“That’s good; go on, read some more.” As she picked up the magazine again, he threw up his hand, perhaps to ward off the swift blow of the Grim Reaper he felt coming, and, with a sigh, he was gone—the valiant spirit had flown—the splendid, vigorous body lay limp—but an empty shell.
While Mrs. Harding rushed for help, she knew all too well that it was too late—her husband was dead.
A shocked and grief-stricken group of relatives, Cabinet members, officials, and friends quickly assembled and were rallied to the necessities of the hour by the heart-broken wife, who had never failed Warren Harding in life and would not let herself fail him in death. Upheld by the marvellous will power that had characterized her life, though prostrated by her sorrow, she reassured her pitying friends: “I will not fail—I will not break down.” No one can imagine how she went through the formalities and services in the hotel, calm and controlled; how she endured the long, weary, sorrowful journey to Washington in the car beside the bier of her husband, the return to the White House—there to stand by the casket in the East Room and then calmly and quietly to go through the solemn scenes at the Capitol, with the oversight in the evening that compelled her to ask the hospitality of a friend’s car to take her to the train—the journey to Marion, the scene of her childhood, her romance, her happy wifehood, business life, political triumphs, past the little home where she had been married, to the home of her aged father-in-law. Then she greeted the officials who had journeyed many hours and miles to pay final honours to Marion’s great man, and, still controlled and composed, she participated in the last rites that returned her husband to the dust whence he came.
Even greater courage was required to turn her face to Washington, once more to endure the fatigue of another journey, and to remove their belongings from the White House and make room for their successors. After ten days of heartbreaking residence in the great mansion, where she lived alone, she slipped out of the city in a dismal downpour at dusk with the saddest part of life yet before her. In all this time, never once did she utter a plea for herself. With super-courage she filled her rôle as she felt her husband would expect her to fill it. But the effort was too great.
Mrs. Harding lived but a year and a half after her husband’s death. She died November 21, 1924.
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Warren Gamaliel Harding was born on a farm just outside the little town of Blooming Grove, Morrow County, Ohio, on November 2, 1865. He was the first child of eight, born to a country doctor, George Tryon Harding, and Phœbe Dickerson Harding. To his parents he was, of course, a prodigy; and his mother, deeply religious, supplied his middle name, Gamaliel—which in Hebrew means “God is a reward”—from the Bible, and in her heart settled upon his future in the ministry, in the Baptist faith.
Typically and wholly Colonial, the ancestors of President Harding were Puritans and Pilgrims who came to wrest freedom and livelihood from an unbroken wilderness and played their part through the generations as pioneers, soldiers, and patriots. Dr. George T. Harding, his father, was a Civil War Veteran.
Warren G. Harding’s boyhood was spent upon a forest-bordered farm, and, like most country boys, his time was filled with a routine of work and chores that never failed and seldom varied. He chopped down trees, split rails and firewood, dug post holes, built fences, planted and hoed corn and other crops, and tended stock and painted barns and farmhouses. One season, it is said, he left a crimson trail all through Morrow County in the barns he tinted a vermilion hue. This barn painting was done with extra zeal, as the money was to take him to college. In the strenuous days of his farming, chores, and general utility work, in the school of poverty that has turned out so many of our great men, who in such environment learned the industry and the mastery of detail along with the dignity of labour, that made them grasp opportunity with both hands and braced feet, Warren G. Harding laid the foundation for all later successes.
A little knowledge of the printer’s trade, learned during his college career as editor of the college paper, fired the boy with a desire for more, and soon he handled odd jobs at the town printing office, later becoming a practical pressman and a “make-up” man.