The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 175
What a sorry state of affairs for the greatest country on earth! The Harding attitude was but the universal social attitude toward all unwedded mothers: that they have sinned against society and must suffer the penalty. Indeed, do not ministers all over the country preach this to a public willing to accept it, because, in most individual instances, either temptation has not been experienced or else, being experienced and indulged, has not resulted in actual childbirth? And so this attitude is generally accepted as Right.
My own situation, which differed and was distinguished only because it concerned the child of a man who had been placed in the highest position the greatest republic in the world can offer, led me to the conclusion that it was high time it was righted, and that little children should be recognized, not for their parental origin, but for themselves and as having every right to legitimacy, and to every opportunity that would be theirs if they had been born under the yoke of legal marriage.
In the chapter entitled "Social Justice," in Warren G. Harding's book, "Our Common Country," he says: "It will not be the America we love which will neglect the American mother and the American child."
If every man, woman and child were to ask this question: "Would I like to suffer ignominy, neglect, social slights, and unfair recognition because my mother and father had not been
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linked by the bonds of conventional wedlock?" I am sure that the vehemence of the united "No!" would resound to the farthest corners of the country, and that a people, drawn together through great human sympathy and Christlike forgiveness, would unite to wipe out every stain upon the motherhood of a nation through measures designed to protect and honor every mother's child!
There would then be laws governing such protective rights, there would be frank and unashamed admission of fatherhood, and there would be abstinence of indulgence where there existed unwillingness to make such admissions, and equal advantages for the so-called illegitimate as well as the legitimate; and there would be no more shifting of responsibility upon the mother or upon her family.
And if I could, through my revelations, cause my daughter, as well as thousands of potential mothers in the world, to recognize the gross injustice humanity imposes through adherence to a social ruling which is doing nothing in the right direction and much in the wrong, then, indeed, we would have an array of intelligence raised against the present system, in whose place would be demanded such legal measures as would banish forever the heart-break of myriad lovers and their true love-children.
I would not change the world. I would not preach recognition of indiscriminate indulgence where admission of parenthood is denied. I would not ask anything which is not humanly and divinely right and possible. But I would, if it were within my humble prerogative and power, as the mother of Warren Gamaliel Harding's only child, open the eyes of those blinded through adherence to hypocrisies which are basely unfair, and I would bear the glorious fact of what constitutes true birth legitimacy—which, in a word, is love.