The first black president, that is. Steve Gill links to an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine about the racial heritage of 29th President of the United States, Warren G. Harding:

Will Americans vote for a black president? If the notorious historian William Estabrook Chancellor was right, we already did. In the early 1920s, Chancellor helped assemble a controversial biographical portrait accusing President Warren Harding of covering up his family’s “colored” past. According to the family tree Chancellor created, Harding was actually the great-grandson of a black woman. Under the one-drop rule of American race relations, Chancellor claimed, the country had inadvertently elected its “first Negro president.”

The case is far from a slam dunk. Chancellor was a racist demagogue and a partisan Democrat out to destroy the Republican Harding. But there are a number of interesting rumors that suggest some truth to the claim, including reports from neighbors and alleged African-American relatives.

Of course, Harding’s African-American ancestry, if it exist, was tenuous: his great-grandmother was supposedly black. If true that would make 7/8 white and 1/8 black. But in those days even a drop of “Negro blood” could spell doom for a political career.