Whitewashing Warren G. Harding
Can we stop pretending Warren G. Harding wasn't one of the horniest presidents of all-time?
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There are only two reasons for an outsider to venture to Marion, Ohio: To score cheap black tar heroin or learn the history of Warren G. Harding, the 29th and consensus worst president of all time.
President Harding got a raw deal. Not that I would compare him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln, that coward who refused to hang the Confederates. But he was simply a man who won his party’s nomination in a smoke-filled backroom and was out of his depths when he won the presidency in a landslide.
Harding died as a wildly popular president. Unfortunately for him, the Teapot Dome Scandal broke posthumously and tanked public opinion on him.
In retrospect, Harding handled the presidency as any Marionaire would. He appointed his unqualified drinking buddies to positions of power, and those unqualified drunks weren’t satisfied with their sinecures and engaged in garden-variety corruption. So what? Shit happens.
Here was Harding’s typical Tuesday evening, from Robert Watson of sun-sentinel.com:
Girls and booze were part of what amounted to a bootlegging operation by the Justice Department. Liquor confiscated during Prohibition flowed at White House parties and regular happy hours. At one drunken orgy, a [sex worker] who was dancing on a table slipped, hit her head, and died from the injury. Harding was quickly whisked out of the party and evidence of the incident was destroyed.
What we can say with certainty is that Harding was the horniest president that ever lived. The man referred to his penis as “Jerry” in long missives in what anthropologists consider the advent of sexting.
One of his longtime lovers, Carrie Phillips, the wife of one of his best friends and likely a German spy, successfully extorted the Republican Party for $25,000 and a European vacation when she threatened to raise Hell about their history of trysts during Harding’s presidential campion campaign. She remains the only person to ever successfully extort a national political party. (Editor’s Note: For now.)
Another mistress died by suicide when Harding refused to leave his wife, Florence, for her.
Harding was so horny that he once remarked about his thanks for not being born a woman, otherwise he would have spent his life “barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” because he could never say “no.”
His most consequential mistress was Nan Britton, a woman from Bucyrus who fell in love with Harding when she was 14 years old and started banging the future president when he served in the United States Senate.
Harding would later impregnate Britton and funnel cash to her throughout his life until his untimely demise. Destitute, Britton confronted the family for financial support of Harding’s only child. The Harding family responded by calling her a skank and tossing her out on to the street.
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Britton went on to publish a controversial tell-all book entitled The President’s Daughter. As the book’s description notes, bills were introduced in Congress to stop the publishing and the New York City Vice Squad raided the book’s printer. It was wildly considered pulp fiction produced by a woman capable of concocting a lurid albeit entertaining tale.
Britton died broke in an insane asylum, which is a damn shame considering she told no lies. The Harding family—of course—denied this until that pesky thing known as “DNA testing” came into play.
From the Associated Press via stripes.com:
The grandson of the nation's 29th president and his lover, Nan Britton, went to court in an effort to get the Republican's remains dug up from his presidential memorial in Marion, the Ohio city near where Harding was born in 1865.
James Blaesing said he was seeking Harding's disinterment as a way "to establish with scientific certainty" that he is Harding's blood relation.
A branch of the Harding family pushed back against the suit filed in May because they already don't dispute Blaesing's ancestry.
I understand Blaesing’s desire for scientific certainty, but DNA is already about as certain as gravity. No need to force a broke city like Marion to exhume a nearly 100-year-old corpse to answer a question to which we already know.
Here’s where I have a problem. The Harding Memorial Association recently erected a new museum next to Harding’s famous house in Marion. It was scheduled to open this year until coronavirus came to our shores.
Still, it’s going to present the whitewashed version of Warren G. Harding and not who he actually was:
[Blaesing] told the AP his mother's legacy as the daughter of a U.S. president is shaping up to be little more than a footnote in the new museum and that he had not been approached to provide details of her life or even a photograph for the coming display.
Erecting a museum to present a sanitized version of history is a disgrace, and yes I am still bitter after reading my third non-assigned history book and realizing 70% of my country’s history that I learned in public school was horseshit. Every president in history has been an enslaver/racist/war criminal or some combination somewhere there of.
Nobody is infallible, and we do a disservice to future generations to pretend otherwise. If you choose to concentrate on only the good from somebody’s life and ignore all the bad, then perhaps that person isn’t worthy of the accolades in the first place.
As a Marionaire and an autodidact Harding historian, I hate to see the Harding Museum take the easy road. No amount of will can change Harding’s true legacy as the horniest and drunkest president of all time. Honor his legacy in full or don’t waste my time.
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