The Love Letters That Warren G. Harding’s Family Didn’t Want You to See

[jimmy olsen]

Pretty steamy for the time, here's an example.

Jan. 28, 1912

I love your poise Of perfect thighs When they hold me in paradise . . .

I love the rose Your garden grows Love seashell pink That over it glows

I love to suck Your breath away I love to cling — There long to stay . . .

I love you garb'd But naked more Love your beauty To thus adore . . .

I love you when You open eyes And mouth and arms And cradling thighs . . .

If I had you today, I'd kiss and fondle you into my arms and hold you there until you said, 'Warren, oh, Warren,' in a benediction of blissful joy. . . . I rather like that encore discovered in Montreal. Did you?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/magazine/letters-warren-g-harding.html

The Letters That Warren G. Harding's Family Didn't Want You to See

By JORDAN MICHAEL SMITHJULY 7, 2014

Warren Harding is not the most beloved of American presidents. Two of the earliest polls to assess presidential popularity, conducted in 1948 and 1962, ranked him last and last among chief executives. Harding served only briefly, from 1921 to 1923, before he died in office, but his administration has been widely regarded as visionless, ineffectual and corrupt. He slashed immigration quotas, appointed his cronies — one of whom, his secretary of the interior, accepted bribes from oil companies in what became known as the Teapot Dome scandal — and brought an end to the famously reform-minded eras of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Perhaps the best that can be said about Harding is that he seems to have been conscious of his defects. "I am not fit for this office and should never have been here," he once conceded.

It is no wonder, then, that in 1964, after the historian Francis Russell gained access to letters from Harding to his longtime mistress, Carrie Fulton Phillips, the Harding family sued to halt their publication. Rumors of the affair were not new, but the letters — written between 1910 and 1920, before Harding assumed the presidency — confirmed the infidelity in startling detail. The Harding family feared that publishing them would further tarnish Harding's legacy and hurt the entire family. To the dismay of many historians, a settlement was reached in which the Harding family, who owned the copyright to the letters, agreed to donate them to the Library of Congress in return for a guarantee that they remain sealed for 50 years. Russell's biography appeared, sans letters, in 1968, but was no less scathing for their absence.

"He was looking at protecting the younger generation at the time," Richard Harding, the president's grandnephew, says of his father's lawsuit. But the family is now prepared to break that seal. On July 29, the Library of Congress will make the original letters available to the public for the first time. "We've honored the trust," Harding says, "and it's time to release them."

The correspondence is intimate and frank — and perhaps the most sexually explicit ever by an American president. Even in the age of Anthony Weiner sexts and John Edwards revelations, it still has the power to astonish. In 106 letters, many written on official Senate stationery, Harding alternates between Victorian declarations of love and unabashedly carnal descriptions. (While Phillips's notes and some drafts of her letters have been preserved, her actual replies were not.) The president often wrote in code, in case the letters were discovered, referring to his penis as Jerry and devising nicknames, like Mrs. Pouterson, for Phillips.

The affair lasted, off and on, for almost 15 years — through Harding's term as Ohio's lieutenant governor and his time as a U.S. senator. Shortly after Harding won his party's nomination for president, Phillips threatened to release their correspondence and demanded money in exchange for her silence. Historians say that to keep her quiet, the Republican National Committee paid for Phillips and her husband to go on a lengthy trip to Japan and provided her with a gift somewhere between $20,000 and $25,000 (more than $297,000 today). Harding himself offered her a stipend of $5,000 a year as long as he was in public service.

The R.N.C. may have gone to such lengths because of something even more troubling than Harding's adultery: Phillips's support of Germany in World War I and her efforts to bring Harding around to her point of view. She hounded Harding throughout his senatorial career about his votes and positions, sending newspaper clippings that demonstrated her strong opposition to America's anti-German stance. Phillips had lived in Berlin just before the war and had social ties to Germans in the United States who were said to be spies.

By the time Harding was elected president in 1920, anxieties about Phillips's German sympathies seem to have largely evaporated. A ticket to the inauguration ceremony exists in her name. Though the affair had ended, Harding continued to see Phillips socially and even in private. As late as January 1922, Harding asked Carrie's brother to tell her that "he would be here all this month and would be able to see [her] anytime."

In August 1923, Harding died of a heart attack. Over the following days, legend has it that his wife, Florence, burned many of Harding's personal papers, public documents, books, the contents of a safe-deposit box and a stuffed suitcase. In fact, many of those papers survived. But it is true that she feared that some of them would be misconstrued and would harm his memory.

