The Jacksons were dismayed and reluctantly accepted the advice of several friends that they should remarry. By doing so, however, they more or less admitted their previous marriage was invalid and they had been living in adultery. The accusation returned to haunt Jackson several times before he ran for President. In 1806 he killed a man in a duel for saying it to his face. But he could do little about newspaper stories. The tangled affair had left a rich lode of evidence from eyewitnesses and court papers.
As the 1828 campaign escalated, Rachel Jackson was called “an American Jezebel,” “a convicted adulteress,” and “a profligate woman.” The Adamsites studiously ignored the almost three decades of fidelity and domestic happiness in which Rachel had lived with Andrew Jackson. She was irredeemable, a forever fallen woman. Jackson’s infuriated supporters tried to counterattack along the same low road, dredging up flimsy rumors that President Adams and his wife had had sexual relations before they married. A bellow from Tennessee stopped this onslaught. “I never war against females and it is only the base and cowardly who do,” Old Hickory thundered.
The Jacksonites regrouped and counterattacked with their own version of the marriage story, which portrayed a gallant Andrew Jackson rescuing a forlorn and beautiful woman from a life of misery. They found a man who had been living in the Donelson boardinghouse at the time to bolster their account. They obtained affidavits from politicians who had voted on the divorce decree in the Kentucky legislature, affirming they only wanted to liberate Rachel from the beastly Robards. Finally they cited the way all the respectable women in and around Nashville accepted Rachel as their equal in virtue and reputation.
This Democratic defense was distributed throughout the country in pamphlet form. A hefty share of copies went to Tennessee, where, paradoxically, Jackson was both loved and hated with maximum intensity. The original smear campaign had, in fact, begun with a pamphlet by a home state rival. Inevitably, this meant Rachel heard still more about the campaign. “The Enemyes of the Genl have dipt their arrows in wormwood & gall and sped them at me,” she told a friend in the summer of 1828.
Possibly because of their tangled marital background, Rachel had repeatedly urged Jackson to forswear politics and retire to The Hermitage. In her middle years she had grown religious, and the pursuit of fame seemed so much worldly nonsense to her. “I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of God than live in that palace in Washington,” she declared.
The news that Jackson had won the presidency in a landslide only made Rachel anxious and depressed. Except for her journeys to Natchez and Kentucky, she had seen little of the world and severely doubted her ability to cope with Washington, D.C. She pleaded with her husband and his advisers to let her at least skip the inauguration, where she would be on maximum public display. She wanted to tiptoe into Washington and take refuge in the White House when the uproar had subsided.
Nonsense, declared the exultant Jacksonians. If she acted in such a furtive manner, her persecutors would “chuckle and say they have driven you from the field of your husband’s honors.” They were almost certainly right about that; political hatchet men were much the same in those pre-Beltway days as they are now.
Rachel reluctantly began acquiring a wardrobe for the inauguration. Early in December 1828, she went shopping in Nashville. She stopped to rest in the office of a cousin who happened to be a newspaper editor. There she found the pamphlet which Jackson’s friends had written to defend her against the Adamsites. It was full of the grisly specifics of the charges and countercharges. When friends arrived to pick her up, they found the once and future First Lady sobbing hysterically.
Rachel Jackson never recovered from the shock of reading that pamphlet. Back at The Hermitage, she took to her bed and died a few days before Christmas. Andrew Jackson uttered a typical homily at her grave. “In the presence of this dear saint, I can and do forgive all my enemies,” he said. “But those vile wretches who have slandered her must look to God for mercy.” One hopes the wretches did look heavenward because for the eight years Old Hickory was President they found no mercy in Washington, D.C.
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RACHEL JACKSON’S DEMISE MIGHT BE CALLED SIMPLE, PREMEDITATED murder by newsprint. The attack was made on her directly, with malice aforethought. The other First Lady who suffered a similar fate is a more complex story. The plot, you might say, is thicker, but the conclusion is, I think, equally inescapable.
