A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother

by Janny Scott

  Augusta, with a population of several thousand, was not the cul-de-sac that the small-town Kansas stereotype might summon to mind. Mack Gilkeson, who grew up in Augusta and knew both Madelyn Payne as a child and Stanley Dunham as a teenager, went on to become a professor of chemical engineering in California and a consultant in places like Papua New Guinea. As many as half of his high school classmates, he said, eventually moved away. Their teachers encouraged students who were academically gifted. Asked when he had first felt the urge to move beyond Butler County, he said, “I was led on that path.” Members of Stanley and Madelyn’s generation not only left Augusta behind, they abandoned their parents’ political views. Mack Gilkeson’s parents were Republicans, as was everybody they knew. When they went to Topeka to visit a relative who worked for the newspaper chain owned by the Republican United States senator from Kansas, Arthur Capper, Mack was under orders not to utter the name Roosevelt. That sort of rigidity did not appeal to him. “I just found it distasteful,” he said. “When I encountered it, I would say, ‘That’s not what I’m going to do.’” Because there were no private or parochial schools, everyone in Augusta went to the same high school—children of bank presidents, oil company executives, doctors, farmers, and oil-field workers. “I suppose that led me to be more egalitarian than I would have been from other circumstances,” Gilkeson said. Children reared in Augusta had some understanding of class differences. Virginia Dashner Ewalt, an oil pumper’s daughter who grew up on the Sinclair oil lease southeast of Augusta and was in the Augusta High School senior-class play with Madelyn, went to elementary school with twenty other children in a one-room schoolhouse heated by a single large coal-burning stove. “Country kids were a little different,” she said. She sometimes felt a distinct chill from some of the crowd that had grown up in Augusta.

  Leona and R. C. Payne had expectations for their children. They were to be good, study hard, get good marks, and make something of themselves. “My mother had high aspirations,” said Margaret Arlene Payne, who got a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kansas, a master’s degree from Teachers College of Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. The message was, Arlene said, “You’re going to college. And there’s no question.” Jon, Madelyn’s youngest brother, said, “I don’t think they had an expectation of us staying in Kansas. I think they expected much more out of us—to get to college and then do whatever you could.” But the Depression and the shadow of war colored the children’s sense of their future. Clarence Kerns, historian for the El Dorado High School class of 1935, said there were so few jobs available when his class graduated that nine of his classmates became ministers. Many others became teachers in one-room schoolhouses across Kansas. Few went straight to college. Long-range planning seemed pointless. “The news month by month was always bad,” said Mack Gilkeson, recalling the years leading up to and during World War II. “You’d go out and get the morning paper at seven a.m. and look at the headline. It would be: ‘The Germans have invaded Norway. The Germans have invaded Greece. The Allies are retreating. Things are going bad in North Africa.’ The future was very uncertain. So you would make the decision, ‘I’m going to do this,’ and not worry about what two years from now will bring.” Some couples married early, craving permanence. Girls who had expected to go straight to college, instead had to find work. “I can remember Madelyn fretting over the fact that some of her friends, who were more well-to-do than we, were planning to go to some fancy college or other, and she knew she couldn’t,” Charles remembered. “So the question was: Would she go to the local junior college? Should she go to work? That sort of thing.” As for himself, he said, “I knew from about the seventh grade on that there was going to be a war and I was going to be in it. So I never really thought a whole lot about going to college, because I just figured, ‘Okay, I’ll grow up and I’m going to go off to war.’ Truth is, I didn’t really expect to survive it.”

  R. C. Payne had a particular attachment to his firstborn daughter, according to her brother Jon, who was born fifteen years later. She was the only child born in Peru before Mr. Payne’s job brought the family to Augusta. A notice published in the Sedan Times-Star on November 22, 1922, announced, “Charles R. Payne [sic] and wife are rejoicing over the arrival of little Madelyn Lee, an 8 lb daughter.” She was bright, lively, and strong-willed. She got good grades if she wanted to, Charles Payne said, but she was not above taking off the occasional school-day afternoon with a friend, precipitating a row with her mother, who wanted her children to do their best at all times, not just when they felt like it. Slender, tidy, and well turned out, Madelyn affected a kind of worldliness, at least toward her siblings. “Madelyn in high school always had boyfriends—usually a couple, maybe three different ones,” Charles said. “She was nice-enough-looking, no great beauty, and quite vivacious, lively, and fun. Her various boyfriends bored her, to tell you the truth. They were Kansas boys. She tended to view herself more as a Bette Davis type.” By her senior year in high school, with the country stuck in the Depression and war on the horizon, Madelyn’s options for higher education may have looked limited, at least in the short run. “I think she was looking for a more exciting life, wanting to escape small-town Kansas,” Charles said. “And I think she really didn’t see her own future. She didn’t see anything other than going to school and getting a teaching certificate, which my mother assumed she would do, because that was what she had done. It was either that or be a clerk in the dry goods store.”

