The Duchess: First Lady Florence Harding and the Tragedy of Being Ahead of Her Time.

CARL SFERRAZZA ANTHONY [*]

One of the great fallacies of contemporary presidential studies is that the political partnership of the chief executive and his spouse did not exist prior to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Whereas the Roosevelt partnership evolved throughout the presidency from 1933 to 1945, the balance of power between Warren G. Harding and his wife, Florence, was a known quantity before he was even elected president in 1920 and she is deserving of consideration as the initiator of the modern activist first ladyship; in fact, its widespread publicity may have contributed to his election in the first presidential election to be dictated by the 19th amendment, giving women the right to vote.

However accomplished, precedent-breaking, or exemplar a first lady may conduct herself and be perceived during her husband's presidency, her power is ultimately, unavoidably derivative. As such, Florence Kling Harding could never escape the taint of being the spouse of the man consistently rated as American history's worst president. If Harding has been so judged, the tragedy is that the assorted scandals that emerged after his death in office, on August 2, 1923, were the handiwork not of him, but of his Interior Secretary, Attorney General, and Director of the Veteran's Bureau. For Florence Harding's reputation in history, the tragedy is that she is inextricably intertwined with that legacy. Regardless of how revolutionary were her public declarations on gender equity, how modern the belief system that underpinned her campaign for humane education, how vital her definition of a first lady's responsibility to interact with the public as her constituency, Mrs. Harding is shadowed by the Administration's scanda l.

As can so often happen with the person who is in the position of first lady, her real work and effort has been eclipsed by the "personality" coverage she received as a celebrity. During Florence Harding's tenure as first lady that was often manifested in pejorative observations about her older physical appearance, her faith in metaphysics, and what were usually disparaging remarks about her "masculine" mannerisms and speaking style. After her death, a new set of biases were put into dramatic motion against her reputation. Thus today, if most Americans know the name of Florence Harding at all it is most likely in association with the posthumous rumors that she poisoned the President in retaliation for his adultery instead of her becoming the first first lady, for example, to develop a national constituency--in her case, the wounded and disabled veterans of the first World War. To look at her record in just two and a half years in the White House is to realize that because she was so different a first lady, his tory pinned her as an oddity and an anomaly, rather than the trailblazer she was for the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Bird Johnson, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, and Hillary Clinton.

PLANTING THE SEEDS

A first-born child, with two younger brothers, Florence Mabel Kling was born on August 15, 1860 in the small town of Marion, Ohio. Educated in local public schools and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, she was raised by her father in the manner he had intended to raise what he had hoped would be a son: trained in hardware, real estate, banking, finance, and all aspects of business. After her pregnancy and alleged elopement to Henry DeWolfe in 1881, which resulted in her only child, a son, her father refused to help her. So Florence went to work as a piano teacher to support herself and her child. After her 1891 marriage to Warren Harding, the editor of the local newspaper, the Marion Star, her son went to live with her father. That Florence Harding took such an active role in the worlds of journalism and politics was undoubtedly fostered by the fact that she had none of the traditional responsibilities of motherhood.

Although there is no suggestion that the Harding marriage was ever passionate, it was a complex and emotionally dependent relationship, with a strong and loving attachment to each other. She dealt with her husband's string of adulterous relationships first with rage and a threat of divorce, then with an angry but apparently accepting resentment. She became the full-time business, circulation, and advertising manager of the Star. Her business acumen helped to eventually make it the state's most successful daily. What proved to be central to her later orientation of the first lady's role, however, was Florence Harding's familiarity with the reporting needs of the media, as well as her comfort among the almost exclusively male profession of journalism.

As Harding rose in the Ohio Republican hierarchy, Florence Harding was almost always--literally--at his side. Thus, she became familiar and comfortable with another nearly exclusive male domain, that of politics. Her judgment on the character of fellow politicians was not always keen, but her sense of what was appropriate in terms of the public presentation of her husband proved important to his great success and personal popularity. She often worked on drafting his speeches with him, assessed which issues were important for him to consider, and built her own alliances with important political figures. Essentially, she became his manager. It was the partnership between Florence Harding and lobbyist-lawyer Harry M. Daugherty that positioned Harding to run his successful campaign for the U.S. Senate, a seat he assumed in 1915. It was in Harding's 1920 presidential campaign, however, that Florence Harding directly aided his political career by creating a public role for herself. This campaign role became the bl ueprint for her groundbreaking behavior as first lady.

The New York Times was the first to take notice of how utterly different Florence Harding was from other political spouses and previous candidates' spouses. In its coverage of the June 1920 Republican Convention in Chicago, a Times reporter wrote of how astounding it was that this potential first lady made herself accessible to the press, and furthermore, she was willing to speak on the record about the political maneuverings of the convention. [1]

During the course of the campaign, as the final states were ratifying the right to vote for women, national and local newspapers were filled with everything from serious analysis to lighthearted jokes to advertisements about the foregone conclusion of the feminine influence at the November polls. With this coverage were dozens of news pieces, interviews, and other printed stories with and about Florence Harding. This in itself was new: never had the image, opinions, and life story of a candidate's spouse become such a familiar and detailed commodity during a campaign.

This phenomena was largely due to Florence Harding herself. Not only did she help shape the campaign image of the candidate but of herself as well. In finding a balance between the old-fashioned manager of the home, and the newer full-time working woman, she had a broad appeal to the woman voter. By also stating on the record what she did, Florence Harding was crafting a new image for a potential first lady. Certainly, it would even seem radical today for a candidate's spouse to say what Florence Harding did in a direct attribution interview with…