Florence Harding: The First Lady, the Jazz Age, and the Death of America's Most Scandalous President - Hardcover

Anthony, Carl Sferrazza

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688077943 ISBN 13: 9780688077945

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1998

Synopsis

A prominent biographer sheds light on the previously unexplored life of First Lady Florence Harding and finally answers the question of whether she slowly poisoned her husband, President Warren G Harding, to death.

About this title

About the Author

Carl Sferrazza Anthony is the author of First Ladies, First Ladies, Volume JJ, and As We Remember Her: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the Words of Her Friends and Family. His work has appeared in George, American Heritage, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair and Town & County among many other publications. He is a popular lec-turer and media commentator on First Ladies. He lives in the Washington, D.C., area.

Reviews

A revealing biography with unmistakably powerful contemporary parallels to recent presidential spouses, from Anthony (First Ladies, 2 vols., 1990, 1991). Plain and five years older than Warren, Florence was more indispensable helpmate than lover to her randy spouse. Anthony discloses what she assiduously sought to conceal, depicting a woman whose air of command (her husband nicknamed her Duchess) was a necessity for someone badly served by those closest to her. Escaping from a tyrannical father in small-town Ohio, she bore an illegitimate baby by a neer-do-well neighbor at age 19, only to have the father abandon her and their baby. Having obtained a common-law divorce, she later won the handsome Warren, supplying the drive and business acumen that propelled him from newspaper editor to president. Halfway through her marriage, she discovered Warrens affair with her friend Carrie Phillips. Friends such as Harry Daugherty, Jess Smith, Charlie Forbes, and Albert Fall helped destroy her husbands reputation through scandals such as Teapot Dome. A trusted family doctor, Anthony concludes, caused Warren to die by misdiagnosing heart trouble as food poisoning (and led Florence to cover up the mistake). Even boon companion Evalyn McLean, the morphine- and alcohol-abusing owner of the Washington Post, allowed Warren to use her mansion for trysts. In many ways, Florence deserved better. She relentlessly pushed causes (aid for veterans, animal rights, Zion National Park, womens suffrage) and, even before Eleanor Roosevelt, made the First Lady a figure of visibility, influence, and popularity. Inevitably, a public gripped by gossip in recent years about popular presidents and their assertive wives will find echoes in this chronicle, such as affairs, a friends suicide, and a First Lady who consulted an astrologer. While sometimes overly reflective of Anthonys painstaking research, this biography is a fascinating account of one of the most complex of all the political wives of this century. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Florence Harding's story is absorbing, poignant and dramatic. Mr. Anthony tells it best when he tells it simply.

On inauguration day in March 1921 the new First Lady reputedly turned to her husband and remarked, "Well, Warren Harding, I have got you the Presidency. What are you going to do with it?" He answered, "May God help me, for I need it." Enlarging, with recently emerged documentation, on his First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents' Wives and Their Power (1991), Anthony has produced an engrossing, full-breadth biography of the spouse of possibly the most incompetent American president, which establishes "the Duchess" as one of the most remarkable of First Ladies. ("Jazz Age" is only a title embellishment.) Mother of an illegitimate child before her marriage to the proprietor of a small-town weekly, she became a straight-laced, activist helpmate who pushed and prodded her mediocre husband into a political career in which he was increasingly unqualified. Despite a proclivity toward adultery, poker, drink and crooked cronies, Harding still managed to conduct some creditable public business before dying of an apparent heart attack after only two and a half years in office?long enough, however, for scandals among his associates to brew. Protecting his fragile reputation while building her own, his wife promoted women's rights, veterans' welfare, racial equality and national parks. But her dependence on the White House physician (her incompetent home-town homeopath) would accelerate Harding's decline while, paradoxically, keeping the ailing Florence, five years her husband's senior, active. She died a year after Harding and was quickly forgotten. Anthony's melodramatic life strenuously rehabilitates her. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

With regard to President Harding's notorious sexual dalliances, one contemporary of his said, "He took rash chances with his reputation." About what other chief executive in similar circumstances have similar words been spoken in recent weeks? At any rate, the truth was that Warren Harding had difficulty resisting feminine charms. But First Lady Florence Kling Harding, so posits author Anthony in this riveting, defining biography of the indefatigable spouse of the twenty-ninth president, was certainly not a poisoner who did in her husband on their famous Alaska trip in 1923, as legend has often suggested. Anthony paints Florence in vibrant detail as a groundbreaking presidential wife who set the stage for later activist first ladies, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Rodham Clinton. "No such woman--pregnant bride, [then] abandoned, homeless, divorced, a single working mother, [then] her [second] husband's business partner--had ever served as First Lady." Although husband Warren ranks rock-bottom in effectiveness as chief executive, wife Florence here shows much more ability--" one of the greatest" first ladies. She knew what the country was all about in the 1920s and exerted her energy for the public good. But who remembers her now? Regardless, readers of this richly worked book will come to realize how much and for what she should be remembered. Brad Hooper

Anthony's extensive subtitle pretty much sums up his huge book on the driven wife of one our most unfortunate presidents. This work follows Anthony's two-volume history, First Ladies (LJ 8/90), and, more recently, As We Remember Her: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the Words of Her Friends and Family (HarperCollins, 1997). His new book is a massive, incredibly detailed study of the Hardings, the unhappy couple who thrived in the seamy atmosphere of official Washington during and after World War I. We get Warren Harding, scandals and all, and after a while the reader becomes repulsed at the president's dalliances and improprieties. Anthony takes pains to raise out of the muck Florence's positive contributions, including the creation of Zion National Park, implementation of the federal women's prison system, and staunch support for the establishment of the Veterans Bureau. Anthony's book is an essential-if uncomfortable-guide to the wild side of Jazz Age Washington and an important corrective to what we think we know about this era. Recommended.
-?Edward Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0688077943
• ISBN 13: 9780688077945
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 645