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The president's daughter

Chapter 89: 84
By Nan Britton
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About This Book

A candid personal memoir recounts the author's long relationship with a nationally prominent public figure, the birth and upbringing of their daughter, and the social, familial, and political pressures that resulted. Combining narrative episodes, occasional poems, and frank reflection, the work explains the author’s motive for public disclosure and documents emotional and practical hardships. It closes with a direct appeal for legal protections and social compassion for unwedded mothers and their children, arguing for legislative remedies and greater public understanding to reduce stigma and secure rights for those born outside formal marriage.

84

In my position at Northwestern University, as President Walter Dill Scott’s secretary, which position I filled for six months, I was being thrown into a social element I might have enjoyed had it not been for my preoccupation in my own trying matter. Acting on impulse, I decided to give up my work with President Scott and go into the University as a student. I set about to gain Mr. Harding’s consent and approval. I wrote him I wanted to see him on a matter, and he set the date of my coming. It was in January, 1923, and the second semester of school would begin in February.

Mr. Harding’s latest letter had inclined me to think that perhaps we might be able to have more than a formal visit, and so I invested in a lovely orchid neglige and ostrich-befeathered mules. These I hoped I might have occasion to need upon my visit to Mr. Harding, and you may be sure this intimation from him had set my heart beating wildly. Perhaps I needed this intimate nearness to re-affix a certain sanity I seemed to have lost; perhaps he needed me to help banish the harassing fears besetting him on all sides.

Mrs. Warren G. Harding, wife of the President of the United States, was a very sick woman. According to the bulletins she was still in a critical condition at the time I saw Mr. Harding, despite the fact that she had, I think, passed the crisis of her illness. Brigadier-General Sawyer, personal physician to Mrs. Harding, headed the list of doctors in attendance upon her. But Mrs. Harding had, as far back as I could remember, been ill or ailing most of the time, and one time in particular, when Mr. Harding was Senator, he had come over to New York to see me during her illness and told me very calmly that they had been “sure she would die.” So the credence given by most people at that time to the unusual severity of her illness was somewhat discredited by those of us who knew the chronic character of her sickness. And when Mr. Harding wrote thus hopefully to me in very early January, I felt sure that the papers had grossly exaggerated the First Lady’s illness, and that likely by the time I reached Washington she would be on her way to Florida, or some other place, for a period of recuperation.