Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [43]
Despite his astonishing majority—Harding won 61 percent of the popular vote and thirty-seven of forty-eight states—his campaign team must have heaved a sigh of relief. For months they had been struggling to prevent Harding’s many affairs being made public. In return for signed affidavits denying their involvement with Harding, and the passionate letters and erotic poetry Harding had written to them (often on blue Senate writing paper), his mistresses had been paid off out of a secret account funded by the National Republican Committee. One woman demanded and received $20,000. But Harding’s craving for romance was hard to suppress. Even on the night before his inauguration the President-elect had to be prevented from sneaking out of his room in the middle of the night for an assignation.
People joked that anyone who had to live with Florence Harding deserved extra-curricular activities, but despite his infidelities Warren (or “W’rr’n,” as Florence called him) seemed to dote upon his determined, heavily-marceled wife. Certainly he always deferred to the woman he called the “Duchess” and trusted her implicitly; she was the one person he knew for sure had his interests at heart.
Seven years her husband’s senior, Florence Harding was the most emancipated First Lady America had known. When the Belgian queen, Elizabeth, had visited Washington in 1919, Mrs. Harding (then a senator’s wife) had met her not with a curtsy but with a “level eye [and]…an outstretched hand.” A declared suffragist, she was the first president’s wife to have voted for her husband, following legislation that granted women the vote in 1920. “If Warren G. Harding is elected there will be two P- well, personalities in the White House,” wrote a journalist during the campaign. “For Mrs. Harding is no mere gentle shadow flitting in the background of her husband’s greatness.”
Florence had made her own living as a single mother before meeting Harding and then helped him make a success of his newspaper, the Marion Star. Domestic life didn’t interest her. “I’d rather go hungry than broil steak and boil potatoes,” she said. “I love business.” She refused to pretend that she wasn’t interested in the running of her husband’s administration. Having bossed W’rr’n around for years, she had no compunction about pressing for appointments, reviewing budgets, writing his speeches, attending government conferences and lobbying on behalf of her many interests, which included all-female prisons, Girl Scouts and animal welfare. She and Warren were childless but they both loved animals; their Airedale, Laddie Boy, was familiarly known as the “Publicity Hound.”
Mrs. Harding brought a breath of fresh air and modernity to her role as First Lady and to the White House, throwing open its doors to visitors (and often leading tours herself), screening movies in the East Room and playing jazz at presidential functions. She was the first First Lady to fly in an airplane (with a woman pilot), the first to hold her own press conferences for female reporters, the first to welcome divorcees to the White House, and she made a point of entertaining black schoolchildren as well as white at White House receptions. Her unabashed prominence meant that she was popularly thought to be the power behind the throne. When John Anderson, a Swedish immigrant taking the U.S. citizenship test in the early 1920s, was asked who would assume the president’s duties if he should die in office and replied Mrs. Harding, the judge, smiling, let him pass.
After a crisis in 1911, when Florence discovered letters from her best friend to Harding revealing the affair they had been having for more than five years (and would continue for almost a decade), an impasse was reached. Florence decided to stay with the man she still adored and turn a blind eye to his infidelities, as long as they were contained enough to jeopardize neither her pride nor his career. The price she paid was isolation. Afraid of making female friends because she suspected that they would try to ensnare Warren, she devoted herself