The Family (6 page)

The
Ohio State Journal
story to which Flora skeptically referred had a headline that rang with glory:

3 HIGH MILITARY HONORS CONFERRED ON CAPT. BUSH:
For Notable Gallantry, When Leading Allied Commanders Were Endangered,
Local Man Is Awarded French, English and U.S. Crosses.

According to the anonymous reporter, a German shell had momentarily endangered the lives of three Allied leaders, General Ferdinand Foch, Sir Douglas Haig, and General John Pershing, as they were inspecting American positions. Prescott, who was guiding them about the sector on the western front, sprang forward to save their lives. In the sycophantic story, Prescott looked to be the equal of Charlemagne in valor and courage:

Suddenly Captain Bush noticed a shell coming directly for them. He shouted a warning, suddenly drew his bolo knife, stuck it up as he would a ball bat, and parried the blow, causing the shell to glance off to the right.

The three generals marveled at the exploit. Apparently they couldn’t believe their eyes . . . Within 24 hours young Bush was notified of the signal recognition that was to be accorded him—the three allied commanders had recommended him for practically the highest honors within their gift.

On the following day there was a parade in Paris of soldiers to be decorated. As he was the only one to receive three honors, Captain Bush was placed at the head of the procession.

The next day the cartoonist of the
Ohio State Journal
responded with unconcealed skepticism by drawing a young boy sitting under a tree with his dog. The caption underneath the boy read:

And just as the three greatest generals in the world were passing the boy captain, he noticed with terror a German 77 flying straight for Gen. Foch, Gen. Haig and Gen. Pershing. Quick as a flash our young hero drew his bolo knife, using it as he would a ball bat knocked the deadly shell far off to the right where it exploded without injury to anyone. For his notable gallantry in saving the lives of the three great generals he was awarded the cross of the legion of honor by the French government, the Victoria Cross by the English government and the Distinguished Service Cross by the American Government.

The caption above the dog’s head: “Gee! I wonder if anything like that could ever truly happen to a boy!”

A week later the
Ohio State Journal
’s news story appeared on the front page of the
New Haven Journal-Courier
under a different but equally fantastic headline:

TRIPLE HONOR TO P. S. BUSH, YALE ’17:
Yale Man, in Remarkable Exploit,
Averts Danger to Foch, Haig and Pershing.
Changed Course of Shell. Struck It with Bolo Knife—
England, France and America Confer Honors for Act.

It was an extraordinary tale of heroism. But within a month Flora’s worst suspicions proved true. On September 5, 1918, she wrote a contrite letter to the editor of the
Ohio State Journal
, which was reprinted on the front page:

A cable received from my son, Prescott S. Bush, brings word that he has not been decorated, as published in the papers a month ago. He feels dreadfully troubled that a letter written in a spirit of fun, should have been misinterpreted. He says he is no hero and asks me to make explanation. I will appreciate your kindness in publishing this letter.

Flora Sheldon Bush
Columbus, Sept. 5

The fabrication was punctured in Ohio but not in Connecticut. The New Haven paper never retracted its report. To this day the glory story remains attached to the page of Prescott’s entry in the Yale class of 1917 yearbook in the reading room of the Manuscripts and Archives division in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library.

History does not record what Grandmother Harriet Bush had to say when she learned of all these turns in her grandson’s “pernicious habit of fooling.”

CHAPTER TWO

A
s one of the seventy-three hundred millionaires in the United States in 1914, David Davis Walker was highly regarded by
The St. Louis Republic
as “a student of political conditions and current trends.” At the age of seventy-four, he commandeered the front page of that newspaper with his pronouncements on race and religion. His letter to the editor published on July 22 of that year proudly endorsed segregation, eugenics, the lynch law, and the whipping post:

I am in favor of segregating the Negroes in all communities. I consider them more of a menace than the social evil [prostitution], and all other evils combined. I am completely in favor of the unwritten law—lynching for assaults on women, no matter whether the criminal be black or white.

