Our First Negro President?
By Bill Kauffman

Poor Warren Harding. His administration gave us historic reductions in federal taxation and spending; a major naval disarmament treaty; and freedom for Eugene V. Debs and other political prisoners jailed by Woodrow Wilson. Yet he is consistently rated a "failure" in polls of historians—polls which always deem the warmaking and state-building presidents "great."

If ever a black man has gotten a raw deal from a lily-white profession, it’s Warren G. Harding.

Like so many American boys destined for glory, Warren married rich. He was a handsome and amiable Marion, Ohio newspaper publisher who took for his wife Florence Kling, the non-pulchritudinous daughter of Marion’s wealthiest man. As a result, her father, Amos Kling, would not allow Florence to cross his threshold for 14 years—because he believed his son-in-law to have Negro blood.

So did many of the residents of Blooming Grove, Harding’s birthplace. The President’s partisans claimed the mixed-blood stories originated in a pre-Civil War dispute between Ohio Democrats and Harding’s abolitionist forbears; whatever the source, some elderly locals said that the Hardings had long been regarded as mulattoes in Blooming Grove.

It took a scholarly Harding-hater to give the rumor wings. William E. Chancellor was a professor at Ohio’s College of Wooster, and former superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C. He was a passionate supporter of Woodrow Wilson, segregation, and the League of Nations, none of which Harding could abide. Throughout the 1920 presidential campaign, Chancellor published broadsides asserting that "Warren Gamaliel Harding is not a white man…. [He] was always considered a colored boy and nicknamed accordingly." Chancellor’s evidence? Four notarized affidavits from Blooming Grove old-timers.

The style of the pamphlets was luridly racist—Harding’s father was "obviously a mulatto; he has thick lips, rolling eyes, chocolate skin"—and they created a sensation in Ohio and beyond. In New York, operatives passed out photos of the White House labeled "Uncle Tom’s Cabin?" As many as 250,000 circulars may have been printed. Yet editors refused to touch the story. As muckraker Samuel Hopkins Adams later wrote, "In the annals of American journalism there has never been another case where so much was left unpublished on a topic of major and sensational interest."

Republicans denounced "whispering campaigns" and "scurrilities" without mentioning their substance. (Though one gop-produced poster did reassure voters that "the Harding Stock" consisted of "the blood of English, German, Welsh, Irish, and Dutch.") The candidate himself said nothing. For as Pennsylvania pol Boies Penrose counseled, "Don’t say a thing about it. From what I hear we’ve been having a lot of trouble holding the nigger vote lately."

Ultimately, Harding moved into the White House. And Chancellor was summarily fired from Wooster. But the professor persevered.

In 1922 the obscure Sentinal (sic) Press published A Review of Facts, a bizarre agglomeration of Harding rumors compiled by Chancellor. "Our first Negro President," the book asserted, "is big, lazy, slouching, confused, ignorant, affable, yellow, and cringing like a negro butler to the great." His boyhood nickname was "Nig"; he uses "cosmetics in order to make himself look more white than he really is."

The $5 book was sold door to door in Ohio and perhaps Washington, at least until Attorney General Harry Daugherty ordered the Bureau of Investigation into action. Bureau agents raided Sentinal Press, obtained a list of purchasers, and then ransacked Ohio, buying and seizing every copy of A Review of Facts they could find. They did a thorough job: only a handful of books are extant today, and they are among the greatest rarities of political Americana.

Investigator Gaston Means claimed that he burned "the entire edition" in a bonfire on "the rear grounds" of a Washington mansion. (Then again, the imaginative Means also said that Mrs. Harding poisoned her husband to save him from impeachment.)

In any case, President Harding died in 1923; Professor Chancellor outlived him by 40 years, always—strangely—denying authorship of the book that bore his name. Many black Harding families today claim kinship with the President. The Harding genealogy remains a mystery, though one that never seemed to trouble the easygoing Warren. As he once confided to an old friend who asked him about the rumor, "How do I know, Jim? One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence."