First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  Lucretia Garfield lived only a few weeks in the White House before she became ill and her husband was assassinated. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  In this advertisement, carried in Harper’s Weekly, May 15, 1878, the President and First Lady appear to endorse a household appliance. Courtesy of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center.

  Caroline Harrison, the second wife of a president to die in the White House, was noted for starting the White House china collection and for helping to make a medical school coeducational. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  At age twenty-one, Frances Folsom became the first woman to have married a president in a White House ceremony. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  Grover Cleveland’s admitted association with a Buffalo woman resulted in many cartoons such as this one. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  Ida McKinley, weak and ill during most of her White House stay, managed to symbolize the kind of femininity that many Americans found attractive. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

  5

  The Office of First Lady: A Twentieth-Century Development

  AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY began, the sickly, self-centered Ida McKinley still sat in the White House. Before many more administrations had ended, however, evidence would show that the job of First Lady was changing. Gradually, presidents’ wives began to hire separate staffs of their own, take more public roles in policy and personnel decisions, and lead important reform movements. Although still unpaid, the job was quasi-institutionalized. Edith Wilson (1915–1921), Woodrow’s second wife, received most of the publicity associated with this shift and heard herself criticized for exercising “petticoat government,” but she should be seen as part of a trend rather than an anomaly. Each First Lady between 1901 and 1921, even the most insecure, left her mark. Together, they guaranteed that their successors would never find an easy retreat from a public role.

  It is no accident that a new and stronger role for the president’s wife coincides with the United States’ growing importance in the world and the executive branch’s ascendancy over the legislature. Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909), William Howard Taft (1909–1913), and Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921) all possessed much greater knowledge and experience in the field of foreign affairs than had most of their immediate predecessors, and Theodore and Woodrow held definite ideas about a president’s preeminent role. Theodore Roosevelt’s attempt to engineer a peace settlement between Russia and Japan in 1905 and Woodrow Wilson’s vigorous activity at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 are only examples of how the two men put their ideas into action, causing the rest of the world to focus more attention on the United States and, in particular, its presidents. Press coverage of chief executives increased dramatically, and some of the new attention focused on the president’s family. When Theodore Roosevelt described the presidency as a “bully pulpit,” he might have also noted the increased opportunities for a First Lady.

  For almost a dozen years (September 1901 to March 1913), either Edith Carow Roosevelt or Helen Herron Taft presided over the White House. With their husbands at the top of the Republican party, their paths crossed many times, and that they did not particularly like each other is a matter of record. Edith’s stepdaughter, Alice, revealed at least part of the reason when she wrote of Helen Taft: “Her ideas were rather grander than ours.”1 Helen, who in 1914 became the first ex-president’s wife to publish her own memoirs, implied that Edith did not excel at household management and had left the executive mansion depleted of linens and china.2

  Although the two women bore an uncanny resemblance to each other in the bare facts of their lives, they differed markedly in their views of their places in the world. Born in 1861, they married within six months of each other and each died in her eighties. Yet beneath these irrelevant similarities lay sharp differences. Edith Roosevelt always appeared supremely confident, in command of herself and often, it seemed, of those around her—while Helen Taft’s ambition pushed her to try for more. No achievement sufficed, and even a very large prize, like residence in the White House, never quite equaled her expectations.

  Portraits of the two women underline the contrast. Edith Roosevelt sits regally, chin up and arm gracefully arched as though she never meant to move, apparently unconcerned about the stray wisp or two that falls on her face. Helen Taft is perfectly coiffed, leaning forward as though ready to pounce into action.3

  Edith Carow Roosevelt traced her American roots all the way back to the 1630s, through a line of illustrious men and women that included the prominent Puritan Jonathan Edwards. She grew up in New York City in the same Union Square neighborhood where the Roosevelts lived, and Corinne, Theodore’s sister, became Edith’s best friend. Theodore’s relationship with Edith is less clear. Although he was three years older than she, they moved in the same circles, and before he enrolled in Harvard the two may have reached an agreement to marry.4 Edith later explained that Theodore had proposed but that she had refused, presumably influenced by her family’s opinion that she was too young to accept. In any case, Theodore’s path in Cambridge intersected with that of an exceptionally beautiful young woman, Alice Lee, and as soon as he graduated, he married her. Four years later she died of Bright’s disease on the same day that Theodore’s mother died of typhoid fever. He was inconsolable and left his New York State Assembly seat for a period of reflection and strenuous exercise on a North Dakota ranch. Rejuvenated, he returned to run (unsuccessfully) for mayor of New York City in 1886. A few weeks later, in an unheralded ceremony, he married Edith Carow in London.

  In addition to Theodore’s daughter, Alice, product of his first marriage, Edith raised five children born to her and Theodore. Frequently she implied that she considered her husband a sixth. While he rough-housed with them and encouraged them in all kinds of shenanigans, she remained aloof, neither participating nor intervening. Once, while she was preparing to return to their Sagamore Hill home on Long Island, someone suggested that she wait until Theodore could accompany her, but she laughingly dismissed the offer, saying that she already had her hands full.

