AUDASE

DNA Is Said to Solve a Mystery of Warren Harding’s Love Life

By PETER BAKERAUG.

Nan Britton with her daughter, Elizabeth, in 1930. The revelation that Warren G. Harding had a child with Ms. Britton, according to genetic testing, has roiled the two families. 

WASHINGTON — She was denounced as a “degenerate” and a “pervert,” accused of lying for money and shamed for waging a “diabolical” campaign of falsehoods against the president’s family that tore away at his legacy.

Long before Lucy Mercer, Kay Summersby or Monica Lewinsky, there was Nan Britton, who scandalized a nation with stories of carnal adventures in a White House coat closet and endured a ferocious backlash for publicly claiming that she bore the love child of President Warren G. Harding.

Now nearly a century later, according to genealogists, new genetic tests confirm for the first time that Ms. Britton’s daughter, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was indeed Harding’s biological child. The tests have solved one of the enduring mysteries of presidential history and offer new insights into the secret life of America’s 29th president. At the least, they demonstrate how the march of technology is increasingly rewriting the nation’s history books.

The revelation has also roiled two families that have circled each other warily for 90 years, struggling with issues of rumor, truth and fidelity. Even now, members of the president’s family remain divided over the matter, with some still skeptical after a lifetime of denial and unhappy about cousins who chose to pursue the question. Some descendants of Ms. Britton remain resentful that it has taken this long for evidence to come out and for her credibility to be validated.

“It’s sort of Shakespearean and operatic,” said Dr. Peter Harding, a grandnephew of the president and one of those who instigated the DNA testing that confirmed the relationship to Ms. Britton’s offspring. “This story hangs over the whole presidential history because it was an unsolved mystery.”

The Nan Britton affair was the sensation of its age, a product of the jazz-playing, gin-soaked Roaring Twenties and a pivotal moment in the evolution of the modern White House. It was not the first time a president was accused of an extracurricular love life, but never before had a self-proclaimed presidential mistress gone public with a popular tell-all book. The ensuing furor played out in newspapers, courtrooms and living rooms across the country.

While some historians dismissed Ms. Britton’s account, it remained part of popular lore. Pundits raised it as an analog after revelations of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Ms. Lewinsky. HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” made it a subplot a few years ago. The Library of Congress effectively recalled it last year when it released Harding’s love letters with another mistress, Carrie Phillips.

Ms. Britton, who was 31 years younger than Harding, had a harder time proving her relationship when she revealed it after his death because she had destroyed her own letters with him at his request and because his family insisted he was sterile.

As a boy growing up, Peter Harding said he believed the family line. “My father said this couldn’t have happened because President Harding had mumps as a kid and was infertile and the family really vilified Nan Britton,” said Dr. Harding, now 72 and a physician in Big Sur, Calif.

After finding Ms. Britton’s book, “The President’s Daughter,” among his father’s belongings, though, he concluded that the man described in it resembled the writer of the letters to Ms. Phillips, an expressive romantic who doted on women.

Dr. Harding and his cousin, Abigail Harding, decided to pursue the matter and made contact with James Blaesing, a grandson of Ms. Britton and son of the daughter she claimed to have conceived with the president. Testing by AncestryDNA, a division of Ancestry.com, the genealogical website, found that Mr. Blaesing was a second cousin to Peter and Abigail Harding, meaning that Elizabeth Ann Blaesing had to be President Harding’s daughter.

“We’re looking at the genetic scene to see if Warren Harding and Nan Britton had a baby together and all these signs are pointing to yes,” said Stephen Baloglu, an executive at Ancestry. “The technology that we’re using is at a level of specificity that there’s no need to do more DNA testing. This is the definitive answer.”

The testing also found that President Harding had no ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, answering another question that has intrigued historians. When Harding ran for president in 1920, segregationist opponents claimed he had “black blood.”

Abigail Harding, 72, a retired high school biology teacher in Worthington, Ohio, said the Nan Britton question is resolved. “I have no doubts left,” she said. “When he’s related to me, he’s related to Peter, he’s related to a third cousin — there’s too many nails in the coffin, so to speak. I’m completely convinced.”

Still, other relatives withheld judgment. “I’m not questioning the accuracy of anybody’s tests or anything,” said Dr. Richard Harding, 69, another grandnephew and a child psychiatrist in Columbia, S.C. “But it’s still in my mind still to be proven.” If the tests are valid, he added, he welcomed the new family members. “I hope they’ll find their new place in history is meaningful and productive for them.”

James Robenalt, who wrote a book on Harding’s affair with Carrie Phillips that was skeptical of Ms. Britton’s claims, said he accepts the new evidence. “I’m very pleased that that’s the result just because that family deserves to be recognized,” he said.

Warren Gamaliel Harding was a newspaper publisher in Marion, Ohio, who won a Senate seat in 1914 and captured the presidency in 1920 promising to restore “normalcy” after World War I. He is often ranked low among American presidents because of the Teapot Dome corruption scandal that ensnared top advisers. But advocates argue he is underrated, noting that he advocated equal rights for African-Americans, created the Bureau of the Budget and led international disarmament efforts.

Nan Britton grew up in Marion, where her father knew Harding and Harding’s sister was her schoolteacher. She was consumed with Harding, who was married but had no children and was seen by women of the time as attractive. Ms. Britton hung pictures of Harding on her bedroom wall and sought his help finding a job. Harding agreed to meet her in New York. In July 1917, at age 20, she “became Mr. Harding’s bride,” as she put it, during a New York hotel room assignation.

For six and a half years they maintained their affair, meeting wherever possible, including in Harding’s Senate office, where Ms. Britton wrote that they conceived Elizabeth Ann, born in October 1919. Harding never met his daughter but provided financial support, He and Ms. Britton continued their relationship after he became president, repairing to “a small closet in the anteroom” in the West Wing where, she wrote, they “made love.”

Ms. Britton was devastated when he died in office in 1923 at the age of 57 and more so when she discovered there was no provision to support their daughter. In need of money and shut out by Harding’s family, she wrote “The President’s Daughter” in 1927, inciting a fierce backlash from his supporters.

James Blaesing, her grandson, said Ms. Britton’s relationship with Harding was a love story and her family always believed her. “She loved him until the day she died,” he said. “When she talked about him, she would get the biggest smile on her face. She just loved this guy. He was everything.”

Mr. Blaesing said the family lived with scorn for decades. They were followed, their house was broken into and items were stolen to try to prove the relationship was a lie. “I went through this growing up in school,” said Mr. Blaesing, 65, now a construction contractor in Portland, Ore. “They belittled him and her.”

The tests, he said, finally vindicate his grandmother. “I wanted to prove who she was and prove everyone wrong,” he said.