First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  107. “New Mistress of the White House,” Current Opinion (March 1913), pp. 195–196

  108. Daggett, “Woodrow Wilson’s Wife,” p. 320.

  109. Frances McGregor Gordon, “The Tact of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson,” Collier’s, vol. 50 (March 8, 1913), p. 13, gives a contemporary account. For historians’ evaluations, see Saunders, Ellen Axson Wilson, pp. 214–215. Bryan’s motives at the 1912 Democratic convention remain the subject of much speculation. See George E. Mowry, “Election of 1912,” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., et al., eds., History of American Presidential Elections, 4 vols. (New York, 1971), vol. 3, pp. 2150–2151.

  110. Daggett, “Woodrow Wilson’s Wife,” p. 322.

  111. Mrs. Ernest P. Bicknell, “The Home-Maker of the White House,” Survey, vol. 33 (October 3, 1914), p. 19.

  112. Parks and Leighton, It Was Fun, p. 36.

  113. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom (Princeton, 1956), pp. 247–249.

  114. Bicknell, “Home-Maker,” p. 20.

  115. McAdoo, Woodrow Wilsons, p. 201.

  116. McAdoo, Woodrow Wilsons, p. 201.

  117. New York Times, August 7, 1914, p. 1; September 15, 1914, p. 10.

  118. McAdoo, Woodrow Wilsons, p. 247. No president since John Adams had addressed Congress in person.

  119. Edith Boiling Wilson, My Memoir (New York, 1939), p. 38. This autobiography has been judged unreliable in many areas, and Edith herself gave contradictory accounts of events, as, for example, her first meeting with Woodrow.

  120. Wilson, My Memoir, p. 33.

  121. Wilson, My Memoir, p. 18.

  122. Arthur S. Link, biographical entry for Edith Boiling Galt Wilson, in Sicherman et al., eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period, p. 740.

  123. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Library of Congress, reel 71.

  124. Wilson, My Memoir, p. 146.

  125. Jaffray, Secrets of the White House, p. 58.

  126. New York Times, March 5, 1913, p. 8.

  127. Wilson, My Memoir, p. 125.

  128. New York Times, July 10, 1977, p. 42.

  129. Alden Hatch, Edith Bolling Wilson: First Lady Extraordinary (New York, 1961), p. 80.

  130. New York Times, January 10, 1918, p. 1; Sally Hunter Graham, “Woodrow Wilson, Alice Paul, and the Woman Suffrage Movement,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 98 (Winter 1983–84), pp. 665–679, presents evidence showing a gradual shift in the president’s position.

  131. New York Times, January 9, 1918, p. 12.

  132. Charles A. Selden, “Mrs. Woodrow Wilson: Wife and Secretary Who Kept the President Alive During the World’s Greatest Crisis,” Ladies’ Home Journal (October 1921), p. 20.

  133. Dudley Harmon, “What is Mrs. Wilson Doing?” Ladies’ Home Journal (July 1918), p. 22.

  134. Florence Jaffray Harriman, From Pinafores to Politics (New York, 1923), p. 325.

  135. Selden, “Mrs. Woodrow Wilson,” p. 156.

  136. Wilson, My Memoir, p. 289.

  137. Jaffray, Secrets of the White House, p. 71.

  138. Gene Smith, When the Cheering Stopped (New York, 1964), p. 112.

  139. Robert J. Bender, “Signed—Edith Bolling Wilson,” Collier’s, vol. 65 (March 1920), p. 5.

  140. Wilson, My Memoir, p. 299.

  141. Barbara Klaw, “Lady Bird Johnson Remembers,” American Heritage (December 1980), p. 7.

  142. Edith James, Mabel E. Deutrich, and Virginia C. Purdy, “Edith Bolling Wilson: A Documentary View,” in Mabel E. Deutrich and Virginia C. Purdy, eds., Clio Was a Woman: Studies in the History of American Women (Washington, D.C., 1980), p. 238.

  143. Judith Weaver, “Edith Bolling Wilson as First Lady: A Study in the Power of Personalities,” Presidential Studies Quarterly (Winter 1985), p. 51.

  144. Wilson, My Memoir, p. 297. According to Edith, she had suggested that Woodrow consider a compromise with senators who opposed him, and he had replied: “Little girl, don’t you desert me; that I cannot stand.”

  145. Weaver, “Edith Bolling Wilson,” p, 70.

  146. On December 11, 1975, the National Broadcasting Company included in a publicity release this summary of Edith Wilson: “During an era when women had not yet been given the right to vote, Mrs. Wilson virtually took over the reins of the White House when her husband collapsed.” Cited in Deutrich and Purdy, Clio Was a Woman, pp. 239–240.

  147. Hatch, Edith Bolling Wilson; Ishbel Ross, Power With Grace (New York, 1975).

  148. Gregg Phifer, “Edith Bolling Wilson: Gatekeeper Extraordinary,” Speech Monographs, vol. 38 (1971), pp. 277–289.

  149. Robert J. Maddox, “Mrs. Wilson and the Presidency,” American History Illustrated, vol. 7 (1973), pp. 36–44.

  Chapter 6

  1. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New York, 1931). See especially chapter 5, “The Revolution in Manners and Morals.” Although the Allen book is now old, its view of the 1920s continues to dominate in general textbooks. For more recent works on how outdated Allen’s view of the 1920s has become, particularly in regard to women’s history, see J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Question (Urbana, 1973). Important articles on American women in the 1920s include James R. McGovern, “The American Woman’s Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals,” Journal of American History, vol. 55 (September 1968), in which changes in women’s manners and morals are traced to the first decade of the twentieth century, and Estelle Freedman, “The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s,” Journal of American History, vol. 61 (September 1974), in which the author provides a historiographical framework for studying women from the 1920s to the 1970s.

  2. William H. Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles (New York, 1972), p. 50.

  3. Chafe, American Woman, p. 30.

  4. Chafe, American Woman, p. 58.

  5. Ruby A. Black, “The White House Day,” Household (February 1930), p. 12.

  6. Anne O’Hagan, “The Woman We Send to the White House,” Delineator (November 1920), p. 7.

  7. Lois W. Banner, Women in Modern America (New York, 1974), pp. 160–167.

  8. Good Housekeeping, vol. 90 (April 1930), p. 24.

  9. The Harding Memorial in Marion, Ohio, has a large collection of Florence Harding’s clothes, and I am grateful to Herbert S. Gary for showing them to me and for sharing his knowledge of the Hardings.

  10. Barbara Sicherman et al., eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period (Cambridge, 1980), p. 163.

  11. U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract (Washington, D.C., 1931), p. 91. In 1900, eighty-one divorces were granted in the United States for every one thousand marriages. By 1925, this figure had increased to 148 (per one thousand marriages) and to 163 in 1929.

  12. New York Times, July 16, 1957, p. 25.

  13. In a campaign biography, Roger W. Babson, Cox: The Man (New York, 1920) carefully explains the details of the Cox divorce and assigns blame to neither party. James Cox’s parents had separated when he was a teenager; James’s first wife, whose maiden name was coincidentally “Harding,” had remarried in 1914 before James reportedly met his second wife. The candidates in the 1920 election must have set something of a record for the number of marital splits that had occurred in their immediate families: Warren Harding’s father had been divorced from his second wife, Eudora Adella Kelley Luvisi Harding, in 1916.

  14. O’Hagan, “Woman We Send to the White House,” p. 7.

  15. Edward T. James et al., eds., Notable American Women, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1971), vol. 2, p. 132. Carl Sferrazza Anthony, Florence Harding: The First Lady, the Jazz Age, and the Death of America’s Most Scandalous President (New York, 1998), xvii, calls the marriage to DeWolfe “a sham. They were never married.”

  16. Samuel Hopkins Adams, Incredible Era: Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding (Boston, 1939), p. 19.

  17. Nan Britten, The President’s Daughter (New York, 1927), and Carrie Phillips’s letters. See note 29 below.

  18. Adams, Inc
redible Era, p. 25. See also Andrew Sinclair, The Available Man: The Life Behind the Masks of Warren G. Harding (Chicago, 1961), p. 297, for a different interpretation—one that gives less importance to Florence’s business acumen.

  19. Britten, President’s Daughter, page 74. It is hardly necessary to note that Warren might not have been completely honest in what he told Nan about his wife or his relationship with her.

  20. Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove (New York, 1968), p. 162.

  21. Good Housekeeping (February 1931), p. 18.

  22. Harry M. Daugherty and Thomas Dixon, The Inside Story of the Harding Tragedy (New York, 1932), p. 170.

  23. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Crowded Hours (New York, 1933), pp. 324–325.

  24. Evalyn Walsh McLean, Father Struck It Rich (Boston, 1936), p. 239.

  25. McLean, Father Struck It Rich, p. 251.

  26. McLean, Father Struck It Rich, p. vii.

  27. McLean, Father Struck It Rich, p, 217.

  28. McLean, Father Struck It Rich, p. 220.

  29. See New York Times, July 10, 1964, p. 1; “250 Letters from Harding to Ohio Merchant’s Wife Found.” The letters between Warren Harding and Carrie Phillips are the property of the Library of Congress and closed to researchers, but one historian, who claimed to have seen them briefly, discussed their contents in American Heritage (February 1965), pp. 25–31.

