August 19, 2007
Warren G. Harding and Barack Obama II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:10 PM EST I certainly agree with Alexander Burns that if Warren Harding had a black ancestor, that does not make him “black” in any modern sense of the term. So it is ridiculous to say that he might displace Barack Obama as the first black President, assuming—and it’s a very big assumption at this point of course—that Senator Obama is elected. But the story goes back much further than the racist Professor Chancellor. Indeed, it goes back further than Warren Harding, who was born in 1865. As his most recent major biographer (Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren Harding in His Times; Russell also wrote the article in American Heritage Mr. Burns referred to) wrote, “In church and meeting, in ownership of land and in the quality of their gravestones, the Hardings appeared the oldest and most prominent family in the village. Blooming Grove [Ohio] was even referred to as Harding Corners. Yet there was a flaw in this successful family, a shadow that the Hardings could not escape, a rumor that would not quite die down, that they and every family in Blooming Grove were aware of. For it was said, usually in whispers, and had been said almost from the arrival of the Hardings in Ohio, that the Harding veins had Negro blood in them.” President Harding’s great-great grandfather, Amos Harding, who was the first of the family to move to Blooming Grove and died there in 1839, told his descendants that the rumor had been started by a man whom he had caught stealing corn from him and who had soon thereafter left town. But whether or not the rumor was true doesn’t really matter. The rumor was always there. And that did matter in the nineteenth century. Warren Harding had it thrown in his face in every schoolboy quarrel. It never went away, and it profoundly affected Harding and many of his relatives. Indeed, the shadow in the title of Russell’s biography was the rumor of Negro blood. Harding hardly ever referred to it, but the one time he did, he told a reporter friend of his, “How do I know, Jim? One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence.” There is little if any evidence to support the rumor, but Harding’s ancestry, while as well studied as all presidential genealogies have been, has some large gaps in it. One great grandmother is only probably known, and another has “said to be” parents. So there is room for the rumor to fester in the absence of evidence to the contrary. What interests me here is that as far as this country has come in race relations in the last 60 years, the fact remains that 170-year-old utterly unsubstantiated rumors about the supposed black ancestry of an American President who died 84 years ago can still be regarded as newsworthy by a respectable newspaper.
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