing vacation to Florida in March 1923, and for ten days, as the party made its way down the Inland Waterway, Lasker was compelled to play a round at every course they encountered along the way. “I’m glad Harding doesn’t skip rope,” the exhausted Shipping Board chairman was overheard to remark.²

Lasker’s two-year stint in Washington also provided an unusual interlude in his personal life. Flora had persuaded him to take the job in the hope that he would distinguish himself in public service. Perhaps she also had a goal of bringing their family together for what might well be the last time, since Mary—the oldest of the three Lasker children—was about to start her senior year in high school. If that was Flora’s hope, her experience in Washington both frustrated and satisfied her.

The frustration arose out of her own physical and emotional health, the circumstances of their family, and her relationship with Albert. After the birth of her younger daughter, Francie, in 1916, Flora knew that she would never realize her dream of having six children. She was largely housebound, both before and after Francie’s birth. (Albert later commented that Flora “hardly knew a well hour” after Francie’s birth.³) Albert was on the road much of the time, and while he was away, Flora almost never went out:

I imagine I was away half the time, and I don’t believe in all that time she averaged over one night a year when she wouldn’t be home if I wasn’t there—just stay[ed] at home alone reading. It was an effort [for her] to go out without me. Whenever we went out, she’d beg me to keep close to her, because her disabilities made her feel particularly sensitive, and she was of a sensitive nature anyhow, so she’d screw up inside of herself. She was very scared about crowds—even to go into a crowd of people she knew.⁴

On her own turf, though, she could be formidable. Among other things, she worried about Albert’s dignity; left to his own devices, he rarely thought much about that. “You’re a very dignified man,” she would tell him—and then she’d set about making it so. “I waited until she wasn’t around,” Lasker later commented, “to let myself go.” (He came home drunk once; he never did so again.) Living up to Flora’s high expectations sometimes chafed:

Her standards were those of the 1880s—never changed—which at times was a little difficult for a person who went about as much as I did, to live up to, and it got me so that I had to go through a life of repressions in not being myself.

I think this affected my nervous system quite a good deal, but she was the type of woman you can’t be with and disappoint. You just couldn’t do it. It was like hurting a dove or a deer, and she was unyielding in her standards.⁵

The Lasker family moved to Washington in stages. Albert arrived first, in June 1921, renting a yellow-brick house at 1706 18th Street N.W., a few blocks from Dupont Circle. The rest of the family followed later that summer. Mary enrolled at Miss Madeira’s School for her final year of high school, while Edward enrolled at the St. Albans School in Washington—a relief to Albert, who worried that his son, growing up in the family’s Glencoe, Illinois, mansion, was “surrounded only by women.”

Briefly, Flora flourished in Washington. For several months, the Laskers were regular guests at formal dinners hosted by the Hardings, including the February 1922 fete in honor of the Supreme Court justices, where Albert and Flora hobnobbed with the likes of tire magnate Harvey Firestone and his wife, Mrs. Marshall Field, and conservationist Gifford Pinchot.⁶

Then something went badly wrong. Toward the middle of that month, Flora suddenly left Washington for three months of near-total seclusion in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Albert visited her on weekends when his schedule permitted, but otherwise, Flora—under doctor’s orders—remained completely isolated.

Although Albert regularly reported to family members and close friends about Flora’s symptoms, he revealed very little about the causes of his wife’s illness. In April, for example, he wrote to his in-laws in Buffalo:

She will be in Atlantic City until May 15th. The plan then is for her to come to Washington for a couple of weeks, and from here go June first to Glencoe, where she will be under rigid restrictions until Fall. While she does not know it, she will have to keep a trained nurse all the time so as to insure that she leads the restricted life that she should. Her progress is satisfactory, but she herself realizes that she has no reserve power. If she goes out on the boardwalk for an hour and meets no one, when she comes back everything is normal; but the chart shows that if she meets any one even for five minutes, she has cold feet, fast pulse, and other manifestations. In fact, [son] Edward and [governess] Miss Sachse visited her for two days Saturday and Sunday and she was really glad when they went; she did not see much of them but it excited her . . . With an absence of excitement, she feels better every day.⁷