  30. Judith Exner, My Story (New York, 1977), esp. pp. 220–221 and 244–245.

  31. Kay Summersby Morgan, Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight David Eisenhower (New York, 1976). Nan Britten’s claim of intimacy with Warren Harding has generally been accepted as credible, although some evidence suggests that mumps, which he had as a teenager, had left him sterile and that he could not have been the father of Britten’s child. In that case, Florence’s failure to have a child by Warren would not have been a matter of her choice or the result of the “tiny white pills.”

  32. New York Times, June 13, 1920, p. 7.

  33. Adams, Incredible Era, pp. 125–126.

  34. Robert K, Murray, The Harding Era (Minneapolis, 1969), p. 64.

  35. McLean, Father Struck It Rich, p. 254.

  36. Longworth, Crowded Hours, p. 324.

  37. Edith Wilson, My Memoir (New York, 1939), p. 318; Beatrice Fairfax, Ladies Then and Now (New York, 1944), p. 204.

  38. Ishbel Ross, Ladies of the Press (New York, 1936), p. 312.

  39. Murray, Harding Era, p, 418.

  40. New York Times, June 13, 1920, p. 7.

  41. Murray, Harding Era, p. 418.

  42. Russell, Shadow of Blooming Grove, p. 399. Although Florence Harding was photographed frequently, pictures of her with her grandchildren are not easily located—if they exist at all.

  43. John D. Hicks, biographical entry for Florence Harding in Notable American Women, vol. 2, p. 132.

  44. O’Hagan, “Woman We Send to the White House,” p. 7.

  45. Russell, Shadow of Blooming Grove, p. 428.

  46. Photograph in collection at Harding Memorial, Marion, Ohio.

  47. Letter of February 7, 1922, Harding Papers, reel 242, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio. Florence Harding’s Papers are on reels 242–247, with her letters on 242–243 and clippings about her on the subsequent reels.

  48. Lillian Rogers Parks and Frances Spatz Leighton, My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House (New York, 1961), p. 162.

  49. Florence Kling Harding to Mary E. Lee, Letter of January 5, 1922, Harding Papers.

  50. Florence Kling Harding to Evalyn Walsh McLean, Letter of July 28, 1922, Harding Papers.

  51. Sinclair, Available Man, pp. 285–286.

  52. An entire book on the subject was later published, detailing how Florence poisoned Warren to save him from the shame that exposure of corruption in his administration would bring. See The Strange Death of President Harding: From the Diaries of Gaston B. Means as Told to May Dixon Thacker (New York, 1930).

  53. Adams, Incredible Era, p. 8.

  54. Thomas A, Bailey, The American Pageant, 4th ed. (Lexington, Massachusetts, 1971), p. 806.

  55. “Warren Harding’s 4,000 Mile Funeral,” Literary Digest, vol. 78 (August 25. 1923).

  56. McLean, Father Struck It Rich, p. 274.

  57. Daugherty and Dixon, Inside Story, p. 174.

  58. New York Times, November 22, 1924, p. 3.

  59. Nicholas Murray Butler, Across the Busy Years, 2 vols. (New York, 1939–40), vol. 1, pp. 355–356.

  60. Good Housekeeping (February 1932), p. 18.

  61. Grace Coolidge, “The Real Calvin Coolidge,” Good Housekeeping (February 1935), p. 181. This is the first of a series of articles (all with the same title) published over several months by Grace Coolidge. The articles include quotations from their friends and Grace’s recollections.

  62. Grace Coolidge, “The Real Calvin Coolidge,” Good Housekeeping (June 1935), p. 42.

  63. Coolidge, Good Housekeeping (February 1935), p. 186. For an interpretation that gives Grace Coolidge more credit, see Robert H. Ferrell, Grace Coolidge: The People’s Lady in Silent Cal’s White House (Lawrence, Kansas, 2009).

