Until her dying day, Nan Britton claimed that her daughter was the product of a love affair with President Warren G. Harding. Nearly 100 years after this tryst began, Britton has been vindicated. This week, her long-dismissed claims of paternity were confirmed by DNA testing that proved Harding’s descendants and Britton’s daughter’s children were second cousins.
This revelation lends credence to a book that scandalized the country way back when. In 1927, four years after Harding’s untimely death, Britton published her autobiography: The President’s Daughter. Multiple publishers had refused her, but her persistence paid off—the titillating details of her presidential affair became a bestseller. Britton, who’d been shunned by the Harding family for financial support in the upbringing of her child, made her exposé into a rallying cry for children born of wedlock.
Her tale and its smooth-talking characters are too juicy to be forgotten with time. Britton grew up in Marion, Ohio, where Harding’s family ran the local newspaper. She fell in love with Warren G. Harding, a local politician, at age 14. He was 45. She was taught high school English by his sister as he was in the midst of a campaign for office. Britton’s early pursuit of the man who’d become president was, frankly, quite creepy.
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“My early recollections are not so much concerned with actually seeing him as with the unforgettable sensations I experienced after I had once seen him and knew that he was for me my ‘ideal American,’” she writes in the book.
Britton’s behavior as a lovestruck teen borders on stalkerish. She writes that she called the family home under false pretenses when she thought he might be home to answer. She waited outside his office and then followed him home. She memorized his license plate and watched for the coming and going of his car. She cut out his campaign posters and posted them around her room. “One of these pictures hung directly in front of my bed so that when I awoke in the morning I looked into the handsome face of him whom I loved, and saw his likeness the last thing before turning off my light,” she wrote.
She even petitioned to name her newest family member after him. “When my youngest brother, John, was born there was much discussion about what he should be called. I immediately attempted to solve the problem by announcing, ‘Why, he’s going to be named “Warren,” of course!’”
“[T]he spectacle I made of myself those months, and indeed in years that followed, for I talked about [Harding] incessantly; no, I did not talk, I raved,” she wrote.
Britton grew up but didn’t grow out of her unyielding infatuation with the senior politician. She moved to Chicago, then New York, and began a correspondence with him to request his help in acquiring a job. When she was 18, he came to visit her in New York and they began a six-year tryst. “A skylark amid the clouds could not have been happier than I during the intervening days between my receipt of this letter and the arrival of its author,” she wrote.
They exchanged love letters, some apparently up to 60 pages long (these were later destroyed, she claimed, at his request). These early days of their romance yield the book’s most titillating section. The best bits revolve around his seemingly incessant requests to sleep with her, which she refused—to a point. Here are some of the most salient lines:
“I was afraid the taxi man would surely hear Mr. Harding’s whispered remarks to me on the way down, especially when he said over and over again, ‘Dearie, ‘r y’ going t’ sleep with me? Look at me, Nan: goin’ to sleep with me, dearie?’ How I loved to hear him say ‘dearie’!”
“What a maze of emotions! I knew I loved Warren Harding more than anything in all the world. However, up to this time I had kept my virginity, despite his very moving appeals to become his completely.”
“I remember once during one of our ‘kissing tours,’ as he jocularly called them, I asked him what under the sun people were given navels for! … It was he who told me of course what my body functions would be if I were to yield myself to him. He said, ‘You ask me whatever you want to know; I’ll tell you.’”
“Of course there was the perfectly logical plea from Mr. Harding that if I loved him so deeply I would consent to belong to him, not merely to be with him, trying him by continued denial. I think I made up to Warren Harding everything I ever denied him,” she writes, and then offers this sterling review: “In the history of lovers, there was, I am sure, none to compare with Warren Gamaliel Harding. And to him I was, or so he has often said, ‘the sweetheart incomparable.’”
“Mr. Harding has many times said to me that if people were to know that we had been together intimately without indulging in closest embrace they would not credit the story.”
At age 20, she lost her virginity to him. The vast age difference is barely mentioned, but comes up in this strange sentiment: “I used to think Mr. Harding might have liked to adopt me, though he never said so to me,” she writes. “However, he spoke very freely to me about what he would do if Mrs. Harding were to pass on—he wanted to buy a place for us and live in the country, and often during those days Mr. Harding said to me, ‘Wouldn’t that be grand, Nan? You’d make such a darling wife!’”
After a few years of their relationship, she became pregnant, and she recalls that he attempted to take care of the issue quietly. “[I]n an attempt at a simple solution, he went out and returned with some Dr. Humphrey’s No. 11 tablets, which, he said, Mrs. Harding used to take and found in some instances effective. I affirmed my belief that they would do me no good. I even made fun of the tiny white pills.” Later, she wrote that Harding suggested putting her in a Catholic home. She did neither of these things and gave birth to a baby girl named Elizabeth Ann in 1919. At that time, Harding was a senator and she was living in a home in New Jersey that he’d set her up in.
“As she lay in my arms, a few hours old, drawing her mouth into comical contortions, and wrinkling her face in what seemed a thousand wrinkles, I saw Warren Harding—oh, I saw him so strongly that it seemed I was holding a miniature sweetheart in my arms!” Britton recalls of her daughter.
“My eyes swam, and I recalled my Freshman school year at Marion, when, in the margins of all my books, I, then but thirteen years old, had written the prophecy of my heart-longing, ‘Warren Gamaliel Harding—he’s a darling—Warren Gamaliel Harding—President of the United States!’”
Harding kept Britton on her feet with $500 a month for child care, along with bills he’d peel out of his wallet and give her for rent and clothing.
The president never actually met his daughter, but the affair didn’t end after he was elected president. Britton continued to visit Harding in the White House, where they fixed up a new arrangement in Harding’s office—or, specifically, the coat closet. “Whereupon he introduced me to the one place where, he said, he thought we might share kisses in safety,” she writes. “This was a small closet in the ante-room, evidently a place for hats and coats, but entirely empty most of the times we used it, for we repaired there many times in the course of my visits to the White House, and in the darkness of a space not more than five feet square the President of the United States and his adoring sweetheart made love.”
But after his death, Britton was jilted. She fruitlessly petitioned the family for a stake in Harding’s estate for her daughter, but found she had no rights and little evidence for legal proceedings.
So Britton branded her kiss-and-tell as activism. In the early pages, she outlines “The Author’s Motive,” explaining that the point of her revealing the affair is to gain rights for other mothers with children born out of wedlock. “Knowing the real President Harding as she does, the author feels that if he could be brought back today to witness the futile struggle the mother of his only child has suffered, he himself would proclaim his own fatherhood, and seek to open eyes blinded by convention to a situation which is depriving thousands of innocent children of their natural birthright in denying them legal recognition before the world,” she writes. “In the author’s opinion, there should be no so-called ‘illegitimates’ in these United States.”
Instead, her story was widely discredited and her claims dismissed. Until a century later, when the starry-eyed teen—who’d written, “Warren Gamaliel Harding—he’s a darling—Warren Gamaliel Harding—President of the United States!” in her high school book margins—was finally redeemed.
