Edith Wilson’s prominent tenure as First Lady capped the institutional changes made by Edith Roosevelt, the public and influential participation of Helen Taft, and the acknowledged reform leadership of Ellen Wilson. Together, the four women altered the meaning of the title they held. What had been unusual before 1900—the contribution of significant work of their own—became common among presidents’ wives in the next two decades: three of them wrote books about themselves or their families, and the fourth, Ellen Wilson, left a sizeable collection of her own paintings.
To comprehend their cumulative impact, it is necessary only to ask what if they had acted otherwise. What if Edith Roosevelt had refused to acknowledge White House mail directed to her and had not hired a secretary to handle it? What if she had confined herself to family matters and delegated all First Lady mail to her husband’s staff? What if Helen Taft had not admitted to an important role in shaping her husband’s career, keeping him off the Supreme Court until he had a chance to be president? What if Ellen Wilson had not used a deathbed wish to encourage passage of a slum clearance bill that carried her name? What if Edith Wilson had not controlled access to a sick president? What if she had failed to write her account of that period? The answer is that the job of First Lady would have retained its nineteenth-century character rather than taking on the marks of the twentieth.
6
The Paradoxical 1920s
THE MOST POPULAR BOOK on the 1920s emphasizes enormous contradictions in the American scene. At the same time that individuals experienced great strides in their personal lives, the nation took one giant step backward into “normalcy.” A country tired of sacrificing for war and weary of high-minded slogans about “making the world safe for democracy” reverted to old ways that emphasized personal comfort and national isolation.1
Nowhere is the contradiction more apparent than in accounts of women’s lives. The view of the 1920s as “roaring” gives only half the picture. It is true that contraception and cosmetics became more available and acceptable; Freud and flapper fashions offered new freedoms. Electric appliances promised to diminish the time required for housework (if standards of acceptable cleanliness did not rise concurrently) and old barriers that had stood between the sexes, in matters such as smoking in public, dropped. Women increased their percentage of the labor force, and 450,000 of the new jobs were in the professions.2
But the decade had a less exuberant side, one that showed disillusionment and restraint. Some women approached their new opportunities with suspicion, while others refused to change or did so only reluctantly. Reliable contraception information and equipment did not reach all women who would have used it, and only a small percentage of women eligible went out to vote in 1920.3 The number of female physicians actually declined in the decade as did women’s share of college enrollment, and three out of every four women who earned college degrees went into fields commonly considered “women’s work”—teaching and nursing.4
This paradox of apparent freedom circumscribed by old, strong traditions shows up in the lives of the three First Ladies of the 1920s. Warren Harding’s landslide victory over James Cox in 1920 brought into the White House Florence Kling Harding, considerably more conscious of the value of good public relations than any of her predecessors but, at the same time, extremely narrow in her outlook. At Warren Harding’s death in 1923, charming Grace Goodhue Coolidge captured the nation’s attention. With her dropped waistlines and raised hemlines, she epitomized current flapper style. Not until she had left Washington did she reveal her considerably more serious side in the poetry she published. After Calvin Coolidge chose “not to run” in 1928, an erudite, well-traveled Lou Henry Hoover became First Lady, and for all her demurrals about merely “forming a backdrop for Bertie,”5 she gave some remarkably feminist speeches. All three of the presidents’ wives who moved into the White House in the 1920s sought to present themselves—their educations, marital arrangements, participation in their husbands’ careers, and views on women’s roles—in ways that reflected contemporary standards without offending those whose views remained less modern. Together they set the stage for many of the innovations for which Eleanor Roosevelt gained credit in the 1930s and 1940s.
None of the three was young by the time her husband took the presidential oath. Florence Kling Harding, at sixty-one, was the oldest woman yet to assume the job of First Lady. She made a point, however, of appearing energetic and youthful, and in the 1920 campaign, she seemed every bit as up-to-date as the twenty-nine-year-old wife of Warren’s Democratic opponent. Both major parties had looked to pivotal Ohio for names to head their tickets that year and both had settled on former newspapermen who had moved on to politics, James M. Cox to the governor’s seat and Warren Harding to the U.S. Senate. The men’s parallel careers had not, however, included similar wives.
