‘The world changed because of this relationship.’ — Harding historian James D. Robenalt
Long-dead presidents don’t often make their way back into the national news headlines, but Ohioan Warren G. Harding, the nation’s 29th chief executive, did just that this week when a trove of steamy love letters he wrote to a girlfriend were released to the public by the Library of Congress, after many years of being hidden away. Today, Jessica Wehrman of our Washington Bureau writes about the letters, the reaction to them, and their possible impact on the less-than-stellar reputation and legacy of President Harding.
In the years after President Warren G. Harding’s death in 1923, while he was still in office, most of his papers disappeared. As the story goes, his wife, Florence, had burned them all.
With a dearth of source material, rumor flourished. Harding, people wrote, had multiple affairs, including with a woman who wrote a tell-all 1927 memoir professing to have borne his love child. Harding, they whispered, had committed suicide. Harding, they murmured, had been poisoned by his jealous wife.
“Basically, there was no one to speak for Harding,” said Library of Congress archivist Karen Linn Femia, who said history has proven most of those rumors to be false. In fact, she said, most of Harding’s papers were closed for 40 years by the Harding Memorial Association before they were opened for research in 1964.
Still, scandal followed the Marion native to his grave and misinformation marred his reputation. History remembers Harding primarily as the president linked to the Teapot Dome Scandal, in which Harding’s secretary of the Interior was convicted of accepting bribes and illegal loans in exchange for leasing public oil fields to cronies.
Harding’s Attorney General — Harry Daugherty of Ohio — and his Veterans Bureau director had scandals of their own. Nobody ever linked Harding directly to them, but after his death from a reported heart attack, few were willing to put their political capital behind a man who could not defend himself.
Largely forgotten was what the president himself had done during his two short years in office.
Harding, a man whose abbreviated presidency resulted in the country’s first formal budgeting process, cut the government budget in half in two years. He helped the nation emerge from a postwar economic decline. He championed the eight-hour work day and backed anti-lynching laws. And he organized the Washington Naval Conference, a global conference that limited the number of battleships for the major world powers in the aftermath of World War I.
Now, it’s possible the very thing that Harding’s family hoped to keep a secret may be a key to restoring his legacy.
Some 1,000 pages of letters between Harding and his lover, Carrie Fulton Phillips, released to the public last week, reveal a man with intense ardor, but also with more intelligence and thoughtfulness than the public has perceived.
The letters don’t span Harding’s presidency — he and Phillips cut off their affair before then — but do cover some of his tenure as U.S. senator.
The letters — occasionally seamy, with Harding writing of Phillips’ “thrilling lips … your matchless breasts … your incomparable embrace” — also include important historical context that refutes Harding’s reputation as a lightweight.
“It is astonishing, the amount of misinformation about Harding,” said Library of Congress Manuscript Division Chief James Hutson.
The letters show a U.S. senator who faced enormous pressure — from both his lover and his German-American constituents back home — to oppose the U.S. entry into World War I, but who stared down those foes and voted for it anyway.
And they shine a light on Harding as a person.
Ohio attorney and historian James D. Robenalt, author of “The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage during the Great War,” recalls Harding writing Phillips about a partially blind, three-legged dog, who would show up at Harding’s back door. Harding would reliably feed the dog, and the dog came to expect Harding’s affection.
“These are the sorts of details that give you a feeling for the person,” Robenalt said.
It’s this sort of information that provide some relief to Richard Harding, the president’s grand-nephew.
His family remembers Harding as “Uncle Warren,” the man who taught his nieces and nephews to ride bikes and throw baseballs, who left $10,000 to each niece and nephew for their education, whose wife Florence was kind-hearted but had an occasional tendency to be a bit brusque.
The family does not deny Harding’s long love affair with Carrie Fulton Phillips, but feels a bit squeamish about his occasionally explicit letters being put in the public domain. Historians are skeptical about the veracity of claims by Nan Britton — the author of the infamous 1927 tell-all — that Harding fathered her daughter.
“It is our hope and your responsibility to not be distracted by the sexually explicit prose that fills parts of these letters, but instead to use all the information in them to reassess the measure of the man,” Richard Harding said. “Warren Harding does not need protection. He needs honest, hard-working and fair historians to tell us the story as they see it.”
What the letters do reflect is an incredibly passionate romance between Phillips and Harding. Harding’s wife, Florence, was very ill with kidney disease, and it’s clear that he saw Phillips as a “sexual outlet,” said Robenalt.
And maybe more than that.
“This woman appears to be the love of his life,” he said.
But that love had repercussions. He said that Harding’s political ambitions may have been tempered, briefly, by his passionate love affair with the wife of one of his good friends from Marion.
Robenalt argues that Harding could’ve been elected president as early as 1916. Instead, Republicans nominated Charles Evan Hughes, later Harding’s secretary of state, a “lackluster candidate” who was “not a very good campaigner.” Woodrow Wilson beat him in Ohio by 90,000 votes. Those 24 electoral votes gave Wilson the presidency.
“It would’ve been a landslide the other way for Harding had he won,” Robenalt said.
And had that happened, Robenalt said, Harding might not have gotten the United States involved in World War I. The reason he voted for war, Robenalt said was “only to protect us.”
He said Harding was very clear: The U.S. government should not force democracy on the world — especially in places not ready for it. It was a message that might’ve resonated during Vietnam and during the most recent war in Iraq.
“The real issue is, ‘do we have the right to force other people to become a democracy?’” Robenalt said. “He said no.”
Why didn’t Harding run in 1916? Robenalt theorizes that Harding’s love affair — and Phillips’ disapproval for his political aspirations — may have deterred it.
“The world changed because of this relationship,” he said.
And had it been exposed, it could’ve been devastating for Harding — not just because of his infidelity, but because of Phillips’ deep, and very vocal, sympathy for the Germans during the Great War.
In fact, the two fought bitterly over Harding’s April 1917 Senate vote to enter World War I.
“You say … that I ‘have helped to betray my country,’” Harding wrote in a letter believed to have been written shortly after that vote (Harding rarely dated his letters). “It does not lessen my ordinarily high regard for your opinion to reply that I have voted in the best conscience and highest sense of duty which I am capable of feeling. … A vote is an inalterable record — no dodging, no escape. … If it is a blunder, if it is a betrayal, I shall have to pay.”
At another point, he begged her to keep her pro-German sentiments a little more discreet.
“Be prudent in talking to others,” he wrote. “Remember your country is in war, and things are not normal, and toleration is not universal, and justice is not always discriminating.”
Phillips spent three years living in Germany before World War I, and became so pro-German that at one point, military intelligence contacted then-Sen. Harding in 1917 to ask whether she might be a Germany spy. Harding defended her, replying that the “very openness” of Phillips’ praise for Germany would “seem to establish its innocuous character.”
“He never backed away from her,” Femia said.
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