The election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States came as a shock to many Americans, not to mention the world, even though his victory was predictable in its own way. The overlooked and desperate inhabitants of the new continent, painfully affected by the economic crisis and barely getting by from one day to the next, are many, and certainly enough to have placed their future in the hands of a man who is controversial in every way, but who has been able to promise them, in a language close to their hearts, what they hope will make their lives easier. Donald Trump is not the first American politician to have succeeded against expectations, but time will tell how bad or good he will be and how many skeletons will fall from his cupboards.
“I was not made for this job and I should never be here,” Warren G. Harding (1865-1923) once said. We are not all made for everything, but it would be good to know what you are doing if you are the US President. He did not know it very well between 1921 and 1923, when his presidency was cut short by his sudden death. Still, when the popularity of American presidents is measured, he regularly ranks top of the list, except when he is sovereignly reigning on the throne of unpopularity.
When he became the 29th US President, he put his friends first in the top jobs. One of them, Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall, accepted bribes from oil companies. A scandal broke out, revealing, among other things, that other old comrades of his had used their new jobs to their advantage.
He pursued a fiercely anti-immigrant policy, although on the other hand he was such a fierce advocate of equality for African-Americans that throughout his political career he was unsuccessfully attacked with rumours that he had “black blood” in his veins.
He never failed in this area, his knees weakened in front of women to the point where he could hardly stand on them. Nan Britton didn’t have to make any special effort to make him feel good. Once his sister had taught her at school, now, aged 20 and 31 springs younger than him, she lay in his bed. A long-cherished dream had come true for her, but for him, at the age of 52, the blood was once again pumping through his veins.
He had forgotten a little what passion feels like. He married Florence King De Wolf in 1891 and caused a minor scandal. She was divorced, and a union with such a woman in those days was a bit like cheating. It is not known whether their marriage withered away after 14 years, but in 1905 he certainly flourished again when he married Carrie Fulton Philips.
They were lovers until 1920 and their relationship was marked by all the drama that an affair brings. They broke up and found each other again, quarrelled and reconciled. Shortly after Harding became the Republican presidential candidate, Carrie threatened to expose his secret if he did not appease her with money.
He offered to pay her around 60,000 today’s dollars every year as long as she was in public service, and in return for her silence, the Republican National Committee “gave” her and her husband a trip to Japan, which in today’s money cost just over 300,000 dollars.
The Republicans were probably so generous not to cover up the Harding affair, even though it could have cost him his career, but to keep the fact that Phillips is a fierce supporter of the Germans from coming out. She had lived in Berlin just before the First World War and, after it, in America, socialising with Germans who were rumoured to be spies.
Suspicions that she had been collecting classified information in the bed of a then-senator also fell on her, but no evidence was ever found that she was Mata Hari in spirit. She was quite openly brainwashing Harding and influencing his policies.
But by the time he was sworn in as President, fears of her had subsided and their personal differences had also been resolved, at least judging by the fact that the invitation to the swearing-in ceremony in her name had been kept. As lovers, they broke up shortly before he took up the presidency, but they continued to see each other, both at social events and in private. At the end of January 1922, for example, Harding asked her brother to tell her that he would be “here all month and we can see each other any time”.
My friend Jerry
They had nothing more juicy to say to each other at the time, and between 1910 and 1920 they resembled erupting volcanoes, according to their letters from that period. Carrie showed them to historian Francis Russell in 1964, but the Harding family sued to stop their publication.
The letters not only revealed that he had cheated on his wife, but also said a lot about him as a man. Sometimes his display of emotion was downright puritanical, other times he was down-to-earth, for example when he wrote to her about all the things his Jerry would do. He called his penis that, and his mistress Mrs Pouterson, or Mrs Pigeon, because pouter in English means pigeon, a type of pigeon.
The statements on page 106 of the letters are also full of secret codes that Harding resorted to in case his words were read by uninvited eyes, but they are still so intimate that his relatives could not allow the letters to be published. They were donated to the Library of Congress, but with the agreement that they would remain sealed for 50 years, until 2014. Nevertheless, they did not object to their publication when, in 2009, the lawyer Jim Robenalt found them, microfilmed, and copied them.
To this day, most of his great-nephews and nieces cannot believe that their parents lied to them when they assured them what a calculating and wicked liar Nan Britton was, the 31 years younger mistress who had an affair with Harrding in 1917, when he was still married to Carrie Fulton Philips. She gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth Ann, in October 1919 and, after Harding’s death in 1923, claimed in a book to be the President’s daughter.
