When the family of Ohio’s Warren G. Harding asked the Library of Congress to wait until 2014 before publicly revealing love letters he wrote to a longtime mistress before becoming the nation’s 29th president, it hoped to avoid the fever of tabloid sensationalism associated with political dalliances, a story from the Cleveland Plain Dealer said.
Harding, a newspaper publisher from Marion who also served as a Republican U.S. Senator and Ohio’s Lt. Governor, had conducted an affair with a family friend named Carrie Fulton Phillips for 15 years before he won the White House in 1920.
He also had trysts with other women, including Nan Britton, who claimed Harding had fathered her daughter. She wrote a tell-all book when she couldn’t get his estate to establish a trust fund for the child after his death in 1923.
Phillips was more discreet. The trove of letters that Harding wrote to her on subjects ranging from sex to whether the United States should enter World War I was hidden in a box at her home in Marion when she died in 1960. A lawyer for Phillips wanted to provide them to a Harding biographer after her death, but was blocked when Harding’s nephew, Dr. George Harding, filed a lawsuit.
According to the Library of Congress, an Ohio probate judge sealed the papers on July 29, 1964. The litigation concluded with George Harding buying the letters from Phillips’ daughter, Isabelle Phillips Mathee, and donating them to the Library of Congress with the stipulation that they not be unsealed until 50 years after the probate judge closed them.
“I am bracing myself for a series of very poor tabloid articles that will come out the week after the papers are released,” said George Harding’s son, Richard, a child psychiatrist in South Carolina who will attend a July 22 discussion of the letters at the Library of Congress. “After a week or two, hopefully, the people who are more historically minded will have a chance to look through those papers and sort out the most important aspects.”
Shaker Heights attorney and historian James Robenalt is among those who has already seen much of the correspondence. He found microfilmed copies at the Western Reserve Historical Society and used them to write a 2009 book that hypothesizes Phillips was a German spy during World War I: “The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War.”
James RobenaltShaker Heights attorney and historian James D. Robenalt. Eustacio Humphrey, PD file
Robenalt says many of the letters written between 1910 and 1920 are “steamy” and others discuss political controversies of the day, such as whether the United States should enter World War I after German submarines sank ships that carried cargo and passengers between the United States and Europe, such as the Lusitania.
He argues there is much circumstantial evidence that Phillips was a spy.
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