In a campaign interview with a New York reporter, James Cox’s young wife sounded as sweet and docile as an antebellum matron, concerned only about her children and the “price to pay” if her husband won the 1920 election. Florence Harding at least appeared more in control of her life as she insisted that victory would not affect her marriage (which was later rumored to have contained a great deal of discord) and that nothing could “disturb our serenity and happiness.” Margaret Blair Cox, who had graduated from an elite eastern girls’ school, described her interest in gardening and canning while Florence ignored the domestic side of her life and stressed her part in her husband’s career. “Some people in Ohio will tell you she is the better politician of the two,” the reporter Ann O’Hagan wrote, adding that even Warren admitted that his automobile was the only thing he possessed that “Florence did not have a desire to run.”6
The new acceptability of cosmetics assisted Florence considerably in her determination to appear young and vigorous. Married for almost thirty years to a man five years her junior, she had grown adept at camouflaging the difference, and even her enemies agreed that she usually succeeded in looking younger than her years. She employed lace inserts and wide velvet ribbons, often studded with a bauble, to cover neck wrinkles. Instead of accepting the comfort of flat shoes, she wedged her feet into the then fashionable pointed toes with toothpick heels. Daily appointments with a hairdresser kept every gray hair marcelled tightly in place, and liberal applications of rouge suggested, at least from a distance, the rosy glow of youth.
The 1920s rewarded a different kind of youthfulness than had been the vogue in the first half of the nineteenth century. Instead of the innocent, ingénue stance of the antebellum period, the preferred model in the 1920s suggested adventure, glamor, and sophistication. Movie stars and aviators had replaced sober reformers as the “most admired women in America,”7 and all three of the 1920s First Ladies reflected that change. Even the scholarly Lou Hoover released a formal photograph of herself, swathed in white fur and peeking almost flirtatiously from behind a fan.8 Florence Harding’s wardrobe of plumed hats and pearl-studded satin gowns could have competed with those of a Hollywood starlet.9
By far the most successful of the three in conveying energy and glamor was the youngest, Grace Coolidge, who at forty-four showed some of the fun-loving rebelliousness for which she had been known in her teens. A sorority member at the University of Vermont, enthusiastic dancer, and Boston Red Sox fan, she was among the first to arrive at parties and the last to leave. She longed to try whatever was new, from smoking a cigarette to bobbing her hair and traveling in an airplane. That she recognized her marriage to a successful politician limited her opportunities is clear from a statement she made soon after moving into the White House. “Being wife to a government worker,” she wrote, “is a very confining position.”10
Grace’s description of herself should not obscure the fact that, unlike any of her predecessors, she had attended a coeducational university and prepared for a career of her own. Although Lucy Hayes (1877–1881) is often credited with being the first president’s wife to have graduated from college, hers was a women’
s academy that did not offer the same curriculum that would have been offered to men students. Grace Coolidge earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Vermont and then went on for additional training so that she could teach the deaf. Many nineteenth-century presidents’ wives had taught school, but only temporarily, in order to earn some money and perhaps put some distance between themselves and their parents. Their letters convey little sense of education as a career or lifelong interest. Grace Coolidge worked only three years between her college graduation in 1902 and her marriage in 1905, but she maintained a permanent interest in training the deaf. After her husband’s political career ended, she served on several boards and committees dedicated to improving conditions for the hearing-impaired.
Lou Henry Hoover’s degree in geology also came from a coeducational university, Stanford, where she studied with the same professors who had taught her husband. Of the three, only Florence Harding followed a traditional woman’s course of study, but her training at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music equipped her for the time when she had to support herself and young son. Any American young woman searching for a model in the 1920s had three examples of presidents’ wives who had prepared to take care of themselves. That each chose to join forces with a politically ambitious husband is another matter.
Divorce statistics suggest that Americans ended their marriages in the “roaring twenties” more often than in any preceding decade,11 and here, too, examples stood at the top of political life. Short-memoried reporters, who seemed to imply in 1952 and 1956 that Adlai Stevenson was the first divorced man to win the presidential nomination of a major party, would have profited from a close look at the 1920 election. Both Florence Harding, whose husband headed the Republican ticket, and James Cox, the Democratic hopeful, had been divorced from their previous spouses. Florence had sued her first husband for desertion in the 1880s, and Cox had split with the mother of his three children in 1911.12 Neither breakup received much attention in the 1920 campaign, however, perhaps because each side considered restraint advisable in light of its own vulnerability.13 The divorces may have seemed irrelevant since both had occurred well in the past and, at the time of the campaign, all the principals had either remarried or died. A prominent woman journalist, who interviewed both candidates’ wives for an article in a popular magazine, wrote the entire piece without mentioning either divorce.14
By the time she became First Lady, Florence Harding had been married to Warren for nearly thirty years—time in which she had shown two powerful traits which her enemies and supporters agreed she excelled in: willfulness and determination. While still enrolled in the Cincinnati Conservatory, her energies had turned more to play than to the piano, and she had joined in with a hometown group of young people known as the “rough set” because they took up among other sports the new fad of roller-skating. One of their number, Henry A. De Wolfe, was particularly attractive to her, perhaps because her father detested his heavy drinking and playboy attitude. When Amos Kling, Florence’s father, forbade her seeing Henry, she promptly married him and six months later gave birth to a son.15
The young couple’s attempt to run a roller-skating rink in nearby Galion failed, and Henry quickly tired of the responsibilities attached to being head of a family. Before their son had reached two years of age, he deserted Florence who had little choice but to return to Marion. The story persisted for years that she had taken her son and slept in an abandoned house the first night back rather than humble herself by appealing to her father for help.16 Her in-laws supplied some money; Florence gave piano lessons; and eventually her father came to her rescue, but she had learned an important lesson about the costliness of dependence and never allowed herself to become quite so defenseless again. After her divorce, she let her father adopt and raise her son while she set out to try again.
