Bill Clinton was
called the first black president because he crossed racial lines so easily, a
distinction he lost when Barack Obama became the first actual black president.
But for decades, some Americans claimed that the nation’s first black president
was really Warren G. Harding.
It turns out that
he wasn’t, really. At least that is the result of new DNA testing that
according to scientists showed for the first time that Harding almost certainly
had no recent ancestors with African blood, despite assertions that were spread
far and wide a century ago in efforts to sabotage everything from his marriage
to his political career.
+The finding was
overshadowed last week by the determination through the same testing that
Harding did father a child with a mistress, Nan Britton. But the conclusion
about Harding’s racial ancestry likewise addresses a mystery that had puzzled
historians for many years and provides a seemingly definitive resolution of a
subplot that played out during his lifetime.
For Mr. Clinton,
of course, the sobriquet of first black president was meant as a compliment,
and for Mr. Obama a historical accomplishment. But for Harding, raised in a
vastly different era, when Jim Crow governed much of the country and the Ku
Klux Klan was making a comeback, it was a weapon wielded against him. Operating
under the so-called one-drop rule that any “black blood” at all made someone
black, racists used genealogy to try to discredit opponents.
With Harding, it
stuck for decades. Abigail Harding, his grandniece, said last week that her family
told her that when she was a baby in the 1940s, a woman came up to her carriage
on the street and said, “Just wanted to see if she was black.”
From the 1960s to
the 1990s, the story was cited by black authors in pamphlets and books like
“The Five Negro Presidents” and “The Six Black Presidents” to avenge being
exposed for wrongdoing. More recently, the question was revived with Mr.
Obama’s election in 2008.
The historian
Francis Russell, in his 1968 biography of Harding, traced the story back to Harding’s
great-great-grandfather, Amos, who supposedly told descendants that a man
spread the rumor that he was black to avenge being caught damaging a neighbor’s
apple trees. Another Harding biographer, Robert K. Murray, had a different
explanation, writing that when the future president’s abolitionist family moved
to Ohio, they lived in the same area with black residents and there was
mingling.
It gained
traction with some when Amos Kling, a local tycoon in Marion, Ohio, angry that
his daughter, Florence, was marrying Harding, spread the rumor that he was
black and tried to force businessmen in town not to do business with him.
As John W. Dean
and other biographers wrote, years later Mr. Kling came to a peace of sorts
with Harding, who by then had made a name in politics. “My daughter,” Mr. Kling
told an acquaintance, “married a” — and here he used a term not acceptable
today — “but he’s a smart” one.
By 1920, when
Harding was running for president as the Republican nominee, William Estabrook
Chancellor, a professor at the College of Wooster and a racist supporter of the
Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, collected unsubstantiated statements from
various Ohio residents asserting that Harding had black ancestors. The research
was then published in pamphlets that were distributed to voters.
Harding stayed
away from the matter, although he told a reporter he did not know the truth.
“One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence,” he said. His supporters
responded aggressively lest the issue hurt his chances. His campaign adviser
boasted that the Hardings were from “a blue-eyed stock” and federal agents
seized the pamphlets. In the end, they did nothing to stop Harding from winning
a landslide victory, and Professor Chancellor was fired from his college job.
While in office,
Harding was more outspoken on civil rights for blacks than perhaps any other
president since Ulysses S. Grant. In his first address to Congress, he called
for an anti-lynching law. He later traveled to the Deep South to call for equal
political and economic rights for blacks in a speech in Birmingham, Ala.
“Whether you like it or not,” he told white audience members, “unless our
democracy is a lie, you must stand for that equality.”
Still, in his two
years as president before dying in office in 1923, Harding made little progress
toward achieving those lofty goals or even reversing Wilson’s segregation of
federal departments. The anti-lynching law passed the House but not the Senate.
The story of
Harding’s supposedly mixed ancestry has persisted into modern times. Just 10
years ago, Marsha Stewart, an African-American schoolteacher claiming to be a
fifth cousin of Harding’s, published a book, “Warren G. Harding U.S. President
29: Death by Blackness.”
But when Abigail
Harding and her cousin, Peter Harding, decided to be tested through
AncestryDNA, a service of Ancestry.com, the genealogical site, their results
told a different story.
While humankind
is generally traced to sub-Saharan Africa, the AncestryDNA test measures for
more recent regional origin going back hundreds or thousands of years. By
testing Harding’s grandnephew and grandniece, as well as a grandson of Ms.
Britton, the scientists said they could extrapolate Harding’s own ancestry.
The tests found
“no detectable genetic signatures of sub-Saharan African heritage in any of the
three cousins,” said Julie Granka, a population geneticist at AncestryDNA. As a
result, she said, “it is very unlikely,” meaning less than a 5 percent chance,
that Harding had a black ancestor within four generations, meaning
great-great-grandparents.
“However,” she
added, “the analysis does not rule out the possibility that Harding still could
have a more distant ancestor from sub-Saharan Africa.”
While such a
finding would have once been politically expedient for his great-uncle, today
Peter Harding confessed to a little disappointment. “I was hoping for black
blood,” he said.