  Stanley Dunham, flamboyant and seemingly worldly, may have looked like just the ticket. After dropping out of high school, he had hit the road for a time. According to Ralph, Stanley, who was four years older than Madelyn, had gone to California and spent some time with a Kansas friend who later became a Hollywood writer. He returned to Kansas, others said, with grand tales of hobnobbing with John Steinbeck, various playwrights, and other California writers of the 1930s. He seemed to have left the impression, at least with Madelyn, that he had a trunk full of plays and the possibility of a literary future—even if, for the time being, he was doing construction at the Socony refinery in Augusta. “He wrote plays and poetry, and he would come over to our house and read them to us,” Arlene Payne remembered. “It was, I’m sure, all very exotic to her.” Though El Dorado and Augusta were archrivals in football and baseball, it was not uncommon for El Dorado boys to date girls from Augusta and vice versa. It is unclear exactly how or when Stanley and Madelyn met. When I asked Ralph Dunham what he thought drew Madelyn to his brother, he said, “Well, he was a personable guy and wasn’t above telling a—” Stopping in mid-sentence, he changed course: “You know, he was okay.” When I asked him what he had been about to say, he continued, carefully, “Well, Stanley didn’t always tell things exactly like they were. But not many people do. And when you’re courting, you first try to present a good side of yourself and your hopes and ambitions and all the rest.” Asked the same question, Jon Payne said, laughing, “Oh, you know, 1930s Kansas, Dust Bowl, Depression, stuck in Hicksville, USA. I think she was looking at Stanley as a way of getting out of Dodge.”

  Madelyn and Stanley Dunham

  Madelyn’s parents were not impressed. Stanley came across to them as a glad-hander, a gadabout—the antithesis of the Paynes, Jon said. As Obama described their attitude in his memoir, using the nickname with which he and Maya addressed their grandmother, “The first time Toot brought Gramps over to her house to meet the family, her father took one look at my grandfather’s black, slicked-back hair and his perpetual wise-guy grin and offered his unvarnished assessment. ‘He looks like a wop.’” Their disapproval did not escape Madelyn’s notice. On the evening of the Augusta High School junior-senior banquet in May 1940, Madelyn, at seventeen years old, and Stanley, at twenty-two, slipped out of the banquet and got married in secret. They kept the marriage quiet until Madelyn graduated the following month—to try to prevent her parents from having it annulled, some of her classmates believed. The news re
ached Stanley’s brother, Ralph, only months later. Charles Payne was away at Boy Scout camp by the time it broke.

  “My parents were pretty much crushed that their daughter would go off with someone they didn’t really have much respect for,” he told me. “But they accepted it.” Putting as good a face on it as possible, Leona Payne sent out engraved announcements.

  Twenty years later, Madelyn Dunham would surely remember her youthful romantic rebellion, her secret marriage, and her parents’ reaction, when her daughter, at age seventeen, learned that she was pregnant with the child of a charismatic older man whom she would marry a few months later. Perhaps Madelyn would be struck by the similarities between herself and Stanley Ann—headstrong teenagers swept away by seemingly worldly charmers promising new horizons, the possibility of adventure, and the certainty of escape. Perhaps she thought, too, of Stanley’s dead mother, Ruth Armour, who, at an even younger age, had done something similar. To anyone new to the story, Stanley Ann’s infatuation, pregnancy, and precipitous marriage to a black student from Kenya might appear to be an inexplicable break with her family’s presumably straitlaced, white-bread Kansas history. But Madelyn and Stanley would have known there was a precedent in Madelyn’s own decision to override the reservations of her parents and short-circuit any discussion of her future by marrying Stanley and bolting for the coast.

  Paradoxically, it may have been on the rim of the Pacific that it first dawned on Madelyn that life with Stanley might prove less dazzling than she had imagined. As soon as school was out, the newlyweds had headed for California, the obvious place for an aspiring writer with a trunk full of unpublished works. But after settling in the San Francisco Bay Area, Madelyn found herself working odd jobs in various quotidian establishments, including a dry cleaner, to help pay the rent, her brother Charles remembered. In later years, she would come to regret deeply that she had never gone to college. She would make sure that her daughter, faced with a similarly abrupt change in life circumstances, was able to stay in school. Madelyn would be the one, too, who would subsidize the education of her grandchildren in one of Hawaii’s most respected private schools. But if she thought during that time in California about going back to school, it was not an option. She needed to make money. What was more, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, she and Stanley were back in Kansas, just eighteen months after leaving. Six weeks after Pearl Harbor and a few months short of his twenty-fourth birthday, Stanley enlisted on January 18, 1942, as a private in the U.S. Army. According to his enlistment records, he gave his education as “four years of high school” and his civilian occupation as “bandsman, oboe, or parts clerk, automobile.”

