-Caveat Lector-
An excerpt from:
The Ohio Gang
Charles L. Mee, Jr.�1981
M. Evans and Company, Inc.
216 East 49th Street
New York, New York 10017
ISBN 0-87131-340-5
218 pps � out-of-print/one edition
--[5]--
XIII.
A Girl on His Arm
DURING HIS TERM as senator, Harding received a letter from a Marion girl who
had moved to New York City: "I wonder if you will remember me; my father was
Dr. Britton, of Marion, Ohio.... I have been reading of the imperative demand
for stenographers and typists throughout the country. . . ."
Harding did indeed remember her: Nan Britton, the teenage girl who had fallen
in love with his campaign posters in 1910, during his ill-fated attempt to
take the nomination for governor of Ohio, when she was a fourteen-year-old
schoolgirl, and he was forty-four. Her infatuation with the older man had
become so problematical that her father had even called on Harding to see, as
man to man, whether they could find some way to redirect her impossible
feelings.
In her early twenties, she was as insouciant as ever, still with plump
cheeks, a flirtatious manner of looking out the corners of her eyes, an ample
body, a breathtaking innocence, and a wish simply to throw herself on a man,
be told entirely what to do, and be taken care of.
Harding could hardly reply quickly enough. He did remember her, "you may be
sure of that, and I remember you most agreeably, too." He mentioned that
there was "every probability" of his being in New York the next week and
would look her up, that he would "take pleasure in doing it."
My dear Mr. Harding:
It was good to know that you remembered me; and I appreciate your kind
interest and prompt response.... I will say frankly that I have had little
practical experience. . . . I am hoping that you will be in New York next
week and that I can talk with you.... There is so much I want to tell you;
and I am sure that I could give you a better idea of my ability-or rather the
extent of my ability, for it is limited-and you could judge for yourself as
to the sort of position I could competently fin.
He phoned her from the Manhattan Hotel, at Madison Avenue and 42nd Street.
"He was standing on the steps of the hotel," Nan recalled, "when I reached
there." They sat in the hotel lounge and reminisced, touching upon her
childhood infatuation with him�"and he seemed immensely pleased that I still
retained such feelings. I could not help being perfectly frank."
Some sort of convention was going on in New York at the time, Harding told
Nan, and he "confessed that he was obliged to take the one room available in
the Manhattan Hotel-the bridal chamber! He asked me to come up there with him
so that we might continue our conversation without interruptions or
annoyances.
"The bridal chamber of the Manhattan Hotel was, to me, a very lovely room,
and ... we had scarcely closed the door behind us when we shared our first
kiss.... I shall never, never forget how Mr. Harding kept saying, after each
kiss, "God! ... God, Nan!' in high diminuendo, nor how he pleaded in tense
voice, 'Oh, dearie, tell me it isn't hateful to you to have me kiss you!' "
The bed, said Nan, remained undisturbed. Between kisses, they found time to
discuss her immediate need for a secretarial job, and Harding had become
somewhat "less inclined to recommend me in Washington." He would think of
something else. Meanwhile, he tucked a thirty dollar bill in her new silk
stocking, and then they parted.
On his next visit to New York, Harding took Nan with him to a speaking
engagement. In the taxi as they drove, Harding asked how fast she thought she
could take dictation. She thought she could not go too fast.
"Well, look here," said Harding, "I'll dictate a letter to you and you tell
me whether you 'get' all of it."
Harding dictated: "My darling Nan: I love you more than the world, and I want
you to belong to me. Could you belong to me, dearie? I want you ... and I
need you so. . . ."
Nan silenced him "with the kisses he pleaded for."
Harding took her at once to the Empire Building at 71 Broadway, to the office
of the chairman of the board of the United States Steel Corporation, judge
Elbert H. Gary. judge Gary introduced Nan to the comptroller of the company,
saying: "Mr. Filbert, I want to help Senator Harding to help this young
lady." She was hired.
On the way back down in the elevator, Harding whispered to Nan, "Now, do you
believe that I love you?"
Back in the bridal chamber at the Manhattan Hotel, they cuddled together in a
big armchair. "I love you, dearie," Harding said. "We were made for each
other, Nan." Still, the bed remained undisturbed.
Her job was in Chicago�a safer place than either Washington or New York. They
met several times more, when Harding's speaking engagements took him to the
Middle West, and Nan coyly managed to slip away from his suggestions, and,
finally, his direct question: "Dearie, 'r y' going t' sleep with me?"
