Announcer up next, Carl Sferrazza anthony, author of Florence Harding the first lady, the jazz age, and the death of americas most scandalous president , discusses the life of the woman married to president warren g. Harding. Dispels some myths around her time in the white house. The White House Historical association hosted this event and provided the video. Ms. Mann today we are welcoming Carl Sferrazza anthony, the author of several books on president ial families including four biographies and a conference of overview of all the first families. He wrote a two volume history, an inside view of 200 years inside the white house. He served as a consultant to the first ladys exhibit and was the National First ladys historian in 2017. Welcome. Mr. Anthony thank you. I appreciate so much being able to join the White House Historical association today and very honored to give you a little bit of a background about Florence Harding in the book. I have to tell you, as is often said, a parent should not really have per se a favorite child, and i think an author perhaps should not have a favorite book. But i will say that the research of this book and then the unique promotion that i did for this book will always be a very important part of my life. I started writing this book and researching this book at a time when the sun was just setting on the last generation of people who knew the hardings firsthand. Of course they had been young children, some almost teenagers. At the end of the process, the 75th anniversary of the death of president harding, of course he died in 1923, so this was in 1998, i retraced the hardings western tour, Transcontinental Railroad trip in the blistering summer of 1923, at all the stops along the way. And of the hardings had gone to alaska and the president had driven the golden spike that completed the alaska railroad. There was an elderly man there who had been at that original ceremony, then in his 90s, and he redid that little bit of the striking of the golden spike with a second golden spike. So this story has a lot of personal residence for me personal residence resonance for me. I would also say Florence Harding has a lot of personal resonance for me, because, as so often will happen, we have had many great first ladies who were married to president s who were not always remembered quite so kindly, but what ended up happening so often was these women really are forgotten. They are oftentimes turned into caricatures and nobody really gives them much attention. And i have always detected something about mrs. Harding that i thought was as worthy and as important as Eleanor Roosevelt was in the role of the first lady. And as i began doing research over a long period of years, starting when i was in college, i really full measure of her greatness. Florence harding had been born into a very successful small town, a central ohio man who owned real estate, owned a Hardware Store, and started rather she was born about the Hardware Store in the second floor. The eldest of three. Her father had hoped she had been a boy, so he kind of raised her as he would have a son, teaching her all of those things that, at that time, with so much of a conscious notion of what gender should or should not be doing, he sort of ignored that. She rode horses, she had great physical strength. And they were close, but he was rather tyrannical. Her mother was a bit passive. As time went on and she began developing more of a sense of what she wanted to do with her life, was to be a serious musician. He did send her to the cincinnati conservatory of music. There were a lot of arguments. And ultimately, she ran away with a neighborhood boy. There is no proof of there being a legal marriage, but they held themselves out as married and was a commonwealth marriage, and she became pregnant and had a son. Unfortunately the husband, her companion, abandoned her, and she had to come back into the small town of marion, her hometown, where she broke into a house that she knew was abandoned for the winter. From there, really continue to struggle. Ultimately her father made a deal with her in which he would take her son in and raise him as his own. She began giving piano students. One of her students had a brother by the name of Warren Harding. Hes interested in journalism. He buys a small local paper, and florence really goes after her. He is five years younger than her, but they really form a great business partnership. And she becomes the Business Manager of the newspaper and sevens up and ends up turning it into one of the most successful daily papers in the state. And it not only required a great deal of business acumen, but also great interpersonal skills, as well as a sense of what made a great story, because she was working with journalists. She was elected to lieutenant governor, then makes a run for the u. S. Senate. And florence was really behind him in this. He formed friendships formed a friendship with a powerful lobbyist by the name of harry. He and florence became kind of comanagers of hardings career. She comes to washington as a senate wife. Even though she was sort of a big fish in a small pond back in ohio, shes not just a senate wife, does not really know anybody. But harding, as the u. S. Senator from ohio, becomes friends with nicholas longworth, a congressman. Of course nicholas longworth, married to alice roosevelt, the daughter of president theodore roosevelt, and already established as washingtons premier hostess. And there, the famous poker games began between the longworths and the hardings. They also included a man or the name of den mclean, whose father owned the Cincinnati Enquirer and the national and the washington post. And his wife owned the hope diamond. She and mrs. Harding, despite their 30 year age difference, became instant friends. In a sense, more than friends. They became great confidence. And evelyn and she were excited to discover that they not only shared a common bond in their love and respect for animals, for