Spoiler alert! She didn’t do him in!

The Death of Harding

When President Warren G. Harding died unexpectedly in August, 1923, the country was sincerely shocked and saddened. The people liked and thought well of him.

The fact that he had been ill for some time with a un- or mis-diagnosed heart condition was not common knowledge. His widow, Florence Kling Harding, had adamantly refused to have an autopsy performed. It was also noticed that Mrs. H. was stoic and stone-faced during the entire time. She quickly burned quantities of his letters and related documents.

When she vacated the White House, she returned to Marion, OH, and died a year later. She had been chronically ill herself – for years!

The Dam Cracks

Within weeks of the President’s death, a trickle of rumors and innuendos began to emerge about misdoings and irregularities in the Harding Administration. The trickle became a torrent, and eventually a flood lasting for years. Screaming headlines throughout the ’20s implicated high-level members of the Harding Administration with their hands in the public purse up to their elbows. Most were long time pals of the former President and Mrs. Harding.

Some months prior to his death, Harding became aware of complicated doings of cabinet members, department heads, and trusted friends. It gave him great grief and stress, complicated by his wife’s serious illness. Their marriage had been turbulent, but by this time, Florence Harding was likely the only person he could truly trust. She knew all the players and was equally upset.

The Dam Breaks

Lumped into a general category they called “Teapot Dome” (named for an area of oil reserves in Wyoming) a variety of complex crimes, misdemeanors and financial finagling surfaced.

Government owned oil reserves in the Rocky Mountains were illegally (or certainly suspiciously) leased to oil moguls, with large sums of money (or loans) equally illegal or certainly suspicious, going to Harding cabinet appointees (and former good-buddies).

The Department of Veterans Affairs (dearly loved and supported by Mrs. Harding), was systematically being swindled out of huge amounts of money, paying top-dollar for new supplies and re-selling them almost immediately for cash. It’s department head was a long-time Harding friend, whose resume concealed prior finagling and outright fraud.

Then there was the problem of Prohibition. Liquor sales and distribution (but not consumption) had been banned – except for “medicinal purposes”. Several members of the Harding inner circle found dozens of connections for “medicinal purposes” in exchange for large sums of cash.

Some people committed suicide. Some went to jail. Some probably should have gone to jail.

Insult to Flooded Injuries

If that were not sufficient to taint the Harding reputation and give additional grief to the Widow Harding in her remaining months, she was personally/privately apprised of yet-another one of WGH’s amorous liaisons. She had known about his peccadilloes for decades, but this one flew under her radar.

Nan Britton, a teenaged Marion, OH neighbor, had a crush on Harding for years, and when she was eighteen, the publisher-turned-Senator began a steamy love affair with her, resulting in a child, born a year before Harding was the Republican nominee. While he lived, WGH was generous with the young woman, but he never publicly admitted to the child, nor provided for them in his will.

When Nan sought child support, a furious Florence Harding flatly refused, remembering the child as a strumpet-in-situ. Finally, in desperation, she published The President’s Daughter and the tell-all book became a best-seller. But by that time, Mrs. Harding had died.

The Strange Death of President Harding

Gaston Means (1879-1938) was a con-man, swindler and general nogoodnik, who managed to inveigle himself a job with the Bureau of Investigation in 1921 (pre-FBI), under the directorship of William Burns. Burns obviously never scrupulously checked Means’ very shady past, which included indictment for murder, along with other acts of crime and fraud.

Via his new “position” he managed to inculcate himself, at least peripherally, within the Harding inner circle of pals, including his boss’s boss, Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, who met regularly for poker and booze. The “iffiness” of his association appears to have been more wannabe than “wuz.” Nevertheless, he was involved with several violations of the Volstead Act (Prohibition-related), and spent a couple of years in jail, courtesy of the government.

While in jail, he conceived the idea to write his own book, with the help of a ghost-writer. He called it The Strange Death of President Harding. His book came out in 1930.

His mild association with the “Ohio Gang,” as Harding-buddies were termed, made him privy to the public, personal and private gossip about Warren and Florence Harding, who by that time, were dead for several years.

One of his many plausible “innuendos” was the deep implication of Florence Harding, reputed to be a very savvy political insider. He completely fabricated a story of her knowledge and fury at the Nan Britton hijinks-cum-child, an elaborate plot for revenge, and finally poisoning WGH to “protect” his reputation.

In a century since the Hardings died, there has been no evidence that they were involved in any of the scandals.

The Upshot

Of course the deceased Hardings could refute nothing, but… a) Mrs. Harding knew all about many of WHG’s romances – but the one about Nan was unknown to her till after her husband’s death; b) She absolutely did not poison him – or commit any other mayhem; c) Means’ ghost-writer, having had her own reputation sullied by all the scurrilous accusations sans factual evidence etc., turned state’s evidence.

Gaston Means wound up in in Leavenworth where he died in 1938.

But copies (many reprints!) of The Strange Death of President Harding are still available.

Sources:

Daugherty, Harry M., and Dixon, Thomas – The Inside story of the Harding Tragedy – The Churchill Company, 1932

Means, Gaston G. and Thacker, May Dixon – The Strange Death of President Harding – (Elizabeth Ann) Guild Publishing – 1930

Miller, Hope Ridings – Scandals in the Highest Office: Facts and Fictions in the Private lives of Our Presidents – Random House – 1973

Sinclair, Andrew – The Available Man – Macmillan Co., 1968

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gaston-Means

http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Harry_M._Daugherty