Chapter XVII: Part 17

It seemed I had failed all around to sponsor Elizabeth Ann’s cause successfully: In the first place my marriage had been a disappointment and a failure; my approach to the Hardings had fallen flat except in the case of the $800 altogether which Miss Harding had supplied; Tim Slade had apparently failed in his attempts in behalf of my daughter; and even the Vice-President of the United States, assuming that he knew the truth, had failed to see in my situation enough of importance or merit to warrant his serious consideration or kindly help.

Therefore, it seemed up to me to fight almost single-handedly--and what mother is there in the world who, loving her child as dearly as I loved the child Warren Harding and I had given to each other, would dare to deny that it was my sacred duty now, all things having failed, to fight for her rights, even to disregarding the sensibilities of those who had ignored and neglected _her_!

_169_

But, in seeking the right method of solving Elizabeth Ann’s problem for her, I realized that mere speed was impracticable where right motives prompted, and I was forced to admit to myself that nothing could be accomplished in time to enable me to keep Elizabeth Ann with me through the summer of 1926.

I was determined to write again to Elizabeth and Scott, but had not actually done so, when they dropped in upon us one Sunday afternoon, having motored through from Ohio. In view of existing circumstances, their appearance in New York seemed almost to indicate actual divination, and I was secretly grateful for whatever decisions had resulted in their making the trip East. They explained that they had given up the idea of going to Chicago for the summer and planned instead to go to the Willits farm in Illinois (Scott’s people’s farm), making use of the quiet and leisure there for music practice in preparation for their fall work.

I had not had up until then, and did not have after their arrival, any discussion with Elizabeth and Scott of my attempts to date to establish Elizabeth Ann’s claim upon the Hardings, and they made ready to start back West, with my baby, after a few days’ visit. Again I was left alone. Again I had been forced to give her up.

I had experienced many heart-breaks in having to part with my daughter, but up to that time they had been, like the black clouds of a thunder storm, mentally devastating to me only so long as I permitted myself to see only the clouds. When I saw beyond their obscuration, the sun, which was the glory of my child ultimately restored to me, then my heartaches, like the clouds, disappeared. Mental indecisions and temporary discouragements gave way to renewed purpose and heartfelt anticipation. I was a crusader of a great Right,--_the right of every sane and loving mother to possess her own child_.

But now, as I stood on the sidewalk, dry-eyed, waving goodbye to my child and answering the kisses which she blew to me through the small rear window of the motor car, I scarcely dared to think. Was I really a crusader after all? Was there aught to assuage the grief of a mother who had struggled against odds to hold her child and had failed? Was there a ray of hope to light the coming day? Must I return again to emptiness, to loneliness, to sorrow, to pain? Was it right that _they_, who had never known the glory of my sweetheart’s smile as a father, should deny his daughter her birthright as a Harding? Did God give only to deprive? No! “Every mountain shall be made low and every valley shall be exalted.” Wherefore, then, Pride? I must be humble. Resentment? I must forgive! Hatred? I must love. Retaliation? “Do good to them which despitefully use you.” And even as I struggled to give these healing thoughts an abiding place in my consciousness, there came before me the face of him I love, and clearly I saw his lips move, and heard the incomparably sweet voice--“Courage, dearie!”

_170_

I haven’t a great deal to add to my story. The futility of pressing the Hardings for recognition of their brother’s child was clearly apparent to me. I gradually drew the sympathies of several men and women of standing, who felt that I had a distinct cause to sponsor, and their advices from then on have been for the most part followed.

Shortly after the departure of my sister and her husband and my child came a request from my landlady to vacate the apartment we had been occupying, because I had been unable to meet the full rent the previous month and could not promise a definite day of payment. I had been frank to tell her so.

My mother had found employment on Long Island for the summer. I was forced to take a single room again. This I did, being able to secure the same one-room-and-bath which I had occupied the previous summer, within walking distance from my office. However, I felt very badly about not being able to finish the payment of my rent, and once more, having this and many other obligations to meet, I wrote Tim Slade under date of June 26, 1926, as follows:

“This month finds me terribly in need of help. Many disappointing things have happened since you were here. I seem to be eternally slated for disappointments.”

