Turns out, she was! Peter Baker, reporting in the NYTimes just yesterday, “DNA Is Said to Solve a Mystery of Warren Harding’s Love Life“:
She was denounced as a “degenerate” and a “pervert,” accused of lying for money and shamed for waging a “diabolical” campaign of falsehoods against the president’s family that tore away at his legacy.
Long before Lucy Mercer, Kay Summersby or Monica Lewinsky, there was Nan Britton, who scandalized a nation with stories of carnal adventures in a White House coat closet and endured a ferocious backlash for publicly claiming that she bore the love child of President Warren G. Harding.
Now nearly a century later, according to genealogists, new genetic tests confirm for the first time that Ms. Britton’s daughter, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was indeed Harding’s biological child. The tests have solved one of the enduring mysteries of presidential history and offer new insights into the secret life of America’s 29th president. At the least, they demonstrate how the march of technology is increasingly rewriting the nation’s history books…
The Nan Britton affair was the sensation of its age, a product of the jazz-playing, gin-soaked Roaring Twenties and a pivotal moment in the evolution of the modern White House. It was not the first time a president was accused of an extracurricular love life, but never before had a self-proclaimed presidential mistress gone public with a popular tell-all book. The ensuing furor played out in newspapers, courtrooms and living rooms across the country…
Dr. Harding and his cousin, Abigail Harding, decided to pursue the matter and made contact with James Blaesing, a grandson of Ms. Britton and son of the daughter she claimed to have conceived with the president. Testing by AncestryDNA, a division of Ancestry.com, the genealogical website, found that Mr. Blaesing was a second cousin to Peter and Abigail Harding, meaning that Elizabeth Ann Blaesing had to be President Harding’s daughter…
The testing also found that President Harding had no ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, answering another question that has intrigued historians. When Harding ran for president in 1920, segregationist opponents claimed he had “black blood.”…
Nan Britton grew up in Marion, where her father knew Harding and Harding’s sister was her schoolteacher. She was consumed with Harding, who was married but had no children and was seen by women of the time as attractive. Ms. Britton hung pictures of Harding on her bedroom wall and sought his help finding a job. Harding agreed to meet her in New York. In July 1917, at age 20, she “became Mr. Harding’s bride,” as she put it, during a New York hotel room assignation.
For six and a half years they maintained their affair, meeting wherever possible, including in Harding’s Senate office, where Ms. Britton wrote that they conceived Elizabeth Ann, born in October 1919. Harding never met his daughter but provided financial support. He and Ms. Britton continued their relationship after he became president, repairing to “a small closet in the anteroom” in the West Wing where, she wrote, they “made love.”
Ms. Britton was devastated when he died in office in 1923 at the age of 57 and more so when she discovered there was no provision to support their daughter. In need of money and shut out by Harding’s family, she wrote “The President’s Daughter” in 1927, inciting a fierce backlash from his supporters…
Ah, technology! Ninety years of acrimony, settled by a couple hundred dollars’ worth of DNA testing from an online genealogy site. If only the Virginia Jeffersons could be as gracious about Sally Hemings’ “shadow family”… but then, the new Harding/Blaesing DNA tests seem to scotch an old rumor, rather than confirming it.
I also love the parenthetical note that Warren “was seen by women of the time as attractive“. It’s not just standards for female beauty that evolve over time!
Betty Cracker
I read that article this morning (well, yesterday morning), and who needs a DNA test when you have the accompanying photos? She looks just like her old man.
Tree With Water
This NY Times story reminded me the a Monty Python sketch for some reason. A minister asks Micael Palin what future prospects would enable him to support his daughter in a manner to which she was accustomed. Palin – who cleans public toilets- responds by stating he was due to receive both a promotion and his first brush the very next year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/nyregion/three-men-arrested-in-east-flatbush-for-illegally-exploring-brooklyn-manhole.html
Amir Khalid
Warren G. Harding? Isn’t he a hippety-hop music guy or something?
