The “return to normalcy” met “not safe for work” this morning, when the Library of Congress made nearly 1,000 handwritten pages of Warren G. Harding’s steamy letters to his mistress freely available online, 50 years after they were sealed by a judge.
The letters, written between 1910 and 1920 to Carrie Phillips, an Ohio woman Harding appears to have become involved with when he was lieutenant governor, first came to light in 1963, and became the subject of a legal battle between the Harding family and the biographer Francis Russell, which ended with an agreement that they would be deposited under seal at the library. They came to renewed attention in 2009, when James Robenalt, a lawyer and historian who had found microfilm copies at an Ohio historical society, quoted from them extensively in his book “The Harding Affair,” which argued that Phillips was a German spy.
But it wasn’t until earlier this month, when The New York Times Magazine published excerpts based on Mr. Robenalt’s transcripts, that the letters became a full-on viral sensation. Gawker, with uncharacteristic restraint, summed them up as “a treasure trove of pillowing breasts, fevered fondling and penis nicknames.” (“Wish I could take you to Mt. Jerry,” Harding wrote in one missive. “Wonderful spot.”) The late-night comedian John Oliver declared: “As a president, he was terrible. But as an R&B lyricist, he was way ahead of his time.”
At a panel on the letters held at the Library of Congress last week, Richard Harding, the former president’s grand-nephew, said he wished they had been sealed longer. “The family’s had some frustration that now most articles and inquiries so far have focused more on the titillating phrases rather than the meaningful historical content,” he said.
Some Harding partisans, however, have expressed hope that the letters will prompt fresh consideration of a man perhaps remembered best for the Teapot Dome scandal and his role in popularizing the word “bloviate.”
Writing in Slate, the historians Ron Radosh and Allis Radosh, who are working on a revisionist biography of Harding, credited him with rescuing the economy from depression following World War I, freeing political prisoners incarcerated by the Wilson administration (including the Socialist Eugene Debs), and supporting federal anti-lynching legislation, among other accomplishments. A focus on the “more substantive letters” in the stash, they said, “would certainly challenge the standard view that Warren Harding was the worst president in our history.”
Among the letters are a number discussing Harding’s vote, as a United States senator, on whether to enter World War I. On March 25, 1917, Harding (who later voted in favor of the war resolution) wrote to the ardently pro-German Phillips: “How unthinking and unfair you are when you accuse me of playing politics! I represent a state with hundreds of thousands of German Republicans. Nobody knows better than I do that I seal my political fate by displeasing them.”
Harding also warned his paramour against speaking too strongly in support of Germany in public, writing in February 1918: “I beg you, be prudent in talking to others. . . . Remember your country is in war, and things are not normal, and toleration is not universal, and justice is not always discriminating.”