First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  When, as the wife of an Ohio senator, Florence first arrived in Washington in 1915, she lacked the celebrity status that she might have liked. But she could prepare for success. Alice Roosevelt Long-worth who, with her husband Nicholas, socialized with the Hardings in their Senate days, reported that Florence kept a little red book with the names of people she meant to get even with when she got the chance. In the meantime, the handsome senator from Ohio appeared on many guest lists and even Alice included him at her poker table. She waited until he was dead to write: “He was not a bad man, just a slob.”23

  Florence had spent too much time around the newspaper office to remain unaware of the value of good publicity, and she added some dash to her own image by associating with the capital’s wealthy, risk-taking social leaders. One of Florence’s closest friends became the legendary Evalyn Walsh McLean, when Evalyn was looking around for some “serious” cause to “save,” as she put it, her husband, Edward, from “dissipation.”24 Dabbling in politics and associating with politicians would divert him, she thought, from his playboy ways. The daughter of an Irish immigrant who made his fortune in Colorado mining and then spent the remainder of his life enjoying the money and spoiling his children, Evalyn had married a man every bit as fun-loving as she. On their European honeymoon, $200,000 proved insufficient to pay the bills. Back in Washington he concentrated on running the Washington Post, which he owned, and she engineered a highly publicized social life for them and spent money as though it would never run out. On one shopping trip, conducted comfortably from her chauffeured Rolls Royce, she admitted to paying $5,000 for a St. Bernard dog for her daughter (although the girl had requested a poodle).25 On another day, Evalyn purchased the famous Hope diamond, reputed to bring tragedy to whoever owned it, and then attempted to negate the curse by having a priest bless the gem.26

  Such extravagance fascinated small-town Florence Harding, and Evalyn admitted that she grew fond of Florence, who could be haughty and nagging, “her mouth a revelation of discontent.”27 The unusual friendship between the two very different women continued until Florence’s death. Evalyn, who rarely admitted to caring what anybody thought about her, confessed she was flattered to have an important politician’s wife seek her advice.28 Florence knew where to place herself when the cameras started rolling, but she knew where to draw the line, too, and on one occasion, when she feared being photographed beside a cigarette-smoking Evalyn, she knocked the offending article from her friend’s mouth.

  The careful housewife’s dependence on the flamboyant Evalyn McLean represents one of several inconsistencies in Florence Harding’s life. When Warren’s name came up for consideration for president in the 1920 campaign, she intensely wanted the glory of victory but she feared the disastrous exposures that a national campaign could bring. Warren had already been linked romantically with at least two women, and one of them, a Marion housewife, had frequently vacationed with her husband and the Hardings. Because the woman’s husband was in poor health, he removed himself from the scene for long recuperative jaunts to the West Coast, and Florence, who had had one kidney removed in 1905, was often ill. Their absences left their spouses considerable freedom, causing speculation in Marion about what they did in their time together.29

  Warren Harding’s other reported romance involved a much younger woman who had developed a crush on the senator while she was still a high school student and had first aroused Florence’s suspicions. Nan Britten later published a book about her involvement with Warren Harding and thus became the first (but not the last) to divulge the details of her own sexual liaison with a president. Like her latter-day counterparts, Judith Exner (who publicized her relationship with President John F. Kennedy)30 and Kay Summersby (who described the time she spent with then-General Dwight Eisenhower during World War II), Britten waited until the other principal was dead before going public.31

  Britten titled her account The President’s Daughter, although at the time of her daughter’s birth, Warren was still a senator. The book details how Warren helped young Britten move from Marion to New York City and find a job. On trips the two took together, Warren registered her in hotels as his niece. With that record and that visibility, her relationship with Warren could hardly have escaped sharp-eyed Florence or his colleagues, and Florence had good reason to fear the close scrutiny of a national campaign.

