-Caveat Lector-
This true story of President Harding is reminiscent of Theodore Drieser's
novel, Sister Carrie.
(Caroline Meeber, a small-town girl from Wisconsin goes off to the big
city where she meets Hurstwood, a plump, amiable middle-aged man with
a penchant for pretty young girls. Love blooms and Hurstwood deserts
his wife for Carrie. Carrie eventually abandons her older lover and finds
success as an actress; while her former paramour, Hurstwood, is ruined.)
On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Kris Millegan wrote:
> -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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CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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