William Estabrook Chancellor

William Estabrook Chancellor
Born	(1867-09-25)September 25, 1867 Dayton, Ohio, United States
Died	Wooster, Ohio, United States
Occupation	Novelist
Language	English
Nationality	American
Citizenship	American
Alma mater	Amherst College

William Estabrook Chancellor (September 25, 1867 – February 12, 1963) was an American academic and writer. An opponent of the Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, Chancellor wrote a study of his family just prior to the 1920 election alleging that Harding had an African-American ancestor, in the hopes of turning voters against him based on prejudices of the time.

Biography

Chancellor was born in Dayton, Ohio. After graduating from Amherst College, he went into teaching. In 1906 he was the superintendent of schools of Paterson, New Jersey. He wrote prolifically, publishing around 40 books and hundreds of articles between 1904 and 1920. He married into the family of Harriet Beecher Stowe. He was a Democrat.

When Chancellor was a professor at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, he began to research the background of Republican candidate Warren G. Harding. He wrote two pamphlets about this subject prior to the 1920 presidential election, unleashing a major scandal as he alleged Harding was of mixed-race descent. The college dismissed Chancellor from his post four days before the election. Copies of Chancellor's pamphlets were confiscated by federal agents and destroyed; only five are thought to be in existence, three of which are owned by rare book collectors, the other two owned by museums.

Research

Chancellor's theory on Harding's lineage was based upon affidavits provided by aged Crawford County, Ohio residents that Harding was of mixed race. Chancellor claimed that Harding had a great-grandmother, Elizabeth Madison, who was black. The affidavits by elderly residents in Galion, Ohio, served as the basis for Chancellor's book. Unless Chancellor's sources had intimate knowledge of Harding's genealogy, the rumor is probably untrue.

Harding was born in 1865 near Corsica (now Blooming Grove), Ohio. Harding's father, Dr. George Tryon Harding, was a homeopathic physician; Harding's mother Pheobe Dickerson Harding was a midwife who later qualified for an Ohio medical license. Dr. Harding relocated his family to Caledonia in eastern Marion County when the younger Harding was a young boy.

Relying upon the affidavits, Chancellor moved forward with his book, which lacked primary source records to validate his claim. Chancellor could not produce an Ohio birth record for Harding (who was born in 1865) because Ohio did not mandate the recording of births until 1867. Furthermore, Chancellor could find no court records, deeds, or other legal documents that could prove that Harding was of mixed race. Chancellor also could not verify his position through U.S Census records because popular schedules made prior to 1850 did not provide a complete enumeration by name and race of all people in a given residence. Instead, 1840 and earlier census records only listed the name of the head of household and counted by "hash-mark" the age-group and sex of other persons living with that head of household.

After Harding was elected, Chancellor published his biography of the president; however, federal agents acted immediately to suppress the distribution of the book. Chancellor was also monitored by federal agents. Unable to research or find a teaching position, Chancellor moved to Canada.

In the spring of 1922, Chancellor was in Dayton, Ohio (his hometown as well as that of 1920 Democratic Presidential candidate and prominent newspaper publisher James Cox) long enough to publish a biography of Warren Harding. In it Chancellor developed the race rumors at great length. He included some additional research, including the first notice of Harding's poor cardiovascular health. The book is normally credited to Chancellor, although no explicit claim of authorship is made, nor is the additional research obviously Chancellor's. After it was published, a statewide organization sold the book door-to-door during the midterm election year.

In 1927 Chancellor was hired by the University of Cincinnati, and he taught there until his retirement. He died in Cincinnati in 1963, aged 96, having given several interviews to journalists over the years in which he denied writing either book or pamphlet. He never suggested who might have been responsible.

Evaluation

In 2015, press reports indicated that DNA analysis showed Harding had no recent Black ancestors.

According to Harding biographer John W. Dean, Chancellor's theories were partly based upon a rumor spread by Amos Kling, Harding's father-in-law, who opposed him politically. Dean, who lived in Marion as a teenager, claimed that Kling spread the rumor as retribution for positions taken by Harding in his newspaper The Marion Star. Dean characterized Chancellor as racist.

Following Chancellor's death, the author Francis Russell attempted to research the theory that Harding was of mixed race. His book, The Shadow of Blooming Grove noted he was unable to substantiate Chancellor's conclusions beyond circumstantial evidence. Further discussion of Chancellor's claims appears in the book The Strange Deaths of President Harding by Robert H. Ferrell, published in 1998. (This work should not to be confused with the book by Gaston Means's The Strange Death of President Harding, which uses the singular "Death"). Russell wrote, "To anyone who tracks it down today, Chancellor’s book comes across as a laughable partisan screed, an amalgam of bizarre racial theories, outlandish stereotypes and cheap political insults. But it also contains a remarkable trove of social knowledge — the kind of community gossip and oral tradition that rarely appears in official records but often provides clues to richer truths."

The objective significance of Chancellor's attempts at research into Harding's racial background weighs far less heavily than does their perceived significance in the context of Harding's times. At a period when widespread prejudice existed about racial issues even in 'polite' society, Chancellor's weak and speculative claims may have seemed more relevant than they would have in later decades.

Publications

• The United States: A History of Three Centuries, 1607-1904 (1905) with Fletcher Willis Hewes
• Our City Schools, Their Direction and Management (1908)
• Class-teaching and Management (1910)
• A Life of Silas Wright 1795-1847 (1913)
• Our Schools: Their Administration and Supervision (1915)
• Educational Sociology (1919)
• The Health of the Teacher (1919)

Further reading

• John W. Dean, Warren G. Harding, The American Presidents Series, Arthur M. Schlesinger, General Editor (Times Books, 2004)
• Robert Ferrell, The Strange Deaths of President Harding (University of Missouri Press, 1998)
• John A. Murphy, The Indictment (2000)

See also

• Swiftboating
• October surprise
• African-American heritage of United States presidents

External links

• William Estabrook Chancellor books