First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  Cleveland already had a low opinion of the press. Early in his term, he had written to a magazine editor, declaring that in no other country in the world was “newspaper lying” so widespread. Now the reporters infuriated the President by camping around a perimeter of the honeymoon cottage and spying on the presidential couple with field glasses and telescopes. No detail was too small for their inquisitive eyes. They described every change of outfit by the First Lady and even checked out the grocery deliveries to give their readers imaginative descriptions of what the First Couple was having for dinner. The irate President raged that they were making American journalism “contemptible.”

  Returning to the White House to take up her official duties, the soon-to-be-twenty-two-year-old First Lady enchanted everyone. She never tired of standing in receiving lines and shaking hands with her guests. But she had to learn the hard way there was a limit to how much pressing the flesh could take. Massage and some tutoring in the art of the political handshake were necessary to keep her on the job. The stern, pugnacious Cleveland seemed to take on a softer aura in his wife’s presence. He beamed as she melted roomfuls of visitors and told her mother in his gruff way that Frankie, as she was called, “would do.”

  Unlike the glamorous Julia Tyler, who adored playing queen in the White House and reveled in displays of presidential power, Frankie had no patrician pretensions. Instead of galas, she preferred simple receptions that were open to a broad spectrum of the public. One of her most popular innovations was Saturday afternoon receptions specifically for working women, who could not attend the weekday doings at the White House. Her popularity soared, and “Frankie Cleveland Clubs” sprouted in many urban Democratic wards. Soon her hair and dress styles were being imitated by women all over the country, and not a few manufacturers used her likeness in ads for their products.

  Cleveland was inclined to denounce Frankie Clubs and, for that matter, every other kind of women’s club; in his ultraconservative view, women should stay home and raise their children instead of running to meetings. But Frankie persuaded him to be more tolerant. Under her influence, his famous irascibility declined noticeably. She also coaxed him into shortening his eighteen-hour workdays and selecting more tasteful clothes.

  The President remained at war with the press. Instead of staying in the White House, where privacy was practically impossible, he startied everyone by buying a house on the Potomac, Red Top, where he and Frankie lived most of the time, commuting to the White House for public purposes only. (The area has since become one of the loveliest sections of Washington, Cleveland Park.) No one seemed to object to this idea, which strikes me as dreadful. The press, cut off from almost all access to the First Lady, had their revenge when Cleveland ran for reelection.

  Frances Cleveland was the only First Lady who was married in the White House. She conducted a running war with reporters over her right to a private life. (Underwood Archives)

  In the newspapers of this period, there was a notorious tolerance for “faking it,” the term reporters used when they substituted fiction for fact. If the details were convincing, editors would run stories of heroic policemen subduing thugs, or firemen rescuing babies from burning buildings when nothing of the sort had happened. The reporters in the Republican-oriented newspapers began faking it about the Clevelands. Stories blossomed of a drunken President reeling around Red Top, clubbing the First Lady to the floor with a swing of his massive arm. According to another tale, Frances was supposedly thrown out of the White House in the middle of the night while her husband roared boozy insults at her. If any of this nonsense were true, I suppose Frances Cleveland would have been our only First Lady to qualify as an abused spouse.

  The stories were too vivid to ignore. Frances finally wrote a letter to a woman in Massachusetts who had inquired if they were true. She said she hoped “the women of our Country” had husbands who were “as kind, attentive, considerate and affectionate as mine.” The letter was given to the press and widely published in Democratic newspapers. But the smear campaign, which revived the image of the President as a brute, took its toll. Cleveland lost his 1888 bid for a second term to Benjamin Harrison, grandson of William Henry Harrison, the President whose death put John and Julia Tyler in the White House.

  Other factors, such as Cleveland’s refusal to play the patronage game with big-city Democratic machines, also played a part. But Frances Cleveland obviously felt she and her husband had been defeated by underhanded tactics, and she left the White House fighting mad. On inauguration day, as she went out the door, she told one of the staffers to take good care of the furniture and ornaments, because “I want to find everything just as it is now, when we come back again.” The startled staffer asked when the Clevelands planned to return. “Just four years from today,” Frances said.

  That was exactly what they did, becoming the only President and First Lady to win a second term after a four-year hiatus. In American politics the feat is the equivalent of coming back from the dead. For this second White House tour, Frankie brought with them her first child, Ruth, who only escalated her mother’s already tremendous appeal to the American people. During the 1892 presidential election, Frankie’s picture appeared beside Cleveland’s on many campaign posters. Although Cleveland still tried to discourage them, Frankie Cleveland Clubs multiplied across the land.

  Yet Frances, for all her immense popularity, was totally nonpolitical. Cleveland was determined that she would never get “notions” like his aggressively feminist sister Rose—and she never did. She politely sidestepped the numerous causes she was asked to support and demonstrated, not for the first time, that personality is far more important than politics in determining a First Lady’s popularity.