I heard nothing, however, from Tim, and determined then that I would never again approach him for help he was in no wise obligated to give. On July 2nd came another $40 from Daisy Harding, this time enclosed in an envelope with no accompanying letter. It was in the form of a cashier’s check from the Marion County Bank Company. I wrote to Miss Harding and thanked her sincerely for the check. I applied it upon “back bills” immediately.

_171_

The work I was doing turned my thoughts toward literary effort, and I found myself once more attempting to write. The necessary funds were not forthcoming for a night summer course in literature at Columbia, and anyway the heat was not conducive to comfortable journeying uptown every third night. But I rented a typewriter and spent my evenings creatively at home. This was a great source of relaxation mentally, and on warm nights, when it seemed too sultry to retire, I would become oblivious to the heat and to fatigue as I sat before my typewriter, balancing this line and that, searching the dictionary for suitable synonyms, or turning to my beloved Keats for poetic atmosphere and delicacy of word manipulation.

Naturally the themes of my thoughts were my love for Warren Harding and my love for our child. It was upon such a night that I sat before my typewriter, reminiscently fondling my child and dwelling in the memory of her father, and wrote my visions into a poem. I had sat dreaming for hours before I touched the typewriter keys, but when I began to write at one o’clock in the morning, and lost myself in juggling lovingly the words which would best convey my thoughts, I felt, when a distant clock struck four, that I had really written some worth-while lines.

My belief was confirmed later by _The New York Times_ poetry editor, who accepted and published the poem within ten days after I had made up my mind to send it to him. This was, however, not until late August. It was published in the _Times_ of August 30th, 1926, under a partial _nom de plume_--“Ninon Britton.” For this poem I received a check from the _Times_ for $20 which I promptly had photostated, because it was the first money I had ever received for literary effort. The editor changed my title, “Her Eyes,” to “The Child’s Eyes.” The lines follow:

THE CHILD’S EYES

Sometimes her eyes are blue as deep sea-blue,
And calm as waters stilled at evenfall.
I see not quite my child in these blue eyes,
But him whose soul shines wondrously through her.
Serene and unafraid he was, and knew
How to dispel the fears in other hearts,
Meeting an anxious gaze all tranquilly:
These are her father’s eyes.

Sometimes her eyes are blue--the azure blue
Of an October sky on mountain-tops.
I do not see my child in these blue eyes;
They are the eyes of him whose spirit glowed
With happiness of soul alone which lies
Far deeper than the depths of bluest eyes--
Whose smile a thing of joy it was to see:
These eyes, this smile, are his.

Sometimes her eyes are of a tired gray-blue,
Filled with the sadness of an age-old world.
And then again my child’s not in these eyes;
These are the eyes of one whom grief assailed,
Whom disappointment crushed with its great weight.
Around his head a halo memory casts,
Reflecting that refiner’s fire which purged
Him clean, and made him what he was.

Sometimes in child-amaze and wonder-blue
Her baby eyes are lifted up to mine.
These only are the eyes she brought with her.
And so I fold her close within my arms
And talk of dolls, and stars, and mother-love,
For well I know that pitifully soon
She will be grown, and then her eyes will hold
Only the deeper lights--his own eyes knew!

--_Reprinted by permission of The New York Times._

_172_

Those who have not known Warren Harding intimately--and I feel with all gratitude and humbleness that I was privileged to know him more intimately than any other human being--cannot fully appreciate those “deeper lights” of his eyes. They were expressive of the heights of every emotion experienced by a human heart, and of the greatest sadnesses ever written into the life of a man. I have read in their depths these as well as varying intermediate expressions. When he spoke to me of our child there was in his eyes the longing for open, acknowledged fatherhood, and my heart cried out against the cruelties of both the political and social orders which prevented Warren G. Harding from ever once looking into the eyes of his own little girl. The great pity of it! The injustice of a man-made law which would impose the necessity for renunciation of a desire so natural, so fine, and so normally impelling as that implanted in his heart as her parent!

