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Florence Harding: The First Lady, The Jazz Age, And The Death Of America's Most Scandalous President Paperback – 19 May 1999
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Deeply researched and richly told, Florence Harding reveals the never-before-told story of First Lady Florence Harding's phenomenal rise to power. The daughter of an abusive father in small-town Ohio, mother at a young age to an illegitimate child, Florence Harding saw her escape in Warren Harding, and became the driving force behind his ascent to one of the most scandal-ridden presidencies in United States history.Preeminent First Ladies biographer Carl Sferrazza Anthony not only captures the drama of Florence Harding's personality, but he uses the White House to bring to life Jazz Age America -- a world of speakeasies and Miss America, Babe Ruth, Al Jolson, and the rise of Hollywood. He shows how Florence's friendship with Evalyn McLean, the morphine-addicted owner of the Hope Diamond and The Washington Post was one of the defining bonds in her public life. With newly unsealed medical information, Florence Harding finally unfolds the mystery of whether the First Lady poisoned the President, whose death occurred seventy-five years ago. Florence Harding is a fascinating and informative look at a lost chapter in American history.
- Print length672 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication date19 May 1999
- ISBN-100688169759
- ISBN-13978-0688169756
Product description
About the Author
Carl Sferrazza Anthony, the author of nine books, is considered the nation's expert on the subject of presidential wives and families. He has written extensively for publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, American Heritage, Smithsonian, and Town & Country, and also writes screenplays. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
Product details
- Language : English
- Paperback : 672 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0688169759
- ISBN-13 : 978-0688169756
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Born in 1860 to an Ohio businessman who wanted a son, Florence was in fact raised as a boy until her fourteenth year, when her domineering father realized that what he had actually created was a feminist with an attitude. He struck back ferociously and physically; Florence eventually retaliated by having herself impregnated by a hayseeder several years her junior. Christmas Day of 1882 found the young mother homeless and abandoned. Anthony takes the time to access the options available to this intelligent, ambitious, but impoverished woman. Determined to not disappear into rural Ohio obscurity giving piano lessons, Florence makes two critical decisions that would change her life forever, for better and worse: she gave her child away, and she set her cap for the man through whom she could make her mark in the public forum. On the surface these seem like cynical strategies, but with feminist sympathies Anthony takes pains to remind the reader that American business and politics were both male bastions in the Gilded Age. There were few routes for a woman of ambition.
Florence married the handsome and randy Warren Harding and immediately took over the operation of his local paper, turning a handsome profit and expanding the couple's business ventures. Anthony lets his facts carry the story: the Harding marriage is clearly one of convenience, arguably Florence's more than her husband's. Unencumbered by children, the Duchess, as she came to be called for obvious reasons, had time to consort with the political beat writers and politicians who came to Marion. She tended bar at their poker games, plied them with liquor for information and party gossip, and strategized a grand design for her husband's career in Ohio Republican politics. Managing Warren Harding was a full time job. He was not by nature ambitious, he was not a particularly good businessman, and he was not physically or mentally well, having suffered nervous breakdowns and indications of cardiovascular disease. His most obvious flaw-and one particularly odious to his wife-was his womanizing, which continued virtually to his death, with little concealment, and occasionally on the sly with her best friends.
For two people as different as Warren and the Duchess, it is surprising that they shared one common fatal flaw: they were both dreadfully poor judges of character. For all her intelligence and savvy, the Duchess became dependent [perhaps co-dependent] upon two outright rogues, Charles "Doc" Sawyer, her personal physician, and a gypsy fortune teller, Madame Marcia, both of whom exercised excessive influence throughout the entire Harding Administration. There is a sense in which Florence becomes more insecure with her greater success: Anthony describes her as weeping on Warren's Inauguration Day because of Madame Marcia's prediction that the new president would not live out his term.
Writing about a president's wife inevitably involves detailing the president and the presidency itself. Anthony does a creditable job in paying appropriate attention to Teapot Dome and Veterans Affairs scandals, for example, but in ways that keep the focus of the narrative on Florence and other political wives--Grace Coolidge, Emma Fall, and the aforementioned Mrs. Longworth, for example. The later unraveling of the Harding Administration has obscured the activism of the First Lady; Anthony reminds us of the Duchess's emotional investment in women's rights, veterans' welfare, animal rights, and international peace.
Anthony takes the position that the fateful 1923 "Alaska Trip" was essentially the First Lady's act of self-promotion. Ostensibly, the President's lavish cross continent tour was undertaken to rally political support at a time when congressional investigation of the executive branch was accelerating. The author's narrative of the trip forms a good portion of the book and deservedly so. Warren Harding was depressed and ill as the presidential train left Washington and journeyed across the continent. After innumerable speeches and rallies, the party sets sail from California to Alaska, traveling overland to sites that have probably not seen a president since. Although Anthony debunks many of the myths about the trip, the facts are strange enough-the presidential vessel collided twice with other vessels, and several members of the party were killed in various accidents.
The great mystery of the trip among conspiracy buffs is what [or who?] killed Warren Harding. In one sense the answer is simple enough-the trip exhausted the president to the point where he either suffered a stroke or heart attack in San Francisco. That we cannot say for certain is due to the Duchess, who permitted only Doc Sawyer to treat her husband. Sawyer's incompetence is excelled only by his arrogance; when Herbert Hoover fetched a renowned cardiologist from Stanford to the president's bedside, Sawyer, who was treating the chief executive with questionable purgatives, would have nothing to do with him.
For a veteran of the journalist profession, the Duchess's management of the news of the President's death was poor, and veteran reporters at once smelled cover-up. Most likely her immediate concern was the reputation of Sawyer, and she refused permission for an official autopsy. But her greater worry was the legacy of her husband; she spent weeks burning his official papers and personal correspondence. Her podium destroyed, Florence Harding outlived her husband by one year; she died while in residence at Sawyer's "sanitarium."
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