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 considerable. 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 years 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

Political differences with the Democratic Roosevelts enticed Edith to take an uncharacteristically public role in the presidential campaign that pitted Franklin Roosevelt against Republican Herbert Hoover. Though Franklin’s wife, Eleanor, was Theodore Roosevelt’s niece, she had campaigned against Theodore, Junior, in the New York State election in 1928. Edith, therefore, felt justified in speaking out against Eleanor’s husband in the 1932 election. Her endorsement of Herbert Hoover made the front pages of the country’s newspapers in August 1932. Her appearance at a large Madison Square Garden Republican rally in October received similar notice.

Edith could not always control contacts between the two branches of Roosevelts, as her daughter-in-law pointed out. In the Philippines in 1933, Theodore, Junior, was asked by a reporter why his younger brother was yachting with Franklin Roosevelt back in New York when it was well known that the two sides of the family were political foes. Theodore, Junior, hesitated, uncertain how to answer, but Edith spoke up from across the room: “Because his mother wasn’t there.”26

For the most part she lived quietly the years between her husband’s death in 1919 and her own death in 1948. Rather than write the memoirs of her marriage or of her years in the White House, she teamed up with her son Kermit to produce a volume on her illustrious ancestors.27 When her children decided to publish a book on travel, she contributed a chapter in which she suggested that at least one woman who seemed fully occupied in the jobs that marriage had given her recognized what she had missed. “Women who marry,” Edith wrote, “pass their best and happiest years in giving life and fostering it … and those born with the wanderfoot are sometimes irked by the weight of the always beloved shackles.”28 By diplomatically refusing to cite which of the shackles she connected with her job as First Lady, Edith Roosevelt added a final enigmatic note to a remarkably successful tenure in the White House. Like many presidents’ wives who preceded her and others who would follow, she decided that the job required a little distance between herself and everybody else. Few of the others had her self-confidence to make that work.

Helen Herron Taft, who succeeded Edith Roosevelt in 1909 when William Howard Taft became president, lacked Edith’s quiet control but greatly outdistanced her in personal ambition. Born in southern Ohio in 1861, Helen (known as “Nellie” to family and close friends) had determined very early to escape that region, not only because of a desire for adventure but because of the narrow limits she perceived for herself if she remained there.

Being a woman complicated the escape, she realized, and she fretted over her lack of options. At age eighteen she wrote in her diary that she doubted she would ever marry, and at twenty-two, she explained why: “I have thought that a woman should be independent and not regard matrimony as the only thing to be desired in life.”29 Helen tried teaching, one of the few jobs open to middle-class women like herself and one that many used to leave home, but she found that an imperfect solution. “I do not dislike teaching when the boys behave themselves,” she wrote, implying that much of the time they did not.30 Her mother, more content with the routine of life in southern Ohio, counseled her daughter not to attempt too much.31 Helen knew she had musical talent but not of the magnitude to justify planning a career around it, and church work did not appeal. Depressed by the lack of alternatives, she admitted that she cried a lot.32

With the purposefulness that marked her entire adult life, Helen Herron enlisted the help of two of her friends to start a Sunday afternoon “salon” where “specifically invited” young people could “engage in what we considered brilliant discussion of topics intellectual and economic … . We were bent on improving our minds.”33 Showing an unusual ability to predict who in Cincinnati would eventually achieve most success, Helen invited the two Taft brothers: William Howard, who would later become the first man to serve as both his country’s president and chief justice, and his younger brother Horace, who founded the Taft School in Connecticut.34

The young attorney, whom she called Will Taft, was soon squiring Helen to Cincinnati social gatherings, including the then popular “German” dancing party.35 His letters literally begged for her attention and approval, and when she complained that he did not put high enough value on her opinions, he tried to reassure her: “I know no one who attributes more weight to [your opinions] or who more admires your powers of reasoning than [I.]”36 Bouquets of flowers arrived at Helen’s house with Will’s cards, some of them asking forgiveness for “inconsiderate words and conduct” and others declaring, often in German, his love for her.37

Years of insecurity about her appearance and social skills made Helen Herron wary of all compliments, no matter how genuine, and she demanded reassurances. Her diary shows ample evidence of self-criticism, and she repeatedly judged that she had behaved like “a goose” or failed to invent a witty rejoinder. When she accused Will of “reasoning” himself into loving her, he replied patiently in his careful script that he was genuinely attracted to her “high character … sweet womanly qualities and … intellectual superiority over any woman I know.”38

Helen Herron refused Will Taft’s proposal for marriage at least twice before accepting in 1886 when she was twenty-five. A three-month European honeymoon, with a $1,000 price tag, was her idea, although he worried they could ill afford it and finally rebelled when she filled their itinerary with too many visits to the opera.39

Back in Cincinnati, William practiced law and Helen attempted to settle into quiet wifedom. She gave birth to three children and helped start the city’s Orchestra Association but made no secret of her unwillingness to continue such a monotonous life indefinitely. William’s appointment to solicitor general in 1890 and to a federal circuit judgeship in 1892 raised the dreaded prospect that she might pass her entire adult life as the unnoticed wife of an unimportant judge.

For an ambitious woman who had decided to pursue a vicarious career through her husband, the need to intervene in his decisions was obvious. In the case of Helen and William Taft, the choice to enter elective politics appears more hers than his. Her father and maternal grandfather had both served in Congress and, unlike her husband who preferred the law, she enjoyed the excitement of a campaign. The prospect of putting herself forward as the candidate apparently held no interest for her, although William laughingly predicted early in their marriage that if they ever got to Washington, it would be because of an appointment for her. Even after he had won election to the presidency, he wrote that he felt a little uncomfortable in the new office but “as my wife is the politician … she will be able to meet all the issues [and] perhaps we can keep a stiff upper lip.”40

Women of Helen Taft’s generation exercised few political rights on their own. In the four states that had provided for female suffrage before 1910, popular prejudice against women in high office was almost as great a barrier as were discriminatory laws. The lower echelon offices that women sometimes captured, such as justice of the peace or sheriff, did not appeal to Helen Taft. When she was seventeen, she had gone with her parents to visit their friends in the White House, fellow Ohio Republicans, Rutherford and Lucy Hayes, and Helen had stayed for a few days. She later admitted that she had been impressed and that she had set her sights at that time on becoming First Lady.41

An opportunity to move closer to her dream came in 1900 when President William McKinley selected William Taft to head a commission to the Philippines. Even the nominee was surprised by the offer and said the president might just as well have “told me that he wanted me to take a flying machine.”42 When her husband hesitated, unsure about what the job entailed, Helen urged him to accept, although her ideas were no clearer than his. “It was an invitation from the big world,” she later wrote, “and I was willing to accept it at once and investigate its possible complications afterwards.”43 While some of her friends and relatives worried about unknown diseases and other dangers for the Taft children, she packed them up and moved them halfway around the world. Her only regret in leaving Cincinnati, she later wrote, was relinquishing the reins of the city’s Orchestra Association.44

Helen Taft’s decision to seek status and power through her husband’s career is in marked contrast to other women, also born in the 1860s, who made names for themselves on their own. A sampling of a few of Helen’s contemporaries indicates a variety of routes to public prominence, but few of them involved conventional marriages. Jane Addams (born 1860) rejected marriage entirely in order to concentrate on her own work in settlement houses, reform, and peace; Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch (born 1867) waited until age thirty-two to marry and, after giving birth to two children, tried to integrate them into her career of settlement house director; Charlotte Perkins Gilman (born 1860) risked criticism by divorcing her first husband and giving him custody of their daughter so she could pursue her own career as speaker and writer.