In a city of 4,000 people, an ambitious young piano teacher could not have remained long unaware of the charming, handsome newcomer who had just bought part ownership in one of Marion’s newspapers. The publisher, Warren G. Harding, had a sister who studied piano with Florence, and soon teacher and newspaperman met. That Amos Kling vehemently opposed his daughter’s having anything to do with Warren increased his attractiveness immensely.
By the 1880s the Hardings ranked below the Klings in Marion’s hierarchy, although a few years earlier that would not have been the case. In 1860 when Florence was born, her family lived in an apartment over their hardware store, but circumstances changed as Amos Kling prospered in real estate and business. By the time Warren began to court Florence Kling, her father was one of the most important men in town. Warren’s parents both practiced medicine and his mother later acquired midwife certification, but their specialty, homeopathy, paid none too well. Warren, who had prospered during his first few years with the Marion Star , had bought out his partners and built himself a handsome house on one of the town’s best streets. Such considerations mattered far less to Amos Kling than the persistent rumor around town that Warren had Negro ancestry. Marion, Ohio, was not integrated in the 1880s, and racial prejudice was strong. In such a setting, the ancestry of a new, young man in town became the subject of considerable speculation. Some of the locals insisted they detected Negro features in Warren.
Continuing a long tradition, the future First Lady married against strenuous parental objection, and in this particular case, the objection remained so strong that Amos Kling did not speak to his daughter for seven years. The small ceremony at Warren’s new house in 1891 united a divorcée, one week short of celebrating her thirty-first birthday, with a promising businessman, then twenty-five. Some of their friends detected a mother-son relationship in the match and they pointed out that Warren had always been very attentive to his mother, taking her fresh flowers every Sunday or, if he could not go, arranging for someone else to make the delivery. Now he transferred that filial devotion to his wife, making her his conscience, bookkeeper, and monitor. For the fun part of his life he evidently went elsewhere—at least two women friends left accounts of the time they spent with Warren, and his poker-playing friends supplied their own recollections of his participation in their games.17
Florence had her own reasons for entering the marriage—she came from the same generation that had produced many women who insisted on independence. Born in the same decade as First Ladies Helen Taft and Ellen Wilson, Florence Harding kept her rebellions closer home than they had—she married local young men whom her father detested and then worked hard to prove him wrong.
Florence devoted herself to Warren’s career as though her own reputation were at stake. His mother, Phoebe Dickerson Harding, who was something of a career woman herself, had warned Florence to keep the icebox full and both eyes on Warren. Florence lost no time stopping at the Star office to see how the business—and Warren—operated. She remained for fourteen years, first streamlining the bookkeeping system and then organizing a home delivery service to boost circulation. One of the carriers whom she hired ran for president himself later, and he recalled how she had taken over the Star. “She was a woman of very narrow mentality and range of interest or understanding,” Norman Thomas wrote, “but of strong will and within a certain area of genuine kindness. … It was her energy and her business sense which made the Star.” According to Norman Thomas, Florence complemented her husband’s enormous affability by overseeing the advertising and circulation while Warren supplied “the front … a joiner … popular.”18
As for the other part of her mother-in-law’s advice, Florence dutifully pedalled her bicycle home to cook Warren’s dinner, but her domesticity did not extend to maternity. She showed little interest in the son from her first marriage, and by Warren she remained childless even though one of his women friends reported that he would have very much liked to have a child. It was “Florence [who] would not hear of it,” he said, and he explained that she took “tiny white pills” to avoid conceiving.19
The control over her own life that had been so conspicuously abse
nt from Florence’s first marriage showed up in other ways in her second marriage. She involved herself in each of Warren’s campaigns: from state senator he moved to lieutenant governor and then, after losing a bid for governor in 1910, to the United States Senate in 1915. In the early days, she accompanied him on the lecture tour, impressing some of his managers as “meanly accurate in calculating expenses.”20 By the time Florence arrived in Washington, one politically active woman observed in her a “ruthless ambition to become First Lady” as she “constantly worked and made Warren work toward that end.”21 Florence once confided to Norman Thomas’s wife that Warren got into a lot of trouble when she was not around so she limited those opportunities whenever possible. During his Senate days, she encouraged him to give his interviews at home so that she could participate, and she kept up with the issues so that eventually Warren’s campaign manager pronounced her “one of the best informed women in the country.”22
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