The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage during the Great War

PROLOGUE

’Twas a Search in Vain

On Sunday, May 27, 1917, a train pulled into Penn Station in New York City at nine o’clock at night. Among those on board was Warren G. Harding, a U.S. senator from Ohio. He was recognized by some, but most people drifted past him. He traveled alone, not an uncommon thing even for a man of his status.

Senator Harding was a distinguished-looking man, with finely combed white hair, offset by thick dark eyebrows and a kind face. As usual, he was nicely turned out, his tailored suits hiding an acceptable midlife paunch. He looks like a president was something often said of him, but in person he was even more striking and magnetic than the usual high-ranking statesman. Although moving pictures were in their infancy at the time, it could be said that he had an early movie star quality about him: something deep, ineffable, and melancholy.

In photos, he looked too serious, and he knew it, for that was not who he really was. So my portrait looks, as you stated, solemn and forbidding? he once wrote to his neighbor, Carrie Phillips, of a photograph she kept on her wall when she was living abroad in Berlin. Well, all my pictures have that sad and solemn look, he confessed. "Can’t be otherwise, I guess, so long as I look that way. That sober, distressed look is inherited, so I can’t help it," he wrote underlining the words for emphasis.

I get it from my mother, who was careful and contented, and it comes from her father, he wrote of his stern appearance. "I never saw him, but have seen his pictures, and that same solemn look that clouds your room is in his face. Some day I’ll pose for a laughing picture, and send you a copy," he added.

I do laugh sometimes.

He missed Carrie terribly, back when she was an ocean away, and dreamed of what it would be like to trade places with his portrait in that Berlin pension. I know I should smile if I could take the picture’s place, he wrote. You could put a different light in my eyes.¹

In person, he had an intimate manner, an easy smile, a honeyed, baritone voice. He liked people. Women found him unusually attractive. After he died, his secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, bestowed upon him the greatest compliment one American can pay to another. He belonged to the aristocracy of the plain people of this country, Hughes said.²

In May 1917, Carrie Phillips was back in the United States, and Warren Harding was looking for her in the New York train station. He took a rushed glance around and then he hurried over to Grand Central, where he checked his luggage. From there he made haste to the Biltmore Hotel. I searched the lobby and parlors, then enquired at the desk, he later wrote to Carrie.³ Failing in that I went to the Manhattan [Hotel] expecting to find you or a note or telegram, he wrote, and was again disappointed.

He returned to Penn Station to look again. No luck.

‘Twas a search in vain. So back to the Biltmore and Manhattan till 11:30, then a twenty minute vigil at the Grand Central and finally to bed in my midnight train for Boston, tired and disappointed.

He had known Carrie Fulton Phillips for a long time. She was from his hometown in Ohio, married to one of his best friends. She was beautiful, ample and fleshy, strong-willed, and the mother of one child, a daughter named Isabelle. Harding was childless, stuck in a complicated and sexually arid marriage to a woman five years his senior. The Harding marriage had become a business relationship, lacking the deep affection Warren needed. By 1917, Carrie and Warren had been in an intimate and stormy love affair for twelve years. Theirs was no short-term tryst.

The world was at war, an appalling conflagration, and the United States had just joined in, officially taking sides after nearly three years of neutrality while vicious warfare among the combatants had led to a virtual stalemate and had brought the civilized world to its knees. Harding was quietly leading the opposition to Woodrow Wilson and his expansive goals in calling the country to a war. Harding was worried more about protecting America—he was not particularly concerned about Wilson’s crusade to save the world, and he was apprehensive that the strains of the war within the country were dividing the loyalties of its citizens, one against the other. The war in Europe had taken the country to the brink of another civil war, Harding thought. But this time, the division was along ethnic and national heritage lines.

Fear, paranoia, and outrage spilled over into every town, small or large. Those who considered themselves patriots began to spy on their neighbors. German Americans and recent German immigrants were vilified. Vigilante groups sprang up. Mail was searched, comings and goings watched. Quiet arrests were made. Labor leaders were rounded up. Free speech, especially any criticism of the war or its conduct, could become the reason for a ten-year jail sentence.