On one train ride together, they shared a berth. "I had early reached this
conclusion," Nan said: "People got married and undressed and slept together;
therefore, one must be undressed in order for any harm to come to them. I
remember that this belief was so strong in my mind that when, during our ride
together from Connersville to Chicago, I experienced sweet thrills from just
having Mr. Harding's hands upon the outside of my nightdress, I became
panic-stricken. I inquired tearfully whether he really thought I would have a
child right away. Of course this absurdity amused him greatly, but the fact
that I was so ignorant seemed to add to his cherishment of me for some
reason. And I loved him so dearly."
In July of 1 917, Harding and Nan met once again in New York and repaired,
this time, to a hotel on Broadway in the Thirties. 71 remember so well I wore
a pink linen dress which was rather short and enhanced the little-girl look
which was often my despair.... There were no words going up in the elevator.
"The day was exceedingly warm and we were glad to see that the room which had
been assigned to us had two large windows. The boy threw them open for us and
left. The room faced Broadway, but we were high enough not to be bothered by
street noises. We were quite alone."
They had shared a bed so often by this time, Nan was so truly fond of him,
her resistance had become too tedious a burden for her to maintain, it was
hot, and, somehow, the standards of brisker days dissolved.
"I became Mr. Harding's bride�as he called me�on that day." If it seemed
anticlimatic� evoking no rapturous reminiscences on Nan's part-at least she
was not dismayed. She had moved to a job in New York then, and Harding would
come up from Washington at least once a week to spend the night with Nan in
one shabby hotel or another, and Nan's passion did not fade. Often, when she
wrote to him from the little table next to her bed in a room she rented in
the apartment of an older couple, she would look up into an oval mirror above
her writing table, "and smile at the girl who smiled back at me knowing, as I
knew, that she was the sweetheart of the man who was to me easily the most
desirable man in all the world. I studied the features of this girl in the
mirror ... minutely, to discover for myself just why he had chosen to love
her! Sometimes ... I would glance up and catch the soft lights in the eyes of
the girl in the mirror which were the tell-tale lights of worshipping love or
languishing passion."
Sometimes they would meet outside New York, if Harding had a speaking
engagement somewhere else. He would write to Nan, enclosing money, and give
her gentle but exact instructions about just which train to take, when and
where to arrive, how to register.
"I shall never forget," she said of one such meeting, "how the sun was
streaming in at the windows in the hotel when Mr. Harding opened the door in
his pajamas in answer to my rather timid knock. His face was all smiles as he
closed the door and took me in his arms. 'Gee, Nan, I'm s'glad t'see you!' he
exclaimed. I just loved the way he lapsed into the vernacular when we were
alone together.... We strolled out into the country.... He could have chosen
no lovelier spot than the sunny meadow where we spent the morning. It sloped
gently down to a winding stream, and on one side there was a thick wood. The
ground was soft and the grass high. . . ."
Once they met in New Jersey, where Harding was to give a speech at the armory
in Elizabeth. They were to meet before he spoke, but Nan was late; and,
afterwards, he said, he had to get back to Washington. But, Nan asked,
couldn't she then ride back down to Washington on the train with him? "Why,
dearie, they're stopping a special train for me�a through train�and I
couldn't explain having you with me. Now you take the first train back to New
York and I'll be over soon, I promise you!"
"Which I did, of course," Nan recalled. "And he kept his promise."
Their times together were usually brief, but occasionally Harding would be
able to spend the whole afternoon and evening with Nan�as he did one time in
the Senate Office Building in Washington. Sometimes he would arrive in New
York unexpectedly as he did once in midwinter, asking Nan if she could get
the afternoon off Nan told her boss that her sweetheart had arrived
unexpectedly. Her boss knew, she said, "as everybody else in the office knew,
of course, that I had a sweetheart who lived in Washington. I usually
referred to him as 'my man.' "
She borrowed the apartment of a friend, and Harding arrived, getting off the
elevator on the floor below, to allay any suspicions on the part of the
elevator man, and they spent "a most intimate afternoon. How indelible," said
Nan, "my memory of Mr. Harding sitting on the day bed, his back against the
wall, holding me in his arms and looking down at me with a smile that was so
sweet that it made me want to cry from sheer contentment! 'Happy, dearie?' he
asked.."
"How I loved," Nan said, "to hear him say 'dearie'!"
They went to the theater often. One night they saw Al Jolson in Sinbad, the
Sailor at the Winter Garden. Nan did not much like the show and betrayed her
impatience by starting to put on her gloves and her wrap. "'Where are you
going, Nan?' Mr. Harding asked in gentle rebuke. If ever there was anyone
thoughtful of others, it was Warren Harding, and it is likely that, being a
speaker himself, he wished to extend all possible courtesy and attentiveness
to others who held the stage."
>From time to time they talked about how wonderful it would be to have a
child, concluding, of course, that such a thing was strictly impossible.
