POLITICAL NOTES: Ghosts

The name of Warren Gamaliel Harding again trailed ghostly shadows through the news last week.

“President’s Daughter.” In Federal court in Toledo appeared Nan Britton to press her claim to the illicit love of the 29th President of the U. S. With her was her prim and mannerly 12-year-old daughter Elizabeth Ann whom she presented to the world in her book, The President’s Daughter (1927) as the bastard of President Harding, conceived in the Senate Office Building. In 1928 one Joseph de Barthe. now dead, wrote and published a thin little book entitled The Answer to “The President’s Daughter” in which he defended President Harding’s good name, denied that the President was biologically able to achieve paternity, depicted Miss Britton as an unscrupulous impostor with a bad character. Round-faced, smiling Charles Augustus Klunk, 53, old Harding friend, proprietor of the Marion (Ohio) Hotel, put Author de Barthe’s book on sale at the newsstand of his musty old American-plan hostelry. Miss Britton filed a $50,000 suit against him on the ground that his distribution of The Answer libeled her.

U. S. District Judge John Milton Killits presided at last week’s Toledo trial. In effect the jury was being called to pass upon the validity of Miss Britton’s claims against President Harding. After the first day Elizabeth Ann was sent out of the court room. Later Judge Killits barred the public and the press lest the evidence “corrupt public morals.” Miss Britton, calm and demure, wearing a white blouse, brown skirt and caracul coat, sat very still while Grant Mouser, defense attorney, branded her tale as false and read chapter after chapter from the two books to prove it. Once Miss Britton passed a handkerchief over her face when Lawyer Mouser, his grey hair disheveled with excitement charged that she had neglected utterly, to establish the paternity of her child while President Harding yet lived. Judge Killits, unexcited, ruled that statements in the book were libelous per se and that “there is nothing left for the plaintiff to prove except the extent of the publication.”

“Strange Death.” Hair-raising was the story told last year by Gaston B. Means, shifty sleuth, in The Strange Death of President Harding (TIME, March 31, 1930). Actual author of this tale, wherein Mrs. Harding was supposed to have poisoned her husband as a result of the Nan Britton affair, was May Dixon Thacker of Norfolk, Va. In an article in Liberty last week Mrs. Thacker repudiated the whole Means story, lamented that she had been badly duped. Three months ago, she said, she was told by “one of the highest officials in Washington” that “it was positively a physical impossibility” for Sleuth Means ever to have entered the White House to see Mrs. Harding, as he claimed. Also she was shown a long affidavit by Gaston B. Means in which he declared that all his testimony before the Senate Investigating Committee — a foundation for The Strange Death—was “false and a frame-up.” Wrote Mrs. Thacker:

“Today—in mental sackcloth and spiritual ashes—I am forced to concede that I was duped. . . . Mrs. Harding knew nothing whatever at any time about Nan Britton or her child. . . . Nan Britton’s child is not the child of President Harding. That is my opinion [but] I cannot prove it.”