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No forensic evidence has ever been found to suggest that Warren G. Harding had been poisoned by any person, let alone his wife. The suggestion that she had a motivation to kill the president because of Florence Harding’s jealousy over an affair with Nan Britton makes little sense in light of the nearly unanimous consensus of modern historians that Harding had been a womanizer for many years prior to his election to the Presidency, and his wife had had knowledge of at least some of those affairs. The suggestion that she would murder the President to somehow deflect scandals that would be met by apathy is similarly unlikely. Yet despite the source of these charges, their utter lack of factual support, and the unlikeliness of the alleged motives of the First Lady, Frederick Lewis Allen would repeat these charges in his very successful book “Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s” in 1931. Coming as it did in the deepest part of the [[Great Depression]], Allen’s book, which depicted all of the Republican presidents of the 1920s as bumbling incompetents, was eagerly accepted by a public looking for someone to blame. Allen’s history remains in print, and continues to provide misinformation quoted in poorly researched histories, articles and encyclopedias down to the present day.

No forensic evidence has ever been found to suggest that Warren G. Harding had been poisoned by any person, let alone his wife. The suggestion that she had a motivation to kill the president because of Florence Harding’s jealousy over an affair with Nan Britton makes little sense in light of the nearly unanimous consensus of modern historians that Harding had been a womanizer for many years prior to his election to the Presidency, and his wife had had knowledge of at least some of those affairs. The suggestion that she would murder the President to somehow deflect scandals that would be met by public apathy is similarly unlikely. Yet despite the source of these charges, their utter lack of factual support, and the unlikeliness of the alleged motives of the First Lady, Frederick Lewis Allen would repeat these charges in his very successful book “Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s” in 1931. Coming as it did in the deepest part of the [[Great Depression]], Allen’s book, which depicted all of the Republican presidents of the 1920s as bumbling incompetents, was eagerly accepted by a public looking for someone to blame. Allen’s history remains in print, and continues to provide misinformation quoted in poorly researched histories, articles and encyclopedias down to the present day.

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