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Warren Harding’s presidency

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President Warren Harding isn’t our best known president; in fact at times he’s been known as our worst president. But various writers have begun to restore his reputation by digging into the primary sources of the time. James David Robenalt is one of them. He’s a Cleveland lawyer with deep roots in Ohio and a longtime interest in his state’s political figures. He recently got his hands on a trove of love letters between Harding and his longtime mistress Carrie Phillips. Marco Werman speaks with author James David Robenalt.

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MARCO WERMAN: Warren Harding was not one of our great presidents.  In fact, most historians rank him as one of our worst, but author James David Robenalt thinks Harding deserves a second look.  Mr. Robenalt got hold of a microfilm copy of love letters Harding wrote to a woman named Carrie Phillips.  The letters reveal Harding’s passionate side and no small measure of political courage.  Robenalt tells all in the book, “The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage during the Great War.”  The book’s protagonists are the future president and his mistress.

ROBENALT: They were neighbors and they were both married and they started their relationship in 1905 long before the First World War, which is what this book is mostly about.  But they fell madly in love.  It was a very passionate love.  The letters suggest that there was three years of courtship, and then it became physical and boy did it become physical.  You know, he writes a lot about her body parts, and his love for them but he also writes in a very beautiful way about the meaning of love and of their relationship.  They were both caught in marriages that were not very good, and at the time they couldn’t find a way to get divorced and to get together.  So there is this real longing in these letters that come out from Warren Harding.

WERMAN: If you look at Warren Harding’s marriage, I mean, he kind of married the girl next door in Marion, Ohio, Florence Harding.  He could be kind of seen as an internationalist, though, when he starts seeing Carrie Phillips.  I mean, she moves actually to Berlin.  Why does she do that?

ROBENALT: Well, I come from that part of Ohio.  It’s the central and western part of the state, and that state was populated by a lot of German-Americans, and it was not unusual back in the time for people of that heritage to send their children to Germany to get education.  You know, the educational system here was still finding its way.  So Carrie took her daughter, Isabel, who was about 15 or 16 to finish her high school years in Berlin.  That’s why she went.  She left her husband, Jim Phillips, back at home and she went over there originally for a year, and she ended up staying three years.

WERMAN: Right, and when was this, prior to World War I, correct?

ROBENALT: She leaves in September of 1911, and she is supposed to come back a year later.  She doesn’t.  She comes back to see Warren Harding secretly twice on sister ships of the Lusitania and the Titanic.  It was the age of those grand ships.  Eventually, she came back in July of 1914 and, of course, World War I is the guns of August.  It’s August of 1914.  So she comes back just as the war breaks out in Europe.

WERMAN: Just to clarify, this is taking place when he is not president yet.  He was a U.S. Senator at the time, right?

ROBENALT: In fact, he had not run for Senate yet.  He had been a state politician.  He’d been the lieutenant-governor of the State of Ohio, and he was kind of out of politics during this period of time when she took off.  He had just lost the governor’s race in 1910 by a margin of 100,000 votes.  Everybody thought he was done and then in 1914, he wins by 100,000 votes and suddenly becomes presidential timber.  So it’s during that wasteland that this really amazing thing happens where she comes back and they meet and he writes about it.

WERMAN: Now you argue that Carrie Phillips may well have been a German spy.  What is the evidence for that, and presumably nobody knew about the affair and none of this rubbed off on Harding at the time?

ROBENALT: I do believe she became a German spy, and as a lawyer I set out the evidence and let the reader decide because it’s not cut and dried but I think it’s pretty clear.  This was a woman who in her letters with Harding spoke, you know, of the Kaiser and of Germany and was extremely pro-German.  And then when we finally got into the war, when the United States …  Remember the United States didn’t get into that war until about two and a half years into it, but we’re not ready.  Woodrow Wilson wants to send a million men over to France and he wants to send them all at once not a little bit at a time, which is what Theodore Roosevelt wanted to do.  We set up these camps over the summer of 1917, and there were 16 of them around the country, to train volunteers and draftees.  Well, Carrie Phillips and her daughter end up outside one of these camps, and they’re there for six weeks.

Harding writes to them and says, “I hope you’re having a good time dancing with the officers and so forth.”  He doesn’t understand what’s going on, but she’s there trying to get intelligence about how quickly the U.S. is going to get involved and how quickly we will mobilize. So Germany wanted to have women spies outside of all these camps around the country trying to determine how quickly we were getting ready, and how quickly we were going to send troops and get into this war.

WERMAN: You point out in your book that one in five Americans at the time were of German descent.  So this is not kind of pre-World War I kind of us versus them or in ramp up to World War I.  It was much more complex than that.  And then the U.S. became quite vigilant with Americans who had German connections once hostilities really heated up and, of course, after the sinking of the Lusitania.  Did Carrie Phillips suffer from any of that?

ROBENALT: Once we were declared in war, there were a number of measures that Wilson put in place that quite frankly some of them were way over the top, and one of the things that grew up in the United States that we all should remember that nobody remembers is a group called The American Protective League.  It was local businessmen.  It ended up overnight being 250,000 of them all around the country spying on their neighbors and trying to report people who they thought were pro-German including Carrie Phillips.  Little tiny Marion, Ohio where Warren Harding and Carrie Phillips were from had their own Chief of the American Protective League, and they were following her around.  They were opening her mail and they were involved in all sorts of surveillance of her.  They concluded she was a German spy and that news eventually gets to Warren Harding as a U.S. Senator.

WERMAN: How did Carrie Phillips’ pro-German sympathies affect Warren Harding?  Did it convince him at all that maybe the war wasn’t something that we should be involved in?

ROBENALT: No, it’s one of the great parts of the story.  She threatened him in several ways, threatened to make these letter available to the Germans if he voted for war, and he wrote back, “Come what may, I’m going to vote for war and I’m going to vote against the Germans and I know it may be my death sentence politically in Ohio … “  Because there were so many German-Americans in Ohio, and he also recognized the threat that she may carry through with that threat and explode a bomb to kill him and kill his career with the exposure, but he still did it.  I mean, he did what was right.

WERMAN: The figurative bomb?

ROBENALT: Yeah, the figurative.  Yeah, that’s the way he put it.   And so he actually showed a lot of courage, and he also believed that the war should not be about the United States making the world a democracy, another big part of this story.  Woodrow Wilson, of course, says this is the war to make the world safe for democracy.  What he meant was, “I want Germany to go from being autocratic to a democracy because I think that is a safer form of government.”  Harding got up in the Senate and said, “That’s not the case.  It shouldn’t be our job to go around and change people’s government by force.”

WERMAN: So how many years did Harding and Carrie Phillips carry on their affair and how did it end?

ROBENALT: Well, as I say to people when I speak about this book, this was no Monica Lewinsky.

WERMAN: It certainly makes better reading than the Star Report.

ROBENALT: Yeah, it does.  They met in 1905 and their relationship lasted until he ran for President in 1920.  So it’s a 15-year relationship, and she ended up blackmailing him by the time they get to the presidency because she had just grown tired of him not leaving his wife and continually running for public office.  So she blackmails him for some money, and that’s how things kind of fall apart.  But it was a long-term relationship and if you read these letters, you cannot come away but thinking that this guy really loved this woman and said he would drop everything for her multiple times and it just never worked out for him.

WERMAN: James David Robenalt is author of the Harding Affair:  Love and Espionage During the Great War.  Thanks so much for your time.

ROBENALT: Marco, thank you.

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