Helen Herron Taft lacked none of the drive of these contemporaries of hers, but she chose the older route to the top—through her husband’s career. The Philippine assignment, which lasted four years and eventually led to governorship of the islands, marked an important step for both of them. William gained administrative experience, and Helen learned to manage a large staff of servants who, she frequently pointed out, did not always follow her orders but appeared more valuable to her after she no longer had their services. When she published her autobiography in 1914, she used more than half of its 395 pages to describe the four years she spent in the Philippines and only a fraction to discuss an equivalent length of residence in the White House.45

As the consort of the Philippines governor, Helen lived more luxuriously than she ever had before or would afterwards, but her insistence on perfection in every detail resulted in a nervous exhaustion that sent her to Europe for rest.46 In 1904 when the invitation came from Washington for William to return to the United States to enter the cabinet, she worried privately how they could live on a secretary of war’s salary. President Roosevelt’s chiding her that Edith “never minded not having champagne” did little to cheer her up.47

William Howard Taft accepted the chance to become secretary of war, and Helen faced up to a different set of wifely duties when she returned to Washington. Cabinet wives still engaged in the leaving of cards, and Helen was expected to call on the spouses of other cabinet members and set aside one day each week to receive them at home. It all added up to a routine she described as “monotonous stress.”48 Holding less than first rank annoyed Helen, who clearly had become accustomed to the deference accorded the top of the foreign community in the Philippines, and even the prospect of accompanying her husband on official missions abroad did not make up for the loss.

Helen bided her time in Washington as patiently as she could, always ready to speak up when she thought she could advance her husband’s ascent to the presidency. That he might receive a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court appeared one of the obstacles she faced, and she had already made clear her opposition to that. While the Tafts were still in the Philippines, President Roosevelt had held up the possibility of a Supreme Court appointment for William Taft, but both Helen and William’s mother urged him to refuse. By 1906 when another vacancy on the court revived the prospect of putting the scholarly William Taft on the country’s highest court, Helen was back in Washington and could speak more directly on the subject.

President Roosevelt put great importance on his judicial nominations, declaring on one occasion: “The President and the Congress are all very well in their way. They can say what they think they think but it rests with the Supreme Court to decide what they have really thought.”49 Helen saw things differently, especially by 1906 when a Taft-for-President movement was growing outside the family. William explained in his diary that he had told the president that Helen was “bitterly opposed to my accepting the [court] position and that she telephoned me this morning to say that if I did, I would make the biggest mistake of my life.” Who scheduled the resulting meeting between Helen Taft and President Roosevelt remains unclear, but afterwards the president wrote to William Taft that after “a half hour’s talk with your dear wife,” he understood why the court appointment was not desired.50

In 1908 when William was nominated to run on the Republican ticket for president, Helen finally saw victory in sight. William appeared less enthusiastic. “I didn’t think I was going to be foolish enough to run for the presidency,” he jested on one occasion, and another time: “I was engaged in the respectable business of trying to administer justice [but] I have fallen from that state now, and am engaged in running for the presidency.”51

After defeating the Democrat nominee, William Jennings Bryan, in November 1908, William Taft dallied in making appointments. He sought advice, appeared to dangle cabinet jobs and then withdraw them, then seek advice again. Ten weeks after being elected, he confessed to a reporter that cabinet-making was not easy, and he waited until after his inauguration to reveal his choices.

Helen went about preparing for the inauguration with more determination, sending her dress to the Philippines to be embroidered and confidently outlining her plans for the White House. “I had been a member of Washington’s official family for five years,” she later wrote, “and I knew as well as need be the various phases of the position I was about to assume.”52

On the day of the inauguration, Helen Taft signaled publicly her intention to play an important role in her husband’s administration—she took the unprecedented step of riding back to the White House with him. Theodore Roosevelt had decided to leave Washington immediately after the ceremony and so could not accompany his successor. Helen was determined that she, rather than some insignificant member of the inaugural committee, should claim the vacant place of honor.53 The solution was worked out almost a week before the inauguration but kept a secret, and Helen had to rush down from her seat in the gallery before her husband had finished his speech to make sure she arrived ahead of all usurpers. Her innovation did not go unobserved. Ike Hoover, a White House steward, noted “severe criticism” of Helen’s adding a new ceremonial role to those already accepted for First Ladies.54 She felt obliged to defend herself: “Of course there was objection … but I had my way and in spite of protests took my place at my husband’s side.”55

Only the servants and a few friends were on hand to greet the Tafts when they arrived at the White House, but their accounts emphasized that the new president and his wife reacted very differently. Helen remembered that as soon as her eyes lit on the presidential seal, she immediately thought, “and now that meant my husband.”56 William was more sanguine, and according to separate accounts of two of the servants, he threw himself into a chair and said, “I’m President now and tired of being kicked around.”57

William Howard Taft’s discomfort in high political office and Helen’s zeal to achieve perfection in her role had an effect on both their lives, more disastrous for her than for him. His weight, always on the rise when he was feeling dissatisfied with himself, rose to 340 pounds, the highest in his life, and necessitated the installation of a new bathtub. Helen, then forty-seven years old, suffered a stroke two months after the inauguration, impairing her speech so severely that she had to work for the next year to relearn how to form sounds. Newspapers described Helen as suffering from a “nervous breakdown,”58 which kept her away from the White House during the summer of 1909. For several months after she returned to Washington in October, she made only token appearances that did not require her to speak.

Missing the social events constituted the least of Helen’s regrets—she could rely on her sisters or her college-aged daughter to substitute for her—but her illness necessitated her absence from important decisions of her husband’s administration. One Taft biographer, who admitted to assuming “speculative privilege,” pointed to the irony of the situation. “Seven months after the election, it was [Helen] not her husband who proved unable to handle the stress … [and] the dramatic ironies multiply when it is remarked that she—his prod, his alter ego, his voice—lost the power of speech and became totally silent just when he needed her most.”59 Judith Icke Anderson concluded that Helen’s absence gave William a chance to be “his own man” and that he acquitted himself remarkably well. Although he feared that historians would judge his a “humdrum” administration, he believed he had performed well enough. When the split within the Republican party promised to end his presidency after only one term, he wrote to his wife that he was content to retire “with the consciousness that I have done the best I could…. I think you and I can look back with some pleasure in having done something for the benefit of the public weal.”60

President Taft’s inclusion of his wife’s accomplishment along with his own is not remarkable. Well before he took on the country’s highest political office, national magazines had spoken openly of her influence on her husband. In its March 1909 issue, the Ladies’ Home Journal informed its readers that the new First Lady had a touch of domesticity and a healthy respect for the arts but was most remarkable because of the mentor role she played for her husband. Her “intense ambition” had helped propel him into the job and she remained his “close confidante.” “Had it not been for his wife,” the Journal readers learned, “Mr. Taft would never have entered the Presidential race.”61 In the beginning of his term, she sat in on important discussions, justifying her presence by claiming to keep him awake. She accompanied him on political forays and golf outings. One acquaintance characterized their relationship as resembling that of “two men who are intimate chums.” Helen’s demurral that her “active participation in [her] husband’s career came to an end when he became President” rings a little false in light of so many descriptions to the contrary.62

Helen lost little time in taking charge at the White House. Unlike Edith Roosevelt, she did not care for the company of women and she dispensed with the meetings of cabinet wives. If given the choice, and as First Lady she was given her choice on many things, she preferred staying close to the center of power rather than being shunted off on a peripheral social mission. She had frequently complained that on campaign trips her husband was “taken in charge and escorted everywhere with honor while I am usually sent with a lot of uninteresting women through some side street to wait for him at some tea or luncheon.”63