Clearly, Flora continued to suffer from the physical ailments that had plagued her for more than a decade. Albert’s letters suggest that his wife had psychological frailties, as well, evidently including agoraphobia and what would today be called panic attacks. Albert hoped that Flora could build up her physical and emotional strength at Glencoe and then return to Washington in the fall to enjoy the family’s remaining months in Washington. As he wrote to her in Illinois toward the end of May: “Remember dear that you can cheat everything else in the world save nature, but you cannot cheat nature. If you will deny yourself everything but an orthodox following out of the doctor’s program you can come back this fall and we can have a bully time doing all the things together that have been denied us. But if you feel that you can cheat nature then you may be playing a losing game.”

The therapy seems to have worked. Flora began walking and playing a low-key form of golf again during her Glencoe stay, and when she returned to Washington in late October, she was able to enjoy the capital’s social scene in a limited way. As Albert later reflected: “I don’t mean she was well while we were there, but that she wasn’t sick every day, and she could take part in the life, and because of President and Mrs. Harding’s very evident prejudice in our favor, why, we were considerably courted. And the President and Mrs. Harding . . . made almost everyone know that we were favorites, [and] made it . . . their business to check up who was nice to us and who wasn’t.”⁸

The Hardings looked after the Laskers. “Mrs. Harding watched over my wife there as if it was a trusteeship she had undertaken,” Lasker remembered.⁹ The two couples ate lunch or dinner together at the White House three or four times a week. On several occasions, Lasker remembered, he and Flora were just sitting down to an early dinner at home when the phone rang. Florence Harding would be on the line, asking if the Laskers would like to come over and eat at the White House. “We wouldn’t say we were in the middle of [dinner],” Lasker recalled. “We’d just go and start all over again—just the Hardings and ourselves.”¹⁰

Despite this high-level attention, Albert despised the Washington social scene. He later said that he “never heard a worthwhile word spoken the whole time I was there.” The events there were on a par with the “dullest evenings anywhere else . . . People didn’t open up.”¹¹

Flora, by contrast, found Washington society intensely interesting, and life in the nation’s capital during the last two months of 1922 and the first half of 1923 gave her a rare respite. “With all the people she is meeting,” Albert wrote to a family member, “Flora is having a thrilling winter, and one she will remember as long as she lives.”¹² The Washington interlude constituted the “two happiest years of her life,” he concluded, glossing over the significant difficulties of that first year.¹³ Nor was Flora entirely well in those final, happy months in Washington. “Mother has taken a new series of exercises and has been dieting,” he wrote to his daughter Mary in May, “with the consequent result that in the last two or three days she has been feeling nervous, tired and depressed, showing that the results is the same as always when she does these things, i.e., her thyroid gland begins acting up . . . She lost ten pounds in ten days, which is too much.”¹⁴

To several family members, Albert admitted that up to this point he had not been a particularly good father, and that he was determined to do better. During this period in Washington, Albert decided to make up for lost time. This resolution came to bear most heavily on the two older children: Mary, then in her late teens, and ten-year-old Edward.

Mary, in particular, lived under her father’s watchful eye and bore the brunt of his expectations. Enrolling at Vassar in the fall of 1922—the first child to leave the family nest and also the first in the immediate family to attend college—Mary exhibited an unexpected willful streak. Only a month into the school year, she went dancing in New York City without telling her parents. Albert found out and severely scolded her. Thereafter, Mary was required to ask permission to leave Poughkeepsie for any reason.¹⁵

Meanwhile, Albert noted pointedly, she had an obligation to write to her parents regularly. “Just because I visited last week with you,” he wrote to her, “please don’t fail to write us at least three or four times a week. I do not ask more than one long letter a week; on the other occasions a postal card will suffice.”¹⁶ Albert knew that he sometimes stepped over the line of parental intrusiveness with his oldest daughter. “Don’t get it, dearest, that I am trying to police you,” he wrote. “You know that is not the fact; what I want to do is to help you bring out of yourself all there is in you.”¹⁷

