Warren G. Harding was Nan Britton’s baby daddy

Age old rumors about former President Warren G. Harding’s infidelity and a possible love child have been put to rest thanks to DNA testing. Peter Harding tested his DNA against that of James Blaesing, Britton’s grandson, and found that they were second cousins.

On Christmas Eve 1910, future US President Warren Harding wrote his mistress Carrie Phillips a letter that began: “There are no words, at my command, sufficient to say the full extent of my love for you … mad, tender, devoted, ardent, eager, passion-wild”.

Ancestry.com then became involved to conduct DNA testing, enlisting relatives of Harding and Britton for the tests.

Harding reportedly supported his daughter financially but did not acknowledge the child as his publicly.

“The family connection is definitive”, said Stephen Baloglu, an executive at the company. She included salacious details of the affair, claiming that they conceived her daughter in Harding’s Senate office and kept the affair alive after he won the presidency in 1920.

And I don’t know where Warren G. Harding is but I do know he had a lot of fun on earth, and not just with Nan Britton.

Harding was married to his wife, Florence, from 1891 until he died. “I hope they’ll find their new place in history is meaningful and productive for them”. The family believed that President Harding, who had mumps as a child, was sterilized by the illness and could not have children. In her account, Britton detailed a steamy six-year-long affair with the 29th president, including one encounter in a White House closet, before his untimely death in 1923.

If the tests are valid, he added, he welcomed the new family members. She was 31 years younger than him.

The revelation has also roiled two families that have circled each other warily for 90 years, struggling with issues of rumour, truth and fidelity. “It sounds like a middle-school kid having his first crush”, Harding said of the president’s distinctive style. Now it’s rewriting another chapter in presidential history, this one from the Roaring ’20s. Even now, members of the president’s family remain divided over the matter, with some still skeptical after a lifetime of denial and unhappy about cousins who chose to pursue the question.

Unfortunately, Nan Britton died in 1991 so she never got a chance to do the suck-it-haters thing on Twitter.

As for Britton, The New York Times’ Peter Baker writes that she “was consumed with Harding, who… was seen by women of the time as attractive”.

Blaesing, now confirmed as Harding’s grandson, did not immediately respond to calls for comment, but said on Thursday that the tests vindicated his grandmother.

“I wanted to prove who she was and prove everyone wrong”, he said.