While Edith Roosevelt had proceeded as confident administrator, keeping herself aloof from the details of White House management, Helen involved herself in every tiny matter. She insisted that her vigilance could save money. The Roosevelts had attempted economizing but had judged it inappropriate to try saving anything from the president’s salary or living allowances. Helen Taft harbored no such reservations. Since the chief executive’s salary had just been increased from $50,000 to $75,000, she resolved to budget carefully so that $25,000 could go into the family’s personal bank account. Like most of the objectives she set for herself, she succeeded in this one and accumulated $100,000 dollars during the four-year term. Her zeal during the first two years alone resulted in an $80,000 nest egg which the president bragged to his aide was a “pretty good sum.”64

New economies were effected by revolutionizing the running of the White House. A housekeeper replaced the steward because Helen decided that “no man, expert steward though he might be, would ever recognize [what needed to be done].”65 Elizabeth Jaffray, the woman hired, insisted that she had not set out to obtain the White House job, but “this rather outspoken, determined [Helen Taft]” was very convincing and Jaffray found herself “swept into the position.”66 Later, Jaffray had further opportunities to witness the First Lady’s commanding presence when orders came down for comparison shopping to economize and for the scrutiny of every expenditure.

The celebration of their silver wedding anniversary in 1911 gave the Tafts another opportunity to appreciate a material gain. Helen dispatched invitations to four or five thousand people (she could not recall the exact number), and although some of her friends thought gifts inappropriate, she saw no reason to discourage generosity. The response was overwhelming. One White House employee confessed that he had not known so much silver existed in the world. The head of U.S. Steel, Judge Elbert Gary, who hardly knew the president, sent a silver tureen reputedly two hundred years old and worth $8,000. A congressman’s wife described the rather bizarre party scene in which one guest, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, took center stage in her “electric blue suit, flesh colored stockings and gold slippers, [kicking about and moving her body] sinuously like a shining leopard cat,” while other guests made “ sotto voce inquiries” about how much each had “put up” for a gift.67 The president attempted to head off criticism by ordering that none of the gifts go on display, but Helen showed much less embarrassment and treated the presents as money in the bank: later she attempted to have the Taft monogram erased on one piece so that she could recycle the silver as a gift for someone else.68

While Edith Roosevelt’s influence on her husband had been quiet and private, Helen Taft’s was rather publicly documented. Early in their marriage he had called her his “dearest and best critic … worth so much to me in stirring me up to best endeavor,”69 a description she took every bit as seriously as he. Her contemporaries commented repeatedly on her competitive nature, and one biographer later reinforced their conclusion that “without her ambitions, [William Taft] would probably never have become President.”70 Although she did not include cabinet meetings in those she attended (as Rosalynn Carter would later do), she stayed close by the president’s side whenever political discussions occurred in social settings. One aide reported that Helen supplied her husband with names and numbers he forgot, and during parties, whenever “some important politician took the President aside for a private talk, they would always be joined by Mrs. Taft as soon as she realized the situation.”71 Helen made no secret of her differences with the president, and she announced that she would serve wine at White House dinners although “Mr. Taft does not drink.”72

Personnel decisions interested her particularly and she frequently based her judgments on subjective or irrelevant considerations. One visitor overheard her countermanding her husband on an important nomination, because she found the individual in question “perfectly awful and his family are even worse. I won’t even talk of it.”73 She engineered the recall of an American ambassador to France, a man judged by Theodore Roosevelt as the most capable in the service,74 because he had slighted her on her honeymoon in London more than twenty years earlier. Easygoing William Taft confided to his friends that he would have forgotten the whole matter and let the man remain at his post but Helen proved less forgiving.

The complexity of Helen Taft’s association with her husband’s administration is hinted at in her memoirs where she refers to William as “Mr. Taft,” except in the presidential years when she frequently switches to “my husband.” She did not relinquish the White House power base without a fight. Suspecting that Theodore Roosevelt wanted to reclaim the presidency in 1912, she pushed her husband to fight hard for the party’s nomination.75 When Theodore Roosevelt accepted the nomination of the Progressives, thus splitting the Republicans and guaranteeing a Democratic victory, William Taft noted that Helen was too pleased with her correct evaluation of Theodore’s motive to worry much over losing the election.

Thus, Helen Taft’s stint as First Lady ended after only one term. Her illness had rendered her far less effective than she had planned and her one permanent contribution to the capital was a cosmetic one, although not insignificant. During the years she spent in the Orient, she had become fond of Japanese cherry trees and she saw no reason why they could not survive in Washington’s climate. She arranged for the planting of several thousand, thus providing for one of the capital’s biggest tourist attractions, the annual spring blossoms.

Helen Taft had engineered her flight from Ohio many years earlier and she had no intention of going back just because her husband had lost an election. After a period in New Haven where William taught classes at Yale Law School, the Tafts returned to Washington in 1921 when he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court. Even after his death in 1930, she remained in the capital. When she died in 1943, she was buried beside him in Arlington National Cemetery, the only First Lady to be interred there at the time.

In escaping the limitations imposed on the wife of an Ohio judge, Helen Herron Taft journeyed around the world more than once and to a place at his side at the top of American political power. However, she never put much effort into helping other women engineer easier escapes. Like other First Ladies before her, she refused to take a public stand in favor of woman’s suffrage and never supported reforms for her sex in general. In 1912, President Taft appointed Julia Lathrop to head the newly formed Children’s Bureau, but there is no evidence that Helen influenced this first appointment of a woman to such a post.76

The only Taft daughter, Helen Taft Manning, compiled an entirely different record. Raised partly in the Philippines and in Washington where she received considerable attention as a cabinet member’s daughter, the younger Helen chose the privacy of an academic life and the satisfaction of a career of her own rather than a share in her husband’s. After being graduated from Bryn Mawr, she earned a doctorate at Yale and then published in the field of British colonial history before taking a job at her alma mater, first as dean and then as history professor. She expended considerable energy in achieving female suffrage, and while her mother had complained of being isolated with “a lot of uninteresting women,” Helen Taft Manning worked most of her life in a women’s college.

The women whom the elder Helen Taft sought to avoid may have been considerably less schooled and less stimulating than the ones whom her daughter met a generation later. Education and leadership opportunities had begun to widen, and more women felt confident to voice their own opinions. First Lady Taft’s role in that change should not be neglected because, for all her faults, she introduced a stronger model in the White House. She made no additions to the First Lady’s staff, but by abolishing the cabinet wives’ meeting and inserting herself in more substantive discussions, she showed her disapproval of a limited “woman’s sphere.” If her influence was sometimes petty and unfair, it should be pointed out that she, like other women of her time, had often been confined to taking control over small matters. She worked with what she had.

The degree to which a more substantive, less purely social role for the president’s wife was becoming common rather than exceptional is apparent in the brief tenure of Woodrow Wilson’s first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson (1913–1914). Although she lived little more than a year in the White House and was seriously ill much of that time, she took a prominent leadership position in housing reform and had her name attached to the slum clearance bill that Congress passed at the time of her death. That such a reticent woman, who admitted she was more interested in painting than in politics, should have been drawn into a major reform effort suggests that it would be difficult for any woman in her place to withdraw completely from a public role.

Woodrow Wilson’s presidency (1913–1921) coincided with the dropping of many barriers against women in politics. In 1912, the summer his fellow Democrats chose him as their standard-bearer, Jane Addams, the settlement leader, stood up at the rebellious Bull Moose Convention to second Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination for a third term. In 1917, Jeannette Rankin, a thirty-seven-year-old former teacher and social worker from Montana, broke Congress’s old tradition of no women members when she took her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In August 1920, near the end of Woodrow Wilson’s second term, Tennessee ratified the nineteenth amendment. Overnight millions of American women acquired exactly the same power at the ballot box as their husbands and brothers.