all living beings, but also for astrology, and a belief in various forms of spiritualism. Mrs. Mclean took mrs. Harding to her fortuneteller, which apparently everyone in washington did. A woman by the name of madame marsha. And madame marsha did tarot card readings and astrology readings for mrs. Harding about her husband. She predicted in the winter of 1920, right as the republican president ial primaries are beginning, she predicted if harding ran, he would be elected, but that he would die of a sudden violent death by poison. What is interesting is these things were reported in the newspaper at the time. And in fact, at the june, 1920 convention, mrs. Harding spoke openly about them, saying she saw one word above her husbands head if he were elected, and that word was tragedy. Also going on at that time is the 19th amendment. Its on the verge of being passed, ratified. And mrs. Harding had always been a suffragist. She always believed in the equality of women. During that sam during that summer campaign, she she began to give interviews with reporters. Which candidates wives usually did not. And rather unusually, she announced that she did not wear a wedding ring, she did not like to cook, that her interests were mostly in business. She addressed some of the hot political issues of the day. For example, very much against the league of nations and entangling the u. S. In any overseas obligations. This, of course, coming on the heels of world war i. And harding is elected in no small part because of florences management, particularly in the area of press relations. Not unlike Jacqueline Kennedy in terms of having a strong sense of how to frame her husband as the ideal president ial candidate. Both in terms of his words and deeds, but also his appearance. The evolution of media is very crucial at this time, because although we do not yet have sound recordings, the sophistication of newsreels and visual recordings is great, and the hardings are really the first couple to have their images proliferate across all media, both in print newspapers and magazines, but also in newsreels, which would often play in the middle of when people went to the theater at the time, they would often see newsreels, which of course had text, because there was no audio recording, describing the scene. So the country was exposed to Florence Harding in a way that they had never been before, to any other first lady. And as first lady, she gets onto the steps on Inauguration Day and she turns to her husband and says, i got you the presidency. Now what are you going to do . Once they are in the white house, later that day she tells the servants to open all the windows so the public can look in, because she says it is their white house. She came to the role of first lady with a very strong sense of public duty. That the public was, in a sense, her constituency. This is a similarity to Eleanor Roosevelt. It is not something often seen by any of her predecessors. We know that the first ladies before her always saw the role of the upkeep of the house, the entertaining, at that point, part of a traditional feminine role, a womans role in american society. But Florence Harding really expanded that. She felt a sense of great civic responsibility. And this manifested primarily with three constituencies. One was the wounded and disabled veterans who were returning from world war i. And in fact, when harding helped to establish the new reforms Veterans Bureau, its mrs. Harding who weighs in, unfortunately, on the choice of a charles ford to head that. She was a friend of hers. A friend of both hardings, and she very strongly believed he was capable of that. But she evolved the veteran bureau affairs. When scandals start to break, she is on it very quickly. The second area she really concentrated on was economic and political and professional and Educational Equity for women. She encouraged women to seek Higher Education. She supported a ban on sugar, when sugar prices became too exorbitant. She talked about how the housewives could have power. She encouraged women to become more involved in the political process now that they had the vote. She said it is not a question of yes, it is a fact. So women should become better educated. Although she was a republican, she supported what many at the time what Many Democrats and republicans saw as a potential threat to loyal members by the creation of a National Womens party. And mrs. Harding supported the National Womens party in their successful effort to have a triptych bust, if you will, of susan b. Anthony, and i forgot the second womans name. But anyway, the third area she focused on was animalrights. She was rather radical. She was an antivivisectionist. Using animals in any kind of experimentations for experimenting experimentations for products that humans would use. She was very engaging, very friendly, but also very blunt. Sometimes she rubbed people the wrong way. They attributed that to somehow her small town ways. But even though she was older than many of the other first ladys had been when they assumed that position, she was really very much in touch with current popular culture. For example, she is the first to use film, movies, a silent film called the covered wagon, which the sound of it was provided by a large orchestra she used that as live dinner entertainment at the white house. Through evelyn maclean, she got to know d. W. Griffith. And the gish sisters, who came to visit the hardings in the white house. She brought the first radio into the white house. And although she tried her best to stick to the traditional notions that a first lady should not speak on the record with reporters, she could not help her self. So, she really was in a very short period of time, a very dynamic woman and a very honest woman. Now, everybody also always wonders about the scandals. And the fact of the matter is, as far as personal life goes, we know from letters released that Warren Harding had a fullblown love affair with a woman