The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 47
The summer of 1920 was arriving, and with it the Republican Convention in June which was to nominate my sweetheart for the Presidency. Only four years before I had hung on street car straps going to and from my work at Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company, reading about my beloved Mr. Harding and his much featured oratorical achievement in connection with making the nominating speech for his friend Charles E. Hughes, the then Republican candidate for President.
Now I was back in Chicago, making almost daily visits to Warren Harding's child and mine, and watching every political aspect with keenest interest. Only four short years and I had come to these heights! The mother of Warren Harding's only child! The glory of it!
Mr. Harding came on to Chicago early in June and came out immediately upon his arrival to my sister's, 6103 Woodlawn
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Avenue. I remember I missed him at the station and was so disappointed because I thought he had not come, but I had gone to the wrong station to meet him and so we reached the apartment almost simultaneously, having come from opposite directions.
I had, in letters to Mr. Harding, described Elizabeth's apartment, calling it a "perfectly adorable place." When I came on from Asbury Park I was in such a weakened condition that any place where my adored sister lived seemed heaven to me. And I really did think for a young married couple their apartment was dear. Elizabeth's husband is rather small compared with Mr. Harding, and the tiny four rooms did not seem out of proportion to his stature. But I shall never forget how I gasped when I beheld Mr. Harding in the living-room of that apartment. His head nearly touched the ceiling!
"I thought you said Elizabeth had a lovely roomy apartment, dearie!" he teased me.
"Well, I thought it was—but, my, you fill it up so!" He sat down in a big chair and took me on his lap. Elizabeth knew he was going to be there and had arranged so that the rest of the family would be away during his visit with me.
That visit was a very important one from many angles. While Mr. Harding scouted my prophecy that he would soon be the President of the United States, it must have been that he did think some about it, for even as early as that first visit he warned me about what might happen in case he were nominated. I would be "shadowed" very probably, he said, and certainly would be if he were elected President.
Those were stirring days for me as well as for my hero. I would fly from the Republican Convention at the Coliseum out to our baby, often giving her airings in the nearby park. The excitement those days seemed to sustain me with a strength not really mine. Elizabeth Ann made a perfect picture in her new carriage. I tried to persuade Mr. Harding to meet me some morning in the park so he could see her, but, though he pondered it all lovingly and said he was as "crazy to do it" as I was to have him, he never did. I suppose it would have been unwise, though I was
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Bottom: The opening of the season, American League Park, Washington
sure I could pilot that project as safely as I seemed to have done the others up to this time, with my sister Elizabeth's good co-operation.
Elizabeth Ann and I had lovely times together. I talked to her even from babyhood as though she were a companion instead of a baby, and she would lie there looking up at me so seriously that sometimes I felt she must understand me. I would whisper to her, "Darling, do you know who your daddy is? Well, maybe you do (her answering look was full of wisdom!), but you don't know who he is going to be!" Then I would stoop down and whisper in her ear, "Your daddy is going to be the President of the United States!" And surely her look of comprehension was more than a baby's look—it seemed to me to be the understanding gaze of her father's own eyes.
Mr. Harding came several times to 6103 Woodlawn Avenue during that month. I remember one time I rode downtown on the elevated with him. Standing on the platform at University Avenue, I said, "Honey, why do they have primaries?" I could see no need for them. In fact, I told him I thought politics was a terribly complicated business—to go through all the red tape, when he would be President anyway. I talked on and on, suggesting a simplification of the whole governmental machinery. He seemed highly amused. "A fine politician you'd make, Nan!" he said. I remember also how he leaned far over to read his neighbor's paper after we were seated in the train, and when I strained my eyes to see what could interest him, he turned and explained that he "was just trying to steal the baseball score." He followed the ball games with great interest, and was a dyed-in-the-wool fan if ever there was one.
A few days later, in the lobby of the Auditorium Hotel, I met him and he gave me a ticket to the Convention. It seemed to please him to do it, and very likely he could not help recalling my many predictions. He may even have gloried a bit in the knowledge that he was fulfilling every ambition I ever had for him.
I listened with rapt attention and rising regard to Frank B. Willis, who made the nominating speech for Warren G. Harding. I had heard Mr. Willis only once before and that was at Kent, Ohio, where I attended Normal School the summer immediately following my graduation from high school. At that time—1914—I had looked upon him as an illy-groomed, small-stage politician, but my appraisal of him swiftly swung in his favor with that speech.
I witnessed excitedly the balloting at the Convention which slowly but surely rose in favor of Ohio's son. I could not share with anyone, by the most extravagant verbal picture, the emotions I experienced as it was announced amid roaring acclaim that the Republican nomination for the Presidency of the United States had been given to Warren G. Harding. How could that surging multitude—cheering and whistling and stampeding the aisles with their Harding banners held aloft—be interested anyway in the tumult of unutterable emotion that rose within me? My eyes swam, and I recalled my Freshman school year at Marion, when, in the margins of all my books, I, then but thirteen years old, had written the prophecy of my heart-longing, "Warren Gamaliel Harding—he's a darling—Warren Gamaliel Harding—President of the United States!"