Such an assault on the old male monopoly of politics perplexed Woodrow Wilson, the first president since Andrew Johnson to have been born in the South. Although Woodrow eventually came out in favor of the suffrage amendment, he acted reluctantly, moved less by conviction than by the realization that he could not arrest change. He had, after all, been raised in a Presbyterian manse where he was accustomed to hearing the male head of the household speak not only for the family but also for God, and he did not easily transfer authority to women. Few men outdid Woodrow Wilson in appearing to like women, but rather than treating them as intellectual equals, he expected them to supply his support system: bolster his ego and laugh at his jokes.

Beautiful women who knew how to conceal their brains beneath adoring glances and innocent repartee were especially welcome in his presence. Youth did not necessarily attract him—indeed, he called all the women he liked, even the middle-aged ones, “My little girl”—and he exacted from all those who wished to be counted as his friends a juvenile obeisance to his views and an unquestioned acceptance of his courtesies. In the list his daughter compiled of the women he admired most, southerners predominated.77

His first wife, Ellen Axson of tiny Rome, Georgia, might not at first glance appear a likely candidate for Woodrow’s attention. Like her husband, she grew up in a Presbyterian manse and in her case, both grandfathers had also been men of the cloth. Ellen showed little interest, however, in following the examples of her mother and grandmothers. Her father pronounced her as a youngster too “obstreperous and independent” for her own good,78 and she dreamed of going to New York to study art as her teacher had done.79 That plan was deferred, however, while Ellen attended a local women’s college. Then her mother died, leaving Ellen, the oldest of four children, to help raise the younger ones. Just as she was finally working out the possibility of combining serious art study and family responsibilities, young Woodrow Wilson came through her town and imposed another complication. He renamed her “Eileen,” and pursued her with what one historian called “among the greatest love letters in the English language.”80

Ellen put Woodrow off, pleading first that her family needed her and then pointing out that he could hardly think of supporting a family on his income. Both her excuses ring a little hollow, however, because when Ellen, at age twenty-four, inherited some money of her own after her father’s death, she left the brothers and sister and headed north—not to Baltimore where Woodrow had gone to pursue a doctorate in political science, but to a boardinghouse on New York City’s West Eleventh Street and art classes nearby.

Like many presidents’ wives, Ellen Axson showed a streak of independence in her youth that her husband lacked. While he picked his schools carefully from among the most prestigious (Princeton, University of Virginia, and Johns Hopkins), Ellen enrolled in the infant New York Art Students’ League.81 Inexpensive and student-run, the League admitted both men and women,82 and its constitution mandated equal representation of both sexes on its governing board. The League hewed to the mores of the time, however, by segregating drawing sessions that included nude models—women attended in the afternoons and the men went in the evenings.83

Not yet known as Greenwich Village when Ellen Axson arrived there, the area around West Eleventh Street already attracted a wide variety of people moving into the city. The 1880s marked the largest single decade of that century for population shift to the cities, and New York drew more than its share—not just immigrants from Europe but men and women from farms and small towns across the United States. The aspiring painter from Rome, Georgia, was not unique in her complaints of loneliness. To fill her time and help her feel more useful, she joined a reading club84 and volunteered to teach two nights a week in a “missionary school.”85

Since Ellen Axson had evidently already decided to marry Woodrow Wilson, her assertion of independence is remarkable, particularly in light of Woodrow’s disapproval. From Baltimore he wrote that he did not like the idea of her going out alone in the evening, although he hastened to add that she had every right to develop her own talents. In any case, he considered this show of independence on Ellen’s part a temporary aberration because he was convinced, and assumed she agreed, that a woman found completeness only through marriage and a family.86 Ellen showed only temporary ambivalence between accepting the excitement of art classes in New York City and the staid life of a professor’s wife. She wrote to Woodrow in strangely biblical terms: “I was indeed meant for you—that I may do you good and not evil all the days of my life.”87

Ellen Axson’s flirtation with the artist’s life may have grown out of several considerations, including the inspiration of contemporaries who had achieved national and even international reputations. Mary Cassatt, the Philadelphia painter, had been exhibiting in Paris since the 1870s, and Harriet Hosmer, the Boston sculptor, had earned wide acclaim and considerable personal wealth. Several women had exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 and two of them had won medals.88 Even women of lesser promise than these might have seen advantages in an art career. Preparation and study often occurred in private, without the necessity of enrolling at an established institution, and the work itself was performed at home, so that like a writer, an artist did not have to travel to some central place of employment.

But Ellen Axson must have also noticed that women artists who boasted large reputations had not combined their careers with marriage. Neither Cassatt not Emily Sartain (the medal winner at the Philadelphia Centennial) nor Hosmer ever married, and Hosmer had explicitly stated her reasons. “An artist has no business to marry,” she wrote. “For a man, it may be well enough but for a woman on whom matrimonial duties and cares weigh more heavily, it is a moral wrong, I think, for she must neglect her profession or her family becoming neither a good wife and mother nor a good artist. My ambition is to become the latter, so I wage an eternal feud with the consolidating knot.”89 There is no evidence that Ellen Axson knew of Hosmer’s pronouncements, but her study at the Art Students’ League stopped after one year.

In June 1885, Woodrow completed his course work for the doctorate at Johns Hopkins, and Ellen accepted his calculations that two could live “as cheaply as one and one-half.” Since Woodrow’s beginning salary at Bryn Mawr was only $1,500, he and his bride had to pay careful attention to finances. They boarded the first year with another family, and Ellen did her part in economizing by putting her painting easel away and traveling into Philadelphia twice a week to take a course in home economics. The next year the Wilsons were able to rent a house of their own and bring Ellen’s younger brother and sister to live with them.

The move came none too quickly because Ellen gave birth to two daughters, Margaret and Jessie, within twenty-five months. When she bore still a third daughter two years later, Woodrow concealed rather poorly his disappointment—he had written his wife that he was “glad—almost as at the thought of having a boy.”90 The future president now headed a family of four females, and under his tutelage they could also become adoring.

For a man who showed little appreciation of brainy women, Bryn Mawr was a mistake, and Ellen had her own reservations about his going there. When Woodrow was considering whether or not to take the job, he had informed Ellen that he found women speakers “manly,” giving him a “chilled scandalized feeling.”91 She replied as though she thought all women moved in an intellectual realm well below his: “Do you think there is much reputation to be made in a girl’s school—a ‘Woman’s College?’ … Can you be content to serve that sort of an institution?” Although Ellen had studied art in a coeducational school, she placed Woodrow on a pedestal far above women, and the idea that he would consider working as a subordinate to a woman was dismaying. She begged him to consider: “Can you with all your heart cooperate with the strong-minded person who conducts [the college]? The ‘Dean!’ how ridiculous! If they are going to have ‘prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,’ it would be more consistent … to exclude men altogether. … Seriously dear, I fear you would find it very unpleasant to serve, as it were, under a woman! … [It would be] so unnatural, so jarring to one’s sense of the fitness of things, so absurd … beneath you.”92

In spite of his own and Ellen’s misgivings, Woodrow took the job as the best of his offers and soon he was complaining that his boss, M. Carey Thomas, was younger than he, forgetting that it was a question of five days and that both were only twenty-eight. After three years at Bryn Mawr, Woodrow confessed he had been “for a long time hungry for a class of men,”93 and he escaped with relief to Wesleyan College where he became an enthusiastic sports booster. An alumnus recalled years later that Professor Wilson ran up and down the sidelines at football games, exhorting Wesleyan players to victory.94 In 1890 Woodrow moved on to the better known Princeton.