I would compel all men and women to submit to a strict physical examination by a first-class physician before permitting them to marry. For humanity’s sake, I am in favor of putting to death all children who come into the world hopeless invalids or badly deformed.

I have been a temperate man all my life, but I am bitterly opposed to these rule-or-ruin prohibition cranks. When men and women can’t have a glass of beer or wine, if they want it, it’s time for another civil war.

I am in favor of a whipping-post law for every state in the Union for wife-beaters and all other petty offenders on whom jail sentences are imposed.

Less than a hundred years later, some of D. D. Walker’s fierce opinions could be glimpsed in his great-great-grandson George Walker Bush, who had become the forty-third President of the United States. Certain issues reverberated through the generations from the Roman Catholic religiosity of the great-great-grandfather to the born-again evangelism of the great-great-grandson. Both believed in the fire-and-brimstone God of retribution. On politics, the two men differed. The great-great-grandfather, a strong Democrat, believed President Woodrow Wilson had “enacted more good legislation than did the Republican Party in all its time in power since the day of Lincoln,” whereas the great-great-grandson aligned himself to the hard right of the Republican Party, vehemently opposing abortion and enthusiastically endorsing the death penalty. For all his reprehensible views on race and eugenics, D. D. Walker was surprisingly emancipated toward suffragettes, and endorsed women’s right to vote. In contrast, his great-great-grandson said that admitting women to Yale in 1969 “changed the social dynamic for the worse.” Both strongly opinionated men might have found common ground on the restrictions of Prohibition, but one wonders if the elderly ancestor would have recommended the whipping post for his great-great-grandson, who during his drinking days was known to be verbally abusive to his wife.

Walker’s screed was published in the place that had given rise to Dred Scott, the slave whose lawsuit to obtain his freedom had precipitated the Civil War. Being the crossroads between North and South, and free states and slave states, gave St. Louis a colorful but contentious history. During the Civil War, Walker was a southern sympathizer who, according to family recollections, hired someone to join the Union Army in his place. As co-founder of Ely, Walker and Company, the largest wholesaler of dry goods west of the Mississippi, he spent the war years amassing a fortune supplying goods to J. C. Penney and other similar companies, and built the biggest warehouse in St. Louis, a block-long building on Washington Street south of Tucker. He and his son George Herbert Walker, known as Bert, bought land in Kennebunkport, Maine, so the family could escape the industrial heat of Missouri summers, and he wintered in Santa Barbara, traveling to California by private train. He drove motorcars and raced horses and became a pillar of St. Louis society. By the time of his death in 1918 at the age of seventy-eight, D. D. Walker had piloted his family into the Social Register, no small feat for the penniless son of a failed farmer from Bloomington, Indiana.

Several years before he died, he started giving away money; within four years he had disposed of $300,000 ($3.6 million in 2004). His two sons, who stood to inherit his great wealth, were incensed. They went to court in St. Louis to declare their father insane and obtain a writ of prohibition against any further disbursements of his estate. Bert Walker, who testified that his father was “squandering” his money, asked the court to find him mentally incompetent and to appoint a legal guardian to manage his financial affairs. D. D. Walker then sued his sons as well as Ely, Walker and Company for money he said he was owed. After Bert’s court testimony, the jury found that his seventy-year-old father “was of unsound mind.” This finding was overturned by a higher court judge for technical reasons, and the matter was returned to probate court for retrial in St. Louis. D.D. appealed to the state supreme court, arguing that since he lived in California, his sanity could not be tried in Missouri. The appeal of the jurisdictional issue was pending when D.D. died on October 4, 1918, in Kennebunkport. The next day
The St. Louis Republic
reported that his two sons, George Herbert and David Davis Junior, “were too ill last night to discuss funeral arrangements.”