No one would have dreamed anything but happiness and glory awaited Lou Henry Hoover in the White House. Few First Ladies seemed better prepared for the job. The same seemed true of her husband, President Herbert Hoover. Between them, in 1928, they appeared to be supreme examples of all that was wise and good in American civilization.
Lou Henry was the first woman to get a geology degree from Stanford University. She married Herbert Hoover, a fellow geology major, in 1899 and followed him around the world while he amassed a fortune as a mining engineer. When World War I broke out, the Hoovers were living in London. Together they hurled themselves into the chaos that erupted, helping over 120,000 Americans fleeing the war zone to get back to the United States. All told, they loaned these often frantic fugitives $1.5 million out of their own pockets—the equivalent of $100 million today All but $300 was repaid, forever convincing them, Herbert Hoover liked to say, of the basic honesty of ordinary Americans.
On the European continent, the entire country of Belgium, occupied by the Germans, blockaded by the British fleet, was close to starvation. Herbert Hoover, with Lou at his side, plunged into an emergency effort to feed 7.5 million people. Lou braved German submarines to return to America to raise money in a cross-country speaking tour. Herbert set up the world’s first international relief agency in London. While Lou was being called “the most capable woman alive” for her vivid appeals for American aid, Herbert assembled a fleet of forty ships and five-hundred canal boats, at a cost of $25 million a month, to carry food to the beleaguered country. The success of this stupendous operation made the Hoovers world famous.
When America entered the war in 1917, Woodrow Wilson brought Herbert Hoover back to America and put him in charge of the Food Administration. His job was to persuade Americans to produce more and eat less, so the United States could rescue England and France from starvation. With Lou’s help, Hoover once more succeeded magnificently. He organized the farmers and shippers with his usual efficiency. She told the nation’s housewives how to “Hooverize” a family’s diet by cutting down on meat, wheat, and sugar, and encouraged the nation’s Girl Scouts to increase food production by cultivating war gardens.
After the war Herbert Hoover accepted still more international relief assignments, funneling millions of tons of food to the starving women and children of Germany, Eastern Europe, and Russia. By 1920 The New York Times ranked Hoover among the ten greatest living Americans. Woodrow Wilson reportedly said he hoped the Great Engineer, as the newspapers called him, would succeed him as President. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy, said he would be proud to run as Herbert Hoover’s vice president. Too late, they found out the Great Engineer was a Republican.
At the 1920 Republican Convention, Hoover was brushed aside by the conservatives in the party, who wanted Warren Harding and the status quo. But Hoover had been bitten by the presidential bug. He accepted an appointment as secretary of commerce in the cabinets of Harding and Calvin Coolidge. While both administrations drifted into passivity, Hoover converted commerce into the most dynamic department in the government, topping his performance with another miraculous rescue operation when the Mississippi overflowed its banks in 1927, leaving thousands homeless and penniless. Meanwhile, Lou entertained like a First Lady in waiting at the Hoovers’ opulent home on S Street in Washington and made speeches urging American women to chart new paths by combining marriage and careers. When Calvin Coolidge chose not to run in 1928, there was no serious Republican competition to keep the Hoovers out of the White House.
Herbert H
oover’s only obstacle to the Oval Office was the Democrats’ 1928 “cherce”—Alfred E. Smith, the first Catholic to run for the presidency. Al’s sidewalks of New York accent and assaults on Prohibition ignited almost as much opposition as his Catholic faith. It was a nasty campaign, in which vicious things were said by some of Hoover’s backers, leaving the Democrats more than ordinarily furious about losing by another landslide.
On inauguration day, advertising executive Bruce Barton accurately forecast the public mood when he told Hoover: “People expect more of you than they have of any other President.” Hoover’s inaugural address did little to diminish this soaring optimism. He envisioned a nation of homeowners and farmers “insured against death and accident, unemployment and old age,” a future “bright with hope” in which every American could count on “security from poverty and want.” Completing his image as a combination white knight and miracle man, Hoover announced he would serve without pay.