  Even if fear of exposure of her husband’s active extramarital sex life had not deterred Florence, she had other misgivings. While she would have liked to think that matters of life and death did not depend on such things as the stars, she could not free herself from the belief that they did. A medium whom she frequently consulted had predicted that Warren would win the presidency but that disaster would follow: Warren would die in office and Florence, soon afterward. When he won the nomination, Florence was widely quoted as saying she saw only tragedy in his future.32

  Her own poor health also concerned Florence. Her one remaining kidney frequently became infected, swelling to several times its normal size and causing great pain. She had barely escaped death once when she had chosen to rely on her Marion homeopath rather than on other doctors who had advised surgery, and she understood that her luck might not hold the next time.

  In spite of these misgivings, Florence put her best effort into getting Warren nominated and elected. Early in the primary campaign when his determination flagged, she stymied his attempt to drop out by seizing the telephone from him and shouting to his campaign manager on the other end that they were in the race until “hell freezes over.”33 When people came to Marion to assess the candidate, she was unfailingly courteous to all, smiling agreeably when they ran over the hedge and trampled the grass so thoroughly that the yard had to be graveled. On questions of politics she curbed her inclination to speak out and deferred to Warren, even though more than one of her friends thought she found it trying to learn at her age to appear submissive.

  Florence held strong ideas about when to use the press and when to keep quiet. When a Wooster College professor published pamphlets outlining Warren’s black ancestry, Warren and his campaign advisers were uncertain how to react. The candidate wanted to go public with the explanation he had already given his friends—that the story persisted because of his family’s record of giving aid to slaves escaping on the underground railroad. Florence decreed otherwise and ordered a cancellation of the denial that Warren’s staff had drafted.34 Some charges, if treated as unworthy of response, would eventually die down, she reasoned, and no statement on the matter came out.

  Warren Harding won the 1920 election (garnering sixteen million popular votes to Cox’s nine million), and preparations began for an inaugural celebration to outshine all previous ones. Edward McLean, who headed the inaugural ball committee, planned a party that would combine, his wife wrote, “the liveliness of ten July fourth celebrations with the ending of a victorious war.”35 The Republican National Committee, having a more modest celebration in mind, balked at spending that kind of money and dropped sponsorship of the official inaugural ball so that the McLeans hosted their own party at their Friendship estate outside Washington.

  The expensive, private initiation of the Harding administration set the tone for what followed, and the Hardings persisted in acting as though they operated above and apart from the rules governing other people. In spite of a constitutional amendment prohibiting the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors” the Hardings kept a well-stocked bar in the private quarters of the White House. While official “dry” receptions were held downstairs, the president would be upstairs, Alice Roosevelt Longworth reported, surrounded by his friends and all brands of whisky, playing cards, and poker chips, thus presenting an atmosphere more appropriate to a saloon than to the residence of a head of state.36 The First Lady was left to move between the two worlds, adding a touch of schoolteacher rectitude while keeping the drinks fresh.

  In honing a public image as a nonimbiber, Florence reflected typical First Lady be
havior, not restricted to the prohibition years. Until Betty Ford’s post–White House confession that she was an alcoholic, presidents’ wives regularly objected to accounts that they consumed alcoholic beverages and to photos showing them with drink in hand. The temperance movement itself rarely caught their fancy, however, and except for Lucy Hayes, no First Lady became an outspoken advocate of the cause.

  To ensure the most favorable publicity possible, Florence carefully honed her relationship with reporters—the men became “my boys” to her and the women “the girls.” One Washington veteran recalled that Florence invited newspaperwomen to cruise down the Potomac with her on the presidential yacht and then startled the group by slapping one of them on the back and exclaiming, “Well here we are, all girls together.”37 She even invited women reporters to interview her and then, wearing a rose-colored negligee, she spoke with them in her bedroom.38 Although Ohioan Jane Dixon of the New York Telegram was a personal favorite with Florence, she never showed her preferences and reporters responded by treating her well. Although some of them found her haughty,39 much of what they wrote was not unflattering. Her claim that she gave them important, newsworthy information is difficult to substantiate because she said she asked them not to name her as a source, and none of them did.40