To the very end of his life D. D. Walker believed he was a just man who gave every man a fair shake. He never acknowledged that life’s playing field might have been more level for the rich and healthy than for the poor and handicapped whom he wanted killed at birth. His large grave site in Calvary Cemetery, the resting place of St. Louis Roman Catholics, attests to his sense of self-righteousness. Flocked by elaborate granite crosses, adoring cherubs, and all sorts of praying angels, David Davis Walker is buried under the words he said he lived by: “All Through His Life He Tried to Give Everyone a Square Deal.”

His forty-three-year-old son, George Herbert Walker, the fifth of six children, defied his father at every turn. His anger toward the unforgiving D.D. drove Bert to the unbounded success that eventually made the Walker family the financial ballast of the Bush dynasty.

Bert Walker had attended school in England, at the behest of his ferociously religious father, who prayed he would return a priest. Instead, he came back a defiant anti-Catholic and fell in love with Lucretia “Loulie” Wear, a Presbyterian from St. Louis.

“If you marry her in a Presbyterian church, you’ll go straight to hell,” D. D. Walker told his son.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” replied Bert. “I’ll go straight to hell if I don’t marry her.”

Bert married her out of the Catholic Church, and his father refused to attend the wedding.

Bert rejected his father’s Democratic politics; he even turned his back on his own friend Franklin Roosevelt and joined the Republican Party.

D. D. Walker had boycotted the Union Pacific Railroad because he said its owner, “E. H. Harriman, was hogging all of the railroads in the country.” Bert Walker went into business with Harriman.

Bert abandoned his father’s dry-goods business to build his own investment empire, topping his father’s fortune many times over. He, too, drove motorcars, but his were Rolls-Royces. He became the first president of the Automobile Club of Missouri. He also raced horses, but surpassed his father by buying his own stables (Log Cabin Stud) to breed champions. He served as a New York state racing commissioner. He helped found the Racquet Club in St. Louis and the Deepdale Golf Club in Great Neck, Long Island. He became president of the U.S. Golf Association and donated the three-foot silver trophy for amateur golf that became known as the Walker Cup.

Even as a young married, he lived better than most. The census of 1900 shows that when Bert was twenty-five, he and his wife and one baby had three live-in servants—a maid, a nanny, and a cook. Years later Bert outgrew St. Louis, and he moved his wife, two daughters, four sons, and four servants to a sumptuous residence in New York City. He eventually added to the size of his father’s property in Kennebunkport, purchased a mansion on Long Island, New York, with marble floors, butlers, and two Rolls-Royces, and bought the ten-thousand-acre Duncannon Plantation in South Carolina, which he used for shooting parties every Thanksgiving. With his own private railroad cars, he lived like the Maharaja of Missouri.

A virtuoso wheeler-dealer, Bert Walker calibrated numbers faster than a riverboat gambler. Unhampered by business ethics, he embraced the frenzy of stock-market speculation and seized the financial advantages of short selling stocks, fee splitting, split-stock arbitrage, and buying on margin. He founded his own brokerage and ratcheted up commissions by trading on margin for securities that could then be highly leveraged. He made his fortune before insider trading became illegal. In 1929 he judged the stock market to be overpriced and sold short in the months before the crash, bolstering his riches. His business prospered so rapidly that before he was thirty, he was well known in financial circles for his ability to “make deals.”

One of his “first and biggest killings” occurred when the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway Company went into receivership. Bert arranged for G. H. Walker and Company to acquire its principal subsidiary, the New Orleans, Texas, and Mexico Railway. He took commissions for negotiating the acquisition and then for selling it later at a stupendous profit.

He never let anything stand in the way of making money, and that included political principles or religious beliefs. At the age of sixty-two, he was one of the Wall Streeters publicly rapped by then-Senator Harry S. Truman for “rampaging greed” and “the larger evil of money worship.” Bert flicked off the reprimand like a pesky mosquito and continued piling up large commissions from the various offices of G. H. Walker and Company in St. Louis, Clayton, and Kansas City, Missouri; Omaha, Nebraska; Waterloo, Iowa; Chicago; New York City; Philadelphia; White Plains, New York; Bridgeport, Waterbury, and Hartford, Connecticut; Springfield and Boston, Massachusetts; and Providence, Rhode Island.