Lou seemed the perfect First Lady for the Great Engineer. Finding the White House “bleak as a New England barn,” she rearranged the furniture and brought from California some lovely pieces she had collected in her world travels. She also hired Signal Corps photographers at her own expense to take pictures of every piece of furniture in the White House and embarked on a vigorous search for authentic American antiques, continuing the tradition her friend Grace Coolidge had launched. The President may have had some doubts about this eagerness to restore the past after he sat on a chair that had supposedly belonged to Dolley Madison and it collapsed under his bulky six-foot frame.
Lou’s long years as a hostess enabled her to cope with any and all entertaining emergencies. She even provided the cook with a recipe that became known as White House Supreme—croquettes of ground ham, beef, lamb, and whatever else happened to be in the refrigerator. The dish was Lou’s answer to the frequent discovery that her dinner guests would number forty rather than four. When someone asked the weary housekeeper to sum up the Hoovers’ regime, she groaned: “Company, company company!” Lou and “Bert,” as she called him, had guests for lunch and dinner every day of the year except February 10, their wedding anniversary, when they dined alone.
On these occasions, guests sometimes encountered a Herbert Hoover who was a less than gracious host. If he decided the company was insufficiently stimulating, or was failing to give him the information he had expected, he would lapse into a glum silence worthy of Calvin Coolidge. Fortunately, Lou was adept at keeping the conversation alive. She was also deft at changing the subject if she saw a topic was starting to embarrass or annoy her husband. Although she never made the kind of extravagant statements about her absolute faith in Herbert Hoover’s judgment that Grace Coolidge made about Silent Cal, it was evident to everyone that Lou not only loved Bert, she admired him deeply.
Lou and Herbert Hoover relax at their camp on the Rapidan River in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Lou designed this forerunner of the current presidential retreat Camp David. Protecting the President from stress is one of the First Lady’s primary responsibilities. (Herbert Hoover Presidential Library-Museum)
A devoted outdoorswoman who had grown up riding and camping in the California hills, Lou used the First Lady’s star status to call for more and better school athletic programs for women and urged parents to enroll their daughters in the Girl Scouts as an ideal way to get them in touch with nature and the beauty of the American countryside. She persuaded her husband to buy 164 acres for a camp on Virginia’s Rapidan River, 109 miles from Washington, where they could fish and relax, beyond the reach of the White House’s formalities. Lou personally designed a little village of log cabins where, her younger son Allan remarked, everyone could “rough it in perfect comfort.”
When the Hoovers discovered that the children in the area had no school, they donated the money to start one and went to considerable trouble to find a teacher for it. That was typical of their private generosity. Both Quakers, they were devout believers in voluntary charity. Lou fretted over the illnesses of the White House staff. One butler, unable to afford the cream he needed for a stomach ulcer, found bottles of it on his doorstep each morning, paid for by Mrs. Hoover.
Lou made some enemies below the Mason-Dixon line when she invited Mrs. Oscar DePriest, wife of an African-American congressman from Chicago, to tea. Some of the other guests refused to shake Mrs. DePriest’s hand. Southerners reviled the First Lady for desecrating the White House; the Texas legislature passed a formal rebuke. Lou not only refused to waver—she invited the choir of the black college, Tuskegee Institute, to perform at the White House. These gestures were part of the Hoovers’ mutual determination to do their utmost to eliminate injustice and deprivation from American life.
In the Oval Office, the President unleashed a whirlwind of programs to reform America’s creaky banking system, improve the farmers’ lot, and launch an old-age pension plan. Newspapers showered praise on him, comparing him with Theodore Roosevelt and other presidential dynamos. Then the nation’s economic roof collapsed on top of Herbert Hoover—and everyone else. On October 24, 1929, seven months after he became President, the stock market crashed with a rumble heard around the world. By 1930 six million people were out of work, banks were failing, and businesses were going bankrupt by the hundreds. Similar things were happening in Europe.