Mustang Bobby
In 1968 Francis Russell wrote a biography of Harding, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, that included a bunch of love letters between Harding and his various girlfriends, and very good circumstantial evidence that he did indeed father the child. The heirs to the Harding estate sued and portions of the book are laced with dash marks where the redacted text of the letters should be.
Mr. Russell went to his grave with the pages still redacted, but it’s good to see him vindicated.
Anne Laurie
@Betty Cracker:
Well, yeah, but I’ve been told all those people look alike.
By which I mean: Ohioans!
Villago Delenda Est
@Anne Laurie: There must be something in the Cuyahoga River that causes that.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Villago Delenda Est: It might also be flammable.
mtiffany
@BillinGlendaleCA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8mD2hsxrhQ
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Wasn’t there someone who claimed her son was Bill Clinton’s love child? The kid looked like Bill but DNA proved he was not his son.
raven
I WENT BACK TO OHIO
BUT MY PRETTY COUNTRYSIDE
HAD BEEN PAVED DOWN THE MIDDLE
BY A GOVERNMENT THAT HAD NO PRIDE
THE FARMS OF OHIO
HAD BEEN REPLACED BY SHOPPING MALLS
AND MUZAK FILLED THE AIR
FROM SENECA TO CUYAHOGA FALLS
SAID, A, O, OH WAY TO GO OHIO
Too bad Limbaugh has killed this with his bumper.
Schlemazel
@Amir Khalid:
Hard-G?
Iced G?
@Tree With Water:
Our young son has done a bit of “urban exploring” but none of it included sewers. There was an abandoned flour mill, abandoned brewery and an abandoned auto plant (boy that says something about modern America right there!) as well as utility tunnels under the downtown area. It was always with the understanding that if he got caught there would be charges & fines.
Keith G
@Anne Laurie: Hey…watch it!! Buckeyes come in all types of individualized beauty.
meanwhile:
I have been reading the NYT article about ISIS institutionalization of rape
So deplorable.
Zinsky
It’s too bad the media never said a thing about George H.W. Bush’s multi-year affair with Jennifer Fitzgerald:
http://tca-reference-desk.blogspot.com/2004/04/jennifer-fitzgerald-described-as-george.html
Maybe his idiot sons wouldn’t have been able to win elections and ruin the country, if Dad had been outed as a philanderer, like the POS should have been!
BillinGlendaleCA
@Zinsky: None of that is important. Hillary’s emails are the most important thang. She’ll probably go to jail and anyway is losing big time to Bernie. Joe Biden, Al Gore, and SecState Kerry are going to get into the race and save the Democrat Party that’s in disarray! Can you tell I was watching Morning Joe?
tybee
al stewart, year of the cat, warren gamaliel harding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZMJAdN75zE
Sherparick
Harding, like Grant, has had his reputation revived a bit the last 20 years, and pretty much for the same reason, his progressive for the times views on race and adhering to the old “anti-slavery” values of the Republican Party. Hence the segregationist charge that he had “black blood.” Like Grant, his own allies in the business half of the 1920s Republican Party, blew up his administration with corruption, but Harding accommodated a lot of progressive (TR) Republicans in his administration and giving Charles Evans Hughes lots of support as Secretary of State was a fairly successful foreign policy that solved a lot of the post-Versaille debacle that that most over estimated of Presidents, Woodrow Wilson had created.
It must be remembered that the “Republican Party” of today, only the “Business interest” Republicans can claim continuity to the Party’s Civil War days. The other parts are the old Bourbon Democrats of the South, the fundamentalist Protestant churches, and the right-wing, authoritarian, white mass movement of radical reaction and resentment that arose in response to the New Deal and the 60s.
Keith G
@Zinsky: Philandering presidents, whether they are a POS or not, tend not to receive too much in the way of reputational blowback.
And, as American presidents, and those who run for the presidency, go George HW Bush really wasn’t that much of a POS.
Another Holocene Human
@Keith G: The Taliban did the same thing.
So did the Soviet Army when they invaded Berlin.
Or Lord’s Resistance Army.
This shit is not surprising. Never surprising.