“Nan darling,” he would say, “I find myself longing to take little girls in my arms. I never used to feel so deeply moved,” and with this sweet confession there was wistfulness and pathos in his eyes. And so, on the way home from my visits to the White House, I would resolve that he _should_ see her, even if I had to take her at Easter-time when _all_ little children were permitted to play and roll eggs on the White House lawn. He might even pick her up and fondle her unremarked!

In my Harding book of clippings the following appears in a paper of March 28, 1921, a few days after Easter:

“President Harding was a witness of the happy childhood panorama before him, and he took part in a pretty incident shortly before the gates were opened to the children.

“Little Winifred Hiser, six years old, in a new spring dress, and bearing on her arm a basket of eggs, waited in the walk leading from the White House to the executive offices. She is a daughter of an employe of the boiler rooms. As she stood there the President came down the path to his office, intent on starting his daily work.

“Perhaps she epitomized for the President the great crowd of children which shortly were to shout and run and laugh through the grounds. President Harding bent down and kissed the little maid twice, and asked her about the fine time she was going to have.”

But such an experience for his own little girl never seemed possible. It might have, but for Fear, that monster that hounded us continually, and finally made him I loved the victim of its vicious poisoning. Fear of exposure! Fear of the Republican Party! Fear of the Democratic Party! Fear of society’s condemnation! Fear of our respective families! Fear of a national scandal! Yes, fear it was that stayed the hand of Warren Harding, and fear it was that prevented the realization of the holy dream I had visualized as sweetheart and mother. I used to think that if only I could see her go on his lap, and hear him talk to her in the kindly, sweet voice I used to hear him use when he talked with children everywhere, I would be the proudest and most completely happy woman in God’s world. It made my throat ache so terribly just to think of the apparent hopelessness of my hopes. It made the whole attempt at secrecy so unworthwhile, so really _wrong_, so unnecessary! And, above all, so futile in the face of its unfair demands upon us.

_173_

Upon completion of the poem, “The Child’s Eyes,” before I had submitted it for publication, I sent Daisy Harding a copy, but I included no letter and made no comment. Under date of July 16th, 1926, I received a letter from her which in tone differed from some of her recent communications. It was more like the _real_ Daisy Harding I know and love.

She wrote that as she finished reading my poem she both thought and said aloud, “beautiful!” “Perhaps it is in the full of poetry your talent lies. Real poetry must come through true inspiration and it is evident, very evident, in this one,” she wrote. Other paragraphs were taken up with discussion of her doings, mainly, she wrote, in getting back her health. She said frankly that she was glad I appreciated the money she had been sending me each month because she denied herself to send it. The investments she had made had not turned out at all well and she and her husband were having “many blue hours” over them. Would I please send her Elizabeth’s address? “I see where Alice Copeland has sued for divorce. Unfortunate,” was a piece of information which interested me. Alice Copeland (Guthery) was a schoolmate of mine, daughter of a prominent Marion lawyer. She it was who said to me in November of 1920, when I went to Marion simultaneously with Mr. Harding’s overwhelming-majority election, “Nan, do you remember when we were kids in school you used to say Warren Harding would be President?” _Did_ I remember!...

I was riding in Marion with this same Alice Copeland one day back in our Freshman high school days in 1910. Alice was driving the electric runabout which always identified her those days. We passed the Warren Harding home on Mt. Vernon Avenue. Alice observed my excitement with relish: Mr Harding sat with his wife on their front porch! Having passed the house once, she proceeded to turn around to pass it the second time. And, as Mr. and Mrs. Harding smiled again and waved, Alice said to me, “There he is, Nan! There’s your hero! Look at him--quick!... Nan, why don’t you ‘set your cap’ for Mr. Harding anyway? You’re so crazy about him ... and Mrs. Harding is sick most of the time!” Alice always meant these things to be amusing and we all accepted them in the spirit in which they were said. But I never forgot that, and one time I repeated it to Mr. Harding. He smiled and said, “Well, you ‘got’ me all right, you darling!”