  The intentional management of the press extended to virtually every area of Florence’s life. Rather than divulge just how precarious her health was, she attributed frequent and sometimes lengthy absences to food poisoning, thus giving the public a picture of a much healthier First Lady than was actually fact. A life-threatening attack of nephritis, which she suffered in August 1922, was not reported for several weeks and then not in detail.41 Her two grandchildren did not visit her in the White House so that photographers had no opportunity to catch her in grandmotherly poses that might focus attention on her age.42 Mindful of the anti-German sentiment that lingered in America after World War I, Florence tailored her ancestors accordingly. Although a prominent historian has concluded that Florence was descended from German Mennonites,43 she carefully credited her “French grandmother” with teaching her excellent posture and good taste in clothes.44

  In spite of her expertise in public relations, Florence showed little skill at managing the White House. Nor did she seem to care. The 1920s did not place the same importance on domestic skills as had been the case at the turn of the century, and none of the First Ladies of the 1920s spent much time honing her domestic image. Florence had managed only modest-sized houses in Marion and Washington, and she lacked the preparation for taking on an establishment as large and complex as the executive mansion. On first meeting with its staff, she seemed unsure of herself, saying first that she would find a new housekeeper and then that she would retain the old one. Ex-president William Howard Taft, who stopped by the Harding White House to offer advice, judged her completely unprepared for that side of the job.45 She did make one innovation in the staff, adding a Secret Service agent to the usual retinue of housekeepers, maids, and stewards, and then assigning him sundry tasks that had little or nothing to do with her safety. The surveillance that Eleanor Roosevelt so disliked began in the Harding administration when Florence decided she could use extra help to chauffeur her clairvoyant or keep watch on Warren.

  Florence tempered her feminism so that it either fit accepted standards or remained very private. Photographers snapped her voting alongside Warren in November 1920,46 but a surprisingly feminist letter that she composed in the White House remained unmailed. A woman had solicited Florence’s views on careers for women, and the First Lady replied that one career was about all any couple could manage. “If the career is the husband’s,” Florence wrote in 1922, “the wife can merge her own with it, if it is to be the wife’s as it undoubtedly will be in an increasing proportion of cases, then the husband may, with no sacrifice of self respect or of recognition by the community, permit himself to be the less prominent and distinguished member of the combination.”47

  In line with her view that the White House belonged to everybody, Florence worked hard to make it (and herself) available to visitors. One of the maids recalled how Florence would run down the steps to greet tourists,48 and on New Year’s Day she stood to shake hands with thousands of guests even though she needed two days in bed to store up strength for the ordeal and two days to recuperate.49 Her prediction to Evalyn McLean that being First Lady meant “nothing but work, work, work”50 proved accurate, and she insisted on expending considerable energy on the job, even when she was seriously ill.

  In the end, the calculated secrecy that Florence used in dealing with the press worked against her. Neither she nor her husband (who had a long history of high blood pressure and symptoms of heart disease)51 had supplied accurate health information, and the public had little preparation for their deaths. On the fatal western trip in the summer of 1923, Warren’s doctor had issued a bulletin citing food poisoning resulting from eating bad crabs when in fact none had been consumed. When the president died on August 2, many people questioned the cause and some even suggested foul play with Florence as the culprit.52

  The affable, charming man who had attracted Florence had continued to exert his strong magnetism all the way to the White House. He had himself noted a major personal weakness when he laughingly told a group of reporters that his father had been grateful Warren was not born a girl or he would have been “in the family way all the time.” He could “not say no.”53 On the political level, this inordinate desire to please showed itself in a zigzag course of appointments and actions. Although his cabinet included some of the best minds of the time, it also included some crooks, because Warren Harding had never learned to tell one from the other. One wag of the time had it that the difference between the first president and the current one was that while George Washington could not tell a lie, Warren Harding could not tell a liar.54 The value of having the experienced Charles Evans Hughes as secretary of state and the hardworking Herbert Hoover as secretary of commerce was offset by two others who later went to prison: Albert Fall, secretary of interior, and Warren Harding’s old friend, Attorney General Harry Daugherty.

