Potus Geeks Summer Reruns: Warren Harding and Nan Britton
Scandal is one of the first words one associates with the Presidency of Warren Harding. Some speculate that worry about scandal might have been what killed Harding, when he died unexpectedly on a western trip in 1923. Many of the scandals were the result of misplaced trust that Harding had for his friends. He once famously said, "“I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of my enemies in a fight. But my friends, my goddamned friends, they're the ones who keep me walking the floor at nights!" While most of the scandals of the Harding administration were caused by dishonest and greedy friends of the president, Harding himself frequently went offside when it came to the matter of his wedding vows.
Harding wasn't all bad, and in fact I've said a lot of nice things about Harding in this community, particularly about his courage in going to the heart of the south to speak out in favor of the rights of African-Americans. Harding is probably best known for those scandals that happened on his watch in which corrupt underlings pilfered from the public purse. The Teapot Dome scandal is the most famous. But Harding also had a propensity for scandal when it came to his dalliances with the opposite sex. On July 8, 1891, Warren Harding, who was then the editor and owner of the Marion (Ohio) Star newspaper, married divorcee Florence Kling, the daughter of his competitor Amos Kling. Florence was five years older than Harding and he called her "the Duchess" based on a character in a serial that ran in The New York Sun. The Duchess was a character who kept a close eye on the Duke and their money, running anything that required efficiency. Harding was candid about the fact that he had trouble keeping faithful to his wife. He once told a party of reporters at the National Press Club: "It's a good thing I am not a woman. I would always be pregnant. I can't say no."
Harding didn't just go offside with one woman. As his Attorney-General Harry Daugherty put it, "no president had more women scrapes" than Daugherty's boss. Harding reportedly had affairs with Susie Hodder (his wife's best friend from childhood - allegedly resulting in the birth of a daughter), with his wife's closest adult friend, Carrie Fulton Phillips (the affair lasted for 15 years and produced some salacious letters); and with his Senate aide, Grace Cross. Perhaps the most infamous was with a young woman named Nan Britton.
Nan Britton
Nan Britton was born in 1896 in Marion, Ohio, where Harding ran the local newspaper. Nan developed an obsession with Harding, who was a friend of her father. As a young girl, she posted pictures of Harding on her bedroom walls, cut out of local papers and magazines. As a teenager, she would hang around his Marion Daily Star building in Marion, Ohio, hoping to see him on his walk home from work. Nan's father, Dr. Britton, spoke to Harding about his daughter's adulation for him, and Harding met with her. Harding told her father that he had explained to Nan that some day she would find "the man of her dreams." At the time, Harding was involved in his affair with Carrie Phillips, wife of James Phillips, co-owner of a local department store.
When Nan graduated from high school in 1914, she moved to New York City, to begin a career as a secretary. It was at that time that she claimed she also began an intimate relationship with Harding. Harding was 31 years older than her. In his wonderful book 1920: The Year of Six Presidents (reviewed here), author David Pietrusza gives this amusing account of one of the encounters that then-Senator Harding had in 1917 with Ms. Britton in which their amorous encounter was interrupted by two hotel detectives (told at page 79 of the book):
It was not the most romantic of experiences. Shortly after, the phone rang. "You've got the wrong number" Harding barked into the receiver. There was a hard knock at the door. Two men stormed in demanding Nan's name. "Tell them the truth' Harding balefully advised. "They've got us."
He sat on the bed, pleading with the intruders. "I'll answer for both, won't I? Let this poor little girl go." They curtly informed him he should have considered her safety before registering for a room. They asked her age. Harding lied "she's twenty-two" he said. Nan interrupted to say she was really twenty, another lie.
Every time Harding raised an objection, the men snapped "tell that to the judge." They were about to call the police, when one of them picked up the Senator's hat. Inside, he read the gold inscription "W. G. Harding." Nan thought the two men became instantly calm, even respectful.
The embarrassed couple finished dressing and was escorted to a side entrance. Harding slipped one man twenty dollars. Safely inside a taxi, he turned to his paramour confiding "Gee Nan, I never thought I would get out of that for under a thousand dollars."
Following Harding's death, Britton wrote a book about her affair with Harding entitled The President's Daughter, published in 1928, in which she claimed she had been Harding's mistress throughout his presidency, and that Harding was the father of her daughter, Elizabeth Ann (1919-2005). In one passage in the book, Britton writes about their making love in a coat closet in the executive office of the White House.
In the book, Nan Britton claimed that, for six and a half years, she and Harding maintained their affair, meeting wherever possible, including in Harding’s Senate office. It was there Ms. Britton wrote that they conceived Elizabeth Ann, who was born in October 1919. Harding never met his daughter but provided financial support. He and Ms. Britton continued their relationship after he became president.
According to Britton, Harding had promised to support their daughter, but after his sudden death in 1923, first lady Florence Harding refused to honor the obligation. Britton claimed that she wrote the book to earn money to the support her daughter and to champion the rights of illegitimate children. She was the plaintiff in a lawsuit in which she alleged that Harding was the father of her child, but she was unable to provide any concrete evidence to support her allegation. Her credibility was called into question by vicious personal attacks made by former Congressman Grant Mouser (who practiced law in Marion) during her cross-examination. Nan Britton had a difficult time proving her relationship because she had destroyed her own letters with Harding at his request and because Harding's family insisted that the president was sterile.
In 1964, the discovery of more than 250 love letters between Harding and Carrie Phillips of Marion Ohio gave further support to Britton's claims. At that time Britton was living in Chicago, but she refused to grant an interview. In the 1980s, Britton and her extended family moved to Oregon, where her three grandchildren currently live. Nan Britton died in 1991 in Sandy, Oregon, where she had lived during the last years of her life. She insisted until her death that Harding was her daughter's father.
In August of 2015, Jim Blaesing, Nan Britton's grandson, decided to have his DNA tested to determine if he had any of Harding's DNA. The tests did indeed confirm that Nan Britton’s daughter, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was in fact Harding’s biological child. For many years after Harding's death, Nan Britton was vilified and denounced as a someone who was lying to get money and accused of waging a campaign of falsehoods against the Harding’s. It's unfortunate that her vindication came 24 years after her death.
Dr. Peter Harding, a grandnephew of the president, instigated the DNA testing that confirmed paternity of the child. As a boy growing up, Peter Harding believed what his family had told him. In 2015 he told Peter Baker of the New York Times, “My father said this couldn’t have happened because President Harding had mumps as a kid and was infertile and the family really vilified Nan Britton.” Later, Dr. Harding and his cousin, Abigail Harding, decided to pursue the matter. They made contact with James Blaesing, a grandson of Nan Britton and son of the daughter she claimed to have conceived with the president. Testing by AncestryDNA, a division of the genealogical website Ancestry.com found that Mr. Blaesing was a second cousin to Peter and Abigail Harding, meaning that Elizabeth Ann Blaesing had to be President Harding’s daughter. According to Stephen Baloglu, an executive at Ancestry, “The technology that we’re using is at a level of specificity that there’s no need to do more DNA testing. This is the definitive answer.”
According to James Blaesing, Nan Britton was devastated by Harding's sudden death. He told Peter Baker, “She loved him until the day she died. When she talked about him, she would get the biggest smile on her face. She just loved this guy. He was everything.” He also remembered how his grandmother was belittled and scorned by many people. His mother, who died in 2005, was not interested in seeking DNA evidence confirming paternity. But her son felt differently. He said, “I wanted to prove who she was and prove everyone wrong.”