NPC in History: Did President Harding really say this?

Warren Harding was one of us.

Before he entered politics, he was the publisher of the Marion (Ohio) Star. In fact, the 1920 election pitted Harding against James M. Cox, the publisher of the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News. Whoever won, a journalist would be president.

Harding signed up as a member of the National Press Club after arriving in D.C. as a senator in 1915. As the Club’s 1928 history said, “before entering the White House, and in the period following, Mr. Harding was a frequent visitor to the Clubhouse, for he liked to hobnob with those whom he liked to call his cronies in the writing field.”

Harding voted in at least one Club election, and the photo of him casting his ballot is one of the Club treasures. The Club threw a dinner in his honor to mark the first anniversary of his administration.

Harding also was known to enjoy a game of poker. How much he played with his fellow members is up for speculation. All other presidential visits are recorded in the 1928 history. These poker games must have been off the record. That leads us to a story that appeared in an irreverent 1979 history about Washington journalists called “Drunk Before Noon: The Behind the Scenes Story of the Washington Press Corps.”

According to the book, this story was recounted by former Club President Frank Holeman, one of the icons of the Club. He was president in 1956, so the story could not have been obtained first hand. It was passed down from a previous generation that Holeman knew quite well.

First, a little history to set the scene. Jack Johnson was an African American heavyweight professional boxer from 1908 to 1915. Known as “the Galveston Giant,” he defeated white boxer James J. Jeffries in 1910 to become the first black undisputed heavyweight champion. (As an aside, Jeffries visited the Club before the fight.) Johnson’s victory, dubbed “the fight of the century,” triggered race riots across the country.

Johnson was married to a white woman and had a white girlfriend. In 1912, at the height of the Jim Crow segregation era, he was arrested for violating what was known as the Mann Act, transporting a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes.” Sentenced to a year in prison, he fled the country for seven years until 1920 when he served his sentence at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth.

He applied to President Wilson for a presidential pardon, but the request did not arrive until Harding became president in March 1921. And that brings us to a poker game at the old Clubhouse, which at the time was at the top of the Riggs Albee Building at 15th and G streets.

“One night a sports writer sitting in on the game was bemoaning the plight of former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson,” the book says Holeman recounted. “Johnson had just finished a term in Leavenworth Penitentiary on a dubious Mann Act conviction. But he didn’t have the money to pay a heavy fine and was going to stay in jail many extra months.

‘Isn’t it a shame about old Jack Johnson,’ the sportswriter said, ‘He’s got to stay in jail just because he’s black and broke.’ Harding didn’t answer, just kept playing. Every time it came his turn to deal, the sportswriter would hold the cards and complain again about the injustice of it all. ‘Deal! Deal! Harding blurted out at last. ‘I’ll pardon him in the morning.’”

According to this account, Harding followed through on his promise. But that is not true. Johnson’s appeal never made it past Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty. After Daugherty told reporters he might consider it, the backlash among whites made him change his mind, according to a USA Today story. The boxer died in an auto accident in 1946.

But that is not the end of the story. A documentary about Johnson produced by Ken Burns (a regular at the Club’s podium) for PBS in 2004 revived interest in the case. Burns helped launch a drive to get a posthumous pardon. Even though the pardon had the support of high-powered people in Congress, it languished until Donald Trump took office. With actor Sylvester Stallone at his side, Trump signed the pardon in 2017.

This is another in a series provided by Club historian Gil Klein. Dig down anywhere in the Club’s 111-year history, and you will find some kind of significant event in the history of the world, the nation, Washington and the Club itself. Many of these events were caught in illustrations that tell the stories.