Harding was morose. He was not only vexed about the stability of his country, but he thought his relationship with Carrie was finally at its end. I can’t quite explain, he wrote to her. I guess my spirit is broken, or my nerves gone, or both. I am in a half hopeless state. The light has gone out, and I am wearied. One thought insists—I loved you all that I ever said or acted—which was not a little—and I do know, and in that love and the full consciousness of having lost yours, I mean to do all in my poor way to make amends, to pay in contrition and in such poor service and tribute as I may render.⁴

Three years after his unsuccessful search in New York City for the woman he loved, Warren Harding was president of the United States. And three years after that, he was dead. He was fifty-eight years old.

One thing is sure: It is hard to defend yourself once you are dead.

When he died unexpectedly in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel in August 1923, Warren G. Harding was one of the most beloved men in the country. He was kind, decent, handsome, a man of eminent reason. He also had a rare political attribute: courage. In his first address to Congress he asked for the passage of an antilynching law.⁵ Six months after taking office, he was the first sitting president to travel into the deep South to make a bold civil rights speech. Democracy was a lie if blacks were denied political equality, he told an enormous crowd separated by color and a chain-link fence in Birmingham, Alabama.⁶ A few months later, on his first Christmas in the White House, he pardoned Socialist leader Eugene Debs, who was rotting away in an Atlanta prison. Debs’s crime? He spoke out against the draft and the war after America entered the conflict. I have heard so damn much about you, Mr. Debs, Harding said when Debs arrived in the Oval Office to personally receive his pardon without conditions attached.⁷

Warren Harding brought the world together in the first arms limitation treaty. He also signed the peace treaty that ended the war with Germany. He established the first Office of the Budget. He supported the concept of a world court, and he opened the White House to the people after years of closure by the reclusive President Wilson, who tried to hide the ravages of a massive stroke. Harding was a breath of fresh air to a war-weary nation, a pillar of steadiness in a world staggering from economic and political instability. While Germany would sink into economic and political chaos, giving rise to the Nazi movement, the United States survived World War I with a secure government.

As a senator, Harding challenged Woodrow Wilson’s policy to go to war to make the world safe for democracy. Wilson wanted Germany to be a democracy, by force if necessary. Harding thought it was none of our business what type of government any nation on this earth may choose to have.⁸ He privately wrote to former president Theodore Roosevelt just after war was declared: It has seemed to me that one of the great essentials in this serious time is to commit our foreign born citizenship to the American cause, and I have not thought it helpful to magnify the American purpose to force democracy upon the world. I do think it mightily essential that we establish the fact that democracy can well defend itself.⁹

Despite his limited time in office, Harding’s record is remarkable in so many respects, now long forgotten. Teapot Dome, the scandal involving the sale of federal lands rich in oil reserves by Harding administration officials, erupted after his death, and it has never been shown that he knew anything about it. John Kennedy (the only other senator until President Obama to ascend directly from the Senate to the White House) was president for almost the same length of time as Warren Harding, but his record was decidedly mixed: Disasters such as the Bay of Pigs and involvement in Vietnam weigh against successes such as the handling of the Cuban missile crisis and the nuclear test ban treaty. Yet history could not have treated these two men more differently. Kennedy became an icon; Harding was deemed a failure.

What happened?

Ironically, letters showing his adultery, and the story surrounding their discovery, may be Warren Harding’s salvation.

In October 1963, a month before Kennedy’s assassination, a box filled with letters was placed on a kitchen table in a lawyer’s home in Marion, Ohio, for inspection by Francis Russell, a respected author.¹⁰ Russell was astounded by what he saw: almost nine hundred pages of handwriting—long, sprawling missives of love, some forty pages in length, some on United States Senate Chamber stationery. They were in disorder. A few of them were attached to envelopes with postmarks; most had no date identification other than Easter morning or January 8.

Russell had credentials. He was Harvard educated, a contributing editor to the American Heritage magazine, and author of dozens of books that had received critical acclaim. But the Harding letters could not have fallen into more dangerous hands. Privately, Russell loathed Warren Harding. He believed the long-standing but mostly unspoken rumor that Harding came from mixed blood. His book, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, the title itself referencing the race rumor, would become a bestseller and deeply influence, and in many ways help form and solidify, the modern perception of Harding as a failure.

