Harding’s letters don’t rival the Song of Songs. But they’re hardly smut. What the letters portray is a Harding enraptured by what seems to have been the most profound eroticism he had ever experienced, which is saying something, because Warren Harding was a man of the world. He was also married, to Florence Kling Harding, but their union was perhaps more a business partnership (some thought her the Star’s real manager) than as a marriage.
As president, Harding deserves some credit. For 73 years now, since 1941, the United States has been at war almost continuously, mainly in Asia. But when Harding was president, the United States was at peace. Yes, the Teapot Dome scandal let chiselers steal Navy oil reserves, flaunting the oil lobby’s Washington clout — but with Harding pals, not Harding. Is Big Oil’s reach any less today?
The Ohio Gang, Harding’s camp followers, went from milking the Statehouse to milking the Capitol. But it appears Harding didn’t profit from those scams. And he made some solid appointments: Charles Evans Hughes, secretary of state; Herbert Hoover (then seen as a GOP progressive), secretary of commerce; ex-President William Howard Taft (Gov. Bob Taft’s great-grandfather), chief justice of the United States.
The letters’ formal release was a tad anti-climactic, given path-breaking work by Cleveland lawyer-historian James D. Robenalt. His intriguing book, “The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage during the Great War” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), claims Carrie Phillips (an admirer of German culture, and once a Berlin resident) and daughter Isabelle spied for Germany during World War I. Their descendants vigorously contest that, and, in fairness to them and their ancestors, Carrie and Isabelle’s alleged espionage is certainly open to question. In any event, Robenalt’s book quoted from microfilm of the Harding letters, held at Cleveland’s Western Reserve Historical Society, so the tone and wording of the letters the Library of Congress just released weren’t a surprise. Still, it’d been a long 50 years for people interested in Harding. Born in Morrow County in 1865, a success in Marion and Columbus, then elected 29th president in 1920 by defeating another Ohio publisher, Democrat James M. Cox of the Dayton Daily News.
One of the most powerful documents released last week wasn’t a Harding letter but an eloquent statement by Carrie Phillips’s great-grandchildren to accompany family papers they donated to the library to add context to the Harding trove. Their grandmother, Isabelle Phillips Mathée, whom her descendants describe as “a woman of grace and honor,” was Carrie’s only surviving child.
“Carrie Fulton Phillips,” Isabelle’s grandchildren wrote, “was our direct ancestor and it is our endeavor to have history judge her on fact, not theory or untruth.” Opening Harding’s love letters may help accomplish that — not just for Carrie Phillips, who died in 1960, but also for Warren Gamaliel Harding.
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