In fact it seems to be a constant in conflicts with a strong ideological or racist component (which is most of them).
But cue the Islamophobes holding this up as more proof that “Islamacists” are uniquely inhuman.
Another Holocene Human
@Zinsky:
My grandmother (on my mom’s side) was a racist and a life-long Republican (even when Reagan cut her bennies–he was supposed to cut those people’s bennies, not hers, she earned them), but having come from land-poor poverty in the 20s and 30s in Kansas (they got Government food aid … it was bad) she always found it wrong that the Banker could go out on the town with a lady of the night, and nobody would say a word, but let a Farmer pick up a hooker in town, and every tongue would wag.
And this has been confirmed by research on the sociology of college sorority sisters. It was found that the term “slut” was not applied to the girls who had the most sexual contacts but to the ones who were lowest on the economic and therefore social scale of the sorority. In fact the poorer girls had LESS one night stands than the rich girls, but were berated for it MORE.
It’s just not seemly for a poor person to have sex, but for a rich person, nothing is said.
GHW Bush was as WASPy and inherited money as you get; Clinton was trailer trash made good, with a Irishy sounding name.
PurpleGirl
@Another Holocene Human: Let’s not forget the West Pakistani army when fighting in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. It was a concerted program to humiliate the woman and put them outside the tribal society, indeed to disrupt and break the Bangaldeshi society.
Another Holocene Human
@Sherparick:
That’s good to know. All I ever knew about Harding was that his crook friends carted away just about everything but the Capitol Dome.
Wilson is severely over-esteemed, and it disgusts me looking back on it now. Of course, I didn’t know about his role in red-lining, that wasn’t taught. My teachers did teach me about red-lining and urban renewal in a Boston context. Boston was so segregated in the 1920s that probably government redlining had little import. However, in other cities it precipitated racial violence, and, of course, it set up the redlining I learned about, the voluntary redlining perpetuated by real estate agents and banks. So much damage for so many decades from one act by the Federal gov’t. When I was in school Dedham, Mass was well known to be a redlined town (also a shithole, it’s always the shitholes). Newton was not but its biggest African-American neighborhood had been obliterated by the Mass Turnpike Extension Project. A lonely church sits by the on-ramp. (As Black families started moving into our hood my mother had a private meltdown. Finally she decided they were good neighbors who kept their yard up. ?!?!)
Of course there’s plenty of other stuff too. I knew about the colonialist stuff and the end of WWI and the way he sucked on that. But I didn’t know how deeply racist he was.
I did know, from reading up on Bantu language group influence on American English that Wilson insisted that the word “okay” must be Cherokee, and not African, and even tried to get everyone to spell it “okeh”.
It was racist times. Mencken’s first work on American English attributed too many words and expressions to African roots and esteemed (racist) college professors wrote in to him to “correct” him, which he did. (Being a journalist and not a linguist, after all.)
And what a sick irony that is.
(It’s true, Chamber of Commerce may be bank-funded (and sometimes foreign-funded) utter scum, but they reflect what’s going on in Fortune 500 co’s which is celebrating diversity, pushing for investment in infrastructure (be real, though, they want more lanes of roads and don’t care how they get them), and a lace apron of concern about the environment. They are on the wrong end of the rage and fear culture war stick.)
Another Holocene Human
My mother quoted this to me once: a brave man dies but once; a coward dies a thousand times.
She then proceeded to flip out over a Black family moving in because she was sure we were about to get blockbusted. In 1997.
BigSwami
Nah. He’d still be plenty attractive to women today.
gogol's wife
Way too late for this thread, but everyone should read Robert Plunket’s hilarious novel My Search for Warren Harding, which weds this story to a parody of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers.
Bill Murray
@Schlemazel: Warren G.
boatboy_srq
@Zinsky: Cisgender infidelity is irrelevant to the GOTea: it’s between the man, his wife and Jeebus. Infidelity of any kind, OTOH, is enough to finish a Dem’s career, even if it’s the one time, with the cheerleader, as an undergraduate, those many years ago.