Harding had never had a child, and he told Nan that he had really wanted to
adopt one, but Mrs. Harding would not hear of it. "I used to think," said
Nan, "Mr. Harding might have liked to adopt me, though he never said so to
me. However, he spoke very freely to me about what he would do if Mrs.
Harding were to pass on�he wanted to buy a place for us and live in the
country, and often during those days Mr. Harding said to me, 'Wouldn't that
be grand, Nan? You'd make such a darling wife!'"
He gave her presents, of money or boxes of candy, and they would go out to
after-theater suppers that were "so sweetly intimate and it was a joy just to
sit and look at him." He would put especially choice morsels of food on her
plate, caring for her as for a daughter, and occasionally she would catch his
attention of a sudden, and he would say, "That's a very becoming hat, Nan,"
or "God, Nan, you're pretty!" And, when they were apart, he wrote her
letters, wonderful letters, forty and sixty pages long.
Unlike Carrie, Nan did not resent Harding's preoccupation with getting ahead
as a politician. On the contrary, she always told him that she thought he
would one day be president. She loved more than anything to think what an
important man he was, how powerful, how famous. She loved it especially when
they would be leaving a restaurant, and she would hear one of the diners
exclaim, "There goes Harding!"
=====
XIV.
The Available Man
ANY AMERICAN BOY might grow up to be president of the United States, but when
it comes time to choose a candidate to run for the office, some men seem to
be more available than others. Any man over the age of thirty-five, who is
not in jail, who has not been convicted, or recently convicted, of a crime,
who has been married but not divorced, is, perhaps, somewhat more available
for office than others. A man who has proven himself a loyal worker for one
of the two major parties is certainly more available than others, however;
and any Ohioan with these qualifications in Harding's day would have been
even more available, since Ohio was the presidential state. Any Ohioan with
these qualifications who held a major elective office, whose political
adversaries back home had recently been defeated for reelection, who had
taken pains to be cordial to all factions back home, would be among the most
available men�and, in a time that the Democratic president of the United
States, Woodrow Wilson, was concluding a hopeless, pointless bloody, stupid
war, any Republican politician with all these qualifications was so available
as almost to have it.
The trick for a politician is to announce his availability, and Harding
managed that by resorting to the old device of starting a rumor by denying
it. "Honestly," he wrote to one of his old pals in the Ohio legislature, "I
would not have (the presidency] if I could reach out and grasp it, and I
really do not want any of my friends to promote it in any way.... I find it
difficult to make a good many people believe that one can feel this way. . .
. Of course, I am human enough to enjoy having friends who think well enough
of me to suggest me for the position, and I confess some pleasure in knowing
that events have so broken thus far that I should attract some favorable
mention, but when it comes down to serious consideration I am wholly truthful
when I say that I had rather no mention were made whatever."
If an available man has decided to take this passive approach to the
presidency, rather than, as others have done, to grab at it, then he must sit
back and wait for a booster to come along and promote his candidacy, and he
must take (without seeming to want to) whatever booster he can get. Of all
the promoters who came his way, the best that Harding could attract without
encouragement was Harry Daugherty.
Daugherty, a grabber by temperament, thought Harding was a hopelessly
dimwitted, backward fellow who had to be shaped into a presidential candidate
against his will-and afterward, once Daugherty had got the presidential
campaign underway, he took full credit for being a kingmaker. "I found him,"
Daugherty said of Harding, "sunning himself, like a turtle on a log, and I
pushed him into the water."
The campaign that Daugherty thought he designed and forced on Harding was the
classic Ohio strategy: to hang back, help maneuver the convention into a
deadlock, and take the nomination as the natural compromise candidate from
that great presidential state in the middle of America, Ohio.
The great obstacle to this strategy was Teddy Roosevelt, who was willing, for
the sake of being elected president again, to scuttle the Progressives and
become a loyal Republican once more. If Roosevelt wanted the nomination, no
one was more available than he was, and Harding took pains to ingratiate
himself with Roosevelt, writing complimentary letters to the old Rough Rider
until Roosevelt finally invited Harding to a meeting to consider ways in
which the old Republican party might be brought back together again. "We did
not dwell on the differences of 1912," Harding said after the meeting, "for
that was an old story."
In January of 1919, Teddy Roosevelt died. "I have some ideas," Daugherty
wrote Harding on the day of the funeral, "about this thing now which I will
talk over with you." Harding wrote an old friend in Ohio that "the death, of
Col. Roosevelt will somewhat change the plans of some Republicans of Ohio,
especially in their attitude toward state organization. I may be
over-confident about the situation, but I think we are going to be able to
organize without any serious friction." That is to say, Harding now expected,
with the Roosevelt faction in Ohio leaderless, to keep the Ohio organization
solidly behind him as the favorite son candidate for 1920.