Not possible, his kinship argued. He and his wife had no children. The official version was that he was sterile because of a bout of mumps, and Harding’s nephews, great-nephews and great-great-nephews believed it too, until two years ago when two of them decided to find out the truth.
Peter Harding picks up a book by Nan Britton. In her description of Harding, he recognised the man from the letters Harding had written to his second lover, Carrie Fulton Phillips. He wanted to know the truth. So did his cousin Abigail. Despite the objections of their relatives, they sought out Nan’s descendants and took a DNA test.
The results revealed two things: the rumours of the time that Harding had “black blood” in his veins were false, because no ancestor of his had been black for at least four generations before his birth. Nana’s “lie” that she had an illegitimate daughter turned out to be true.
So the story that led society to ostracise Nan Britton and to make a mockery of her descendants has finally reached its public epilogue. Some of Harding’s great-great-nephews and nieces still cannot accept the truth. They refuse to believe that Nan knew exactly how to make love in the White House, because she did it often, and that she gave birth to a daughter in 1919 in the house he rented for her, because no one was allowed to know about it. Harding never saw his only child, but he paid for her regularly.
So everyone involved looked to their own side and lived in silent harmony, without crossing paths, until Harding was suddenly struck down by a stroke in 1923. For many years he had suffered from neurasthenia, better known today as chronic fatigue syndrome.
He was exhausted at the slightest exertion, his muscles often ached and he could not relax. As much as the physical effort, the mental effort was crushing him. The illness usually results in a decline in work performance, and the person has difficulty coping with daily duties. His attention wanes, his thinking becomes ineffective. On top of all this, he may suffer from dizziness, tension headaches, instability, anxiety, irritability, shallower depression, anxiety and insomnia. He may also succumb to anhedonia, in which he is unable to feel contentment, happiness and joy.
At least Harding had no problems with the latter, but his personal doctor was concerned about something else. He repeatedly warned his married patient that juggling a wife and at least two mistresses could weaken his delicate and enlarged heart. Shortness of breath, attacks of chest pains and difficulty sleeping when his head was not resting on at least a couple of pillows had plagued him since 1918, or ever since he had got Nan Britton.
On 2 August 1923, he finally suffered a stroke at the age of 58. He had not taken care of his illegitimate child, and Nan had to fend for herself. She published a book about their relationship, but it was met with a downright hostile reaction. She was branded a liar on the basis that Harding was sterile, and she has been until recently, although for many years now she has been unable to harm either Harding’s memory or his presidential legacy.
The first gay president?
It is so black that it could hardly be blacker, yet it has for many years a fierce rival in the fight to become the worst President in American history: James Buchanan (1791-1868), the 15th President of the United States, the predecessor of the famous Abraham Lincoln.
The main thing that the Democrat Buchanan is accused of is that, at a time when America was boiling and the civil war was knocking at the door, he was almost indifferent to what was going on. He was opposed to the abolition of slavery and did not lift a finger to alleviate the problems brought about by the economic crisis into which the country was plunged as a result of political divisions.
That he was not even a shadow of a president for the first few weeks of his term could easily have been forgiven by the electorate, as he almost paid for his presidency with his life. Just as he was about to be sworn in as President in 1857, an unknown disease broke out in Washington’s largest hotel, the National Hotel.
Around 400 people were sickened and 36 died. Some soon, others within the next two years, like Republican Senator David Robinson, who battled the disease for more than two years and died aged 43. The investigation showed that the guests who fell ill were those who came to the hotel for social gatherings before or after the inauguration and ate at the hotel. If they had only been drinking in the bar, they did not have any problems.
Newspapers were quick to report that the mysterious fatal nausea was the result of arsenic poisoning. The President-elect was supposedly being served by abolitionists, so the food of all the guests was poisoned. Today, experts agree that the tragedy was caused by poor hygiene conditions in the hotel, which also had problems with its sewage system.
The new President, James Buchanan, has not miraculously emerged unscratched. He fell ill twice and was twice on the brink of death, but pulled through both times, once before and once after the inauguration. He was so weak that he was publicly pronounced dead, but he was nevertheless present enough during the swearing-in ceremony to declare slavery in the Southern States to be a subject of “little vital importance”.
