Well, one minor mystery of the American presidency was clarified this week.
According to the New York Times, DNA testing seems to have confirmed that Warren Gamaliel Harding, who served in the White House during 1921-23, had in fact fathered a daughter by one of his mistresses, Nan Britton. The child, named Elizabeth Ann Britton Harding, was born in 1919, and so had been conceived when Harding was a senator, not president. But her paternity had been a matter of speculation, and some controversy, ever since her mother published a sensational memoir, The President’s Daughter (1927), about her six-year liaison with Harding.
The Times exaggerated the controversy, to some degree: It reported, in its opening sentence, that Britton had been “denounced as a ‘degenerate’ and a ‘pervert,’ accused of lying for money and shamed for waging a ‘diabolical’ campaign against the president’s family that tore away at his legacy.” That is true, as far as it goes. But it was various members of the Harding family, including the late president’s sister and brother, who spoke in such lurid terms about Britton when The President’s Daughter was published four years after Harding’s death. In fact, historians have tended to be divided on the question of Elizabeth Ann’s paternity, but most have accepted Nan Britton’s assertion that she and Harding were, at some point and to some degree, clandestine lovers.
It’s a sad story, in many ways. Nan Britton was the daughter of a Marion, Ohio, physician whose family was well acquainted with Harding, owner-publisher of the Marion Star, and whose sister had been one of her teachers. At the age of 14, in 1910, Britton seems to have developed an adolescent infatuation with the 45-year-old Harding when he ran, unsuccessfully, for governor of Ohio — and she never outgrew it. Harding was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1914, and three years later, now 21 and finishing a secretarial course in New York, Britton wrote to Harding asking for his assistance in getting a job. Harding not only agreed to help but met her at a Manhattan hotel for the first of many liaisons. In the memorable prose of The President’s Daughter, “I became Mr. Harding’s bride – as he called me – on that day [July 30, 1917].”
Part of the problem for Nan Britton is that the rococo language of The President’s Daughter has never inspired confidence in its veracity, and the book’s details, while plentiful, are nearly impossible to verify. Both she and Harding destroyed the bulk of their correspondence, and Harding, while indiscreet – as senator and, later, president – was not foolhardy. He used pseudonyms whenever necessary, and of course, Nan Britton’s name is nowhere to be found in any White House logs or registers.
This much we can assume is true: According to Nan Britton, Elizabeth Ann was conceived on a couch in Harding’s Senate office, and after her birth in Asbury Park, New Jersey, he seems to have furnished occasional financial support. We will probably never know whether, or how frequently, they met after Harding’s election as president in 1920, but Britton’s description of their White House meeting-place is not only reminiscent of a recent president’s practice but a classic in the annals of Washington romance:
Harding, of course, died suddenly in August 1923, and few in the late president’s family or official circles were inclined to believe Nan Britton’s insistence that Elizabeth Ann was his child, or that he had intended to support her indefinitely. The President’s Daughter, which sold 50,000 copies, was privately published by Britton as a fund-raising device under the aegis of her Elizabeth Ann Guild Inc., and dedicated “with understanding and love to all unwedded mothers, and to their innocent children whose fathers are usually not known to the world …”
Nan Britton seems never to have married, and died in Oregon in 1991 at the age of 94. Elizabeth Ann married and settled, ultimately, in Glendale, California, where she resisted the efforts of historians and journalists to interview her, and died ten years ago. In the Times story, her grandson claims that “the family lived with scorn for decades. They were followed, their house was broken into and items were stolen to try to prove the relationship was a lie.”
What effect all this will have on Warren G. Harding’s reputation is, of course, a matter of conjecture. Because certain members of his administration were caught up in the posthumous Teapot Dome scandal—in which bribes were paid to lease federal oil reserves in Wyoming—Harding’s standing has never been especially high. Yet even the Times acknowledges that Harding’s stature has risen among scholars in recent years — “he advocated equal rights for African-Americans, created the Bureau of the Budget and led international disarmament efforts” —and in any case, his philandering, especially a passionate, prolonged, and well-documented relationship with Carrie Phillips, the wife of a Marion businessman was revealed a half-century ago.
For that matter, it is fitting that the affirmation of Elizabeth Ann’s paternity should have been revealed in the pages of the Times. In the third summer following Warren G. Harding’s death, Nan Britton writes in The President’s Daughter, “I sat before my typewriter, reminiscently fondling my child and dwelling in the memory of her father, and wrote my visions into a poem.” Entitled “The Child’s Eyes,” and published under the name of “Ninon Britton,” the poem’s four stanzas were published in the New York Times on August 30, 1926:
Sometimes her eyes are blue as deep sea blue,
And calm as waters stilled at evenfall.
I see not quite my child in these eyes,
But him whose soul shines wondrously through her …
Philip Terzian is literary editor of The Weekly Standard.
