Oil! by Upton Sinclair

President Harding died; and Dan Irving wrote Bunny the gossip from Washington. The old gentleman had been reluctant to take the oil men's money, so Barney Brockway and his "fixer" had fixed things for him -- they had "carried an account" in a Wall Street brokerage, a method whereby business men make life comfortable for statesmen. Every now and then they would bring the old gentleman a bundle of liberty bonds which they had "won" for him. And now his widow had found several hundred thousand dollars of these bonds in a safe deposit box, and become convinced that he had meant them for another woman, and was in such a fury about it that she was telling all her friends, and giving great glee to Washington gossip.

And then the new president: a little man whose fame was based upon the legend that he had put down a strike of the Boston policemen, when the truth was that he had been hiding in his hotel room, with a black eye presented to him by the mayor of the city. His dream in life, as reported by himself, was to keep a store, and that was the measure of his mentality. He didn't know what to say, and so the newspapers called him a "strong silent man."