  Whether hurt by being second choice or because of some other inclination, Edith showed an almost complete detachment from everything around her, an attitude described by one historian as almost “Oriental.”5 She was one of those rare women with such a strong sense of her own self that neither a large family nor a conspicuous place in the country’s capital could disconcert her or shake her certainty that she knew what was appropriate.

  This exceptional confidence helped Edith Roosevelt initiate changes in the executive mansion that a more insecure woman would have hesitated to risk. In slightly less than eight years, she solved the old problem of how to separate the president’s personal residence from his official home, developed a new model for dealing with the insatiable demand for information about the president’s family, removed herself from decisions about official entertaining by turning to professional caterers, and hired a secretary to handle her official correspondence, thus institutionalizing the job in a way that had not been done before.

  Part of Edith’s managerial ability resulted from years of running a large household and overseeing its transfer from one city to another. In the fifteen years between her marriage to Theodore and his ascendancy to the presidency, he had progressed rapidly through several important offices, including president of the New York City Police Board (1896–1897), assistant secretary of the Navy in Washington (1897–1898), and governor of New York State (1899–1901). Although the governorship had lasted only two years, it provided Edith, just as it did Theodore, with valuable experience in administration. The family’s house on Long Island became an extension of the governor’s mansion, with political associates and foreign dignitaries visiting the Roosevelts there.6

  Edith opposed Theodore’s run for vice president in 1900, just as she had previously objected to his attempts to win other elective offices, because she understood that the financial drain would be conside
rable. When the Republican ticket won and William McKinley was assassinated only months later, she had to face the prospect of moving her family to Washington. At his inauguration in 1901, Theodore was the youngest yet to take that oath of office. Edith, who had just turned forty, had to solve the problem of how to spread a president’s salary to cover the costs of her brood of six and yet meet all the other obligations of her husband’s job.

  The rambunctious children reinforced the image of a vibrant, energetic man in the White House. Ranging in age from debutante Alice down to four-year-old Quentin, they had already gained national attention for their antics in the New York governor’s mansion. On one occasion, widely and gleefully reported in magazines, they caused an official party to end abruptly when the windows of the reception room were opened and smells unmistakenly those of a barnyard wafted in from the children’s basement menagerie.7

  The White House provided new opportunities for their imaginative minds, and no corner remained long unexplored. The children slid down bannisters, tried their stilts in the Red Room, and repeatedly startled dinner guests by introducing pets at unexpected moments. Jacob Riis, the famous journalist, reported that he had been breakfasting with the Roosevelts when the president apologized for not being able to show him the children’s kangaroo rat. Young Kermit Roosevelt immediately obliged by taking the rat from his pocket and demonstrating how it could hop, first on two legs and then on three, across the dining room table.8

  Such a young and active family acted like a magnet for the curious, and Edith resolved to handle the publicity more successfully than her predecessors had managed. Frances Cleveland had assumed that she could bar reporters from the White House lives of her children, but she found that the lack of access resulted in wild rumors that they were deformed or ill. An older and wiser Edith Roosevelt, aware that she could not deny the public’s curiosity, decided to satisfy it on her terms. Raised in a society that dictated that a lady’s name should appear in print only at her birth, her marriage, and her death, she had to cope with being a First Lady whose activities the public wanted to see in print every day. By supplying posed photographs of herself and her children, she solved most of the problem. McClure’s, Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s Weekly, and Review of Reviews9 all ran pictures of the Roosevelt family but gave little information. Edith appeared on the cover of the Ladies’ Home Journal and alongside articles that featured her husband but had nothing to do with her.10 When the time came for Alice Roosevelt’s wedding to Nicholas Longworth and for Edith’s daughter’s debut, photographers and reporters were included in the preparations so that the uncontrolled snooping that had marred the Cleveland wedding would not be repeated.

  Anyone who thought the formal, posed photographs of the White House family represented increased access was wrong because Edith Roosevelt instituted changes to increase, not lessen, the distance between her brood and the public. In Albany, she had learned that a bouquet of flowers, firmly held, relieved her of the duty of shaking hands in a reception line, and she continued this practice in Washington. After Theodore obligingly greeted 8,538 people on New Year’s Day, 1909, one writer in a national magazine asked readers if anyone could blame Edith for clutching her bouquet of orchids.11

  Extensive renovation of the mansion during the summer of 1902 made possible a greater division between the family’s quarters and those set aside for official events. While the Roosevelts stayed at another house on Lafayette Square, the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White supervised the enlarging of the White House.12 The conservatories came down and were replaced by an office wing. Many First Ladies had wanted a separate residence for the family, at a distance from the official duties of the president. Edith Roosevelt settled for one house but engineered a clearer division between its two functions. The family’s quarters were upstairs and off-limits to the president’s staff and to people invited to the public areas down below.

