Historical Notes: Letters from Constant

It was 1920. Woodrow Wilson was on his way out, and the Republicans seemed certain to take over the White House. Their triumph would be achieved through the candidacy of Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding, the handsome Babbitt from Marion, Ohio. Republicans all over the nation were rooting for him, and in his own home town on the day that Harding, 54, opened his campaign, every storefront in the community was ablaze with bunting.

Every storefront but one, that is. It was the Uhler-Phillips department store, and, as William Allen White wrote years later, “when the reporters asked about it, they heard one of those stories about a primrose detour from Main Street.” According to the gossip, Nominee Harding, long since married to a domineering, unattractive woman, had been treading the primrose path with Mrs. Carrie Phillips, wife of one of the owners of the store. She was a tall, willowy redhead, the best-looking woman in town, and about a dozen years Harding’s junior—but the less said about it the better.

And so nothing was said. Harding, of course, was elected, and presided for three years over the most scandal-scarred Administration in U.S. history. After his death in 1923, another woman, Nan Britton, wrote a book describing a long love affair with Harding, one that began in 1917. She had borne his daughter, Nan claimed, and had continued her clandestine affair with Harding through the years of his presidency.

“Darling Sweetheart Adorable.” Carrie Phillips was forgotten—until last week, when Historical Writer Francis Russell announced that he had seen and read more than 250 love letters that Harding had written to her between 1909 and 1920. Carrie kept the letters. After she died a recluse in 1960, the letters were found by Marion Attorney Don Williamson, who had been Carrie’s guardian.

The letters, says Russell, who plans to detail them in an American Heritage magazine article, portray Harding as a devout lover and Mrs. Phillips as something of a moneygrubber. Many of the missives were written on Senate station ery, some on postcards bearing Harding’s photograph. Some of them ran to 35 or 40 pages. Some of the letters he signed “Warren,” some with his full name, and others with a code name, “Constant.”

One letter, dated only “Easter Morning,” bore the salutation, “Carrie Darling Sweetheart Adorable.” Many more were strewn with homemade poetry. Inspired by a musical play, The Wedding Trip, which he saw in New York City in 1912, he penned an epic of 20 stanzas, including one memorable line, “I love you garb’d but naked, more!”

At Christmastime 1914 he dashed off another poem:

I love you more than all the world,

Possession wholly imploring

Mid passion I am oftimes whirled

Oftimes admire—adoring.

Oh, God! If fate would only give

Us privilege to love and live!

Slow Boat. The love affair was a stormy one, so it was no surprise that it began to fade in 1920. When Harding was summoned to the historic smoke-filled room at Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel during the 1920 G.O.P. presidential convention, he was asked pointedly if he knew of any embarrassing family skeletons that might hurt the party’s chances. Harding asked for time to think, ten minutes later announced that he was as clean as a hound’s tooth. Harding apparently tried to extricate himself from his love affair, and there is some evidence to show that Carrie put a price tag on it. In one of his last letters, he wrote that he could not “secure you the larger competence you have so frequently mentioned. I can pay with life or reputation, but I can’t command such a sum. To avoid dis grace, I will, if you demand it as the price, return to Marion to reside . . . If you think I can be more helpful by having a public position and influence, I will pay you $5,000 per year in March each year, so long as I am in that public service.”

As it turned out, the problem was resolved when, following Harding’s nomination, a party official visited Mrs. Phillips, gave her a reported $25,000-$50,000 and suggested that she take a little vacation—say for six months. Soon afterwards, Carrie and her husband James took a slow boat to the Far East to look into conditions in the raw-silk market.

Carrie Phillips, however, was not always so cooperative. Time and time again, Warren Harding had admonished her: “Destroy these letters!”