on November 19, 1919, to celebrate the Senate defeat of thernVersailles Treaty over a midnight dinner of scrambled eggs.rnThe whole gang was there: atrabilious Missouri Senator Reed,rnthe brilliant Jcffersonian toper; Oklahoma populist SenatorrnGore and his wife; the McCormicks; the Hardings; the Frelinghyscns;rnBorah (without the missus); and aristocratic senatorsrnLodge, Brandegee, and Wadsworth, among others. “Mrs.rnHarding cooked the eggs,” Alice archly recalled in her 1933 autobiographyrnCrowded Hours, a listless effort which MaxwellrnPerkins cajoled her to write.rnThe Lion lay down with the Longworth; the sons of the wildrnjackass drank cocktails with the daughters of Pilgrims. Thernleague issue was of such magnitude that the detritus of pastrnc|uarrcls over domestic issues was swept aside. Next year, Alicernsupported the dim-bulb family friend General Leonard Woodrnfor the Republican presidential nomination, though she was alsornfond of her father’s Bull Moose running mate, CaliforniarnSenator Hiram Johnson, whose campaign theme was his ‘TOOrnjjercent Americanism.” He did not mean by this a petty xenophobiarnor insistence upon loalty oaths that no real patriotrnwould ever dream of signing; rather, Johnson upheld fidelity tornone’s little corner of the world.rnJohnson’s platform was normalcy itself. “It is time for anrnAmerican policy,” he declared in 1919. “Bring home Americanrnsoldiers. Rescue our own democracy. Restore its free expression.rnGet American business into its normal channels. LetrnAmerican life, social and economic, be American again.” Therntragedy of 20th-century American politics is that the faithlessrntook over, and men like Hiram Johnson were cast out into arnwilderness, where they died, graves unniarked, and from whichrntheir heirs have yet to return.rnThough he polled the most primary votes, Johnson’s bid fellrnshort, as did the foolish Wood’s. Alice withheld the endorsementrnof the Sagamore Hill Roosevelts until eventual Republicanrnnominee Warren G. Harding, whom she liked as a pokerrnpal but disrespected as a lightweight, promised a hard-linernantileague stance.rnAlice roared through the 20’s carrying a flask of bootlegrnbourbon and a copy of the Gonstitution in her capaciousrnpurse. Borah sounded, at times, like Alice’s father, as herndenounced “this weakening, simpering, sentimental internationalismrnwhich would destroy national character andrnundermine nationalism” and insisted upon the cultivation ofrn”an American mind, an American purpose and Americanrnideals.” This was Rooseveltian phraseology in service of anrnanti-Rooseveltian program.rn”I am a Republican with a Progressive tradition-inclination,”rnAlice said in 1932. She deplored “lavish Federal spendingrnand drastic Federal control of business and agriculture” and,rnmost of all, any diminution of American sovereignty. Herrnprogressivism was the forgotten kind, that of Amos R.E. Pinchot,rnthe hlation’s William Hard, and the New Jersey dynamornGeorge Record. It stood for parsimonious expenditure; forrn”equal rights for all, special privileges for none”; for the destructionrnof monopoly by democratically controlled local governments;rnand for the coiled rattlesnake foreign policy of thernFounders. That this progressive tradition was at antipodesrnyvith her father’s never seemed to cross Alice’s mind. (Othersrnunderstood. The Republican Party of North Dakota, deepdyedrnin agrarian antimonopolist radicalism, tried and failed tornstart an “Alice for Veep” boomlet in 1932.)rnAnd then along came her father’s fifth cousin, “FeatherrnDuster” Roosevelt, whom she had long ago dismissed as “thernkind of boy whom you invited to the dance but not the dinner.”rnAlice was Eleanor’s maid of honor and she introducedrnFranklin to the elongated cigarette holder, but she could notrnabide their reign. She sighed, “When I think of Franklin andrnEleanor in the White House, I could grind my teeth to powderrnand blow them out my nose.”rnThe new President, she complained, was “ninety percentrnmush and ten percent Eleanor.” He was hobbling our hale republic.rn”My poor cousin, he suffered from polio so he was putrnin a brace; and now he wants to put the entire U.S. into a brace,rnas if it were a crippled country—that is all the New Deal isrnabout, you know,” she said, typically impolitic. Her animus didrnnot keep her from abetting Franklin’s affair with Lucy MercerrnRutherford: after all, she later explained, he “deserved a goodrntime. He was married to Eleanor.”rnAlice undertook a syndicated column that was every bit asrninsipid as Eleanor’s “My Day.” She meant to write corrosivehrnfunny attacks on the New Deal but, as with Crowded Hours,rnher lively wit sputtered and died somewhere in transit betweenrnmind and paper. Besides, her country had become “allrnbody and no soul” and she despaired of the mostly fourth-raternmen who stood quakingly in opposition.rnHer scorn was withering for the Republican panjandrumsrnwho made the party so ineffectual during the critical middlerndecades of the century. Thomas E. Dewey, of course, was thern”bridegroom on a wedding cake”; John Bricker was “just anrnhonest Harding”; Wendell Willkie “sprang from the grassrootsrnof a thousand country clubs.” She approved of GalvinrnCoolidge, but he was dead. She also admired Senator RobertrnA. Taft, though she conceded that he suffered from “an abundancernof lack and shortage of luster.” With Taft, at least, werncould “return to the ways of our old self-reliance,” she told readersrnof the Saturday Evening Post in May 1940. Yes, he wasrnphlegmatic, but “Miss Golumbia has had a long and giddy spellrnbeing the girlfriend of the whirling dervish. It’s time shernstopped revolving, chose another partner.” (Her paean to Taftrnis sprinkled with metaphors of physical activity, an obviousrntaunt of the wheelchair-bound President. Alice did have arnmean streak.)rnShe lobbied energeticall} against the Supreme Court-packingrnscheme that backhred on F D R in 1937, and the friendshipsrnshe forged in that fight with independent liberals like Senatorrnand Mrs. Burton K. Wheeler flowered over the next quadrennium,rnas old republicans of left and right merged to halt therndrift toward war. The friends she acquired in this phase of herrnlife perplex those chroniclers who regard Alice as a bipartisanrnbon rivant. Borah was strange enough, but another rumoredrnswain. United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis, bogglesrnthe mind. About the Iowa-born CIO leader she quipped, “Hernloved making trouble, and I loved watching him make it. It wasrnnatural that we should get together.”rnLewis also loathed Franklin, but there was more to this thanrnbeefy petulance. He was anti-imperialist to the bone. Leyvisrnunderstood that working men pa’ war’s wages in blood; he wasrna patriot who believed FDR was a “would-be dictator” underrnwhose misrule “the United States first becomes a militaristicrnnation, and second, becomes an imperialistic nation.” Lewisrncalled ’em the way he saw ’em for the rest of his tumultuousrnlife; even in the Gold War’s most frigid phase, he denouncedrnthe transfer of yvealth from American taxpayers to Europeanrn28/CHRONICLESrnrnrn