who had been his wifes best friend in ohio. We also know now, because of dna, that the very young she was almost 40 years younger than harding, and passionately in love with him, had a child by him. The degree to which mrs. Harding knew about her is not entirely clear, although there are some suggestions that she suspected something. But she certainly knew about the Gary Phillips incident. But in another entirely different dimension, the hardings very much loved each other. When mrs. Harding almost died in september of 1922 because of an ailment, the president was beside himself. And really the love and the interdependence they had on each other really emerged from firsthand accounts at that time. As part of her spiritualist beliefs, mrs. Harding was always rather, almost obsessed with this vision she had for many decades of going to alaska. And she felt somehow it was part of some mission she had to complete. And so even though the president s health is beginning to deteriorate, and shes looked over by frankly an incompetent homeopath from their hometown, who actually has mrs. Hardings full trust because she believes he is the only person who can save her. In fact even when the famous mayo brothers come and she is almost dying in the white house, it is only little doc sawyer who is able to relate save her. But through the notes of the secondincommand, joel boone, we know that sawyer was very incompetent. During this trip out west, was doing things that were worsening what boone knew to be a very bad heart condition. And ultimately president harding died in mrs. Hardings presence in San Francisco on august 2, 1923 in the palace hotel in San Francisco. So, ultimately, rumors began that she had poisoned him. And there are some suggesting that perhaps the power of suggestion, mrs. Harding believed it was fate that the president would die. But later a book came out that said she poisoned him was utterly fiction. But the book was wellcrafted in that it took what were known truths and spun a web around those. So ultimately, mrs. Harding was for many years remembered as, if ever remembered, as the first lady to have poisoned the president. Im also being i want to be conscious of the time here. I want to make sure i am not speaking too long. So do give me an indication if give me an indication if i am doing ok or if im going over the time. Ms. Mann you are doing great. I believe we also may have some photos to share. Let me get those up. Mr. Anthony yes. This is the home in marion, ohio where mrs. Harding grew up. The home of her father. Many times she would learn how to slip out of the window and run off with henry dewolfe, was the man she had the first commonlaw marriage with. Well, that is a bulldog. Since i have two dogs, i am very happy to show the bulldog. I believe his name was bully boy. I cant confirm that 100 . But the more famous one was laddie boy. Many times mrs. Harding would let laddie boy go to serve as a host, if you will, for a lot of Animal Rescue and Animal Protection fundraisers. Here is mrs. Harding with a group of women. She loved meeting at the white house with a wide variety of men activists. Whether they were a professional organization, or even in the case of a delegation of filipino women who came seeking support for the independence of the filipino islands. She particularly especially loved to encourage groups of graduating classes of women, because she so believed in the need for Higher Education for women. Here she is after the election but before the inauguration at a Senate Wives Luncheon honoring them. The woman in the white hat on the one side is evelyn maclean. On the other, the outgoing president s wife. Evelyn maclean of course left us some wonderful and colorful recollections of those years, the most famous of which poses mrs. Harding after the body of the president is brought back to the white house in a flagdraped coffin asking for the coffin to be open, and then speaking to him and telling him the trip hasnt hurt you a bit, and expressing the feeling that and this is sort of what helped lead to these rumors now that this is all over, i am beginning to think that this was all for the best. Here is mrs. Harding interested in and fascinated by this new technology of film, motion pictures. Here she is of course winding a camera on the lawn of the white house. And i believe the group was a group of amateur women camera people, i guess you would call them, or camera women as they were called. In many ways, Florence Harding developed the notion of a photo op. She would pose in a group, she would participate by holding something that was symbolic of it. And she was very selfconscious of her physicality and was uncomfortable sometimes posing for images, i suppose because the box made her eyes pop out and so forth. Nonetheless, she always did it as part of what she felt was her public duty as first lady. And this is after her recovery from her illness in march of 1923, before they head down to florida for their annual winter vacation. At this point in the spring of 1923, so many of their friends, close, personal friends, who hold power in the administration, the scandals were beginning. Albert fall, the senator from new mexico, secretary of interior, the secret leasing of oil to the dome, and others. It begins to raise eyebrows. Charlie forbes and the Veterans Bureau scandal in february. Then two months after this trip, along which is taken with the attorney general and his companion, who was a dollar a year man at the justice department, its discovered that smith was involved with the illegal trafficking of confiscated liquor during prohibition. And he commits suicide. And he was a very close friend of theirs. So you can understand that by the time they were leaving for alaska, mrs. Harding has a lot of dark clouds over her. Here she is at a fair, helping to promote some of the textiles that were made by the disabled veterans in walter reed. Maclean first introduced mrs. Harding to the men returning from the