The Hollywood Presidency of Warren G. Harding

Of no other president before Warren G. Harding could it have been said that he had an “early movie star quality,” declares James David Robenalt in “The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War.” In “The President’s Daughter,” the first tell-all memoir, published in 1927, Nan Britton, a Harding mistress by whom he had a child, describes growing up with an adoring attachment to him akin to the fan worship of a screen idol. Britton’s sentimental and sensationalist revelations, scoffed at by generations of biographers, suddenly gained credibility in 2015 when DNA testing proved her daughter was Harding’s.Britton’s father was a Harding friend, and she grew up in the nimbus of his charisma, regarding him, as millions of voters would later do, as not only a popular but an “ideal American.” She described “that silvery voice I so loved” in terms that fit perfectly the persona of leading man Ronald Colman. Britton would sometimes call the Harding home, and he would answer: “I would immediately become so confused and tremble so I thought he must sense it all from the other end of the wire.”In 1927, such sentences seemed like so much movie magazine gush. But Britton’s portrait of a sensitive and considerate man who emanated both decency and romance now looks quite different when measured against Mr. Robenalt’s access to an extensive archive of love letters written to Carrie Phillips, wife of Harding’s friend Jim Phillips, both residents of Marion, Ohio, where Harding began his professional and political career.Harding’s sexual liaisons have done much to obscure what Mr. Robenalt calls a “student and serious reader of history.” The wording is important: Harding saw himself as a student, not a teacher — not, in other words, a Woodrow Wilson whose reading of history lacked the nuance and humility that Harding brought to an understanding of national and international politics. Like Wilson, Harding was an amorous man, but Harding’s affairs with women were intimately connected with his political sensibility forming a personal and political nexus that no biographer of Harding has understood and that Mr. Robenalt only begins to broach.Harding had a powerful identification with living creatures that cannot be separated from his sensuality that seduced men and women and animals. Mr. Robenalt spends a paragraph on a black and tan dog, ”blind in one eye, deaf” and with a broken leg, the result of two automobile accidents. A lonely Harding, mourning his sister Mary’s recent death, and reminded of his mother’s death as well, solaced himself with the dog’s punctual visits every day for supper, “right on the dot, he was on the job.” Harding treated the dog like a constituent, inviting him into the house to “get his gratuity while I dined.” The appreciative Harding expressed his enjoyment and was bereft when the dog failed to show up after four days, and he learned his companion had died. “Really, I am sorry, though he was only the semblance of a dog after all his misfortunes.” What Harding shared with the women he loved was not so different from what he shared with those who voted for him and sought his favors, whatever their disabilities. Such was the case with the woman in Harding’s love letters.President Harding and his wife, Florence Harding, in 1919. Via Wikimedia CommonsCarrie Phillips, an ardent pro-German nationalist, may well have been a spy, as well as a demanding lover, urging and threatening Harding with exposure if he did not pay up and forsake politics. It is quite remarkable that for over a decade Harding continued to love this woman and tolerate her increasingly hostile requests. He took tremendous risks on her behalf and was reckless in writing so much to her and expecting her to destroy his letters, which she did not. He was a trial to her, he realized, promising more than he could deliver. He never left his ailing wife Florence, as Carrie expected him to do. Yet Carrie never quite gave up on him, and he did not give up on her, even as he cautioned her to beware of government agents he was sure followed her and him as well. His letters are devoid of arrogance, and only occasionally display petulance when he is irritated with her importuning.Judging by his letters, Harding was America’s most romantic president: “I need you, and want you, and ache for love’s employments, as you inspire them,” he wrote to Phillips. At the same time, in dealing with his volatile lover, Harding had to employ a diplomacy that he displayed in the political realm: “After the disaster of 1912 [TR’s devastating run that split his party that resulted in Wilson’s election], the watchword for Republicans was reconciliation. State leaders looked for a candidate who could act as a harmonizer among the factions, and Warren Harding seemed just such a man.” Harding welcomed and dreaded the role of harmonizer, which is why his fairly constant claims that he did not want to stay in politics were probably not just a sop to Carrie Phillips, who wanted him for herself. When he wrote to her “I am in politics up to my ears, with all its cares, worries, anxieties and heartaches, with all its excitements and compensations,” he could just as well have substituted the word love for the word politics. Politics and lovemaking formed a reciprocal bond. Harding thought of Americans as a “polyglot people,” which meant — as he wrote to his pro-German lover — he had to be open to the whole range of political opinion. I suspect he was doing more than just placating her when he wrote: “Hundreds have written me on behalf of Germany, but none so ably, so clearly and so forcefully as you.” That he would nonetheless join the Allied war effort was a consequence of a “solemn belief” that he knew she would reject, which is why he added: “But I do tell you I am sorry.”Harding managed — just — to sequester his affairs, not as Grover Cleveland did by cutting off the woman he seduced but by enchanting her in a gentlemanly fashion that again reminds me of Ronald Colman, Hollywood’s gentleman hero. Britton describes a scene that occurred years before she became Harding’s lover, when in her father’s company Harding recognized her and took off his hat: “Then with a bow that could not have been more gallant had I been a titled lady, and the same smile which has won even the hearts of his enemies, he bade me, ‘Good evening!’”President Harding, left, and Vice President Coolidge. Via Wikimedia Commons It all sounds so sentimental, so Hollywood, doesn’t it? Yet the scene comports with a recent biographies by Ryan S. Walters, “The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding” and John Dean, “Warren G. Harding.” Harding, elected with 60% of the vote, remained popular during his term of office. He understood, above all, that the country wanted normalcy (a favorite Harding word). He shrewdly sized up his arrogant, dictatorial predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, whose second term foundered on his refusal to work with Republicans to achieve his dream of a League of Nations. Harding dispensed with Wilson’s progressive promises, put the national budget in order, and tempered the anarchist wave of protests, commuting the sentence of socialist Eugene Debs and even meeting with him in the White House. He reversed Wilson’s segregationist policies, resumed hiring of African Americans in federal jobs, and met with important African American leaders. He spoke up for other minorities, supported a Jewish state in Palestine, and engaged in efforts on behalf of disarmament, slowing down the momentum toward another world war.So, what then of the Harding administration’s corruption? No biographer or historian has ever been able to prove that Harding knew or personally profited from corruption. That alone, of course, should not excuse a president from responsibility for so much pilfering of the nation’s wealth and trust, but Nan Britton’s memoir might actually help to explain what happened to Warren Harding. She lamented his “incarceration in the White House,” which made for an isolation, for what today we call a “bubble,” that belied what was actually happening to him and the country.Mr. Rollyson is the author of ‘Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero‘ and ‘Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History,’ forthcoming on Presidents’ Day 2027.

The Hollywood Presidency of Warren G. Harding

The Hollywood Presidency of Warren G. Harding

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