_174_

On July 22nd, 1926, I answered Daisy Harding’s letter:

“DEAREST MISS HARDING:

It was indeed gratifying to read that you liked the poem. I don’t want you ever to forget that it was under your instruction that I developed a love of poetry and literature; and I love you for having made so attractive to me the work I now want to do....

You will be sorry to learn that I could not continue my winter regime through the summer, but had to allow E. A. to return with Elizabeth and Scott when they motored out. My landlady requested that I vacate because I could not meet my rent, which I am still endeavoring to liquidate.

For your information, I might say that unless the knowledge has reached them from some other source, Elizabeth and Scott are entirely ignorant of the fact that I have ever talked with you or other members of your family on the subject of E. A., and unless you have a particular reason for wishing to acquaint E. and S. with the situation, I would suggest that it might be well not to tell them; it was, however, Elizabeth’s suggestion to me long ago that I tell you, but before doing so I had to persuade myself deliberately that it was what _he_ would want me to do, and I did not advise them when I did so. Moreover, I am, as you know, ... Elizabeth Ann’s legal guardian until she becomes of age, and as such I should be the sole individual to be consulted. This simplification of responsibility is very agreeable to me as a mother.

The paragraph immediately preceding has been a bit difficult for me to phrase, but I know you will understand my spirit in the matter. You will probably be glad to know that E. A. is to be on the farm this summer, because it would have been quite outside the realm of the possible for me personally to afford the country for her--this summer. Elizabeth may be addressed at Keithsburg, Illinois, care of A. L. Willits....

Too bad about Alice Guthery; but what is better than separation where there is discord?...

The other night I dined with one of the men about whom I spoke to you in March, and he tells me he has apparently lost $50,000, more or less, in Florida--but that he has well-grounded hopes of recovering it. It seems everybody just has to “hang on.” I certainly hope that the natural resources and realities of the State, and their natural development in spite of the temporary setback due to florid speculation, may enable you to realize satisfactorily on all the money you have put in down there.

With love to you ever, and hoping to hear from you as the impulse comes to write, I am,

Affectionately yours,
NAN”

Perhaps the letter I received from Daisy Harding on August 9th in answer to the foregoing might not have aroused in me the rebellious spirit I felt had it not epitomized the pitiful futility of attempting to argue for right for right’s sake when a false sense of right satisfies a people enslaved by a superficial conventionality. _The social fundamentals were all wrong._

In this letter, Daisy Harding voiced unconsciously the probable negative decision of the whole Harding family toward my situation, as well as the attitude of our whole country toward unwedded mothers and their children.

“I do hope you can make, some day, a name for yourself,” she wrote. “Then you will have something to offer her for what you have denied her ... she must suffer, and suffer deeply and bitterly when she knows all....” I stared back at these sentences which seemed to stand out in the letter, taunting me with their cruel injustice. “... _something to offer her for what you have denied her_”! Why, all _I_ had denied my child was the knowledge of her parentage, and the privilege that knowledge carried of openly bestowing upon my child the love only a mother is capable of bestowing. And this latter denial on my part would cease as soon as the Hardings recognized and assumed their just obligation toward their brother’s child. She wrote as though I might be a common woman, one whose life did not justify the role of motherhood, a woman who must redeem herself through fame before she could merit the God-given gift of her child!

My daughter “suffer” when she learned that she was the beloved child of a love-union between her mother and the 29th President of the United States! There does not live the person who could convince me of that, and I am willing to undertake the responsibility of rearing my child, even in her extreme youth, _with the full knowledge of who she is_, for it will not lessen by one jot the love which she bears to me--her mother.

“I am so glad you let E. A. go to her grandmother’s ... if she were my child I’d let stay there for the next two years. I believe _he_ would say the same....” Keep her in the country, away from me, for two years! A cruel suggestion! That my sweetheart, who had been willing, yea, eager to do anything in his power to enable me to be with my baby and to have her with me, would concede that his sister’s suggestion was the right thing was in my eyes only a pitiful thought to prop an argument which had been born of a frightened mind, and was in truth a mere apology for failure on the part of all the Hardings to act fairly toward Elizabeth Ann.

