WARREN G. HARDING
Shortly before the 1920 election day Americans were amazed to read in the Democratic papers that Harding "was a Negro." Some time before that however, millions of mimeographed broadsides had been distributed saying that Harding's father is George Tryon Harding, obviously a mulatto; he has thick lips, rolling eyes, chocolate skin,"and that his mother "Phobe Dickerson, a midwife" of whose ancestry little is known was white.
Attorney-General Harry Daugherty says that there was discovered in the San Francisco mails alone over 250,000 copies and that "President Wilson indignantly ordered the stuff destroyed." Thereafter they were distributed by hand.
With this also appeared a book by William Estabrook Chancellor, Professor of Economics, Politics and Social Sciences of Wooster College, Ohio. Chancellor based his assertions on interviews with aged residents of Marion, Ohio, who knew the Harding family. He had affidavits from them as well as a letter from Senator Foraker, a friend of the Negro, who had written him asking him to give Harding's sister, Mrs. Votaw, employment in the public schools of Washington, D.C., of which Chancellor was then superintendent. She was given employment in a Negro school, then tightly segregated. She also lived among Negroes there.
Wendell P. Dabney, a Negro, editor of a weekly and paymaster of the city of Cincinnati, said that Harding had been known as a Negro long before the circulars appeared and that when he was first running for office he used to tell Negroes he was colored. It is reported that when Republican leaders had called on Harding to deny the story, he said, "How should I know. One of my ancestors might have jumped the fence."
The Justice Department did its best to suppress the story. One of its special investigators, Gaston H. Means, tells how he bought up Chancellor's book on Harding, brought them to Washington in a guarded express car and "made a big bonfire" of them on the grounds of the Boyd mansion. The plates were also destroyed, he said. (Strange Death of President Harding, pp. 139-140).
So thorough was the suppression that the book "Warren G. Harding, President of the United States," is one of the rarest books ever printed in America. There are only three known copies. It is now said to be worth $200,000 a copy. The rare book room of the New York Public Library has a copy.
FACT. January to February, 1964, reproduces copies of some of the sworn affidavits of aged whites who knew Harding's ancestors. It also says that inquiries made by Dr. H. F. Alderfer and Samuel Hopkins Adams among the persons still held to what they had said about Harding's being a Negro.