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In June of 1923, Harding set out on a cross-country "Voyage of Understanding," planning to meet regular people and explain his policies. During this trip, he became the first President to visit Alaska. At the end of July, while traveling south from Alaska, Harding developed what was thought to be a severe case of food poisoning. Arriving at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, he developed pneumonia. Harding died early in the morning on August 2, 1923 at age 57. Naval physicians surmised that he had suffered a heart attack; however, this diagnosis was not made by Dr. Charles Sawyer, the Surgeon General, who was traveling with the presidential party. Mrs. Harding refused permission for an autopsy upon Sawyer's recommendation, which soon led to speculation that the President had been the victim of a plot. Sawyer's medical qualifications were also called into question. Harding was succeeded by his Vice President, Calvin Coolidge, who was sworn in by his father, a notary public, in Plymouth Notch , Vermont.
Following his death, Harding's body was returned to Washington, where it was placed in the Gold Room of the White House pending a state funeral at the United States Capitol. White House employees at the time were quoted as saying that the night before the funeral, that they heard Mrs. Harding speak for more than an hour into the face of her dead husband. The most-commonly reported (but never verified) remark attributed to Mrs. Harding at this time was, "They can't hurt you now, Warren."
Harding was entombed in the receiving vault of the Marion Cemetery, Marion, Ohio, in August 1923. Following Mrs. Harding's death in November 1924, she too was temporarily buried next to her husband. Both bodies were moved in December 1927 to the newly completed Harding Memorial in Marion, which was dedicated by President Herbert Hoover in 1931. The lapse between the final internment and the dedication was due in part to the aftermath of the Teapot Dome scandal.
In 1930, a former private investigator named Gaston Means wrote the exploitive book, The Strange Death of President Harding, in which he suggested that there were many with motives to murder the President, including his wife. Means claimed that it was possible that Mrs. Harding poisoned the President, a rumor that has clouded the facts of Harding's death and heart condition. Means—who had been imprisioned for his activities while an FBI agent— has never had his arguments and theories proven; they remain as speculative as they were sensational.
Many self-appointed experts on Harding's infidelities base their authority on innuendo, speculation, and stories that swirled around the President following his death. What is known, and has been documented by primary documents, is that during his lifetime, Harding had an affair with Mrs. Carrie Fulton Phillips ; he was also rumored to have had an affair with Miss Nan Britton, although information for this comes mostly from her book, written after his death.
Rumors of the Harding love letters circulated through Marion, Ohio for many years. However, their existence was not confirmed until author Francis Russell acquired access to them during his research for his book, The Shadow of Blooming Grove . The letters were in the possession of Harding's one true love, Carrie Fulton Phillips , who was of an advanced age. Phillips kept the letters in a box in a closet and was reluctant to share them. However she relented, and it deemed conclusive that Harding had a 15-year relationship with Mrs. Phillips, who was then the wife of his friend James Phillips, owner of the local department store the Uhler-Phillips Company. Mrs. Phillips was ten years younger than Harding. By 1915, she began trying to sway Harding to leave his wife. When he refused, she left her husband and moved to Berlin with her daughter Isabel. However, the United States was increasingly likely to be drawn into World War I, so Mrs. Phillips moved back to the U.S. and the affair reignited. Harding was now a Senator of Ohio, and a vote was coming up regarding a declaration of war against Germany.
Mrs. Phillips threatened to go public with their affair if the Senator voted for the declaration of war. Harding defied her and voted for the declaration of war, but Carrie did not reveal the scandal to the world. When Harding won the Republican presidential nomination in 1920, he did not disclose the relationship to party officials. Once they learned of the affair, it was too late to find another nominee. In order to reduce the likelihood of a scandal breaking, the Republican National Committee sent Carrie and her family on a trip to Japan and paid them over $50,000. Mrs. Phillips would also receive monthly payments thereafter, thus making her the first and only person known to have successfully extorted money from a major political party.
The letters written to Mrs. Phillips by Harding were confiscated at the request of the Harding heirs, who requested and received a court injunction prohibiting their inclusion in Francis Russell's book, The Shadow of Blooming Grove . Russell, in turn, left quoted passages from the letters as blank passages in protest of the Harding heirs' actions. The love letters between President Warren G. Harding and Carrie Fulton Phillips remain under an Ohio court protective order that expires in 2024, after which the content of the letters may be published and/or reviewed.
In addition to Mrs. Phillips, Harding also reportedly had an affair with Nan Britton, the daughter of Harding's late friend, a Dr. Britton of Marion. Nan's obsession with Harding began at an early age when she began pasting pictures of then-Senator Harding on her bedroom walls. According to Nan's kiss-and-tell book The President's Daughter, published after Harding's death, she and Sen. Harding conceived "their" daughter, Elizabeth Ann, in January 1919 in his Senate office. Harding never met Nan's daughter, but paid large amounts of child support. Harding and Britton, according to unsubstantiated reports, continued their affair while he was President, utilizing a closet adjacent to the Oval Office for privacy. Following Harding's death, Nan Britton sued the estate of Warren G. Harding unsuccessfully on behalf of Elizabeth Ann. Under cross-examination by the Harding heirs' attorney, Grant Mouser (a former member of Congress himself,) Britton's testimony was riddled with inconsistencies, and she lost her case. Britton married a Mr. Christian, who adopted Elizabeth Ann. Now Elizabeth Ann Blaesing , Nan Britton's daughter has been a resident of California for most of her life and was still living as of 2002.
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