He believed that the southern states had every right to decide whether or not to allow slavery, but he did not leave the right to autonomous decision-making to the judiciary, which he was said to have influenced, although not very active, on the subject.
His ineffectiveness led to the resignation of half his cabinet and by 1860 it was clear that he would not be re-elected. When he rode with his successor, Abraham Lincoln, to his inauguration, he reportedly said to him, “If you are as happy about becoming President as I am about no longer being President, you are a very happy man.”
Why was James Buchanan so opposed to the abolition of slavery, even though he was a Northerner and a Democrat? Supposedly because of William Rufus DeVane King (1786-1853), the 13th US Vice-President, who made history by having the shortest term in office: he died of tuberculosis just 25 days after becoming Vice-President.
He came to Washington in 1819 as a representative of the new state of Alabama, although he was born in North Carolina, became a lawyer there and then went abroad as a diplomat. On his return home, he moved to what was then the Territory of Alabama, where he bought 750 acres of land and acquired slaves to work on his new plantation.
When Alabama became a state in 1919, he helped write its constitution, then went to Washington to represent its interests as a senator for four terms. He only said goodbye when he was sent to Paris, but when he returned home he settled back in the Senate.
He spent his entire political career trying hard to become Vice-President, but when he finally did, it was too late. He had been unwell for a long time. Coughing became his regular companion. Looking back, he realised that he had contracted tuberculosis in Paris.
He needed a milder climate, like the one in Cuba. It didn’t help him. He could not go home when he heard that he had become Vice-President. Congress gave him exceptional permission to take the oath of office on foreign soil, and so on 24 March 1853 he became Vice-President in Cuba. He did not return to his home town of Selma, which he had founded with other slave owners after buying a plantation, until April 1853. He died a few days later, aged 67.
It is not known whether the future US President James Buchanan was present at the time, but it is known that the two men remained close until King’s death. Both died single. Buchanan had been associated with a young woman in the distant past, but only for a short time. Thereafter, there was no woman in his life, and none in King’s, and both were in each other’s lives for life.
They worked together in the Senate for fifteen years and lived together. King only moved out of Buchanan’s apartment when his travels took him to France. Their relatives destroyed almost all their personal correspondence, but Buchanan’s letter to King while he was in France survives. Among other things, it reads:
“Now I’m ‘lonely and alone’, with no companions in the house. I have dated many ladies, but I have had no luck with any of them. It seems to me that it is not good for a man to be alone. I should not be surprised if I married some old maid who nursed me when I was ill, cooked me a good dinner when I was well, and expected no ardent or romantic affection from me.”
In 1844, King wrote to him: “I am selfish enough to hope that you will not succeed in obtaining a companion who will not make you regret our separation.”
The 13th US Vice-President and the 15th President were a couple, most historians are now convinced, although there is no irrefutable evidence of this. Relationships between men were more relaxed at the time and it was not unusual for two men to sleep in the same bed. The words gay or homosexual were not known, of course, but they knew that a man was “lustful”. King was said to be “effeminate”.
He and Buchanan were so close that their romantic attachment was already rumoured in the Senate at the time. In his letter, the prominent Democrat Aaron Brown referred to King as Buchanan’s “better half”, “his wife” and “Aunt Fancy”, who was “dressed in her best clothes”. The English word fancy also means exquisite or fashionable, and King was famous for wearing wigs even when everyone else had long since abandoned them.
The odd couple were said to be inseparable. They were usually referred to as Buchanan and his wife. They were also sometimes Siamese twins, but they have nevertheless gone down in history in different ways.
King was not, I think, exceptionally bright, but he was sensible and honest. He never went to extremes and was in the golden mean, even when it came to problems between the states and the federal government. He did a lot for his state, Alabama.
Buchanan has done little or nothing for the country. King, as a southerner and a slave-owner, naturally defended slavery. At home, he debated the issue with the man he lived and worked with in the Senate. It was also because of his influence, historians believe, that the northern President Buchanan was so sympathetic to slavery, and it is also because of King that he is one of the worst American Presidents today.
Vice-President despite his black wife
But at least he is known to Americans, and most people have never heard of Richard Mentor Johnson (1780-1850), even though he was the 9th US Vice-President. Why? Because he managed to do something almost unbelievable: in 1837, when he became Vice-President, he was living an open family life with Julia Chinn, a slave who carried one-eighth African-American blood, which means in practice that one of her great-great-grandparents was black.