The Great Engineer, the man who saw the presidency as primarily a managerial problem, struggled to cope with the catastrophe. But his public personality, with its penchant for statistics and facts, its emphasis on the head rather than the heart, lacked a crucial ingredient for political leadership in hard times. Herbert Hoover had a tender heart, and his First Lady had an even more tender one—but they were loath to reveal their private feelings to the American voter and were appalled at the thought of publicizing them for political gain.
A perfect example was the story of three children from Detroit, the oldest thirteen, who showed up at the White House gates to ask the President to help get their father out of jail. The man had stolen a car to keep his family from starving. President Hoover ordered a meal for the children from the White House kitchen, sat them in chairs around his desk, and talked to them about their father. He told them he was sure he was a good man, if he had children who loved him enough to travel all the way from Detroit to Washington for his sake. After the children left, Hoover called in his secretary, who saw tears on the President’s face. “Get that man out of jail,” Hoover said. “I don’t care how you do it.”
The secretary succeeded in quashing the conviction—and asked the President if he could release the story to the press. “Of course not!” Hoover said.
Instead of searching for words and gestures that could lift the hearts of the growing numbers of bewildered defeated Americans, Herbert Hoover tried to conquer the worldwide Great Depression with work. Eighteen hours a day, he sat at his desk in the Oval Office, conferring with aides and experts, ordering studies, and forming commissions to cope with the mounting crisis. Lou Hoover tried to contribute, making speeches to women’s groups, urging them to help those in need. “The winter is upon us,” she said in a radio broadcast from the White House in 1931. “We cannot be warm, in the house or out, we cannot sit down to a table sufficiently supplied with food, if we do not know… every child, woman and man in the United States [is] sufficiently warmed and fed.”
Both Lou and the President gave thousands of dollars of their own money to strangers who wrote to the White House begging for help. Always, the gifts were anonymous, delivered through friends who were asked to investigate the pleas to make sure the money was needed. But the scale of the nation’s misery was too vast for individuals to comprehend, much less solve. The Hoovers’ good intentions, coupled with their stubborn resistance to sympathetic publicity and their inaugural promise to create Utopia, soon transformed the White House into hell.
The Democratic Party played a major role in this metamorphosis. The Democrats’ publicity director was a shrewd, ruthless man named Char
les Michelson. He correctly discerned that the Great Engineer presented a perfect target for dirty tactics and even dirtier tricks. As one biographer has put it, “The public barely knew him. To most Americans [Hoover] was a rubber face perched above a stiff size 17 collar.” From Democratic Party headquarters in Washington flowed a stream of vituperation, blaming this synthetic Herbert Hoover for the Depression, and portraying him as a cold, cruel, uncaring servant of the ruling class.
The stories ranged from scandals to smears to fantasy An Interior Department employee took a twelve-thousand-dollar bribe to reveal another supposed Teapot Dome oil scam. The President’s older son Herbert was forced to resign from his job when he was accused of profiteering because the airline he worked for had a government contract to fly the mail. Thousands, perhaps millions, believed the whopper that the real cause of the Depression was the theft of the nation’s gold supply from Fort Knox by Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, with the President’s help.
Soon even Republican-aligned Time magazine was calling Herbert Hoover “President Reject.” Comedians ridiculed him. H. L. Mencken called him a “fat Coolidge.” A Pennsylvania congressman persuaded twenty fellow statesmen to vote a bill of impeachment. Everywhere people recited ditties such as this one:
Mellon pulled the whistle,
Hoover rang the bell,
Wall Street heard the signal,
And the country went to hell.
Hoover later claimed that his Quaker background enabled him to tolerate this abuse. He simply refused to let it penetrate the center of peace he had cultivated in the core of his self. Perhaps that was true. Nevertheless, his hair turned white and twenty-five pounds vanished from his frame. Beside him, Lou Hoover suffered even more. The President could at least lash back at the “gangster tactics” of Charles Michelson and his allies. The First Lady had to maintain a smiling silence. White House staffers often saw Lou accompany her husband to the door of the Oval Office, where, in a desperate gesture of sympathy, she smoothed his hair with her hand and turned forlornly away.
First Ladies Page 28
