Out on the street great flags floated in the cool breeze and telephone posts and store windows were draped effectively in the American colors. The throngs of people stood about expectantly. I wondered if my father had attended the meeting and whether I had been missed at home ... then down the street in an open carriage with seats facing each other rode the Republican candidate, his wife and a couple of intimate friends. The entire carriage was a mass of red, white and blue; even the horses seemed to sense the importance and enthusiasm of the occasion, and lifted high their beflagged heads as they stepped mincingly along through the cheering lines of people.

Still smiling and bowing and occasionally raising a hand to wave to the people, the editor stood throughout the entire procession, head bared, acknowledging this tribute of the home folks who loved him....

Loved him? Yes. But who of men can essay an explanation of that instinct of the American voter who can hypocritically hail a candidate one day and the following day betray him at the polls?

As I look back upon that election, a state-wide land-slide for the Democrats, putting Judson Harmon in the Governor’s chair, I do not feel as I felt then, saddened beyond words, for events have been witness to the fact that nothing can prevent those who are predestined from “coming into their own.”

(These two episodes, the one of the meeting with Mr. Harding when I carried the pail of milk, and the political mass meeting, I have quoted in substance from an autobiography which I wrote in 1921 at Columbia as one of our class assignments. I took this manuscript down to the White House at that time and Mr. Harding read it, expressing in a letter to me his interest and praising me for having received an “A” on it at Columbia, however cautioning me as usual very lovingly against treading compositionally upon what he thought seemed to be “dangerous ground.” The whimsical expression in his face when we used to discuss his earlier political activities often led me to feel that he had felt far from the hero I had pictured him, and perhaps more like the disillusioned candidate his friends reported him to be after that election, driven by ambitious admirers into a field he would fain have avoided.)

8

In June of 1913, when I was a Junior in high school, my father passed on. We had very little money, but my mother managed to keep us together for a year and a half or so. She went back to teaching and was given a position in the Marion Public Schools. My baby brother John was about eighteen months old. My older sister Elizabeth was the pianist in a local theatre, a moving picture house. However, we girls continued to chum with the “best people” up to the time we left Marion, which was in 1915.

My mother had often thought she would like to do Chautauqua work, and it was in this connection that after father’s passing she took occasion to consult Mr. Harding. He had had some experience in this line for I remember my mother took me one Sunday afternoon to hear him, and afterward allowed me to go up and shake hands with him and tell him how much I enjoyed his speech, for which hesitating utterance I received one of his loveliest smiles and a courtly “Thank you kindly, thank you kindly!”

It was upon the occasion of my mother’s visit to Mr. Harding’s office that Mr. Harding, inquiring how “Nan” was, and being assured of my continued admiration of him and any cause he sponsored, said ruminatively, “Mrs. Britton, maybe I can do something sometime for Nan.” I walked for days in the clouds after mother had repeated this to me.

Before we broke up our housekeeping and left Marion, the people had elected Warren G. Harding United States Senator from Ohio. Even in the face of my own difficulties—being thrown upon the world with absolutely no equipment except a high school education and possibly some innate common sense—I felt an ecstatic elation over this victory for my beloved hero, and when Miss Abigail Harding “dared” me to go out to his house and congratulate him, it took less urging than courage to do so. Mrs. Harding came to the door in a pink linen dress. I braved her all right and asked if I might be permitted to speak to her husband. It was late afternoon and he was playing cards with his regular “bunch.” He came out, and I shall never forget his smile—I do not think now it would be too much to say it was a smile of genuine appreciation, for so he assured me in later years—and I thrilled unspeakably under the touch of his hand. Mrs. Harding stood pat; it even seemed to me she curtailed any lengthy remarks Mr. Harding might have been tempted to make just to please me by drawing his attention to the gentlemen in the other room who were waiting for him. But she could have nothing to do with the pressure of a hand-shake which was Mr. Harding’s seal of sincere cordiality to me.