Irwin H. “Ike” Hoover, the Chief Usher at the White House for more than forty years described the private Harding as a ladies’ man – but a “sporting ladies man.” It is a term few have used in the last half century, but the idea needs no explanation. Harding liked fast trotters from the beginning.
Warren G. Harding and his Duchess
Historians have always wondered why Warren G. Harding ever married Florence Kling DeWolfe. She wasn’t bad looking, but she was no beauty. She was the daughter of a wealthy man, but they were estranged. She was five years his senior and a divorcée in a time when divorce was stigmatic. And she is said to have had a whining and unpleasant voice.
It is easier to understand why she married him. He was not only a good looking, well-built fellow of twenty-five, but he was also one of the most popular men in town. He had a genial, hail-fellow-well-met personality, and made friends easily. His father once said of him, that “it was a good thing Warren wasn’t a woman or he would always be in the family way.” He couldn’t say no. Florence pursued. He couldn’t say no. Or if he could, he didn’t.
Their marriage was a mismatch from the beginning. She was nagging and domineering by nature, which is why he nicknamed her “Duchess.” His friends said that Florence ran everything but the family car. Their marriage was also complicated by Florence’s very real and very serious kidney ailment, which would flare up from time to time, and keep her bedridden for weeks and even months, sometimes near death. Given the nature of her disease, the marital side of their marriage was curtailed. They would share a room, but not a bed.
If he had been a ladies’ man prior to Florence, he now became a chronic philanderer. Even though the couple stayed together for thirty years, it was a difficult and unhappy marriage for both parties. As President, he once confided to a friend that his life “had been hell.” And staff at the White House would recall the shouting matches between the couple.
Warren Harding and Carrie Phillips
Jim and Carrie Phillips were Harding neighbors in Marion, Ohio. Jim owned a dry-goods store downtown, and was a regular advertiser in the newspaper that Harding owned. Carrie and the Duchess had become good friends. The two couples entertained each other, socialized frequently, and even traveled to Europe together. Unknown to Jim Phillips (and to Florence – at least for a long time), Warren and Carrie Phillips had fallen in love, and were carrying on a torpid and steamy love affair. In the days before email and texting, the journalistically inclined Harding exchanged dozens of surprisingly graphic letters with Mrs. Phillips.
Years passed before the Duchess learned of their treachery: a knife in her heart and a dagger in her back. After the great row, Harding promised he would not see Carrie again. He did not keep that vow. Their romance would be somewhat curtailed, but the relationship would last more than fifteen years, most of the time with Harding still swearing his eternal love, and Carrie carping about something.
Carrie Phillips was no great prize either. True, she was better looking and younger than Florence, but like the Duchess, she had a shrewish disposition, and was very demanding. She also had become a great admirer of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Her outspoken admiration did not abate, despite the hostilities of the First World War. Harding, by this time a U.S. Senator, cautioned her more than once to curtail her overt semi-fascistic enthusiasm, but it fell on deaf ears. By the time Harding was a candidate for President in 1920, the Republican Party had to cough up a large sum of money to send Jim Phillips and his German-loving wife on a two-year fact-finding tour of the Far East to look for trade agreements. The politicians were afraid that private letters would fall into public hands and embarrass everyone.
Warren Harding and Nan Britton
With the Phillipses safely spirited out of the country, and with other romantic (albeit less serious) letters ransomed from various other Harding amours, Warren and Florence Harding were on their way to the White House. But unbeknownst to just about everyone except the intimately concerned, Senator Harding had become involved with a young woman who had lived down the street from them in Marion.
Always a precocious type, according to those who knew her, Nan Britton had had a crush on the handsome middle-aged Harding since she was a child. Now a young woman of nineteen, she wrote to him for help getting a secretarial position in New York. The Senator was happy to oblige with a letter of recommendation – and an offer to take her to lunch next time he was in New York. That opportunity presented itself shortly thereafter, and lunch became a “matinee”. A few more matinees became a baby. And the matinees continued into the White House anteroom.
None of this however, was made public, nor did Florence learn about it until after Harding died and Britton came looking for child support. Harding had been slipping her funds for several years. The Duchess did not believe her. She insisted that some young fellow was responsible, and that Miss Britton was only after their money – like all the others. (And the Hardings never had that much money to begin with!) DNA and paternity tests were long in the future. A few years later, Nan Britton wrote a tell-all book about their affair.
Florence Harding died only a year after her husband. Carrie Phillips lived to be an old lady, financially supported by a stipend from the Republicans. The Harding-Phillips letters were tied up in estate-legalistics for more than fifty years. They have only recently been discovered and made available to historians. Nan Britton lived to be ninety-five and never married, remaining true to the memory of Warren G. Harding.
Sources:
- Anthony, Carl Sferrazza - Florence Harding: The First Lady, the Jazz Age, and the Death of America's Most Scandalous President – William Morrow & Co., 1998
- Britton, Nan – The President’s Daughter, Elizabeth Ann Guild, 1927
- Irwin Hood Hoover, Forty-Two Years in the White House, 1934, Greenwood Press (reprint,) 1974
- Robenalt, James David - The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War – Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
Feather Schwartz Foster - Feather Schwartz Foster, author-historian. Making the First Ladies come to life.