Russell was not interested in mining the full content of the letters Warren Harding wrote to Carrie Phillips. Russell, it appeared, sought scandal. He focused on titillating passages, skipping over the more profound parts and the real story of a forbidden but passionate love. Compared to what is available today in any drugstore bookrack, Russell would later tell the press, Harding’s eroticism is naive and even pathetic as the quality of his mind peeps through the boudoir phrases.¹¹ Russell’s obsession with sex and race caused him to miss the most important story in the letters. Warren Harding’s love for Carrie Phillips was set against one of the greatest man-made disasters of all time: the Great War. At the time Harding and Phillips began their love affair in 1905, neither of them could have imagined how this world calamity would intersect with their lives: he a U.S. senator with the power to vote on war, and she an uncompromising pro-German advocate.

Would he follow his conscience and vote for war? Did Carrie Phillips become a German spy? And who really was this man from Marion, Ohio, born in a crude farmhouse at the conclusion of the Civil War, who would become the twenty-ninth president of the United States? The masthead to the newspaper he founded and edited for most of his adult life, the Marion Star, carried this admonition: Remember there are two sides to every question. Get them both. Be truthful. Get the facts. Be decent, be fair, be generous.¹²

The story that begins to unravel these mysteries begins in a hotel in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the height of World War I.

CHAPTER 1

Espionage in Chattanooga

The Baroness

The plainclothes night watchman for the hotel, Thomas Stiff, knocked on the door.

He heard shuffling inside, and then it grew quiet. The door slowly opened and a woman in her middle years with thick auburn hair, swept back, gave him an imperious stare. Her eyes were piercing, and her manner suggested irritation. She was full figured and only partly dressed. Stiff considered her disrobed.¹ He knew from hotel records that she claimed the title baroness.

Stiff was accompanied by Officer D. G. Grant of the Chattanooga police department. Stiff called Grant to join his investigation when he found that an army lieutenant was not in the room in which he was registered for a second night in a row. Suspicious, Stiff and Grant stood outside the baroness’s room, looking past her to try to see what was going on inside. The time was just after one in the morning, on December 13, 1917. Stiff had seen the lieutenant leaving the baroness’s room the night before. At least I thought it was him, Stiff would later testify. When he checked the lieutenant’s room between nine and ten o’clock that evening, the lieutenant was there, but when he returned after midnight, he could not raise the man. He entered his room and discovered his army overcoat, but there was no sign of the lieutenant.²

Although they lacked a warrant, Stiff and Grant brushed past the baroness and spotted the lieutenant under the bed, wearing his one-piece underwear. Slowly he emerged. He was young looking and could have been the baroness’s son. Either the baroness or the lieutenant said they wanted to keep this thing quiet. Stiff asked the lieutenant who he was and what he was doing in the baroness’s room. This is my brother, she interrupted, shushing the young man.

Funny your brother is in your room at this time of night, Stiff said with a sneer. Grant sniggered. Then Stiff grew serious. You should consider yourself under arrest.

The lieutenant confessed he was not her brother. He did expect to marry the baroness, though, as soon as she received her divorce from her third husband. Stiff looked at them: The lieutenant was clearly half her age, and although she appeared in her early forties, she exuded a powerful sexual attractiveness. The lieutenant, however, looked like a boy off a Kansas farm. The young man asked Stiff if there was anything he could do to avoid going down to police headquarters. The night watchman said there was nothing he could do and told them to get dressed. The next morning, the baroness and the lieutenant were arraigned on charges of vagrancy.

She should have left town, but a local lawyer encouraged her to stay to try to control any newspaper story that might appear and to help the lieutenant fight any repercussions at the army base where he was stationed.³ In hindsight, it was some of the worst legal advice given in the history of Chattanooga because another arrest awaited the baroness. This time the charge would be espionage.

