Harding’s relationship with Nan Britton is questionable. His relationship with a woman named Carrie Phillips is not. My book, The Harding Affair, discloses Harding’s complex relationship with Mrs. Phillips through the use of over 900 pages of letters Harding wrote to Phillips from 1910 though 1920, when he was elected President of the United States. Phillips and Harding were caught in an age when divorce was unthinkable and there were multifaceted reasons for their long-term (15 year) affair. The affair was much too complicated to caulk it up sheer womanizing.
The Britton allegations are subject to real doubt, as I point out in my book. Ms. Britton lived directly behind Carrie Phillips’s home in Marion, and there is good reason to believe her book, The President’s Daughter, came from her familiarity with the Harding/Phillips correspondence and not because of any real relationship between then-Senator Harding and Ms. Britton.
The HBO series relies on biographies that falsely used the Phillips correspondence. Worse, letters Mr. Harding wrote to Mrs. Phillips are used to manufacture dialogue for Ms. Britton’s character.
But sadly for history, these smears of President Harding distort what he did as President and as a U. S. Senator. Harding was no “imbecile,” as Nucky Thompson, the main character in the HBO series, calls him. As a Senator, Harding courageously stood against Woodrow Wilson’s call for America to go to war to “make the world safe for democracy,” though he did vote for war. In a lesson America never learned, Harding warned that it is not the business of the United States to engage in regime change through the violence of war.
During his presidency, Harding pardoned Socialist Eugene Debs, who was rotting in an Atlanta prison, sent there by the Wilson Administration for violating the Espionage and Sedition Act.
Debs’ crime? He spoke out against the war—that is, he exercised his right of free speech. Wilson denied a pardon even after the war ended. Harding granted it.
Who is the “imbecile”?
Entertainment is entertainment. But playing fast and loose with serious historical figures only diminishes our true understanding of history’s lessons.
For a more, see http://thehardingaffair.com/.
Jim Robenalt, a lawyer and writer in Cleveland, Ohio, is author both of The Harding Affair and his other terrific book, Linking Rings, William W. Durbin, the Magic and Mystery of America.