It seemed to me always that Mr. Harding was more than human. In my Harding book I have the following clipping from a March 4, 1921, paper, the day of his inauguration:
“The sun struck the inaugural stand in such a manner as to make his head appear in a halo. It was so marked that there was comment on it from the crowd.”
He was, to me, almost divine. I remember once, in 1920, the first time he came out to see me at my sister Elizabeth’s (6103 Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago) in June of that year, that we were “talking things over,” I on his lap. My elbow accidentally struck his ribs. “Ouch, dearie!” he exclaimed. I apologized and asked if I had hurt him. “No, you just poked me in the ribs!” he laughed. “Ribs!” I echoed, “Have you those things?” I shall never forget his low laugh as he hugged me.
It seemed to me I had never heard Warren Harding speak so feelingly as on that afternoon when he addressed his home town people and the great throng of visitors who had come from miles over the country to hear him. I well remember how he ended his speech, with a quotation from a piece my mother often used to recite. It was the concluding verse of Will Carleton’s poem, “The First Settler’s Story,” and goes:
“Boys flying kites haul in their white-winged birds,
But you can’t do that way when you’re flying words.
Thoughts unexpressed may sometimes fall back dead,
But God Himself can’t kill ’em, once they’re said!”
He must have been inspired by knowledge of all the gossip that had surrounded his campaign, and I wondered, standing there in the bright sun, bare-headed, again adoring my hero from afar, how there could live one who would open his lips unkindly about Warren Gamaliel Harding!
In front of me stood Lois Archbold, as I shall call her, a neighbor and former teacher of mine. She had been a life-long friend of our family and my sister Elizabeth and I had each experienced the school girl “crush” on her which we usually developed upon our teachers. She and her sister were probably as strong Democrats as lived in Marion, and I was surprised to see Lois there in view of all the severe things I had been told by Miss Harding had passed her lips during the recent campaign—things so unkind that even Daisy Harding, who had up to that time been a friend of Miss Archbold and her sister, and had accepted their politics good-naturedly, ceased to speak to both of them on the street. And even I had been tempted to follow suit when I was in Marion in November of 1920 and Daisy had repeated to me these things when I went to visit with her during her luncheon hour at the high school or at her home.