CHAPTER 2

The American Protective League and Love Tricks of Women Spies

The arrest of Baroness Iona Zollner on charges that she was aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war by extracting classified military information from an unsuspecting army lieutenant made national headlines. Baroness Iona Zollner of New York, wife of a German army officer serving on the Flanders front, was held without bail for the Federal Grand Jury here today on the charge of violating the espionage act, the New York Times reported on December 25, 1917.¹

A month and a half later, the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran an article in its Sunday magazine entitled Love Tricks of a Woman Spy.² A fetching photo of the baroness appeared above the caption Baroness Iona Zollner, arrested in the presence of an Army officer, and interned after the discovery of a secret code book and letters. She was described physically as a beautiful brunette, at the most dangerous age in life—the ripe, full-blown era of 35, when women no longer wonder at the mysteries of life, and only long to defer the inevitable day when they will become memories. Her story was used as an example of how women spies had become an alarming force in a war where American loyalties were sharply divided. German Americans in particular were torn between love of their native homeland and loyalty to their adopted country. In every great hotel in America, where the wealth, the fashion and the soldier blood of the particular locality come for display and for recreation, the great secret force of Wilhelmstrasse has its woman on guard.

In war, the article warned, the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

The baroness had been arrested near a sprawling army mobilization camp named Fort Oglethorpe just outside Chattanooga. She was not a German by birth but the daughter of a German American, described in the paper as Wilhelm Pickhardt, a New York millionaire. The paper reported that the baroness, a woman of multiple marriages, by the travesty of fate had a son by her first husband who was a cadet at the United States Naval Academy.

Wilhelm Pickhardt? That name sounded familiar to the postmaster in Marion, Ohio, a man named Frank Campbell, and he began to put things together.³ Pickhardt was an unusual name and Campbell had been intercepting and tracking mail between a Navy lieutenant named Adolf Pickhardt and a young woman in Marion named Isabelle Phillips, the daughter of Carrie and Jim Phillips, prominent Marion residents. We have in our files tracings of his hand-writing secured from envelopes of the numerous letters received from him by Miss Phillips, Campbell wrote.⁴ Perhaps this Lieutenant Pickhardt was related to the baroness: a brother, a son, or a cousin?

It all seemed to fit. The Phillipses were known to be thoroughly pro-German. Carrie and Isabelle had spent a number of years living in Berlin just before the outbreak of hostilities. And Frank Campbell knew that Carrie Phillips had a secret connection to Marion’s most prominent citizen, Senator Warren G. Harding. Campbell’s antennae were up.

Campbell reported his suspicions of the connection between the baroness and the Phillipses to federal authorities and to a man named Asa Queen, the local chief of the American Protective League (APL) in Marion. The APL was a vigilante group of men who were leading citizens in their cities and towns across the United States, organized to support the Department of Justice and its understaffed Bureau of Investigation (later known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation) when the nation was drawn into the war in the spring of 1917.⁵ At the end of 1914, the Bureau of Investigation had only 122 agents and the Secret Service had just 50. The APL was a volunteer police force that sprang up literally overnight just after war was declared, made up of patriotic citizens, mostly entrenched businessmen who did not serve in the military. They were the best men of the city, Emerson Hough, the official biographer and apologist of the APL, wrote in 1919 at war’s end. They worked for principle, not for any excitement, nor in any vanity, not for any pay. . . .They were all good men, big men, brave and able, else they would have failed, and else this organization never could have grown.⁶ They carried badges. The official letterhead of the APL stated: Organized with the Approval and Operating under the Direction of the United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Investigation. The APL started with one purpose: to ferret out German spies and saboteurs and those who would commit treason. League members liked to refer to their organization as a web spun to entrap German spies, one historian has written.⁷

At its peak, the APL had over 250,000 members in 600 cities. The fact that Marion, Ohio, a town of 12,000, had a branch of the APL, and a chief of that branch, attests to its pervasiveness. APL agents were officially prohibited by the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Investigation from exercising police power, but they routinely stopped, questioned, and frequently arrested fellow citizens suspected of disloyalty. They broke into homes, offices, and hotels; intercepted mail; and listened in on telephone calls. As with any such loosely defined group, their mission was murky and at times the goals shifted. They began to harass labor organizations, such as the International Workers of the World (the Wobblies). Leaguers illegally detained slackers (draft dodgers), assisting in the arrest of an estimated 50,000 men from the streets of New York City and nearby communities over a couple of days in September