The Mysterious Death Of Warren G. Harding At San Francisco’s Palace Hotel
Public DomainWarren G. Harding seemingly died of a heart attack, though some believe that the First Lady poisoned him.
Warren G. Harding ascended to the presidency, in part, because of his promise to “Return to Normalcy” after World War I. But his life — and death — were full of plenty of drama.
Elected in 1920, the president didn’t think very highly of his own political abilities. He described himself as “a man of limited talents” and once remarked, “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” He had been something of an absentee senator, and a woman named Nan Britton later claimed that Harding had spent more time having an illicit affair with her than worrying about legislation. (A 2015 DNA test confirmed that Britton’s child was Harding’s, as she later claimed.) Harding also spent his time in the Senate writing explicit love letters to another mistress, Carrie Fulton Phillips, in which he often referred to his penis as “Jerry.”
While his love letters were salacious, his presidency was lackluster — and dogged by allegations of corruption. In 1923, Harding and his wife, Florence, decided to embark on a 15,000-mile, cross-country speaking tour dubbed the “Voyage of Understanding” so that Harding could explain his policies to the people of America and set himself up for a reelection campaign in 1924.
But the voyage would turn out to be a fatal one.
Harding, then 57 years old, had been in poor health for some time. PBS reports that he suffered from a condition doctors then understood as neurasthenia, which manifested itself with chronic fatigue, headaches, and other symptoms. Harding had also been warned that his vigorous love affairs were bad for his heart, and the president had shown signs of congestive heart disease for several years. Furthermore, he had started feeling ill during the cross-country journey, though the president blamed his symptoms, including shortness of breath, on stress and food poisoning.
Then, on the night of Aug. 2, 1923, in the presidential suite at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, Warren G. Harding slumped over and died as his wife was reading him the newspaper.
Public DomainFlorence Harding’s official White House portrait. Though her husband’s death in 1923 was likely the result of a heart attack, rumors spread in the aftermath that Florence had poisoned him.
The president’s death was originally chalked up to “a stroke of cerebral apoplexy,” though Harding had likely been killed by a heart attack. That said, rumors soon spread that the president’s wife had poisoned him. Some believed that Florence Harding wished to save her husband from the looming Teapot Dome scandal, while others suspected that she wanted revenge because of her husband’s multiple extramarital affairs.
While there is no proof of this, Florence Harding did refuse to let doctors perform an autopsy. Instead, she had Warren G. Harding swiftly laid to rest.