front who were being treated at walter reed. And here she is at walter reed with, i believe it was a blind veteran of that first world war. She referred to them as my boys. And tying in with the squalls, mrs. Harding started the big garden parties every spring. She had a series of them. One of the biggest and most important to her was the garden party for the wounded veterans, wounded and disabled veterans from walter reed. Hundreds would come down to the white house, and that is where those drinks were. That remained a tradition. I did not believe it was during world war ii, but otherwise they did during the coolidge and hoover and truman, and then up through the eisenhower years. Those white house garden parties for veterans were held. Ms. Mann sorry about that. All right. Lets transition into our q a. We have a bunch of Great Questions for you tonight. Unfortunately, i do not take we can get through all of them, but lets see what we can get through. First question, we have a question from denise from ohio. She says on the first , anniversary of 9 11, i was reminded about how First Lady Laura Bush was the perfect first lady for that time in history. In what ways was florence the bestas or was not fit for her time . Mr. Anthony i think she was the best possible fit. Even though she was an older woman, she embodied authentically the notion of the new woman. Sometimes caricatured as the flapper. She wore styles, maybe not necessarily the most flattering to her, but representing a certain sense of liberation. She also had a navy combo that performed jazz music for the first time at the white house. So in so many ways culturally, but also politically i think she really was one of those who ideally fits the time. Ms. Mann a lot of people want to know, do you believe the alleged views that florence poisoned her husband and that is really what led to president hardings death . Mr. Anthony no. However, i think because this guy dr. Sawyer, the way i put it was i believe he was an unwitting accomplice to a negligent homicide. And i think that had dr. Boone prevailed, that the president might have been saved, but that with the sort of nutty concoctions and things that dr. Sawyer was doing, and because sawyer saved her life, she had implicit belief in him. He was a bit like a rasputin to her. Ms. Mann jim asks, given mrs. Hardings savvy with the media, why is she not better known . Mr. Anthony the main thing is something i have always said. No matter how much good a first lady does it can never overcome , the perceived damage or harm or failure of her husband. We always have to keep that in mind when talking about first ladies. I mean, i always say, it may be true that we would never know about these women had we never known about these men. The flipside is that is had these men not been married to these women we may never have known these men. She died only about one year and two months after the president had died. As a widow, while the teapot dome trial is going on, and other scandals are coming out, shes still there, but shes a little paranoid, thinking her phone is tapped and so forth. There is even a movement to get her to run for governor. She wants to write a book. She wants to write a book about her husband, and i suppose in some ways it would have served as an autobiography. But really the truth is she never got her version of her life out. The harding papers were closed because dr. Sawyer and his son were very possessive, and very territorial. The hardings of course having no children and the sawyers being in there, they kept those papers locked up for some 40 or so years. So really it is more a matter of fact that she never had a chance to tell their story. Ms. Mann bill from San Francisco asks, this is a similar vein as the last question, was Florence Harding vilified like Eleanor Roosevelt was for usurping her husbands role as president , or did his death mr. Anthony that is an interesting question. Two things. Because there was such a new attitude in the country out with womens voting, not only the reality of it but the perception of it, mrs. Harding being sometimes referred to as there was a cartoon that had the hardings together that said the president and mr. Harding. So there were a lot of jokes, a lot of references. She was not really attacked or criticized. There were a couple of things. One was her being held responsible for the appointment of a woman in california to a federal position where the womans qualifications were questioned. The other thing was she sent money to help save the life of a very elderly workforce in connecticut. And one of the socialist newspapers at the time in the country attacks her because it said, here you are helping an old workhorse, but nobody helps the old humans who are working who dont have a pension. So there was some criticism, but not a lot. Ms. Mann this is kind of a timely question, a topical question from martin from d. C. He asks, what do you think of the request from a descendent of two dissenter hardings ancestry. Mr. Anthony i do not know enough and i have not given enough thought, but i will say this. I know mr. Blazing, he is a wonderful guy. Always very much loved his grandmother and britain. And always defended her and believed in her. His mother, elizabeth, who was the daughter of president harding, was actually a little bit more removed from that whole thing. I think as a young woman growing up, you can imagine that its more difficult for her to deal with it, and it was her mothers big issue. But the dna of course has unequivocally proven that mr. Blazings grandfather is president harding. Ms. Mann publicly, president harding was a supporter of civil rights for africanamericans. But a thirdhand account rumor is he was a member of the klan. Can you clarify his position on civil rights . And what was first lady hardings position on civil rights mr. Anthony harding was . Not a member of the klan, and he spoke out against it. But what happened was there was a convergence in washington