A widely
repeated joke from 1920 has two Black men discussing the political
situation:
Rastus: There's going to be an election this year.
Do you know who's running for president?
Sambo: Yes, Mr.
Harding, I understand.
Rastus: Yeah, I know that. But who
is the white folks' candidate?
Rumors about
Mr. Harding's background had been floating around for years in
Marion, and Blooming Grove, Ohio, where he lived. When he proposed
marriage to Florence Kling, her outraged father was bitterly
opposed. He saw the Hardings as poor trash with a Negro
mixture.
Harding married Florence "Flossie"
Mabel Kling deWolfe, and she pursued him persistently until he
reluctantly gave in. Her father opposed the marriage, warning
her not to marry into the "Black-blooded Harding family."
Warren and "Duchess" had a rocky relationship because of Warren's
longstanding affair with the wife of an old friend. He was
labeled a womanizer and drinker despite Prohibition. John T. Kling
did not accept Warren as a
son-in-law. He cursed him.
"You nigger!" "I'll blow his head off!" "He
forbade his wife and sons to have anything to do with Flossie"
(Russell, 85).
His opponents raised each one
of the foregoing issues surrounding his presidency, but he always
answered the doubters with a resounding:
"No, I'm not a
Negro!" "How should I know?" "One of my relatives must
have jumped the fence."
During the 1920 Campaign, pamphlets were printed that
Harding's great-great-grandfather was a West Indian Negro, and other
Black ancestors lurked in his family tree.
Warren's first cousins Mary
A. Bowers, Anna Johnson, and friend Berenice Norwood Napper (all
with African Ancestry) started "The Warren Gamaliel Harding Memorial
Foundation, Inc." in 1990. The memoriam was held in Riverside,
Connecticut, near New London, Connecticut, where Amos Harding, the
patriarch owned a 400 acre farm and founded the village of Clifford,
Pennsylvania, in 1812.