He had known her since he was a little boy. She grew up in his house and under the supervision of his mother, who also saw to her education. In 1812, when Johnson was 32, they already had two daughters together, but they never married. After the death of his wealthy father in 1815, he could have taken her, as he had inherited her and the estate, and could have freed her, but he did not. If he had, she would have had to leave, but formally he preferred to remain single and she a slave.
There were rumours that they had married in secret, and even the newspapers of the time referred to her as his wife, but she was not, although she was the head of the household in their native Kentucky, after he had been in Washington since 1807. In his absence, she managed his affairs and in 1825 was the official hostess at a lavish picnic for 5 000 people that Johnson threw for the French aristocrat Marquis de Lafayette.
Normal relationships with slaves were tolerated in the South, but in Washington his family life, which he never hid, angered both Southern slaveowners and Northern opponents of the abolition of slavery. His unofficial wife hurt both of them personally, and in 1829, under pressure, Johnson had to say goodbye to the Senate seat he had occupied for ten years.
Six years later, he and Martin Van Buren became the Democratic candidate for the 1835 election. Under the electoral system of the time, two candidates ran together to win. The one with the most votes became President, the one with the fewest became Vice-President.
But now it seemed that the duo had no chance of winning. The racists had almost torn Johnson apart. Julia Chinn had been in the grave for two years. In 1833, she had been buried by cholera. Now they were pouring dung on her memory and on their two daughters.
“Excuse me, my friends, but when I read in the newspapers these filthy attacks on the mother of my children, I get emotional!” Johnson reportedly sighed brokenly when he read an article in the New York Courier and Enquirer in May 1835. The paper slipped from his hands, his head found the support of his arms, and he was completely on the ground.
The journalist Duff Green wrote of Julia that she was “black as oil and a foul-smelling black maid with thick lips”. A desperate Johnson asked his daughters to bring a picture of her to show his friends what she was really like. No picture of her has survived, but descriptions report that she was almost white and white.
Green further expressed dismay that Johnson was “breeding a family with children” and even “pushing them up the social ladder as equals”. There is no evidence that he ever tried to introduce his wife and daughters to Washington society, but it is true that he genuinely loved and cared for them.
They both married white men, and he gave them both a generous dowry. When Adelina married white Thomas W. Scott in 1932, she could read in the newspaper, “The people of Scott County are shocked and angered that the mulatto daughter of Colonel Johnson has married a white man, if a man who has so debased himself as to make himself an object of ridicule and scorn to all who have any sense of decency for the sake of a few possessions can even be called a white man.”
Furthermore, Johnson and his daughters were asked a series of questions, including how long people will allow their moral and religious sensibilities to suffer for such an obscenity that sets a shocking example for their sons and future generations. “The laws of Kentucky forbid white men, at the cost of heavy penalties, to marry a negro or a mulatto, or to live as man and wife.”
But Johnson was miraculously able to cope with all the attacks on him. In 1837, he became Vice-President in Martin Van Buren’s government and served a full term, but did not prove himself. He refused, for example, to support the abolition of slavery. He owned many slaves. He refused to give them up. After his wife’s death, he is said to have lived with another slave, but she ran away with another man. He is said to have had her found and sold her at auction. Then he took up with her sister.
In 1850, he suffered a stroke. In his will, he left most of his property to his daughter Imogene and to his grandchildren, because his second daughter, Adeline, died three years after her mother in 1833. The court nevertheless ruled that he left no “surviving widow, children, father or mother”. After fierce litigation, his descendants were only able to claim their right and their estate, which they wanted to take from them because they were not “white”.
Mr Vice-President, a murderer
Richard Mentor Johnson became Vice President despite his scandalous privacy for the time, and Aaron Burr (1756-1836) of New Jersey remained Vice President despite being criminally indicted and prosecuted.
The son of the president of the College of New Jersey, later renamed Princeton, he was left parentless at the age of two, but his mother’s wealthy brother Timothy Edwards provided him with everything he needed to thrive.
He wanted to go to the Princeton of today at the age of 11, but was turned down; at 13, he was awarded a scholarship, and at 17, he received his diploma. At 19, he joined the army and, of course, distinguished himself on the battlefields, but by 23 he was so exhausted and ill that he had to get out.
He devoted himself to his studies and, shortly after obtaining his law licence at the age of twenty-six, married Theodosia Prevost, a widow ten years his senior, after having been completely won over by her sharp mind two years earlier.
