The other night I dined with one of the men about whom I spoke to you in March, and he tells me he has apparently lost $50,000, more or less, in Florida—but that he has well-grounded hopes of recovering it. It seems everybody just has to “hang on.” I certainly hope that the natural resources and realities of the State, and their natural development in spite of the temporary setback due to florid speculation, may enable you to realize satisfactorily on all the money you have put in down there.
With love to you ever, and hoping to hear from you as the impulse comes to write, I am,
Affectionately yours,
Nan”
Perhaps the letter I received from Daisy Harding on August 9th in answer to the foregoing might not have aroused in me the rebellious spirit I felt had it not epitomized the pitiful futility of attempting to argue for right for right’s sake when a false sense of right satisfies a people enslaved by a superficial conventionality. The social fundamentals were all wrong.
In this letter, Daisy Harding voiced unconsciously the probable negative decision of the whole Harding family toward my situation, as well as the attitude of our whole country toward unwedded mothers and their children.
“I do hope you can make, some day, a name for yourself,” she wrote. “Then you will have something to offer her for what you have denied her ... she must suffer, and suffer deeply and bitterly when she knows all....” I stared back at these sentences which seemed to stand out in the letter, taunting me with their cruel injustice. “... something to offer her for what you have denied her”! Why, all I had denied my child was the knowledge of her parentage, and the privilege that knowledge carried of openly bestowing upon my child the love only a mother is capable of bestowing. And this latter denial on my part would cease as soon as the Hardings recognized and assumed their just obligation toward their brother’s child. She wrote as though I might be a common woman, one whose life did not justify the role of motherhood, a woman who must redeem herself through fame before she could merit the God-given gift of her child!
My daughter “suffer” when she learned that she was the beloved child of a love-union between her mother and the 29th President of the United States! There does not live the person who could convince me of that, and I am willing to undertake the responsibility of rearing my child, even in her extreme youth, with the full knowledge of who she is, for it will not lessen by one jot the love which she bears to me—her mother.
“I am so glad you let E. A. go to her grandmother’s ... if she were my child I’d let stay there for the next two years. I believe he would say the same....” Keep her in the country, away from me, for two years! A cruel suggestion! That my sweetheart, who had been willing, yea, eager to do anything in his power to enable me to be with my baby and to have her with me, would concede that his sister’s suggestion was the right thing was in my eyes only a pitiful thought to prop an argument which had been born of a frightened mind, and was in truth a mere apology for failure on the part of all the Hardings to act fairly toward Elizabeth Ann.
Miss Harding said my child should have the “quiet, fresh air and childish freedom” the country affords. This was exactly my idea, as it would be the idea of any mother, but I wanted to be with her, and this the Hardings were unwilling to make possible to me. I had therefore been obliged to let her go away from me because I myself was unable to provide those things which I knew were for her good.
Miss Harding’s query in this letter as to how the money had been transferred to my sister Elizabeth was entirely superfluous in view of the fact that I had made it very plain to her and to her brother that all monies had been transferred through me, personally, from Mr. Harding to my sister and her husband. As a matter of fact, I had insisted upon this myself as my idea of added protection to Mr. Harding. I had even given his brother, Dr. Harding, the dates of certain cancelled vouchers, for which he asked during our interview. “Was the money sent through some bank in Ohio?” Miss Harding inquired in her letter. This was evidently why she had asked for Elizabeth’s address—to make the inquiry direct to her. Even then there was current gossip which touched some of the government officials in high places when Mr. Harding was President. Was her query instigated by those who themselves would not ask me direct, but sought to allay their fears through information I might give to Miss Harding? I had no way of knowing.