  Little Ruth soon had a sister, Esther, the first President’s child to be born in the White House. Like Jackie Kennedy in later decades, Frances vowed that the public would not have access to her children. She made this decision when she saw a horde of tourists snatch Ruth out of her nurse’s arms on the White House lawn to get a better look at her. Esther’s privacy was so severely guarded, the press were soon printing rumors that she was crippled or retarded. Frances ignored them.

  The biggest test of Frances Cleveland’s second term in the White House was the discovery that her husband was suffering from cancer of the mouth and only a major operation could save his life. Compounding the tension was the stark economic crisis that began with the crash of the stock market in June of 1893. With capital and labor almost at war, many members of the administration feared the country might collapse into anarchy if it were discovered that the President was mortally ill.

  Working closely with Cleveland’s aides, Frances went off to a summer vacation house on Cape Cod’s Buzzards Bay. Meanwhile, Cleveland boarded the yacht of a millionaire friend in New York, ostensibly for a relaxing cruise before joining her on the Cape. The surgery was performed at sea. Almost half the president’s jaw and much of his palate were removed. In two days he was strong enough to walk the deck, and he went ashore to join Frances at their vacation house without a word of the real story reaching the press. Can’t you imagine how much the Clevelands enjoyed that? The operation remained a secret until 1917, when one of the surgeons told the story in the Saturday Evening Post.

  For all her popularity, Frances could do little to help her husband cope with the public’s disillusion with him when he proved unable to solve the nation’s economic crisis. The Clevelands’ last years in the White House were shadowed by political failure almost as stark as Herbert Hoover’s. The Democratic Party deserted Cleveland virtually en masse. But Frankie’s youth and gaiety remained an inexhaustible consolation for the often discouraged President. He left the White House a cheerful man.

  If the glamour girls of the previous century have anything to teach us, it may be—a terrible thought for those Washingtonians who eat, drink, sleep, and breathe issues and crises—the ultimate unimportance of politics when issues and crises are competing with love in bloom.
/>   Chapter 22

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  MATERNALLY

  YOURS

  THE LONGER I WORKED ON THIS BOOK, THE MORE CONVINCED I became that each First Lady should feel free to do what suits her. No matter what columnists, historians, and other assorted pundits say, there should never be a requirement that First Ladies fit into some sort of superachiever Wonder Woman mold. The ultimate proofs of this contention, in my not especially humble opinion, are two First Ladies who share a style that is the polar opposite of the political partner.

  In 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt succeeded the assassinated William McKinley, Edith Carow Roosevelt came to the White House with the sort of catapulted feeling that wives of accidental Presidents know so well. She brought with her the largest family in White House history, six children, ranging from her obstreperous teenage stepdaughter, Alice, to her youngest son, Quentin, almost four. They in turn brought along a veritable menagerie, ranging from ponies to kangaroo rats. Whether she liked it or not, maternity was Edith’s stock-in-trade. She not only liked it, she made it the symbol of the Roosevelt White House, with spectacularly popular results.

  For Edith, maternity was closely allied with management, an absolute requisite in dealing with a family as rambunctious as her brood. She added to maternal management not a little ability at managing the White House—and her husband. An aristocrat who could trace her American lineage back to the great Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards, Edith had an acquired ability to say and do the right thing in any and all situations. Frequently she exuded an almost preternatural calm, no matter how frenetic the atmosphere around her. Friends liked to say she had been “born mature.”

  Edith Carow’s equanimity was ail important factor in her marriage to Theodore Roosevelt. When Theodore went off to Harvard in 1876, he and Edith had an understanding that they would marry one day. They had grown up only a few doors from each other in New York City. But in Cambridge, Roosevelt met blond, beautiful Alice Lee and married her shortly after he graduated. Three years later she died of Bright’s disease while giving birth to their daughter, Alice. After a period of mourning, Theodore proposed to Edith and she accepted him. Not many women could have coped so calmly and decisively with these unexpected turns of event.

  Numerous surviving letters and reams of eyewitness testimony confirm that the marriage was remarkably happy. Edith gave Theodore the stability he badly needed; he had a tendency to ride off in all directions. He gave her the ebullience and excitement that prevented her imperturbability from lapsing into boredom.

  Theodore Roosevelt had one advantage over previous accidental Presidents: he was already a national hero for his charge up San Juan Hill at the head of his Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. Even without those still echoing shouts of popular acclaim, Edith and her husband both saw themselves as born leaders, ready and willing to run the country. While Theodore jousted with the encrusted conservatives in Congress, Edith reorganized the White House in a style that made her a truly pivotal First Lady.

  Edith’s two predecessors, Frances Cleveland and Ida McKinley, had both alienated the press, Frances by being virtually inaccessible, and poor, epileptic Ida by remaining virtually invisible. Instead of attempting to build a wall around herself and her brood, Edith decided to meet the reporters halfway—while insisting politely, firmly, that she would define “half.” At regular intervals she released carefully posed photos of herself and the children. Edith’s picture appeared on the cover of the Ladies Home Journal and other magazines. But anyone who read the accompanying articles would have had to look long and hard to find any real information about her. Almost every word was about Theodore.