Frances Wright Saunders, in a carefully researched biography of Ellen Axson Wilson, portrays the rest of the Wilson marriage as a partnership, with Ellen playing an important, background role in Woodrow’s success while, at the same time, pursuing her own interest in art. More than a skilled hostess, she translated German texts for Woodrow95 and worked out administrative arrangements which he, when he became president of Princeton, offered to the faculty for their acceptance.96 She traveled on her own and continued to paint and sell her work.

That view of Ellen Wilson fails to give adequate weight to the evidence that shows her repeatedly sacrificing her own time and energy so that Woodrow could have more pleasure and rest. When he received an invitation to travel, she encouraged him to go while she stayed home with the children. He explored the Chicago Exposition in 1893 and then she made the trip later.97 He traveled through Europe twice on his own and then she went with one of their daughters. As a student of government and an advocate of the parliamentary system, he was drawn to Britain, but Ellen headed for Italy’s art treasures.98

Although Ellen knew that one of Woodrow’s trips was financed by a “wealthy widow around the corner”99 and that other journeys involved meetings with women, she refused to appear jealous. Frances Wright Saunders concluded, after an examination of the letters between Woodrow and his wife, that Ellen knew of her husband’s long involvement with a divorcée, Mary Hulbert Peck, but rather than feed gossip and harm Woodrow’s political chances, she treated Mary as a family friend.100 Woodrow indicated that he regretted his relationship with Mary Peck as a “contemptible error, … a madness of a few months, … [that left him] stained and unworthy,”101 but he continued to correspond with Mary until his wife’s death.

The youngest Wilson daughter, Eleanor, wrote two books about her parents, and she described a considerably more self-sacrificing Ellen Wilson than did Saunders. Eleanor saw her mother as accepting the fact that she could not provide sufficient gaiety and laughter for Woodrow. He remained the center of the family—a loving, funny clown who could recite more senseless verses and perform more facial contortions than anyone else she knew. Even her adoring account indicates, however, that he divided his life into compartments, with women confined to the audience. His daughters, all of whom favored woman’s suffrage before he did, failed to change his mind. When time came for them to enter college, he rejected more intellectual settings, which, as a Princeton professor and president he could certainly have arranged, and sent the older two to the nearby Woman’s College of Baltimore (later renamed Goucher College) and the youngest to St. Mary’s in North Carolina where, he hoped, she could unlearn her Yankee accent.102

Plans to make southern belles of his three daughters had obviously failed by the time the Wilsons moved into the White House because all three had chosen careers. Margaret, the eldest, worked hard to become a concert singer and while her father was in office she found opportunities to perform more plentiful than they would ever be again. Jessie, the dreamer and Phi Beta Kappa key-holder, had abandoned plans for foreign missionary work in favor of work in a Philadelphia settlement house. Eleanor, the youngest, reflected some of her mother’s interest in art and enrolled in Philadelphia’s Academy of Fine Arts to study commercial illustrating.103

Although they had been exposed to publicity when their father had served as New Jersey’s governor, the Wilson daughters were unprepared for the attention focused on them after he became president. Magazines took such an interest in them that one congressman’s wife confessed she was sick of reading about them. “They are more before the public than any other White House family I have known,” Ellen Slayden wrote. “T[heodore] R[oosevelt] personally never let the public forget him, but the ladies of his household—until Alice took center stage—preserved a well-bred privacy.”104 Even Woodrow complained that he might be a public figure, fair game for all reporters, but he did not think his wife and daughters fell into the same category.

Ellen Axson Wilson received particularly close scrutiny. A month after the inauguration, the Ladies’ Home Journal published two of her landscapes in full-color pages and noted that one painting had been exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and that others had been shown in Chicago and Indianapolis.105 Good Housekeeping106 and Current Opinion107 carried similar stories. Ellen’s domestic interests and abilities were not ignored and there were the usual speculations about the cost of her wardrobe. She felt moved to defend herself when one newspaper reported that on one of her shopping trips she had bought seven new gowns ranging in cost from $200 to $300 each. The actual amount spent had been much less, as she proved with the receipts which showed two gowns, one hat, one “waist,” two pairs of gloves, and some fabric to repair old clothes—all for a total of $140.84.108

The intricate political maneuvering that had appealed to Helen Taft held little interest for Ellen Wilson, but she was not opposed to acting as an intermediary to promote Woodrow’s career. He was out of town in March 1911 when William Jennings Bryan, three times nominated to head the Democratic ticket, came to speak at Princeton. Ellen had to make her own decision about what to do. She invited the Bryans to dinner and then wired Woodrow to get back in time. When questioned later about her motives, Ellen replied that she had thought it the kind thing to do, but historians have seen it differently and have emphasized the importance of Bryan’s support in Woodrow’s attaining the 1912 nomination.109

Ellen Wilson edged toward advocating the vote for women but refused to take a public stand on the issue. The experience of her middle daughter in Philadelphia’s slums had influenced her and she was quoted as saying in March 1913: “The arguments of my Jessie incline me to believe in the suffrage for the working women.”110 Such a statement left unclear Ellen’s opinion on votes for nonworking women or on just how the change should be effected—so that it could not possibly have embarrassed the president who had not yet come out for suffrage on the national level.

Much safer than suffrage as a “cause” for the president’s wife was housing, and in the same month as her husband’s inauguration, Ellen Wilson started her own investigation of Washington’s slums. While enlarging the electorate might be controversial, amelioriating housing was more acceptable, because the fallout from slums hurt everyone, resulting in epidemics, increased infant mortality, and absenteeism. The very reforms that had first been advocated to improve housing had in fact worsened conditions in many cities by razing dilapidated buildings without providing replacements. By the beginning of the twentieth century, housing had become a major reform movement throughout Europe and the United States.

Washington’s slums, hidden away from view because many of them were in the back alleys where only local residents passed, needed stricter law enforcement and more funds if they were to be improved. The thousands who lived there, mostly blacks and recent immigrants, lacked the political clout to act for themselves but their poor health and high mortality rates left little doubt of their need. Ellen Wilson’s first scheduled visit had to be postponed because of a smallpox outbreak.111 When she finally saw the dilapidated and filthy housing, she was appalled and became determined to work for congressional appropriations to provide clearance money. A White House maid, well acquainted with the poverty of the capital’s black neighborhoods, went home after meeting Ellen Wilson for the first time and told her daughter that she thought they had “an angel in the White House—she’s talking about helping the poor and improving housing.”112

The First Lady’s reputation for caring about the problems of black neighborhoods contrasted with the president’s poor record in that area (although it may well be, as their middle daughter charged, that Ellen Wilson’s support for segregation of the races was stronger than Woodrow’s). During his first administration, the president either condoned or encouraged the introduction of segregation in government departments where it had formerly not been the rule—in offices, restrooms, and lunchrooms of the Post Office Department, the Treasury Department, and the Bureau of Printing and Engraving where large numbers of blacks and whites had worked together. After visiting the capital in the summer of 1913, Booker T. Washington wrote to Oswald Garrison Villard, a leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, that he had “never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”113

While President Wilson responded to these criticisms by arguing that segregation would serve the interests of blacks, Ellen Wilson set out to improve their living conditions. She designated a White House car for touring alleys and arranged a reception so that housing reformers could present their case directly to congressmen. Ellen Wilson’s involvement in slum clearance gave the topic a respectability and urgency that it had not had, and one co-worker jokingly remarked that no one could move in polite society without a thorough understanding of alley housing.114 By February 1914, the relevant legislation, known as Ellen Wilson’s bill, had been introduced in Congress.