Within a few years, Bert had built a financial empire that would become the family’s mother lode, bankrolling the fortunes of Walker and Bush sons and sons-in-law through the generations. At various times in various offices, the following members of the Walker-Bush tribe worked for G. H. Walker and Company: George Herbert Walker Sr., George Herbert Walker Jr., George Herbert Walker III, James Wear Walker, James Smith Bush, Louis Walker, John M. Walker, Jonathan James Bush, and Ray Carter Walker.

Like a dog marking his territory, Bert Walker left his name as his imprint: the Walker Cup; Walker’s Point in Maine; G. H. Walker and Company; and, not incidentally, his son George Herbert Walker Jr.

Bert became the amateur heavyweight-boxing champion of Missouri while in law school at Washington University. A man with an explosive temper, he head-butted his way through life, pummeling anyone who got in his way. “We left the holes in the ceiling in the dining room where Mr. Walker shot at a wasp that had stung him,” said Suzanne McMillan, whose family purchased Duncannon Plantation after World War II.

Burly and barrel-chested, he looked like a bull encased in a Hathaway shirt. He was not a man to be trifled with. “He was a tough old bastard,” said his granddaughter Elsie Walker. “His sons hated him.”

“It’s true,” said his youngest son, Louis Walker. “We were scared to death of him.”

Louis once made the mistake of showing up for a tennis match “slightly inebriated.” His father, who worshipped sports, was determined to jackhammer “a respect for the game” into the boy. To punish him for disregarding the rules of American lawn tennis, Bert sent Louis to work in the coal mines in Bradford Township, Pennsylvania, which delayed his graduation from Yale by two years. “In our family, life was based on athletics,” said Louis.

Bert sent all of his sons to Yale because the men in his wife’s socially prominent Presbyterian family, her brothers, had graduated from there: Joseph W. Wear (1899), James H. Wear (1901), and Arthur Y. Wear (1902). Bert felt his sons needed the best education and social entrée money could buy, but he ignored his daughters’ wishes to go to Vassar, because he felt that college was unnecessary for girls. “It’s not ladylike,” he told them. “It will just make you hard and opinionated.” After the girls graduated from Mary Institute, the elite all-girls school in St. Louis, Bert sent them to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, known as a finishing school for rich girls, and then to Paris for six months with their aunt so they could polish their social skills and become more valuable on the marriage market.

The two young women returned to St. Louis in the spring of 1919 because nineteen-year-old Nancy, the older, prettier, and more flamboyant of the sisters, had been selected to be First Maid to the Queen of Love and Beauty at the Veiled Prophet Ball. This was the equivalent of being named first runner-up in the Miss America pageant, the Mardi Gras carnival, and the Rose Bowl parade. “In its time, being the Veiled Prophet Ball Queen was probably the next-best thing to being crowned Queen of England,” said Ann Biraben, a native of St. Louis. “And being First Maid was almost as good as being Queen.”

This was the first Veiled Prophet Ball to be held since World War I, so St. Louis was gearing up for a huge social season. The entire city was swept up in the excitement of the extravaganza that lionized the young women who would make their bows to society. Everyone was invited to participate in the torchlight parade of floats and bands that preceded the invitation-only ball, and crowds lined up for six miles to watch the festivities. The society pages of both of the city’s newspapers covered the teas, suppers, luncheons, and cocktail parties beforehand in breathless detail; little girls growing up in St. Louis could not be blamed for wanting nothing more in life than to be selected by the mysterious Veiled Prophet as the Queen of Love and Beauty at the ball.

Responsibilities came with the title. Following her coronation, the Veiled Prophet Queen had to give up a year of college to devote herself to the daily social obligations of her reign. No Queen ever objected enough to give up the crown, although many years later Dorothy Walker, Nancy’s younger sister, said she found the entire social ritual “barbaric.”