  The extent of scandal in President Harding’s administration had not yet become public when he died in August 1923, and his last recorded activity was listening to Florence read from the Saturday Evening Post a glowing account of his presidency. The train carrying his body across the country for burial passed the largest crowds seen since Abraham Lincoln’s death, with a million and a half people gathering in Chicago alone to pay their respects.55

  Florence made the cross-country trip with her husband’s corpse, attended memorial services in the capital, and then traveled to Ohio for the burial. It was during the stop at the White House that she made her famous nocturnal visit to the president’s bier. Evalyn McLean, who had stayed with her friend, reported that Florence had gone down in the middle of the night to the coffin in the East Room and had stood for a long time talking to it. She sounded more like a mother addressing a dead child when she finished: “They can’t hurt you now.”56

  With very little time to live, Florence stayed for a while at the Willard Hotel in Washington and then returned to Marion. She had neither forgotten nor discounted the fortune-teller’s prediction about her own death and she recognized the signs of further deterioration in her health. Her trusted homeopath died in the summer of 1924, and the following September, when Evalyn McLean came through Ohio in her private railroad car, Florence announced that this would be their last visit. Weeks later, fifteen months after Warren’s death, she was dead.

  The sum of Florence Kling Harding’s influence on her husband’s political career remains difficult to assess, partly because she destroyed much of the physical evidence that could have helped define it. Of the 350,000 documents that survive of the Harding administration, few relate to her political views or activities although hundreds of thank-you notes addressed to her suggest that she was not idle. She contributed to the enigma of her role by juxtaposing stro
ng and blatant claims of her own power alongside demure self-effacement. She smiled obligingly when her husband’s friends called her “Duchess” in a not altogether complimentary tone. She seems to have held strong opinions and expressed them freely. Some historians who have evaluated the evidence have concluded that Florence’s influence on her husband has been exaggerated, but most of her contemporaries insisted it was real, and many of them offered specific instances to support that point of view.

  Harry Daugherty, the campaign manager who later served in the Harding cabinet, reported being summoned to the White House one evening to referee an argument between the Hardings on the wording of a presidential address. In the end, Florence got her way.57 Secretary of State Hughes called Florence “her husband’s most faithful counselor.”58

  Nicholas Murray Butler, a guest at the White House during a discussion about accepting a mansion as a residence for the vice president, reported that it was Florence Harding who applied the veto. Senator John Henderson’s widow had offered to donate her house on Sixteenth Street for the use of the vice president, but Florence Harding would not hear of accepting the gift. “Not a bit of it,” she fumed, according to Butler, “I am going to have that bill defeated. Do you think I am going to have those Coolidges living in a house like that? A hotel apartment is plenty good enough for them.”59 Whatever the reasons, Congress turned down the gift and the vice president remained without a permanent official residence for forty more years.

  To the widespread view that politicians’ wives should form a social backdrop, Florence Kling Harding, as she always signed herself, offered a notable exception. Early in her White House tenure, she had reportedly inquired of a senator whom he judged the most successful First Lady in history. When he replied, “Dolley Madison or Frances Cleveland,” Florence Harding retorted, in what might be considered a slogan of her mature years: “Watch me!”60 She only partly concealed her partnership in her husband’s political decisions and yet she received little of the criticism leveled at her predecessor, Edith Wilson. For a woman whose husband admitted her influence, she died popular with the nation, although not with those who worked closely with her. Few of the Hardings’ friends would contest the view that she imposed a strong discipline on herself and that she showed exceptional determination throughout her life.