On This Date by Carl M. Cannon

Author:Carl M. Cannon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / United States / General, History / Reference
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2017-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

July 8, 1891

The Duchess

Warren G. Harding, a Marion, Ohio, newspaper publisher, was a handsome young man on the rise when he came courting Florence Mabel Kling DeWolfe. She was a plain, divorced, thirty-year-old single mother with an overbearing father—a German-American banker who opposed the relationship because he considered Harding a social climber. Harding’s motives were complicated, which is often the case when matters of the heart are intertwined with professional ambition. Either way, whether by instinct or calculation, Warren Harding married Florence on this date. Whatever his reasons, he had paired off with a woman who could help him go further in politics than his talents otherwise would have allowed.

He called her the Duchess, and she sublimated any aspirations of her own to advance her mate’s political career. She was up front about it, saying she had “only one real hobby—my husband.” Yet, Florence was a feminist, albeit within the confines of the 1920s. She hosted an all-women’s tennis tournament at the White House, promoted the Girl Scouts, and exercised her right to vote—the first time any woman had pulled the lever for her husband in a U.S. presidential election. A member of the League of Women Voters and the National Women’s Party, she encouraged other women to vote as well. In Ohio, the Duchess had propelled Harding into the state’s Republican political circles and she had arrived in Washington with a vision of what a First Lady could be—and she managed an impressive number of “firsts” for a First Lady. She preapproved his speeches, weighed in on cabinet appointments, and pushed the president to appoint women to government posts. Florence also adopted the welfare of World War I veterans as her signature issue, helping launch an East Wing tradition that exists to this day.

She was so strong a personality that when her husband died unexpectedly in office, rumors abounded that she had poisoned him. She didn’t, though she had her reasons, but she may have inadvertently contributed to his death by choosing as a White House physician a homeopath who misdiagnosed her husband’s 1923 heart attack as food poisoning. Florence burned thousands of his papers and letters after he died, explaining they might be “misconstrued.” The Teapot Dome scandal was brewing by then, so that made sense. There were other reasons to get rid of his papers, too, particularly the steamy letters from various women that didn’t surface for nearly a century. Perhaps a better way of saying it is that the letters might have been “construed.”

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