Had she come into the White House half a century earlier, Ellen Wilson would almost certainly have stayed in the background, hidden as much from public view as the slums that she now worked to publicize. She had suffered the usual initial qualms about becoming First Lady and had tried to bolster her ego by outfitting herself for the inauguration in “the most wonderful gown I’ve ever had.”115 Her apprehension that she would not measure up had increased after she arrived in Washington, and before setting out for the traditional pre-inaugural visit to the White House, she burst into tears. Her youngest daughter, observing her mother’s discomfort, predicted then that the White House would “kill her.”116

Family responsibilities piled on top of official ones when two of the Wilson daughters had White House weddings within six months of each other. Not long after Jessie’s big ceremony in November 1913, Ellen’s health began to fail. She had spent the entire summer of 1913 in New Hampshire, but a few weeks back in Washington wiped out all the gains she had made. A kidney disease, later diagnosed as Bright’s disease, debilitated her and, although she seemed to rally at the time of her daughter Eleanor’s marriage in May 1914, she soon worsened. By August 1914, it was clear to everyone except her husband that she was dying.

The housing bill that she had championed still lay in congressional committee where there was unanimity on the abysmal quality of alley residences but little agreement on who should pay for improvements. After word of Ellen Wilson’s deteriorating health reached Capitol Hill, the Senate quickly approved the measure so that she could be told before she died. The House of Representatives acted the next month on this, the first piece of legislation to be passed with such direct and public assistance from a president’s wife. Other First Ladies had acted behind the scenes—Ellen Wilson’s influence made headlines, and at least one major newspaper concluded that a demanding schedule had figured in her death. She had died, the New York Times reported, of Bright’s disease, “aggravated by a nervous breakdown, attributed to the exactions of social duties and her active interest in philanthropy and betterment work.”117

Until her death on August 6, 1914, Ellen Wilson insisted that her only objective in life had been to make life more comfortable for her husband and daughters, but her record is more complex. Naturally shy, she shooed away photographers and refused to appear on the platform with Woodrow. Yet she was often there to support her husband on public occasions. When he broke tradition and addressed Congress directly, she and her daughters set their own precedent by seating themselves prominently in the gallery to hear him.118 Only a little of the rebellious young artist from Rome, Georgia, remained in the White House Ellen Wilson, but she permitted her paintings to be exhibited, sometimes under the name “E. A. Wilson” so as to disguise the origin of the work, and when they sold, she donated the proceeds to charity. Nonpolitical and insecure, she showed that even a very reticent First Lady can make a difference.

Other presidents’ wives had died in office but none for almost twenty years and none so early in a chief executive’s term. Caroline Harrison had succumbed only months before her husband’s administration ended, but Woodrow Wilson had almost three years to serve when Ellen died. Because his daughters were all busy with their own families or careers, he asked his cousin, Helen Bones, who had helped Ellen as social secretary, to assist him in running the White House. It was Helen who invited her friend Edith Bolling Galt to the White House one March afternoon in 1915, thus setting the stage for Woodrow’s remarriage.

The first meeting between the president and the attractive, forty-three-year-old widow was entirely accidental, Helen Bones later wrote. She had not reckoned with the possibility that the same rainy weather that forced her inside that day, with her friend Edith in tow, would also terminate the president’s golf game. As they all sat down to take tea together, Helen Bones observed the almost immediate attraction between her cousin Woodrow and her friend Edith. After months of gloom, the president finally laughed.

Edith Bolling Galt combined a good measure of exuberant independence with sufficient amounts of the subservience that Woodrow Wilson found essential in all women. A bit more stylish and sophisticated than most of the women Woodrow liked, she was accustomed to ordering her clothes from a top Paris designer and creating a stir when she drove herself around the capital in her own little electric runabout. She reported that policemen learned to halt traffic at Fifteenth Street so she could maneuver through.119 At a time when most matrons shunned close association with “business,” Edith helped manage her own jewelry store. Yet she resembled other independent women in seeing such activities as somehow unique to herself. Working to increase opportunities for other women evidently held no interest for her. Before meeting Woodrow, she had paid no attention to politics and she admitted that during his victorious 1912 campaign she could not have named the candidates.120

The path to Edith Galt’s financial independence had been cut by accident, although she should not be deprived of the credit for picking her way across it. In 1896 when she was twenty-four, she had married a cousin of her sister’s husband. Older men had always appealed to her, she admitted, and although she “did not want to marry anyone,” Norman Galt, part-owner of the capital’s most prestigious jewelry store, pursued her “[until] his patience and persistence overcame [her].”121 Their one child did not survive infancy, and when Norman Galt died in 1908, Edith was left with considerable personal and financial freedom. While keeping some control over the jewelry business, she made several trips to Europe.

The only president to possess a doctorate at the time of his election, Woodrow Wilson fell in love with a woman whose education was very limited. One of eleven children born to a Virginia judge and his wife, she received most of her instruction at home, then enrolled for two years at Virginia finishing schools. At least one historian concluded that, even as an adult, she wrote a “primitive … almost illegible” scrawl.122 Much more relevant to her place in history, however, was the self-confidence that allowed her to act without constant reinforcement from those around her. Years of making her own decisions had prepared her to handle new ones with relative ease, and if she ever felt the inadequacy that had troubled Ellen Wilson, she kept it to herself. While Ellen Wilson had agonized over details, including whether or not to purchase a particular piece of clothing, Edith showed little hint of caring what people thought of her or of the amounts she spent on clothing. She never offered to show her bills to an inquisitive public.

Only two presidents before Wilson had married in office and each had approached courtship differently. John Tyler wed Julia Gardiner before reporters learned the intrusion tactics that they later mastered, and Grover Cleveland avoided detection by using the mails. Woodrow Wilson and Edith Galt had to conduct their nine-month courtship in the full glare of curious reporters, at first concealing their meetings under cover of Edith’s friendship with Helen Bones and with the Wilson daughters.

Whatever inconvenience the burdens of his office imposed (and they were, no doubt, considerable, since much of Europe stood embroiled in World War I), the president’s courtship progressed rapidly. When Woodrow vacationed in New Hampshire in June 1915, Edith was there, ostensibly as Helen Bones’s guest. But a postcard written during that visit testifies to the fact that Edith’s romance with Woodrow had already matured into commitment only two months after their first meeting. Dated June 29, 1915, on the “West Porch,” the card conveys the same kind of subservience that Ellen Axson had promised Woodrow thirty years earlier in a similar situation. Edith Galt pledged “. . . with all my heart absolutely to trust and accept my loved Lord and unite my life with his without doubts or misgivings.”123

Even after having sworn such devotion, Edith shied away from marriage to the president for two reasons. Her own explanation was that she had lived in the capital too long to have missed the public’s fascination with whoever happened to occupy the White House. Early in her acquaintance with Woodrow, she discovered that he shared her disdain for the snooping that had become a part of Washington life and for the vigor with which tourists hounded the president’s family, but she knew that the two of them together could not change those habits. Much more important, however, was the matter of allowing an appropriate interval to elapse after Ellen Wilson’s death. Woodrow was so in love he refused to acknowledge the consequences, but his advisers warned that a quick remarriage would hurt his chances for reelection in 1916. Such considerations became all the more important when rumors began to circulate that the courtship had begun before Ellen’s death.

