First Ladies (34 page)

Divorce statistics suggest that Americans ended their marriages in the “roaring twenties” more often than in any preceding decade,
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and here, too, examples stood at the top of political life. Short-memoried reporters, who seemed to imply in 1952 and 1956 that Adlai Stevenson was the first divorced man to win the presidential nomination of a major party, would have profited from a close look at the 1920 election. Both Florence Harding, whose husband headed the Republican ticket, and James Cox, the Democratic hopeful, had been divorced from their previous spouses. Florence had sued her first husband for desertion in the 1880s, and Cox had split with the mother of his three children in 1911.
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Neither breakup received much attention in the 1920 campaign, however, perhaps because each side considered restraint advisable in light of its own vulnerability.
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The divorces may have seemed irrelevant since both had occurred well in the past and, at the time of the campaign, all the principals had either remarried or died. A prominent woman journalist, who interviewed both candidates' wives for an article in a popular magazine, wrote the entire piece without mentioning either divorce.
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By the time she became First Lady, Florence Harding had been married to Warren for nearly thirty years—time in which she had shown two powerful traits which her enemies and supporters agreed she excelled in: willfulness and determination. While still enrolled in
the Cincinnati Conservatory, her energies had turned more to play than to the piano, and she had joined in with a hometown group of young people known as the “rough set” because they took up among other sports the new fad of roller-skating. One of their number, Henry A. De Wolfe, was particularly attractive to her, perhaps because her father detested his heavy drinking and playboy attitude. When Amos Kling, Florence's father, forbade her seeing Henry, she promptly married him and six months later gave birth to a son.
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The young couple's attempt to run a roller-skating rink in nearby Galion failed, and Henry quickly tired of the responsibilities attached to being head of a family. Before their son had reached two years of age, he deserted Florence who had little choice but to return to Marion. The story persisted for years that she had taken her son and slept in an abandoned house the first night back rather than humble herself by appealing to her father for help.
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Her in-laws supplied some money; Florence gave piano lessons; and eventually her father came to her rescue, but she had learned an important lesson about the costliness of dependence and never allowed herself to become quite so defenseless again. After her divorce, she let her father adopt and raise her son while she set out to try again.

In a city of 4,000 people, an ambitious young piano teacher could not have remained long unaware of the charming, handsome newcomer who had just bought part ownership in one of Marion's newspapers. The publisher, Warren G. Harding, had a sister who studied piano with Florence, and soon teacher and newspaperman met. That Amos Kling vehemently opposed his daughter's having anything to do with Warren increased his attractiveness immensely.

By the 1880s the Hardings ranked below the Klings in Marion's hierarchy, although a few years earlier that would not have been the case. In 1860 when Florence was born, her family lived in an apartment over their hardware store, but circumstances changed as Amos Kling prospered in real estate and business. By the time Warren began to court Florence Kling, her father was one of the most important men in town. Warren's parents both practiced medicine and his mother later acquired midwife certification, but their specialty, homeopathy, paid none too well. Warren, who had prospered during his first few years with the
Marion Star
, had bought out his partners and built himself a handsome house on one of the town's best streets. Such considerations mattered far less to Amos Kling than the persistent rumor around town that Warren had Negro ancestry. Marion, Ohio, was not integrated in the 1880s, and racial prejudice was strong. In such a setting, the ancestry of a new, young man in town became
the subject of considerable speculation. Some of the locals insisted they detected Negro features in Warren.

Continuing a long tradition, the future First Lady married against strenuous parental objection, and in this particular case, the objection remained so strong that Amos Kling did not speak to his daughter for seven years. The small ceremony at Warren's new house in 1891 united a divorcée, one week short of celebrating her thirty-first birthday, with a promising businessman, then twenty-five. Some of their friends detected a mother-son relationship in the match and they pointed out that Warren had always been very attentive to his mother, taking her fresh flowers every Sunday or, if he could not go, arranging for someone else to make the delivery. Now he transferred that filial devotion to his wife, making her his conscience, bookkeeper, and monitor. For the fun part of his life he evidently went elsewhere—at least two women friends left accounts of the time they spent with Warren, and his poker-playing friends supplied their own recollections of his participation in their games.
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Florence had her own reasons for entering the marriage—she came from the same generation that had produced many women who insisted on independence. Born in the same decade as First Ladies Helen Taft and Ellen Wilson, Florence Harding kept her rebellions closer home than they had—she married local young men whom her father detested and then worked hard to prove him wrong.

Florence devoted herself to Warren's career as though her own reputation were at stake. His mother, Phoebe Dickerson Harding, who was something of a career woman herself, had warned Florence to keep the icebox full and both eyes on Warren. Florence lost no time stopping at the
Star
office to see how the business—and Warren—operated. She remained for fourteen years, first streamlining the bookkeeping system and then organizing a home delivery service to boost circulation. One of the carriers whom she hired ran for president himself later, and he recalled how she had taken over the
Star
. “She was a woman of very narrow mentality and range of interest or understanding,” Norman Thomas wrote, “but of strong will and within a certain area of genuine kindness. … It was her energy and her business sense which made the
Star.”
According to Norman Thomas, Florence complemented her husband's enormous affability by overseeing the advertising and circulation while Warren supplied “the front … a joiner … popular.”
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As for the other part of her mother-in-law's advice, Florence dutifully pedalled her bicycle home to cook Warren's dinner, but her domesticity did not extend to maternity. She showed little interest in the
son from her first marriage, and by Warren she remained childless even though one of his women friends reported that he would have very much liked to have a child. It was “Florence [who] would not hear of it,” he said, and he explained that she took “tiny white pills” to avoid conceiving.
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The control over her own life that had been so conspicuously absent from Florence's first marriage showed up in other ways in her second marriage. She involved herself in each of Warren's campaigns: from state senator he moved to lieutenant governor and then, after losing a bid for governor in 1910, to the United States Senate in 1915. In the early days, she accompanied him on the lecture tour, impressing some of his managers as “meanly accurate in calculating expenses.”
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By the time Florence arrived in Washington, one politically active woman observed in her a “ruthless ambition to become First Lady” as she “constantly worked and made Warren work toward that end.”
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Florence once confided to Norman Thomas's wife that Warren got into a lot of trouble when she was not around so she limited those opportunities whenever possible. During his Senate days, she encouraged him to give his interviews at home so that she could participate, and she kept up with the issues so that eventually Warren's campaign manager pronounced her “one of the best informed women in the country.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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).
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.