Harding delivered a eulogy to the Ohio state legislature: before Roosevelt
died, said Harding, the great man had spoken from his heart, privately, to
Harding. "Harding," he had said, "we have all got to get together and restore
the Republican party to power in order to save this great country of ours."
Roosevelt, Harding mused, had really been "less the radical than he ofttimes
appeared." He had been, really, it might be said, more a champion of party
harmony and loyalty.
Daugherty, meanwhile, took to the road and called on the political bosses of
key states. Daugherty did not ask any of the bosses to support Harding
outright. Harding did not wish to stand out against the wishes of any of the
party leaders. Harding wanted the leaders to do whatever they wished.
Daugherty asked only this: if a fellow's first choice seemed unable to get
the nomination, then Harding would merely like to be second choice. He would
like to be everyone's second choice.
"Truly, my dear Reily," Harding wrote to an old friend, "I do not wish my
friends to make any effort to make me a candidate.... I know better than some
who over-estimate both my ability and my availability.... I do not wish to be
considered in connection with the nomination for our Party."
"I expect," he wrote, tirelessly, to another old friend, "it is very possible
that I would make as good a President as a great many men who are talked of
for that position. . . . At the same time I have such a sure understanding of
my own inefficiency that I should really be ashamed to presume myself fitted
to reach out for a place of such responsibility. More than that, I would not
think of involving my many good friends in the tremendous tasks of making a
Presidential campaign."
To another friend, he wrote, "I cannot for the life of me see why anybody
would deliberately shoulder the annoyance and worries and incessant trials
incident to a campaign for nomination and election to . .
=====
XV.
A Blessed, Though Quiet, Event
IT WAS TOWARD the end of February 1919, that Nan became certain beyond any
doubt "that I was to become the mother of Warren Harding's child.... I wrote
Mr. Harding as soon as my belief was confirmed in my own mind.
"The effect of Mr. Harding's letters whenever I was perturbed over anything
was to calm me, and he wrote that this trouble was not so very serious and
could be handled."
Nan arrived in Washington and went to the Hotel Willard, where Harding joined
her in her room. "I remember well, how, in spite of the fact that his
forehead was wet and he showed other signs of nervousness, he said in the low
voice which always soothed me, 'We must go at this thing in a sane way,
dearie, and we must not allow ourselves to be nervous over it.' "
The way he suggested handling the situation was to give Nan a small bottle of
Dr. Humphrey's No. 11 tablets. Nan was suspicious of the medicine; she had
not thought of inducing an abortion so much as of having Harding's child. He
took her onto his lap and talked, as he often had before, of the day when he
would be finished with politics, of getting a farm with dogs and horses,
chickens and pigs, and, of course, a bride.
"As he talked his voice grew tense. His hands trembled visibly. I took one of
them in mine and held it tightly.... I had never seen him so moved, so shaken
'and I would take you our there, Nan darling, as-my-wife. . He freed his hand
with sudden force and grasped both my arms tightly. 'Look at me, dearie!' he
cried, 'you would be my wife, wouldn't you? You would marry me, Nan? Oh,
dearie, dearie,' brokenly, 'if I only could ... if we only could have our
child- together!' This last came as a hushed exclamation, almost a prayer,
scarcely audible. The yearning of a heart laid bare! I nodded wordlessly. The
air seemed sacred.
"When he spoke again it was as if he had returned to stern realities.... He
smiled at me sadly. 'Would be grand, wouldn't it, dearie?' . He repeated it
and looked out the window at his left. The voice grew stern again; he did not
smile now; only just turned and looked at me hard as a man might who is
trying not to cry....
Nonetheless, Nan went ahead and had their child, a daughter. Near the end of
her pregnancy, Nan repaired to the Hotel Monmouth in Asbury Park, New Jersey,
just a block from the oceanand then, feeling awkward at the hotel, to a
private rooming house nearby. The child was born on the afternoon of October
22, and Nan could not have been more pleased.
When her daughter was six weeks old, Nan went into New York to do some
Christmas shopping, and to phone Hardingsomething she felt she could not do
from her rooming house in Asbury Park. She felt weak and inexpressibly sad,
and when she got Harding on the phone, he said no more than "Hello," and she
began to cry. She asked him when he felt she might be strong again; she felt
so weak; and he urged her to return to Asbury Park to rest. She wished she
could see him, that he might come to New York just for a short visit, but he
said he could not. "He said he was in fact coming over to New York, but he
thought it unwise for us to be seen together . . . ... Nor did Harding ever
find it prudent to see his only child.
pps. 71-84
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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