  The war jolted southeastern Kansas out of the Depression in much the same way that the oil strike at Stapleton Number One, the discovery well at the oil field in El Dorado, had jolted Butler County a quarter-century earlier. Profits from the oil boom had financed a fledgling aviation-manufacturing industry in Wichita, where aviation pioneers such as Clyde Vernon Cessna, Walter Beech, and Lloyd Stearman had helped win Wichita the title “Air Capital of the World.” The Stearman Aircraft Company, then a subsidiary of Boeing, had landed its first major military contract in 1934. Now the attack on Pearl Harbor strengthened the case for decentralizing the defense industry, and Wichita became one of the biggest defense aviation centers in the country. In 1941, the government began construction on a new Boeing plant in Wichita and picked Boeing to produce the B-29 Superfortress, the aircraft later used in the firebombing campaign against Japan. Employment at Boeing soared to 29,795 in December 1943—up from 766 two and a half years earlier, according to Wings over Kansas, a website on Kansas aeronautics. The plant operated around the clock. The population of Sedgwick County nearly doubled over five years. Huge temporary housing complexes with names like Planeview and Beechwood sprang up. Next to the Boeing plant, Planeview alone had a population of twenty thousand. Boeing had fifty-six bowling teams. There was a nine-hole golf course and tennis, badminton, and shuffleboard courts. The company bused in workers from as far away as Winfield, Kansas, and Ponca City, Oklahoma. Others commuted by car pool from places such as El Dorado and Augusta. The defense-aviation boom, like the oil boom, would prove fleeting. In 1945, after the suspension of B-29 production, Boeing laid off sixteen thousand workers in a single day. The new plant closed, and employment at Boeing Wichita dropped to about one thousand. But while the war lasted, wages were high and, with men off at war, nearly half of all the aircraft production workers were women. Nationally, eighteen million women are said to have entered the workforce between 1942 and 1945, many of them because of government campaigns to lure housewives into full-time, war-related work. Women became financially independent and took on male responsibilities, in many cases for the first time. Madelyn Dunham was part of that change.

  With Stanley away in the Army, Madelyn moved in with her parents in Augusta and commuted by car pool to a job as an inspector on the night shift at Boeing in Wichita. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama described his grandmother in that period as Rosie the Riveter—the icon of wartime womanhood, in overalls, painted by Norman Rockwell for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. The prodigious work ethic that would enable Madelyn decades later to work her way up from a low-level bank employee to vice president of the Bank of Hawaii must have been in evidence at Boeing. She became a supervisor, Charles Payne remembered, and was soon making more money than their father. Madelyn saved her money, but she also occasionally splurged. Like a character in a Bette Davis movie, she bought herself a fur coat.

  Davis, who had helped small-town girls like Madelyn while away the Depression, was now one of the country’s biggest box-office stars. Her movie Now, Voyager became a hit across the country in November 1942, playing to audiences made up mostly of women. The film marked a shift in Davis’s image. As the government campaigned to recruit housewives into factory work, Davis shed what Martin Shingler, a film scholar, has described as her previously androgynous look and emerged as “the leading spokesperson for femininity, lipstick and glamour.” The transformation had begun six months earlier, Shingler suggested, with the May 1942 release of In This Our Life, in which Davis played Stanley Timberlake, a southern belle.

  That spring, Madelyn Dunham, age nineteen, was pregnant. On November 29, 1942, one month after her twentieth birthday, she gave birth to a brown-eyed, brown-haired daughter with the same delicate coloring so admired in her great-aunt Doris, Miss El Dorado. In Dreams from My Father, Obama writes that his mother was born at Fort Leavenworth, the Army base where Stanley was stationed. But Ralph Dunham said he visited Madelyn and the baby in Wichita Hospital when Stanley Ann was a day or two old. Years later, Ann would say that she had nearly entered the world in a speeding taxi. Rushing to the hospital in a snowstorm, she told Maya, Madelyn almost gave birth in the cab. As Ann told the story to Maya, it had a parallel in Maya’s birth twenty-eight years later. On that occasion, Madelyn was arriving in Jakarta by plane, and Maya’s father, Lolo Soetoro, had gone to the airport to meet her. It was the eve of Independence Day (the Indonesian one), and Ann, waiting in a Catholic hospital in Jakarta to deliver, grew impatient and walked out into the street to look for her husband and her mother. As she told the story, she was on the verge of hopping into a pedicab, called a becak, when Madelyn and Lolo finally pulled up. Though delivered in the hospital, Maya, the inheritor of her mother’s wanderlust, was nearly born in a becak. And Ann, whose adventuring impulse came by way of her Kansan parents, nearly arrived in the Wichita equivalent.

  They named her Stanley Ann.

  In the years that followed, the explanation most often given was that her father, Stanley, had hoped for a boy. “One of Gramps’s less judicious ideas—he had wanted a son,” Obama wrote. But relatives doubted that that story was true. Ralph Dunham said his brother “probably would have settled for any healthy child.” Maybe he just liked the name. Or maybe that story originated as a joke, delivered teasingly by the great confabulator hims
elf. The fact was, Madelyn was fully in charge of matters such as the naming and handling of the baby, some of her siblings said. Stanley would not have had veto power. “When I asked my grandmother about it, she said, ‘Oh, I don’t know why I did that,’” Maya told me. “Because she’s the one who named her Stanley. That’s all she ever said: ‘Oh, I don’t know.’”