DNA tests prove that former President Warren Harding fathered a child with his mistress.
The online genealogy research website Ancestry.com tested the son of Harding’s long-alleged daughter by his mistress as well as confirmed relatives of Harding’s and found that they matched.
The tests confirm a claim made by Nan Britton, who came forward after Harding’s death in 1923 to say that he had fathered her daughter, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing. Britton unsuccessfully sought financial support from Harding’s widow and even wrote a book called The President’s Daughter.
Though the claim got little support during Britton’s lifetime, historians had mostly accepted that it was true.
Last year, the Library of Congress released Harding’s love letters with another mistress, Carrie Phillips. That inadvertently spurred the DNA tests, as Harding’s grandnephew and grandniece, Peter and Abigail Harding, found similarities between those letters and Britton’s descriptions of Harding in her book.
“My father said this couldn’t have happened because President Harding had mumps as a kid and was infertile and the family really vilified Nan Britton,” Peter Harding told the New York Times. Abigail Harding added that there were now “too many nails in the coffin” and she was “completely convinced.”
It’s not the first time that science has proven a presidential rumor. In 1998, DNA tests showed that Thomas Jefferson fathered a son with a slave, Sally Hemings.
- What We Know So Far About the Deadly Earthquakes in Turkey and Syria
- Beyoncé's Album of the Year Snub Fits Into the Grammys' Long History of Overlooking Black Women
- How the U.S. Shot Down the Alleged Chinese Spy Balloon
- Effective Altruism Has a Toxic Culture of Sexual Harassment and Abuse, Women Say
- Inside Bolsonaro's Surreal New Life as a Florida Man—and MAGA Darling
- 'Return to Office' Plans Spell Trouble for Working Moms
- 8 Ways to Read More Books—and Why You Should
- Why Aren't Movies Sexy Anymore?
- How Logan Paul's Crypto Empire Fell Apart