In spite of all these objections, the marriage took place in Edith’s Washington home on December 18, 1915. The third bride of a president in more than a century, she attracted enormous attention. At five feet nine, she wore her fashionable French clothes well and, for a touch of the exotic, she explained to reporters that she could trace her ancestry back through nine generations to Pocahontas and John Rolfe. After months of dreariness, the White House came alive again under her direction as she entertained, sat devotedly at the side of a contented-looking president, and even learned to ride a bicycle.124 Elizabeth Jaffray, who worked more than seventeen years as the mansion’s head housekeeper, judged Edith’s first two years there the best of all.125

By the time of the 1916 election, Americans had more on their minds than the circumstances of the president’s remarriage and whether or not he now slept in a double bed. The war in Europe threatened to involve the United States, and many voters believed a victory for the Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes, who was reputedly under the influence of Theodore Roosevelt, would increase the chances of the United States’ entry. On the other hand, Wilson’s campaign slogan, “He Kept Us Out Of War,” implied a continuation he never actually promised.

Advocates of woman’s suffrage changed their tactics by 1916 and superimposed a new element on the election. The young minds that Woodrow had so disparaged at Bryn Mawr had matured, and many of them had joined the professorial ranks themselves. Along with their students, they were encouraged by reports from London where the woman’s suffrage movement had taken a decidedly radical turn. Alice Paul, a Quaker, had concluded after witnessing the tactics of English suffragists that American women would have to increase their visibility if they ever expected to vote. She gathered like-minded thinkers around her and ironically used President Wilson’s own political philosophy to justify an attack on him.

Woodrow Wilson had achieved his scholarly reputation with a doctoral dissertation, published as Congressional Government, which argued the superiority of a parliamentary system over a presidential one. The former provided for assigning accountability, Woodrow Wilson wrote, because the majority party and its leader could be blamed for inaction or inferior legislation. The American presidential system, with law-making divided between the Congress and the chief executive, made it more difficult to assign blame. Woodrow Wilson had urged that the president act as head of his party, fully responsible for its failures, and now that he was in the driver’s seat himself, he had to juggle his own prescription with the reality. President Wilson’s Democratic party held large majorities in both houses of Congress during his first two years in office, but he refused to use that leverage on the side of those who sought a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s suffrage.

Alice Paul and her followers had already gained national attention in March 1913, when they had secured from Congress a special resolution directing that Pennsylvania Avenue be kept clear for them during the inaugural parade. According to one major newspaper, “Crowds broke through the barriers and formed a solid mass [so that] many persons [were] injured.”126 In response to multiple eye-witness accounts charging the police assigned to that area with negligence, the Senate called for a complete investigation, including an explanation from the Superintendent of Police as to why his men failed to control the mobs. According to one witness, the police had joined in beating the demonstrators. Such an assault on defenseless women prompted many people, who had never previously considered carefully the justice of the suffrage argument, to rethink their position.

The attention focused on her in 1913 contributed to Alice Paul’s drive during the mid-term election in 1914, and by 1916 she hoped to bring about President Wilson’s defeat. Under the rubric of the National Woman’s Party, Paul’s followers urged people sympathetic to their cause to use their vote in 1916 for one issue only—suffrage. Nine states had already enfranchised women, and a tenth, Illinois, allowed them to vote in presidential elections. Added together, these states totaled eighty-four electoral votes, a significant chunk out of the total of 531, especially in a close election. Both major parties had written suffrage planks into their 1916 platforms but had left action up to the states even though some southern states showed no evidence of budging, and, in fact, Mississippi did not ratify the 19th amendment until 1984. Only the Socialist Party favored the passage of a federal amendment in 1916, and the Woman’s Party leaders thought the time had come to put pressure on both major parties.

Women who could vote in November 1916 evidently responded more to the peace promises of the Wilson camp than to Alice Paul’s advice, and the incumbent took all but two of the equal suffrage states. Yet Woodrow Wilson could hardly miss the message—that he had garnered only twenty-three electoral votes more than his Republican opponent who had personally advocated a suffrage amendment. Women’s power, if they chose to use it, was no longer insignificant. To underline their point, suffragists stepped up their campaign in January 1917, when they placed twenty-four pickets outside the White House fence. The president, raised to believe that chivalry always wins, sent his secretary to invite the picketers in for tea, and he was visibly upset when they refused.127

After the United States entered the war in April 1917, the woman suffrage movement divided even its most ardent supporters from one another. In a country at war, some women argued, wisdom dictated putting aside the suffrage fight to concentrate on military victory. Anna Howard Shaw, former president of the Woman Suffrage Association, shelved her pro-vote lectures to devote full time to the war effort, and she could not understand why other suffragists continued with their picketing activities, defending them as an exercise in free speech. The demonstrators exhibited little subtlety in attacking the president, and one of their gold and white lettered signs read: “An Autocrat at home is a Poor Champion of Democracy Abroad.”128

Edith Wilson showed no sympathy at all for the demonstrators. After her husband had the picketers arrested and imprisoned, she referred to them disparagingly as “those devils in the workhouse,” and she opposed his decision to pardon them a few weeks later.129 Edith’s position in this phase of the Wilson administration makes an interesting footnote to her much publicized role after Woodrow became incapacitated. In neither case did she express the slightest interest in providing for or setting an example for strong and independent women. In both instances, her concern centered on how the issue affected her husband’s well-being—not the issue itself.

By January 1918, the woman’s suffrage cause seemed poised for victory. New York State had finally passed its own amendment, and the United States’ war ally, Great Britain, prepared to extend the vote to its women. If enough states followed suit, any serious candidate for election in November 1918 would be advised to board the bandwagon. After the House committee gave its nod of approval, a group of Democrats met with the president on January 9, 1918, and announced, as they left the White House, that he now favored a federal amendment on suffrage. The president’s shift was termed “a surprise” by the New York Times, “despite some indications of change.”130 He had been persuaded, he explained, by the need to reward women for their work in the war effort. He could hardly have done less. Two of his Cabinet members, Treasury Secretary McAdoo and Navy Secretary Daniels, had already announced their support for a federal amendment. With many Republicans already on record in favor, passage seemed likely.131

It is true that many women, including those in the president’s family, had participated on various levels in the war effort. His daughter Margaret announced that she would donate all the proceeds from her singing to the Red Cross, and Eleanor, now married to the secretary of the Treasury, went six mornings a week to supervise a Red Cross storeroom. She left at noon only because she was scheduled to preside at meetings of the Women’s Liberty Loan Committee.

Edith Wilson outdid them all by converting the White House into a model of wartime sacrifice. She announced that she would observe meatless days just like everybody else, and to save the cost of cutting the lawn, she borrowed a flock of Shropshire sheep from a Virginia farm. When time came to shear them, she donated the wool, totaling ninety-eight pounds, to the forty-eight states for auctioning, the proceeds designated for the war effort. In Kansas one zealous bidder bought two pounds of White House wool for $5,000 each, and the total sold in all the states brought more than $50,000.132 With less publicity, the First Lady knitted sweaters for soldiers and arranged for a White House car to take furloughed men around Washington. When time came to christen warships, the only First Lady to claim Indian ancestry selected Indian names.133

At the war’s end in November 1918, President Wilson announced that he would go to Europe to work personally on the details of the peace agreement. The first American president to engage in such an international overture, Woodrow gained enormous attention, and Edith, who accompanied him, also received considerable notice. Florence Harriman, another American present in Versailles, reported that Edith “then, as always, was a First Lady to be proud of.”134 When the Wilsons traveled to Italy after the peace conference, an American army captain compared Edith to the Italian queen and concluded, “I don’t think the Italians have got anything on us.”135

It remained for Edith’s return to the United States, however, for her to achieve lasting prominence in the history of presidents’ wives. Woodrow had decided to appeal directly to the people for support of his peace plan—a measure necessitated, in part, by the opposition to it in the Senate. On September 26, 1919, while traveling through Pueblo, Colorado, he suffered a paralytic stroke and then returned to Washington. For several weeks his condition remained uncertain, and his doctor refused to say specifically what ailed him or even how severely disabled he was. Rumors spread.