Miss Harding said my child should have the “quiet, fresh air and childish freedom” the country affords. This was exactly my idea, as it would be the idea of any mother, but _I wanted to be with her_, and this the Hardings were unwilling to make possible to me. I had therefore been obliged to let her go away from me because I myself was unable to provide those things which I knew were for her good.

Miss Harding’s query in this letter as to how the money had been transferred to my sister Elizabeth was entirely superfluous in view of the fact that I had made it very plain to her and to her brother that all monies had been transferred through me, personally, from Mr. Harding to my sister and her husband. As a matter of fact, I had _insisted_ upon this myself as my idea of added protection to Mr. Harding. I had even given his brother, Dr. Harding, the dates of certain cancelled vouchers, for which he asked during our interview. “Was the money sent through some bank in Ohio?” Miss Harding inquired in her letter. This was evidently why she had asked for Elizabeth’s address--to make the inquiry direct to her. Even then there was current gossip which touched some of the government officials in high places when Mr. Harding was President. Was her query instigated by those who themselves would not ask me direct, but sought to allay their fears through information I might give to Miss Harding? I had no way of knowing.

Her letter contained another sentence which hurt me but at the same time aroused in me more resentment than I had known during the whole course of my appeal to the Hardings. She wrote, “I heard of a case the other day, where a woman of means thought she could defy the conventions, but she is realizing now what it means to her son....” To quote to me an example of what a “woman of means” was realizing through her indulgence in unconventionality was highly grotesque when at that very minute I was staggering under the weight of bills long overdue, even to being unable to send my sister any money toward my child’s fall clothes. The utter incongruity of a situation where there existed an amplitude of funds, as was evident with the “woman of means,” and my own situation, where I was unable to meet the rent for the apartment which was sheltering the child of Warren G. Harding, is apparent without any comment from me.

Nor had I, up to that time, even attempted to “defy the conventions” _openly_! In what way could I more meekly have conducted myself, both in the expenditure of nervous energy required to protect the great-hearted man I loved, and, in the later days after his death, in my efforts to carry on alone and practically unaided, that I might not be obliged to go to the Hardings and request to have the situation righted. This would have been justified, even while my daughter’s father lived, _had mere money been my paramount consideration_. Open defiance of conventions could have yielded me no greater suffering than had the growing realization of the hypocrisy which calls itself Justice and marks out its path according to its own narrow-minded limitations.

Daisy Harding, I am sure, did not believe to be true certain things which she wrote--unconscious imputations of past wrong-doing on my part--for she herself had spoken her true feeling when, upon my first revelations to her, she had said, “Why, Nan, I’ll bet that was brother Warren’s greatest joy!” _That_ was the _real_ Daisy Harding speaking. And this sentiment so early and frankly expressed by her would be the sentiment of all who dare to speak truthfully.

The signature of this letter was merely “Lewis,” written in a somewhat different hand and with paler ink. When I came to look at it closely and realized anew how terrified people become who are afraid to face situations and refuse to stand for Right, the bitter resentment I felt because of her insinuations gave place to pity.

_175_

What a sorry state of affairs for the greatest country on earth! The Harding attitude was but the universal social attitude toward all unwedded mothers: that they have sinned against society and must suffer the penalty. Indeed, do not ministers all over the country preach this to a public willing to accept it, because, in most individual instances, either temptation has not been experienced or else, being experienced and indulged, has not resulted in actual childbirth? And so this attitude is generally accepted as Right.

My own situation, which differed and was distinguished only because it concerned the child of a man who had been placed in the highest position the greatest republic in the world can offer, led me to the conclusion that it was high time it was righted, and that little children should be recognized, not for their parental origin, but for themselves and _as having every right to legitimacy_, and to every opportunity that would be theirs if they had been born under the yoke of legal marriage.

