August 19, 2007
Warren G. Harding and Barack Obama Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:20 PM EST A friend of mine recently e-mailed me a column from Massachusetts’s Worcester Telegram & Gazette with the arresting title: “Barack Obama Might Not Be First Black President.” Factually, this headline sounds true—if Obama doesn’t start outrunning Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, he may never reach the presidency. The point of the Telegram & Gazette article, though, was not to speculate about the possible failure of the Illinois senator’s campaign. Its claim is stranger than that. “Barack Obama is campaigning to be the first man with African blood to become president of the United States,” the author writes. “It is a noteworthy aspiration. But even if he is successful, will he be the first to fit that description? Probably not.”
The article goes on to argue that Obama will have been preempted by Warren G. Harding, who “is widely credited with having a Negro ancestor, probably a great-grandmother.” Leaving aside the bizarre use of the term “Negro,” this assertion seems to kind of miss the point. Warren Harding never identified himself as a black man, and neither did many other people classify him as such. The leading spreader of the rumors about Harding’s ancestry, in fact, was a source no more reliable than the virulently racist professor William Estabrook Chancellor, who “held that Mr. Harding’s nomination was part of a plot to establish Negro domination over the United States.” American Heritage ran an article that dealt with several odd aspects of Mr. Harding’s career, including his antagonistic relationship with Chancellor, in 1963. I think it does a better job of laying out the murky areas of Harding’s life story than the column linked to above.
It’s illustrative of a weird (and widespread) view of race that this Worcester paper would bring up Harding as a possible forerunner to Obama. The idea that one drop of African-American blood, so to speak, would have made Harding as much a black President as Obama is profoundly misguided. I doubt this is what the author of the Telegram & Gazette article intended to say with this piece, but his column plays into that notion all the same. The false equivalency it creates between Harding’s experience, possibly having had one black great-grandparent, and Obama’s, as a quite obviously biracial man, is almost as ugly as the questions about whether Obama is “black enough” to win over African-American voters. The column also makes one wonder at what point in the process of history-making people start treating rumors as facts. There is, so far as I know, no conclusive evidence that Harding had any black ancestors. So are we left to go on the word of a long-dead white supremacist? Harding equivocated on the possibility of his having multiracial ancestry, but this, combined with Mr. Chancellor’s screeds, hardly seems like evidence enough to reach a worthwhile conclusion. And in any case, it seems like questionable methodology to stake one’s argument on the claims of a delusional propagandist. When a Jewish person is nominated for the Presidency, can we expect to see similar articles suggesting that FDR was actually the first Jewish President, as some anti-Roosevelt propaganda had it? I hope not, and I think it’s unlikely, but apparently it can’t be ruled out.
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