of the ku klux klan at the very same time that there was a convergence of one of the vaguely secret lodges of the masons. And they had different pacts, that were not by any stretch of the imagination, anything similar. But it was sort of a ceremonial hat the members wore. The hardings welcomed them into the white house. It seems to me these two stories became conflated. Mrs. Harding very strongly condemned racism, and in fact, when a woman, a member of the Republican Party of florida, the state party, wrote, was trying to get a letter to the president that was not being answered, then wrote mrs. Harding to use her influence in a way that was a strike against equal rights, for people of color in florida, mrs. Harding responded very sharply and said, if these are your yous, and this is what you are advocating, i would ask you to no longer write to either my husband or myself. Because this does not represent our views. So, you know, its interesting, because the roosevelts, theres still this adherence to the way things were, meaning there were people of color who largely served in domestic roles. There were a limited number of those who had achieved a level of National Prominence that they were welcomed at the white house. I do not find a record of any prominent people of color being welcomed at the white house, but in terms of correspondence and in terms of what she said publicly, mrs. Harding advocated for civil rights. What is interesting too is she went to alaska, as far as i am able to determine, she is the first figure of National Prominence or associated with the government, who advocates for statehood and is very engaged and interested in the native culture of alaska. And speaking of them as whole americans. Ms. Mann we only have time for a couple more questions. I have just a few more. A lot of people want to know a little bit more about what this is hardings life looked like after her husbands death and what she did then. Mr. Anthony i think her legacy was muted because he died in office she died a year later. , it is really only evelyn mclean, wife of the editor and owner of the washington post, who is at that point writing very positive things about her. But when you look at how she is really the first first lady to feel a sense of commitment to the public, that the American Public was her constituency. That the first lady had a responsibility to answer the needs of the american people. So you had her weighing in on immigrants, you have her writing for help. You have her helping small individual cases of people who need help, and referencing those letters to the different departments and agencies, very much like Eleanor Roosevelt did. In the past, you might have a first lady like mrs. Cleveland who got involved with a local charity, or mrs. Taft, who had a vision for the city, and mrs. , got involvedple in legislation that ended up in the first health and safety measures, standards in the workplace. But it was all related to life in washington, or life within the federal government. Mrs. Wilson, ellen wilson, again, the whole issue over seeking to rid the city of what were deplorable housing without providing housing for the displaced people of color. There were those before her who undertook these projects, but mrs. Harding had a national view. She saw the entire nation as her constituency. Even when they made that western tour across the country and up to alaska, she began to speak and deliver informal speeches from the back of the train to the public. So, she saw the first lady as a public role, and i think that is her most important legacy. Ms. Mann what specific impact do you think she might have on future first ladies . Mr. Anthony i am not sore sure because i think she is largely forgotten. I came across something elsewhere mrs. Roosevelt knew that mrs. Harding had a very close friendship with a couple of reporters, women reporters. Because some of those women reporters covered mrs. Harding 10 years later covered mrs. Roosevelt. So they spoke to her about that. I think to my knowledge, no other first lady has ever gotten involved in animalrights, but certainly in terms of advocating economic, political, educational and professional equity of women you see Eleanor Roosevelt doing , that. Then later Hillary Clinton and laura bush. You see the care of the veterans particularly. I think that is where her legacy is because many first ladies became advocates of veterans. Of the korean war, the vietnam war. Right up to mrs. Obama working with thensecond Lady Jill Biden creating a program directly to help active military and their families. So i think that is a big part of it. Mrs. Lincoln did a little of that, but for example, except for if they cross the path of an individual veterans of the civil war, first ladies from mrs. Lincoln to mrs. Harding really did not focus on that. So if anything, that is maybe where she laid the groundwork. Ms. Mann excellent. Thank you, carl, for your wonderful presentation this evening. From George Washington to george w. Bush, every sunday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern we figure feature the presidency. Exploring their politics, policies and legacies. You were watching American History tv, all weekend, every weekend on cspan three. You are watching American History tv. Onhours of programming American History every weekend on cspan three. Follow us on twitter at cspan history for information on our schedule to keep up with the latest history news. Author and Smith College english professor Michael Gorra discusses his book the saddest s civillliam faulkner war, which examines how the legacies of the civil war in the souths defeat are represented in faulkners novels. The Kansas City Public Library hosted this event and provided the video. Mr. Woolfolk welcome to our latest installment in this series. I want to mention if you have question tonight, you can ask those in the chat box or on comments on the youtube pagend
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