  Edith also reorganized life in the White House in a way that left all future First Families in her debt. Until the Roosevelts arrived, the private quarters on the second floor existed in name only. The official or “state” rooms (used for entertaining) took up most of the mansion’s first floor. The President conducted his business from an oval office on the second floor, with numerous other nearby rooms reserved for his ever-growing staff. This meant strangers were constantly invading the family quarters, making privacy impossible.

  With six children and at least two maids living on the second floor, not to mention herself and her husband, Edith put herself vigorously on record in favor of an expanded White House. Fortunately, Congress and various architects and antiquarians had been debating this very question for several years. One group of experts recommended converting the entire house into executive offices and constructing a more private residence for the President and his family elsewhere. This was something the press-hating Clevelands would have warmly approved. But the Roosevelts, with their strong sense of history, firmly opposed the idea.

  Edith, ever the manager, cut through the indecision by inviting the most famous architect of the day, Charles McKim, to come to the White House and tell her what could be done to make the place more habitable. The Clevelands and McKinleys had done little or nothing in the way of redecoration, and the old house was in another of its periodic phases of shabbiness—one senator called it “squalid.” Aside from being unfit for family living, the cramped setup of the executive offices was out of step with the increased tempo of the modern presidency.

  McKim recommended a bottom-to-top renovation, and with Edith’s backing, Congress coughed up the money. The result was the most thorough overhaul the White House had received since the British burned it—and the creation of the Executive Office Wing, now called the West Wing—to provide working quarters for the President and his staff. The second floor thus became a private sanctuary for the First Family.

  This was only the beginning of Edith’s management. Her entertainments set a new standard for splendor and good taste. She achieved this with a minimum of fuss by hiring an outside caterer who handled all the formal banquets. To these Edith added a plethora of receptions crowded with artists and intellectuals. At one lunch in 1905, the guest list included Henry Adams, the country’s greatest historian, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, its greatest sculptor, and Henry James, its greatest novelist. Even more popular were musicales, at which some of the world’s best-known virtuosos performed. One happened to be a promising young Spanish cellist named Pablo Casals. Another, who won far bigger headlines, was the greatest pianist of the day, Ignace Jan Paderewski.

  At all these events Edith presided with a charm that left everyone babbling superlatives. Not the least of her fans was her husband, who told one correspondent that she “combined… the power of being the best of wives and mothers, the wisest manager of the household and… the ideal great lady and mistress of the White House.”

  One of Edith’s neatest gambits made me retrospectively envious—and I know my mother would have shared my sentiments. Instead of submitting to the perpetual hand mashing that other First Ladies have endured, Edith stood in receiving lines carrying a small bouquet—which of course relieved her of the necessity of shaking hands with anyone. She began this ingenious improvisation early in her White House career, and that was a good thing too. At their first New Year’s Day reception, the Roosevelts greeted over eight thousand people.

  Theodore (he hated to be called Teddy) was another large problem that Edith managed with a deft combination of bossiness, sarcasm, and tenderness. When he worked past 10:30 in his upstairs study, Edith’s foot would tap tap tap on her bedroom floor and staffers would hear her call: “Theodore!” He abandoned his desk instantly. At dinner parties, as Henry Adams loved to point out, Theodore had a tendency to dominate the conversation with torrential monologues. Edith stopped these, too, with a reproving glance—or a postprandial scolding. Politically, she was by no means out of touch. She read four or five newspapers a day and marked stories for the President’s special attention.

  Here is Edith Roosevelt early in her White House career. She all but exudes the self-confidence that made her one of our most masterful First Ladies (AP/Wide World Photos).

  Still another tactical triumph for this amaz
ing First Lady was hiring the first White House social secretary, a shrewd Washingtonian named Belle Hagner, who dealt with the subtleties of guest lists and seating plans with an unerringly expert hand. Simultaneously, Edith took charge of yet another aspect of the social scene. Once a week, she met with the cabinet wives to coordinate their entertaining schedules. The goal was the avoidance of competition and/or duplication with White House events. It also was a discreet way of making sure the Roosevelts were at the center of the action all the time.

  Unlike her successor, Helen Taft, who squirreled away a cool million and a half from her husband’s salary, Edith and Theodore never stinted while they were in the White House. Compared with the Rockefellers and other megamillionaires, the Roosevelts were far from rich. In fact, Edith had worried about Theodore’s plunge into politics because she feared they would go broke trying to keep up appearances for the benefit of the voters. But they both felt the President and his wife should put their best foot forward.

  Ironically, the Roosevelts’ superlative style eventually attracted critics. One newspaper attacked the White House “yachts,” which now numbered three, the new presidential stables, which McKim had added to the grounds, and even the White House tennis court, which Edith had added to McKim’s renovation to try to keep Theodore’s weight down. Even harsher criticism was leveled at the lavish banquets. Edith toned things down a little while Theodore was running for election in his own right in 1904, and nothing came of the brouhaha. After they smashed the poor Democrats flat, Edith went right back to doing things as she pleased.