First Lady Florence Harding: Behind the Tragedy and Controversy.

Payne, Phillip

First Lady Florence Harding: Behind the Tragedy and Controversy. By Katherine A. S. Sibley. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009. 366 pp.

Writing a biography of a first lady can be difficult. With few exceptions, first ladies have lived public lives in the shadows of their husbands, serving in the symbolic roles of model wife and mother in the first family. This raises the following question: How do you write a biography of a person whose primary role was to merge her life into the public identity of her husband? Katherine A. S. Sibley, in First Lady Florence Harding: Behind the Tragedy and Controversy, has tackled the difficult task of writing an honest biography of Florence Harding, the wife of Warren G. Harding, as part of the Modern First Ladies series. Warren Harding is perhaps best known for the Teapot Dome Scandal and his extramarital affairs. It has been Florence's historical misfortune to have married a man regarded as a failed president. As a result, she has been stereotyped as a prudish shrew whose ambitions drove her husband to the presidency or into the arms of other women. Indeed, the only other biography of Florence Harding is Carl S. Anthony's Florence Harding: The First Lady, the Jazz Age, and the Death of America's Most Scandalous President (1999), which makes the link between the reputations of the Hardings explicit in the subtitle. As series editor Lewis Gould notes in the foreword to Sibley's book, "Few women in American history have been the subject of more sustained scorn and criticism than Florence Kling Harding" (p. ix).

Sibley recognizes that Florence Harding's reputation is bad. This ranking is the result of several things, but primarily her reputation is a shadow of her husband's reputation. Ironically, the scandals that have tainted Warren G. Harding's reputation did not involve Florence Harding. In those scandals that did involve Florence, such as Warren's affair with Carrie Phillips, Florence was the victim, rather than the perpetrator. As a result of the scandals, Florence Harding's reputation has been primarily crafted by her critics and those who exploited the scandals for tabloid sensationalism. As Sibley writes, "compared with the popular dismissal of Harding as a crook, Florence's treatment has been nastier. Her place in history has been colored by a particular kind of denigration related to her sex and also her age; she was sixty when she entered the White House." (p. 3) Sibley convincingly writes about Florence's life as the disowned daughter of a prominent local businessman and as a divorced single mother, and shows how these roles influenced her actions as first lady. This background should have proven to be a political liability, but instead it set the stage for Florence's own political identity.

Sibley successfully cuts through the rumors and gossip to write a first-rate biography. She argues that Florence Harding was a transitional first lady with her own political activism grounded in her experiences as a single mother and a businesswoman. Florence Harding also bridged the gap between traditional and modern first ladies. According to Sibley, Florence Harding was an astute politician who understood and used changes in popular culture to embrace the emergence of film and advertising. Thus, Florence Harding was among the first people to grasp the political potential in celebrity. Not everyone will be as comfortable with Sibley's treatment of the Hardings' marriage. Sibley, like Robert Ferrell in The Strange Deaths of President Harding (1998), casts doubt on Nan Britton's account in which she claims to have been Warren's mistress and mother of their child. Sibley does much to contextualize Warren's affairs but ultimately asks "why quibble over Nan?" (p. 30). One of Sibley's real contributions is a sensitive treatment of Florence's private life and a discussion of the Harding marriage that does not resort to sensationalism or undue speculation. Although the focus of the book series is on first ladies, Sibley's account also offers insight into the social and cultural history of women coming of age in small-town America during the later years of the nineteenth century.

The broad strokes of Florence Harding's life have long been known, from the difficulties of her health and marriage to her work on behalf of animals and veterans, but have often been obscured her husband's scandals or distorted by his critics. The Florence Harding who emerges in Sibley's account is a more complex character. Many of Florence Harding's more famous quirks, such as her ambition or belief in astrology, emerge as understandable results of her relationship with her family or as part and parcel to the times. For those interested in the complex politics of the 1920s or the changing nature of the status of the first lady, Sibley's biography offers insight into a complicated and interesting life.

--Phillip Payne

St. Bonaventure University