  In many ways, Edith acted as top commander. The secretary she hired, Belle Hagner, oversaw many details, and one of the other aides reported he was “simply astonished at [Hagner’s] executive ability. She really is the chief factor at the White House.”13 To control the information that went out concerning official entertaining, Edith enjoined her children not to talk to reporters but arranged for Hagner to release details. All presidents have attempted to some extent to control the reports concerning their administrations, but Edith showed that presidents’ wives could learn from the same book. Her stepdaughter Alice explained how Edith was not above “managing” the news. She would wear the same dress several times but instruct reporters to describe it as “green” one evening and “blue” the next.14

  In a further move to establish command over Washington social life, Edith scheduled weekly meetings with the wives of cabinet members. On Tuesdays, while their husbands conferred on one side of the White House, the women met on the other. Archibald Butt, an aide to the president, reported that the women did nothing more than take tea and compare crochet patterns, but Helen Taft, wife of the secretary of war, attended and supplied a different version when she explained: “This was not a social affair.”15

  Indeed, they were planning conferences engineered by Edith to set the limits on entertaining and help keep expenses down. Even with a presidential salary of $50,000 and an equivalent allowance for running the household, she needed to economize. Simply cutting costs would not accomplish her purpose. She could not risk having the president’s parties judged inferior to those of cabinet members. The other wives would naturally be tempted, she understood, to compete among themselves unless she set boundaries for them all. By announcing just what she planned to serve or wear or how she would decorate or entertain for a particular reception or dinner, she restrained exuberant hostesses and reassured the insecure ones who feared falling behind.16 Rumor had it that she also used the gatherings of cabinet wives to issue ultimata on behavior and that on one occasion she warned a married woman to break off her romantic involvement with a foreign diplomat or else find herself banned from the capital’s social events.17

  The institutionalization of the job of First Lady is underlined by Edith’s delegating to specialists the responsibility of preparing food for official dinners, rather than burdening herself with small details. Though the caterers were expensive, charging $7.50 per person per guest (the average woman clerk did not earn that amount in a week), the arrangement shielded Edith from some public criticism and saved her a great deal of work. To ensure that her own contribution and that of other First Ladies would not be forgotten, she continued the presidential china collection, begun by Caroline Harrison, and she initiated a portrait gallery so that all presidents’ wives, “myself included,” she said, could have memorials. Haphazard and incomplete before Edith Roosevelt, the series gained regular additions after her tenure because every administration arranged for an official portrait of the wife, as well as the president, to stay behind when residence in the White House ended.

  When Edith Roosevelt vacated the White House after nearly eight years, opinion was almost unanimous in her favor. Archibald Butt judged that she left the job “without making a mistake.”18 Columnists marveled at her stamina, and a leading women’s magazine, in an article entitled, “Why Mrs. Roosevelt Has Not Broken Down,” attributed her good health to exercise.19 That was far less important, however, than the shield of self-confidence that seemed to insulate her against criticism that had worried some other presidents’ wives. When a famous woman was quoted in a national magazine as saying Edith Roosevelt “dresses on 300 dollars a year and looks it,” Edith proudly clipped the column for her scrapbook.20

  Her most celebrated brush with public opinion resulted from a disagreement over her right to remove a piece of furniture from the White House, and she wisely abandoned her fight rather than pursue it. The question arose when she left the White House and wanted to take with her a small settee that she had purchased for $40 during the refurbishing of the mansion. It had come to symbolize for her the year
s in Washington and she wanted to have it reproduced, at her own expense, and take the original back to Sagamore Hill. Word leaked out and the press treated the settee as though it were a national treasure that the First Lady was trying to purloin. Edith surrendered, saying that she would not have the settee even if it were given to her because of the unpleasant associations it now carried for her.21

  Edith Roosevelt never went beyond classes at New York’s Comstock School, but the erudite setting in which she was raised provided a complete education. If she failed to flaunt this, as her husband sometimes did his intellectual prowess, it was because of a difference in their styles. Theodore confessed that Edith’s education was really much broader than his own and that he often got credit for her ideas. “She is better read,” Theodore told a friend, “and her value of literary merit is better than mine. I have tremendous admiration for her judgment. She is not only cultured but scholarly. I sometimes fear she has a good natured contempt for my literary criticism and I know she scorns secretly my general knowledge of literature.”22

  Edith’s shrewdness extended to politics, and she told a friend she could not understand why, in 1904, Theodore made a premature public promise not to run again in 1908.23 Her strong streak of practicality and good sense helped moderate her husband’s view of the world and his chances in it, and she was one of the few people who did not hesitate to set him straight. When Theodore ventured into crowds, evidently oblivious to possible physical danger, she kept tabs on his guards and encouraged them to disregard his requests for less surveillance.24 His plans to wear a fancy colonel’s uniform on a post-presidential tour of Europe received a veto from Edith, who pointed out that he would be ridiculed by his countrymen. When he toyed with the idea of trying for an unprecedented third term in 1912, she advised him to “put it out of your mind. You will never be President again.”25