In New York, he of course also made a name for himself as a lawyer, but he was already well-off, buying apartments, dressing exquisitely and throwing lavish parties. From here to politics was only a step.
He lost his political virginity on the New York scene, but then turned his sights to state seats, defeating Philip Schuyler, Alexander Hamilton’s brother-in-law, in the Senate race. The latter became his bitter opponent, but Burr also had nature against him. Three of the four children born to Theodosia died. Only their daughter, whom they named after her mother, survived, but the family was not happy together for long. In 1794, Theodosia died and Burr was widowed at the age of thirty-eight.
Since then, his daughter has been the most important woman in his life, but she has not stood in the way of his political career. In 1800, he ran for the presidency with Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson defeated him by a hair’s breadth and Burr became Vice-President. Unfortunately, the two men did not see things the same way, and Jefferson took almost all the powers from the Vice-President and opposed Burr ever running for President again.
Burr thus began to lean towards the Federal Party, the forerunner of today’s Republicans, and in doing so endangered Alexander Hamilton, who was a leading figure in the party. He saw Burr as a rival and felt it his “religious duty to oppose his career”. By the very nature of his extremely long tongue, he viciously attacked his opponent in public and even schemed against him when Burr decided to run for Governor of New York.
With Jefferson’s tacit support, he was attacked by others, but Burr lost the election handily. Disillusioned and furious, he read in the newspaper that Alexander Hamilton, 49, the chief architect of American political economy, who was expected to run for the presidency, won and succeeded Thomas Jefferson, had given a “contemptuous opinion” of him.
Now he had had enough. He challenged Hamilton to a duel of honour. That was not really a big deal in those days. The duel was governed by a set of complex rules, the aim of which was to resolve the dispute without a shot being fired. Hamilton’s long tongue had earned him a few “invitations” to duel, but most disputes were resolved amicably.
This conversation only served to aggravate relations, but the two men met at 7 p.m. on 11 July 1804 in Weehawken, New Jersey, the same spot where Hamilton’s son had lost his life defending his father’s honour three years earlier.
There are two stories about what happened that day. Hamilton’s “assistant” later claimed that Hamilton decided the fight was morally questionable and deliberately fired a shot in the air. This was also a way of taking part in a duel without fighting, but at the same time preserving both your honour and that of your opponent, who would be offended if you refused to fight.
Burr’s “assistant”, on the other hand, claimed that Hamilton shot towards Burr but missed him. Burr did not. His bullet hit Hamilton’s abdomen and lodged against his spine. He was taken back to New York, mortally wounded, and Burr returned to his luxurious Manhattan apartment, where he was reportedly having a quiet dinner in the company and politely did not mention the bloody incident. But two days later, Alexander Hamilton, aged 49, died.
The public was enraged. True, duels were common, but Hamilton was a well-known and popular politician, for many the President of the future. Burr had only the people of some of the southern states on his side, for them he was a man who defended his honour with all the right. To the authorities in New York and New Jersey, he was a murderer and they decided to put him behind bars.
Such a storm arose that Burr hurriedly sailed to Georgia, where he was offered refuge by former Senator Pierce Butler, before returning to work. Murderer or not, he was still US Vice-President and President of the Senate, and in November he returned to Washington, where he was protected by immunity from arrest.
He remained Vice-President until the end of his term, when he returned to law. His most important court battle came when he defended himself, this time against treason charges. In 1805, he wanted to conquer Louisiana militarily and establish an independent empire there. He made contact with the British government, got General Wilkinson on his side and even secretly trained a small army with private money from supporters.
He was betrayed by General Wilkinson and arrested in February 1807. He got off on the basis of procedural errors, but the public had had enough of him: within three years he was charged with murder and treason, and never got the punishment he deserved. He fled to Europe and schemed some more, but without success.
Five years later he was back in America, where everyone was busy dealing with the British, who were knocking at their door, so his sins were more or less forgotten. He got the murder charge overturned and he was able to work as a lawyer again in New York. But now he was a broken man. No political storm could take him alive, and when his daughter drowned in 1813, “my thread with humanity was severed”, as he confided to a friend.
Since then, he has lived away from the public eye. Twenty years later, he married a wealthy widow, but the marriage did not last. He died three years later, in 1836, aged 80, without anyone really remembering him, his military exploits or his political career. He was just another one of those politicians who shine shockingly and then fade away permanently.