Albert also had high hopes for his only son. Perhaps inevitably, young Edward disappointed his father. When Edward finished fifth in his class of twelve at St. Albans, Albert wrote the headmaster, saying he hoped his son could do better the following year. And as Edward’s younger sister, Francie, later recalled, Albert’s expectations for his son could be unrealistically high: “It was May Day. It was Father’s birthday. I was obviously quite little, I remember walking up and down 18th Street with father, before the guests came, and the lights coming on in the house at dusk. Edward was then going to day school at St. Albans. And Father said to me, ‘It’s my birthday, and your brother didn’t remember it.’ And at the age of five, I thought, ‘Oh my God, what a dreadful burden on Edward!’”¹⁸

When Edward, Francie, and Flora moved back to Glencoe for the summer of 1922, his father continued in his heavy parenting by mail. The eleven-year-old boy typed a letter to his father on homemade letterhead with the headline “EDWARD A. LASKER,” having invented a middle initial for himself. Albert wrote back to protest: “Of course I am greatly complimented that you wanted to use my name; nothing pleases me more than your desire to have my name for your middle name. But when I see you I am going to beg of you not to do this. I believe a name is stronger without a middle name; and while the compliment you pay me is great, I want you to go through life with the strongest possible name.”

Then Albert chided his son for using a typewriter when he had asked Edward to write in longhand. He noted that the letter was “carelessly written,” and that Edward had neglected to sign it. “Now, while I would rather get a carelessly written letter from you than none,” Albert concluded, “do you think it shows the proper interest in your father to address him as covered above?”¹⁹

Lasker often went overboard in his high ambitions for his son. In September 1922, he wrote a note to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, asking what steps should be taken so that Edward could enter the school three years hence. On the same day, he wrote to Yale, inquiring as to what he needed to do to ensure Edward’s admission to Yale in the fall of 1929—seven years in the future.

Francie, only six years old in the fall of 1922, was largely spared Albert’s active parenting. Like many children last in the birth order, Francie was intermittently doted on and overlooked, and the love she got from her parents was relatively unqualified. In addition, her two serious illnesses—in the winters of 1920 and 1921—persuaded her parents to go easy on her. Albert and Flora decided to keep Francie at home (first in Glencoe, and then in Washington) during the 1922–1923 academic year.

“You say you love me,” Albert wrote to her, in response to a handwritten letter to him from Glencoe. “Nothing could make me happier. I love you; let’s always love each other.”²⁰ On Halloween night of 1922, with the family recently reinstalled in Washington, Lasker left work at the Shipping Board early. “Frances is giving a little party to herself,” Albert wrote to Mary at Vassar, “the guests being [governess] Miss Sachse, Edward, and I. I have to hurry home. She is as excited about it as if she had a hundred children.”²¹

Lasker’s friend W. G. Irwin sometimes stayed with the Laskers on his trips to Washington. Irwin made a wistful confession to Lasker after one of these visits:

I cannot tell you how great a pleasure it was to me to again see your family and be with them. I was very glad to see Mrs. Lasker looking so much better and apparently in very good health, and then, it was a pleasure to see that intense admiration that Frances showed for Edward and the great interest that she took in the stories that Edward told, but that admiration was no more impressive than was the love that Edward showed for his sister. There is nothing finer than to see that delightful home life and love among all of the family. All old bachelors are not as fortunate as I am in being in touch with it.²²

In mid-February 1923, Albert wrote to a family member about his satisfaction with Flora’s progress, and confessed that he was looking forward to their approaching departure from the nation’s capital. “Flora is in better health this winter than she has been,” he noted, “and is enjoying her Washington stay exceedingly. She is getting everything out of the winter she can, for, as you undoubtedly know, the middle of June we are returning home for good.”²³

Lasker had made a strong, if belated effort to be a better father and family man. But he was already out of time. Mary was gone, and Edward soon would be off to boarding school. Inevitably, once back in Chicago, Lasker would be drawn back into his business affairs and other pursuits. The Lasker family’s interlude of togetherness—brief and interrupted as it was—was coming to an end, and there would not be another.