POLITICAL NOTES Pilgrim's Progress

Pilgrim's Progress

In March 1915, George Busby Christian Jr., 42, was general sales manager of White Sulphur Stone Co. of Marion. Ohio. That year marked a hegira of Ohio Republicans to Washington, D. C. Harry Micajah Daugherty, a rising power in Ohio politics, was just sending a Marion publisher named Warren G. Harding to Washington as Senator.

Salesman Christian was a Democrat. He had been one of the reading clerks at the Baltimore convention which nominated Woodrow Wilson in 1912. But he lived next door to Warren Harding. In fact one summer day in 1891, as a boy in his teens, he had been stationed at the door of the next house to admit guests as they arrived for the wedding of Warren Harding and Florence Kling. So to Washington in 1915 went Democrat Christian as Republican Senator Harding's secretary.*

That was better luck than George Christian realized. Just six years later he and his Ohio friends were moving into the White House. The next two and one half years were the happiest in the lives of the whole Ohio gang. As secretary to the President of the U. S. George Christian was hardly wealthy enough to play poker for high stakes or to do much speculating through the New Willard brokerage office that had been set up by Samuel Ungerleider, another Ohio friend, after Prohibition closed his liquor business in Cleveland. Yet Secretary Christian could appreciate the gay collations of his fellow Ohioans.

Then came that sad day in August 1923, when George Christian, returning from Alaska on the transport Henderson, had a digestive upset from some canned food or from some crab meat given him by the good people of Sitka. The upset would not have been serious if one night in San Francisco President Harding, whom he was accompanying, had not suddenly died of the same indisposition.

That was the end of George Christian's happy days. Calvin Coolidge came. Senators Walsh and Wheeler of Montana between them began to dig into Teapot Dome, into Elk Hills, into the Ohio gang's speculations through the brokerage office of Mr. Ungerleider, into its peculations from the Veterans' Bureau, the Interior Department, the Alien Property Custodian's office. The gang went its way, back to Ohio or to jail. George Christian, by now a deserving Republican, was left in Washington by the receding wave of history.

For a time he was given a job assisting Rodman Wanamaker take care of the Widow Harding's affairs. When she died, he went with Mr. Wanamaker to the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Commission (1926). Finally President Coolidge unobtrusively tucked him away into the U. S. Shipping Board, as assistant to James Caldwell Jenkins, vice president of Merchant Fleet Corp. Last week George Christian gladly resigned that place. Samuel Ungerleider, who a month ago resigned from the brokerage firm of Fenner, Beane & Ungerleider to become president of Distillers and Brewers Corp. of America, made a position for him in the sales department of Distillers & Brewers. Distillers & Brewers, a $7,500,000 corporation formed in August, has a distillery in Jersey City, another in Peoria, breweries in Ohio and Pennsylvania, importing connections with most important wine and liquor regions in Europe. It plans to market on a national scale practically every known type of alcoholic drink. If its ambitious program is carried out there will be plenty of room in its selling organization for George Christian's abilities.

* Nan Britton in her notorious book The President's Daughter alleged that when she stopped at hotels with Mr. Harding she registered as Elizabeth N. Christian because he thought it would be a "good joke": that later when her child was born in New Jersey her name was officially recorded as Elizabeth Ann Christian.

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