  64. Florence Jaffray Harriman, From Pinafores to Politics (New York, 1923), p. 347.

  65. Coolidge, Good Housekeeping (March 1935), p. 217.

  66. Paul A. Burns, “Profile of First Lady,” The New Yorker (May 15, 1926), p. 17.

  67. Anne Hard, “First Lady of the Land,” Pictorial Review (September 1926), p. 7.

  68. Ishbel Ross, Grace Coolidge and Her Era: The Story of a President’s Wife (New York, 1962), p. 264.

  69. Coolidge, Good Housekeeping (February 1935), p. 184.

  70. Margaret Bassett, Profiles and Portraits of American Presidents and Their Wives (Freeport, 1969), p. 310.

  71. Coolidge, Good Housekeeping (March 1935), p. 214.

  72. Coolidge, Good Housekeeping (February 1935). p. 184.

  73. Al Fortunato to author, March 7, 1986.

  74. Coolidge, Good Housekeeping (March 1935), p. 22.

  75. Coolidge, Good Housekeeping (March 1935), p. 22.

  76. Coolidge, Good Housekeeping (March 1935), p. 217.

  77. Mary Randolph, “Presidents and First Ladies,” Ladies’ Home Journal (June 1936), p. 166.

  78. Coolidge, Good Housekeeping (April 1935), p. 41.

  79. Anne Hard, “First Lady,” Pictorial Review (September 1926), p. 7.

  80. Randolph, “Presidents and First Ladies,” p. 16.

  81. Coolidge, Good Housekeeping (March 1935), p. 225.

  82. Irwin Hood Hoover, Forty-Two Years in the White House (Boston, 1934), p. 290.

  83. Letter of July 25, 1985 to author from Lawrence E. Wikander, Curator of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Room, Forbes Library, Northampton, Massachusetts.

  84. Ross, Grace Coolidge, p. 87.

  85. Amy La Follette Jensen, The White House and Its Thirty-Three Families (New York, 1958), p. 227.

  86. Coolidge, Good Housekeeping (March 1935), p. 227.

  87. Ross, Grace Coolidge, p. 257.

  88. Outlook (January 14, 1931), p. 50.

  89. New York Times, July 9, 1957, p. 1.

  90. Coolidge, Good Housekeeping (March 1935), p. 224.

  91. On different interpretations of the Hoover presidency, see Murray N. Rothbard, “The Hoover Myth,” in James Weinstein and David Eakins, eds., For a New America (New York, 1970).

  92. William A. Williams, review of The Shattered Dream by Gene Smith, The New York Review of Books, November 5, 1970, p. 7.

  93. William H. Crawford, “Helping Their Husbands to Great Office,” Ladies’ Home Journal (September 1921), p. 17.

  94. Joan Hoff-Wilson, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (Boston, 1975), p. 18.

  95. Herbert Hoover, “Memoirs,” Collier’s (February 24, 1951), p. 22.

  96. This is Herbert Hoover’s recollection of his earnings, but Joan Hoff-Wilson, Herbert Hoover, p. 14, points out that he frequently exaggerated his success.

  97. Herber
t Hoover, Memoirs, 3 vols. (New York, 1951–1952), vol. 1, p. 36.

  98. Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 1, pp. 50–55.

  99. Frederick Palmer, “Mrs. Hoover Knows,” Ladies’ Home Journal (March 1929), p. 6.

  100. “Hoover’s Silent Partner,” Literary Digest (September 8, 1917), p. 55.

  101. Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 99.

  102. The American Historical Review, prestigious journal of the American Historical Association, reviewed the Hoovers’ work in its April 1914 issue, pp. 597–599. The reviewer called the translation “a noteworthy monument of patient and intelligible scholarship. … This work required both literary and technical training—a combination rarely found in one person, but furnished in this case by the partnership of husband and wife, both Stanford graduates, and the latter specifically familiar with the Latin language and with editorial work.”

  103. New York Times, March 10, 1914, p. 11.

  104. Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 153.

  105. Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 155.

  106. Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 156.

  107. Helen B. Pryor, Lou Henry Hoover: Gallant First Lady (New York, 1969), p. 98. For an interpretation written after Lou Hoover’s papers were opened in 1985, see Nancy Beck Young, Lou Henry Hoover: Activist First Lady (Lawrence, 2004).

  108. Pryor, Lou Henry Hoover, p. 100.

  109. Pryor, Lou Henry Hoover, p. 93.

  110. Pryor, Lou Henry Hoover, p. 104.

  111. “Dining With the Hoovers,” Ladies’ Home Journal (March 1918), p, 38.

  112. Pryor, Lou Henry Hoover, p. 112.

  113. Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 1, pp. 273–274.

  114. Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 188. The point has been made elsewhere that the visits might have stopped during the war even without the influence of Lou Hoover. Many women, including the wife of the assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, objected to spending their time on social visits.

  115. Hoff-Wilson, Herbert Hoover, p, 20.

  116. New York Times, April 20, 1923, p. 14.

  117. Hoff-Wilson, Herbert Hoover, p. 19.

  118. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out To Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York, 1982), p. 229.

  119. Matthew and Hannah Josephson, Al Smith: Hero of the Cities (Boston, 1969). p. 368.