A History of the American People

To get elected, he stuck President McKinley’s old flagpole in his garden and ran a ‘front-porch campaign.’ Many famous people made the pilgrimage to Marion to listen to him talk—Al Jolson, Lillian Gish, Ethel Barrymore, Pearl White among them, but also 600,000 ordinary folk too, many of them black—hence a Democratic rumor that Harding had negro blood.