Cradles of Power by Harold I. Gullan

Author:Harold I. Gullan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2016-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Unlikely to Unlucky—Hardings, Coolidges, and Hoovers

Phoebe and George Tryon Harding II

One thing about Warren Gamaliel Harding: he really looked like a president. Six feet tall, chiseled features, noble bearing, silver hair. His appearance, his amiability, and his availability, in the opinion of many observers, constituted the bulk of his qualifications for high office. Harding found it so hard to say no that his father, George Tryon Harding II, suggested that had he been born a girl, he would always be in the family way.

On the other hand, Tryon, as he liked to be called, bore rather a noble-sounding name, but little else about him seems very notable. Physically, as described by Frances Russell, he “was small for his age—his height at maturity would be below average—dark-complexioned, with dark curly hair and over-large ears. Some would call him ferret-faced.” Charles Mee’s description is equally merciless. Tryon “was a small, idle, shiftless, impractical, lazy, day-dreaming, cat-napping fellow whose eye was always on the main chance.” Yet he was energetic enough to pursue success in a dozen different directions and to induce the grounded Phoebe Dickerson to elope with him.

Both families grew from immigrant roots, English or Dutch, in the seventeenth century. Puritan Richard Harding, “a mariner engaged in fishing,” arrived in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1623. Around forty years later, Phoebe’s maternal grandparents, the Van Kirks, came to Long Island. The Hardings, Dickersons, and Van Kirks replicate the familiar rise in status from farmers and blacksmiths to sea captains and frontier lawyers to doctors and legislators. Each family was active in the American Revolution, one of the Van Kirks reportedly supplying seven sons to the cause, and in the War of 1812. After that conflict, like so many others in New England and New York, Harding’s forebears sensed greener pastures to the west and set off to Ohio.

So it was that barely a century before Warren Harding’s inauguration as president—the seventh chief executive from Ohio—his great-great-grandfather Amos built his log cabin on the frontier that was already America’s breadbasket. Here the first Tryon Harding was born in the “Harding Settlement” around the town of Blooming Grove. Two generations later, George Tryon Harding II was born nearby on June 12, 1843. Although smaller than prior Hardings, Tryon shared their generally swarthy complexion, leading to rumors that there had been Negro blood somewhere down the line. The Hardings were now secure enough to donate land, in the New England tradition, for a schoolhouse. On Sundays it could be converted to community worship.

Later that year, on December 21, 1843, on the adjoining farm, Isaac and Charity Dickerson had a daughter they named Phoebe Elizabeth. She was the youngest of their nine children, the eighth girl, and the liveliest. Early on, Tryon noticed his new neighbor at school. The little girl in pigtails who excelled at recitations was becoming a slender, self-assured young woman.

Although obliged to go back to it from time to time, Tryon would find farming less than fulfilling. Fortunately, it was possible to

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