The first black president -- Warren G. Harding?

In Sunday's New York Times, there's a fascinating piece by Yale historian Beverly Gage which suggests that Warren G. Harding may have been "the first black president."

The story is as follows: in the early 1920s, a historian named William Estabrook Chancellor wrote a book alleging that Harding's great-grandmother was African-American; therefore, as Gage explains, "under the one-drop rule of American race relations" Harding would be considered black.

Harding's political allies quickly went to work to get Chancellor fired and suppress his book, but the rumor lived on. Chancellor quoted dozens of individuals who supposedly swore that the Harding family had been considered black "for generations." And as recently as 2005, there have been press reports of African-Americans claiming to be Harding's kin.

Until "genetic testing and genealogical research" settles the matter, says Gage, we can't know the truth. But there are a couple of points I find interesting:

1. Gage says that Chancellor's book, while clearly a "laughable partisan screed," also "contains a remarkable trove of social knowledge — the kind of community gossip and oral tradition that rarely appears in official records but often provides clues to richer truths." And certainly there is often truth in the oral tradition, as was shown when the Sally Hemmings/Thomas Jefferson relationship, stories of which had been passed down by generations of Hemmings' descendants, was proven.

It's intriguing that historians seem to be looking more closely at this kind of evidence, but how does a historian analyze gossip and oral tradition? Are there specific tools and methodologies that have been developed? I'm not questioning the value of such material; I'm just curious as to whether it's evaluated differently than more traditional sources, and if so, how.

2. Given that there was so much gossip at the time about Harding's racial background, it's interesting that this allegation is not well-known today. And I have to think this has something to do with the fact that Harding was such a colossal hack; indeed the term "smoke-filled room" originated to describe the dubious circumstances of his nomination. Harding's administration was one of the most sordid in American history and he is more or less universally regarded as one of the very worst presidents. He himself even pathetically admitted, "I am not fit for this office and should never have been here." Says U.S. News and World Report, "Once in the White House, the 29th president busied himself with golf, poker, and his mistress, while appointees and cronies plundered the U.S. government in a variety of creative ways." 

It's understandable why you'd want to claim kin with the author of the Declaration of Independence. But the presider over Teapot Dome? Eh, not so much.

3. Gage's conclusion is, I think, well-struck. She mentions Harding's hometown of Marion, Ohio:

The town gained national fame in 1920 as the site of Harding’s “front-porch campaign”; for weeks, he delivered stump speeches from his well-tended home. Far less well known, as the historian Phillip Payne has noted, is what happened the year before, when a mob of armed white Marion residents drove more than 200 black families out of town, one of a wave of postwar race riots that served to segregate the industrialized north.

As he campaigns to become the nation’s first (openly) black president, Barack Obama likes to say that we’ve begun to put that divisive history behind us. The truth may be that we don’t yet know the half of it.

Comments

[Martin Hollick]

I know something about presidential ancestries. I looked at Harding's eight grandparents. George Tryon Harding 1790-1860 and his wife Elizabeth Madison 1800-1866, both appear in the 1860 U.S. Census as white. Joshua Crawford 1803-1868 and his wife Sophia Stevens 1802-1870, also appear in the 1850 and 1860 censuses as white. The other four don't live long enough to make it to an enumerated census (that is 1850 or later). They are Joseph Dickerson 1776-1837 and his wife Abigail Haines and William Van Kirk 1763-1826 and his wife Deborah Watters. However, their children, i.e. Harding's maternal grandparents appear as white in the 1850 and 1860 censuses: Isaac Haines Dickerson 1802-1867 and his wife Charity Malvina Van Kirk 1803-1878.

So if this story is true, these people were passing even back then. Not all of his great-great-grandparents are known.
See Gary Boyd Roberts, "Ancestors of the American Presidents" (Boston, MA, NEHGS, 1995), to which I contributed. His next edition is due out in 2009 and I've contributed to that as well (Hayes and Garfield).

It's annoying that the N.Y. Times piece never says which specific ancestor it was but only refers us to the original book.

[Xantha]

I've heard this rumor before. There are a lot of such rumors among African Americans. Being white, I've only heard a few. But the other one I remember was the movie star Joseph Cotton.

On rumor as a historical source: the historian David Arnold has explored rumor in India at the end of the 19th century. One of the cases he examined was rumors surrounding british medical practices, I think around quarantine and vaccination practices. Some of these practices did violate caste notions of purity and pollution. Indians also believed that British doctors were forcing them to hang upside down to drain them of something--I want to call it a "life force" but I don't know if that's quite right. Arnold found these rumors recorded in Anglo-Indian newspapers that were anxious that South Asians were spreading "misinformation" about these medical practices.

Anyway, the point really isn't whether these rumors are true or not, it's the way they function during the time period in which they emerge. In the context Arnold explores, rumors were one thing that helped undermine the British Raj. As a phenomenon that emerged among poor and low-caste South Asians, they were also a counterpoint to elite nationalist movements.

So why resurrect (or reveal) the Harding rumor at this point? The obvious answer is that we are finally witnessing a time in which a black president is a possibility. But of course Obama's heritage confuses many people. It's really no more complex than that of many people of African descent in this country, who get lumped together as "black" by a racist society. To me, rumor is a way that African Americans have historically gotten to define who is "white," if only in a subterranean fashion.

[jonp72]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Ishmael Reed's novel, Mumbo Jumbo. The racial rumor about Warren G. Harding is a motif that appears frequently in the book.