The Shadow Of Blooming Grove

Description for THE SHADOW OF BLOOMING GROVE: WARREN G HARDING IN HIS TIMES by Francis Russell:

Francis Russell's seven-hundred-page biography of the President who has come to be rated last in the hearts of his countrymen chronicles a fascinating era in American history and provides a remarkable portrait---both comic and oddly touching---of the affable, goodhearted mediocrity who was "everybody's second choice" at the deadlocked Republican convention of 1920.

As the author says in his Foreword: "Harding, with his tarnished reputation, has never claimed the serious attention of historians. In this he has been the most neglected of Presidents. His centennial passed without an adequate general biography of him ever having appeared. He deserves a biography, not so much for himself---though in many ways his life was more interesting than those of more notable Presidents---but because he came as a dividing point in history when men moved forward and looked back. The first President after World War I, he was also the first President to be born after the Civil War. His election was in one sense a nostalgic imperfect haze of memory, at a moment when twentieth-century America was inevitably, if belatedly, taking form."

The title of the book refers to Harding's birthplace and to one of the mysteries of his life. It was whispered in Blooming Grove---and the rumor was revived in a smear campaign by Harding's opponents in 1920---that Harding was part Negro. It is Francis Russell's contention this this"shadow" haunted Harding throughout his career and was a factor in his lifelong sense of insecurity. Russell deals, too, with the other mysteries and scandals of Harding's career: his love affairs with Carrie Phillips and Nan Britton, who bore him a daughter; the allegation (false, in Russell's view) that Harding was poisoned by his wife as the Teapot Dome scandal was about to break. A fascinating pierce of Americana, THE SHADOW OF BLOOMING GROVE contains the fullest and most absorbing account ever provided of the "dark convention: of 1920---the convention that contributed the phrase "smoke-filled rooms" to political folklore---and of the dismal Harding Centennial celebration in Marion, Ohio, in 1965.