So we move on into the twentieth century in ou quest for presidential conspiracy theories dealing with every President of the United States. To be considered for our list, the theory in question should be about as old as the administration in question, or at least nothing something somebody came up with on the Interwebs last week, and should be considered bogus by what the conspiracy theorists call “mainstream historians”. We seem to do better with such stories the farther back in history we go, and actually drawn nearly complete blanks with at least two Twentieth Century Chief Executives. I was thinking of giving up the whole project.
And then we came to Warren G. Harding, long considered one of the three or four worst Presidents of all American history. For years, the most prominent conspiracy theory about Harding was the story, put about in a book after his death, that he had had an illegitimate daughter with Nan Britton, the author of the book. Some staffers told tales of his escapades with women in the White House, while others snarled that this was a vicious lie, told by a woman with a taste for lurid stories. Historians primarily sided with the Hardings on this one, and then Ancestry.com tried DNA testing on descendants of the little girl in question, and scuttled the whole conspiracy theory. Harding WAS, in fact, most likely her father.
The financial scandals don’t qualify as conspiracy theories either. Several of his appointees were excellent choices, but others turned out to be opportunists who tried to make as much money out of their positions as they could. The Teapot Dome scandal was growing larger and larger when Warren, one of the most robust and energetic souls to occupy the White House, fell ill and, after a number of bulletins saying he was getting better, died. The verdict was food poisoning, with canned crabmeat as the culprit.
Harding was only the third President to die of illness in office, and the first since Zachary Taylor, some seventy years earlier. Combine that with our natural tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, and stories started to spread, from rumor to newspaper account (we didn’t have any Interwebs yet) to book publication. His doctors were accused of deliberately starving Harding to death by some at the time; more recent theories have suggested Harding actually had a heart attack but the doctors were confused. One theory blamed the Ku Klux Klan, while the Klan itself suggested Pope Benedict XV. The Anarchists were still a handy group to blame, though the Bolsheviks, having been successful in Russia, were a new alternative. All of the usual suspects were trotted out with grave seriousness.
In the end, the two leading candidates were Harding’s staff, and Harding’s wife Florence. Florence’s refusal to allow an autopsy (very common among families to this day but always suspicious in history) as well as her burning of his personal papers, are cited as clues. A few people feel she committed the murder because she was furious over her husband’s infidelity, but more claim she had the same motive as Harding’s staffers: the Teapot Dome Scandal was going to drag down the Chief Executive: killing him was the only way to save his reputation. (Several noble speeches Florence made about saving the good name of her husband were written for her by witnesses who weren’t actually there but felt she should have said such things.) Florence, who had suffered from kidney problems for years, died one year after her husband, making her an easier target.
Whoever might have done the deed to protect Warren’s reputation, this did not prevent writers from making Harding out to be, if not the most dishonest, at least the most stupid President who ever served, so he might have been better off had he lived to face the music. Modern historians, while still blaming the crabmeat, are still divided on the subject, some pointing out Harding’s accomplishments in a short tenure and others focusing on the financial scandals. Harding’s staff members–the ones who did time in prison when the business was sorted out–wrote some rather rude things about their boss as well. So whether Harding was a victim of plain assassination or character assassination will have to wait until we develop a test for THAT in the DNA labs.
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