Barack Obama might not be first black president.

Byline: Albert B. SOUTHWICK

COLUMN: ALBERT B. SOUTHWICK

Barack Obama is campaigning to be the first man with African blood.to become president of the United States. It is a noteworthy aspiration.

But even if he is successful, will he be the first to fit that description? Probably not.

Warren Gamaliel Harding (1865-1923), president of the United States from 1921 to 1923, is widely credited with having a Negro ancestor, probably a great-grandmother. Mr. Harding never used that item in his political campaigns. On the contrary, he did his best to rebut and ignore it. But the allegation clung to him throughout his political career, from his years as state representative and lieutenant governor of Ohio to the White House. The presidential campaign in 1920 between Mr. Harding and James Cox was marked by various rumors and speculations about Mr. Harding's ancestry..

A widely repeated joke from 1920 has two black men discussing the political situation:

Rastus: There's going to be an election this year. Do you know who's running for resident?

Sambo: Why, Mr. Harding, I understand.

Rastus: Yeah, I know that. But who is the white folks' candidate?

Rumors about Mr. Harding's background had been floating around for years in Marion, and Blooming Grove, Ohio, where he lived. When he proposed marriage to Florence Kling, her outraged father was bitterly opposed. He saw the Hardings as poor white trash with a Negro mixture. The rumor got national attention in 1920 when a circular written by a professor at Wooster College was distributed to the delegates to the Republican National Convention addressed to the "Men and Women of America" and charging that "Warren Gamaliel Harding is not a Creole, he is not a mulatto, he is a mestizo." In other words, of mixed blood, an accusation of some power in those days of lynching, laws against mixed marriages, Jim Crow segregation and primitive racial attitudes. Wooster College officials were outraged by the circular and tried to have the author fired.

The writer was William Estabrook Chancellor, a professor of economics and social science at Wooster College and formerly superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C. Mr. Chancellor was a fanatic believer in white racial superiority and held that Mr. Harding's nomination was part of a plot to establish Negro domination over the United States. Mr. Chancellor believed in strict segregation of the races, and he even favored denying the vote to blacks. Millions of copies of his circular were distributed across the land. More than 200,000 of them were seized by post office officials in San Francisco alone.

Warren Harding was chosen to be the Republican nominee for president by a group of GOP bigwigs meeting in that famous "smoke-filled room" after the leading candidates, Gen. Leonard Wood and Frank O. Lowden, had battled through ballot after ballot without reaching the magic 493 votes needed. He was the most improbable of candidates - a small town editor from Marion, Ohio, a mediocre man with no ideas about running the country. After he was summoned to the smoke-filled room and told that he would be the choice of the convention, delegate George Harvey put a question to him: "We think you should tell us, on your conscience and before God, whether there was anything that might be brought against you that would embarrass the party, any impediment that might disqualify you or make you inexpedient either as candidate or as President."

Mr. Harding asked for a few minutes to think it over, then said there was no impediment. He and Mr. Harvey may have been thinking about his rumored dalliances with a woman not his wife. But they may also have had in mind the rumors about Mr. Harding's black ancestors. At any rate they both apparently felt that he was in the clear. He got the nomination and went on to win the presidency by a landslide.

The American people were tired of Woodrow Wilson, they were tired of the talk about a League of Nations, they were tired of all the social agitation. They wanted a return to the "normalcy" that Mr. Harding promised. And so began the most feckless, incompetent and corrupt administration in American history.

Meanwhile, Mr. Chancellor was busy. In 1921 he produced an extensive account of the Harding family tree - "A Review of the Facts Collected from Anthropological, Historical and Political Researches" - in which he maintained that there were several Negro strains in the Harding background, including the president's great-grandmother, Elizabeth Madison Harding. Some older residents of Blooming Grove claimed to have known the old lady.

Harry Daugherty, whom Mr. Harding appointed attorney general of the United States, acted quickly. When he learned about the Chancellor book, he mobilized agents of the Justice Department and the post office and set out to confiscate every last copy. The drive was so successful that the book is now a rare item, indeed.

Warren Harding always was uncertain about the race allegations. "How do I know, Jim?" he once remarked to a friend. "One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence." It seems an honest statement

At any rate, he soon had other things to worry about. His attorney general, Mr. Daugherty, and his secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, were embroiled in the Teapot Dome scandal, where big money changed hands over oil leases on government lands held by the U.S. Navy. Mr. Daugherty escaped conviction, but Mr. Fall went to jail. Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby retired in disgrace. Charles Forbes, director of the Veterans Bureau, robbed the government and the veterans of an estimated $200 million. At the Little Green House on K Street, all sorts of corrupt deals were made. Many people, probably including Mrs. Harding, "the Duchess", wondered if the president was headed for impeachment.

As the scandals cascaded, Mr. Harding made a trip to Alaska. On his return, he suddenly died in a San Francisco hotel room. Mrs. Harding refused to allow an autopsy. The rumor spread that she had done him in to avoid the scandal that threatened to consume his administration. One report had her standing by the body and murmuring "Warren, they can't hurt you now." Even today there are conflicting viewpoints as to how and why he died.

At that point, his racial background probably didn't matter much.

Albert B. Southwick's column appears regularly in the Sunday Telegram.

ART: PHOTO

PHOTOG: FILE PHOTO

CUTLINE: Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama speaks to a crowd on the campaign trail in Iowa.