The details of the Harding-Phillips affair remained largely hidden from public view until 2009, when Jim Robenalt, an Ohio lawyer, published "The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War." Robenalt came across the letters at the Western Reserve Historical Society — they were preserved on microfilm — and began to transcribe and annotate them. (The letters reproduced here are drawn from those transcriptions, with Robenalt's permission, and photographs of the microfilm.) The Harding family decided not to try to prevent him from using them in his book. "They knew that scandalmongers would pounce once the letters became available," Robenalt says, "and they wanted a balanced discussion of the story." (It didn't hurt that John Dean, the former Nixon administration official who wrote a flattering biography of Harding, vouched for Robenalt.)

Perhaps because it left out many of the letters' more salacious bits, Robenalt's book received little critical attention. He did, however, make a strong case for the theory that Phillips was a spy, building on the F.B.I. investigations of Phillips and her husband and scouring the letters for clues to her pro-German activities, noting that Harding repeatedly warned the Phillipses that they were attracting the attention of federal investigators. Her descendants vehemently reject Robenalt's conclusions. "A thoughtful reader will find only a loose string of 'circumstantial evidence' and 'guilt by association' in this book," the great-grandsons of the Phillipses said in a joint response.

Most historians remain similarly skeptical. James Hutson, chief of the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, examined published sources on the German intelligence apparatus in the United States during World War I to see what was recorded about Phillips. He found nothing. "If the Germans had a spy in the bedroom of a senator, you'd expect them to report that back to Berlin," he says. Hutson and his team are now combing the records of U.S. military intelligence at the National Archives to see what other evidence of Phillips's wartime activities they can find. According to Hutson, these show that Harding described Phillips as a "brilliant woman of intellectual superiority" who was "imprudent" in expressing her pro-German sympathies because of "an egotism in proving her capacity to discuss foreign affairs." Harding's letters suggest, Hutson says, that Phillips, like her suffragist contemporaries, merely insisted "on proving the correctness of her views at the expense of personal popularity or even respectability." In the end, she may have offered no greater threat to the nation than that posed by any "modern woman." A modern woman who liked to climb Mount Jerry.

[Darth Wagtaros]

This smut was released weeks ago Tim. YOu are late to the porn party.

[Syt]

The steamer with the Times has only pulled into the Korean port today, I guess.

[Valmy]

George Washington had a bunch of letters featuring dirty jokes to his army buddies but freaking JP Morgan bought the letters and burned them.  What a douche.

[MadImmortalMan]

Even more scandalous: Harding had black ancestors!!!!1111 

[derspiess]

Wait til the William Howard Taft love letters come out.

[Valmy]

Wait til the William Howard Taft love letters come out.

'Oh Teddy how I dream of your bushy mustache'

[Eddie Teach]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrawNvcF64g

[Josquius]

Thought this would be something on that gay president (hey, I can't remember the names of the lesser distant past presidents). Guess not

[Caliga]

Thought this would be something on that gay president (hey, I can't remember the names of the lesser distant past presidents). Guess not

Buchanan.

[Phillip V]

Women do not demand love letters anymore. 

[LaCroix]

Buchanan.

i hadn't heard this before. 

the wiki page lists three or four historians who argue this, but it doesn't present the other side's argument. are there modern historians who oppose it?

[grumbler]

Buchanan.

i hadn't heard this before. 

the wiki page lists three or four historians who argue this, but it doesn't present the other side's argument. are there modern historians who oppose it?

I'd say the balance of evidence would favor the idea that he was at least bi, if not gay.  The historians who insist that he was definitely gay seem to be selling books about "historical lies" and thus are probably not impartial, but I don't know of any historian who dismisses the idea.  Even during his lifetime, there were a lot of people who knew him and thought he was probably gay, and some of his letters hint pretty strongly that way, so that's why I'd say "yes, he was" based on the preponderance of evidence.

Surprisingly, the rumors about his homosexuality don't appear to have harmed his contemporary public image.  He got elected, and appointed, to a number of high-level offices with those rumors swirling around him.  Of course, he did the Flamenco on his own crank as president, but that's a separate issue.

[Valmy]

Yeah the political jokes at the time suggest he and his predecessors Vice President were an item.  Though if I were gay I would work to prove he was straight, being our worst president and all.