In the chapter entitled “Social Justice,” in Warren G. Harding’s book, “Our Common Country,” he says: “It will not be the America we love which will neglect the American mother and the American child.”

If every man, woman and child were to ask this question: “Would _I_ like to suffer ignominy, neglect, social slights, and unfair recognition because _my_ mother and father had not been linked by the bonds of conventional wedlock?” I am sure that the vehemence of the united “NO!” would resound to the farthest corners of the country, and that a people, drawn together through great human sympathy and Christlike forgiveness, would unite to wipe out every stain upon the motherhood of a nation through measures designed to _protect and honor every mother’s child_!

There would then be laws governing such protective rights, there would be frank and unashamed admission of fatherhood, and there would be abstinence of indulgence where there existed unwillingness to make such admissions, and equal advantages for the so-called illegitimate as well as the legitimate; and there would be no more shifting of responsibility upon the mother or upon her family.

And if I could, through my revelations, cause my daughter, as well as thousands of potential mothers in the world, to recognize the gross injustice humanity imposes through adherence to a social ruling which is doing nothing in the right direction and much in the wrong, then, indeed, we would have an array of intelligence raised against the present system, in whose place would be demanded such legal measures as would banish forever the heart-break of myriad lovers and their true love-children.

I would not change the world. I would not preach recognition of indiscriminate indulgence where admission of parenthood is denied. I would not ask anything which is not humanly and divinely right and possible. But I would, if it were within my humble prerogative and power, as the mother of Warren Gamaliel Harding’s only child, open the eyes of those blinded through adherence to hypocrisies which are basely unfair, and I would bear the glorious fact of what constitutes true birth legitimacy--which, in a word, is _love_.

_176_

It would have availed nothing to answer Daisy Harding’s letter. Had there existed the slightest intention on the part of the Hardings to take up the problem left unsolved by their lamented brother, I would long before this have learned of their intentions. Nor would my failure to answer this last letter of Miss Harding’s have debarred them from concluding whatever plans they were advancing toward the upkeep and maintenance of their niece.

Warren Harding’s empty wallet, given me by his sister, Carrie Votaw, was indeed a symbol, unconscious and voiceless. But to me it spoke eloquently of the universal empty pity, empty sympathy, empty love.

My not answering Miss Harding’s letter provided escape for all. So far as I was concerned the whole Harding attitude had been summed up in the last paragraph of Miss Harding’s letter, “I should like to have sent you some money ... but I couldn’t ... on account of bills I had to pay.”

I would not have felt justified in ever approaching the Harding family had not that very source of income which had fallen, for the most part at least, into the hands of those who had not known it before his death, been the one from which Mr. Harding had drawn the monthly allowance which he gave into my hands for the care of our child. Surely my child and his had a title as clear as that of his brothers and sisters to the generosity he had shown in making his will--a title as clear as the worded legacies which bore Mr. Harding’s signature.

I know nothing whatever about Mr. Harding’s will as it actually stands. I have never inquired into it. I am ignorant also of what has gone on about me since the revelation of my story to certain individuals, except as I have stated it in this book. My fact-story is set down just as the events occurred. The intimate details of Mr. Harding’s death are also shrouded in mystery except as the papers gave them forth. If I were to state my belief, I would say that his passing was entirely untimely, and could have been avoided as truly as could the necessity for this story have been avoided had the laws of the United States provided for the legal protection and social equalization of all children.

According to materia medica, Warren Harding died as the direct result of a cerebral hemorrhage and indirectly from ptomaine poisoning. But I, the mother of his only child, have never for one moment entertained such a thought. I believe that under the burden of fatherhood which he revered but dared not openly confess, combined with the responsibility of the welfare of the nation he loved, the twenty-ninth President of the United States truly laid down his life for his people. He died of a broken heart. And through the voice of the child he loved may there arise a diviner and more lasting memorial to his memory than any reared by human hands,--the answer to the plea from the heart of a mother,--_social justice for all little children_!

THE END

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Transcriber’s note

Typographical and punctuation errors have been silently corrected.