Woodrow’s trusted friend and physician, Cary Grayson, had impressed Edith with the importance of keeping all business from the patient but she hardly needed convincing of the seriousness of his affliction. His trembling hands, gray color, and halting speech told her that, and she resolved to spare him all unnecessary stress. If anyone mentioned that Woodrow ought to relinquish his office to his vice president, the suggestion was quickly discarded, on the grounds that fighting to get back in shape would prove the best medicine. Edith isolated Woodrow from everyone except his doctors, so that even his secretary did not see him for weeks. Any communication that reached the president went first to the president’s wife. “So began my stewardship,” Edith later wrote. “I studied every paper [but] I myself never made a single decision regarding the disposition of public affairs.”136

Observers had no way of knowing who made decisions in the White House, and when she issued memos, signed Edith Galt Wilson, curiosity grew. On papers requiring the president’s signature, Woodrow’s name bore so little resemblance to what it had looked like before his illness that charges of forgery were raised. Edith explained the discrepancy by saying that the bedridden president lacked a hard surface for writing but that his handwriting improved as soon as she provided him with a board.

Word spread that Edith Wilson was running the government. Housekeeper Jaffray referred to Edith as the “Assistant President,”137 and at a Foreign Relations Committee meeting, one senator stormed that the country was under a “petticoat government.”138 Requests to the president frequently began “Dear Mrs. Wilson,” indicating that the writers recognized her as controlling access to the president if not actually making all decisions. Popular magazines reinforced this impression by reporting that Edith “came close to carrying the burden of the First Man.”139

Rumors multiplied until finally New Mexico’s Republican Senator Albert Fall and a more sympathetic Nebraska Democrat, Gilbert Hitchcock, were delegated to call on the president, ostensibly to inquire about the handling of a foreign policy matter but actually to ascertain the president’s physical condition and ability to preside. Woodrow appeared surprisingly alert, propped up in bed so that his right arm could shake their hands and retrieve relevant papers which were conveniently placed nearby. Edith sat holding a pen, poised to take notes but pointedly unprepared to shake hands with the men whom she detested as traitors because they had come to check up on her husband. The senators were surprised by the president’s quick retort to Albert Fall, who had insisted, “We are praying for you,” and the president had answered, “Which way?”140

The cabinet looked for precedents about what to do when a president became seriously incapacitated but refused to relinquish the office. In the one case that seemed relevant, James Garfield had lingered for almost three months in 1881 but the vice president had not taken over. The Constitution left unclear who should decide that a president was no longer able to discharge the powers and duties of the office. In the vacuum that developed, the president’s wife was permitted to enter center stage. She did not have to risk the charge that an ambitious politician might have feared of using the president’s illness to advance her own career.

Edith Wilson’s relationship with her husband during the winter of 1919–1920 falls into a familiar pattern of activity for First Ladies. Married to men in demanding, stressful jobs, the women attempted to protect their husbands. That marital concern, however, should not be confused with any great personal interest in politics or in government. The theme of First Lady as protector of her husband’s well-being runs through the memoirs of several twentieth-century First Ladies, with Lady Bird Johnson putting it eloquently when she explained to an interviewer: “[Every First Lady] feels first primarily the obligation of trying to make a comfortable area, an island of peace, if you will, a setting in which her husband can do his best work.”141

Nancy Reagan’s role during her husband’s campaigns and presidency was described in similar terms: she saw her jobs as protecting him from overwork, inadequate staff, and poor scheduling. If Ronald Reagan had been a used car salesman, one wag had it, Nancy would have been dusting the interiors. This particular view of the role of a president’s wife had very little to do with kind of work he did, and it should not be confused with the blatantly political roles that other women (Helen Taft, Sarah Polk, Abigail Adams, and Rosalynn Carter) took in their husbands’ administrations.

Evidence mounts on several sides that Edith Wilson’s influence in her husband’s administration has been greatly overrated. Edith had never shown any interest in politics, although in the romantic early days of their marriage, she had sat alongside him while he studied official communications. After his death, she refused political involvement, and when Eleanor Roosevelt appealed to her for a statement in support of a woman candidate, Edith cited her forty-year record of obliviousness to politics.142

Most telling of all, in assessing Edith Wilson’s influence, is the nature of the criticism leveled at her. Her alleged dominance occurred only during Woodrow’s illness, from September 1919 until early 1920. A time of great tumult in the United States, this period included a miners’ strike and a government injunction against mine leaders, a steel strike, the continuation of the fight over the peace treaty, and the deportation of aliens. Yet through all these difficulties, the complaint leveled at the White House was a lack of direction, an unwillingness to act—hardly evidence of a powerful leader. When the attorney general, Mitchell Palmer, began his wholesale attack on people he suspected of being disloyal, the president’s secretary futilely begged Edith to see that her husband acted.143

Edith had married a man who rarely listened to women on any substantive issue, and only his debilitating stroke placed him in a dependent position so that rumors could thrive about his wife running the country. Her memoirs describe how during his illness she abandoned ideas that differed with his rather than risk upsetting him. When the fight over the League of Nations became particularly acrimonious, for example, she reported that she had suggested to Woodrow that he compromise rather than hold out for what might be a losing proposition. She quickly reversed herself, however, when he accused her of deserting him.144 At least one student of the Wilson administration concluded that Ellen Wilson, had she lived, might have exerted strong influence on a sick president and possibly convinced him to accept Senator Lodge’s amendments concerning the League of Nations.145 Such a judgment reinforces the interpretation of Edith Wilson as nonpolitical, interested only in Woodrow’s health and happiness. It is ironic that Edith should have gone down in history as the “Mrs. Wilson [who] virtually took over the reins of the White House,”146 while Ellen Axson Wilson has been almost forgotten except by researchers who resurrect evidence of her strength and talent.

Edith Bolling Galt Wilson survived her husband by thirty-eight years, and when she died in 1961, she was buried beside the president, a tradition begun by Martha Washington. Every widow who had remarried and become First Lady had chosen burial beside her second husband rather than by her first. Edith had lived only eight of her nearly eighty years as Woodrow’s wife, but those few years brought enormous publicity. Two full-length biographies147 detailed the influence she supposedly exerted in the White House and virtually all accounts of her husband’s life assessed her role. She had been called “Gatekeeper Extraordinary”148 and “surrogate President.”149 Yet the consensus is that she described her role as accurately as anyone when she wrote that she simply looked out for her husband’s health.

Her role during Woodrow’s illness demonstrated another potential trouble sport in the presidential system, whose weaknesses Woodrow had studiously pointed out. In a parliamentary government, which he had favored, the prime minister functioned as head of his party, more dependent on other party members than was a president who won power in a popular election. The prime minister’s term of office is more flexible, and elections take place in response to current needs and problems, while the president’s term is a fixed four years. Woodrow Wilson’s second term had almost eighteen months to run when he became ill, and members of his family thus had the opportunity to make decisions that in other government systems would have been handled by fellow party members. Not until the passage of the twenty-fifth amendment in 1967 was that power vacuum officially filled. Under that amendment, Congress could designate some “body [other than the Vice President and the Cabinet]” whose judgment of a president’s incapacity could be used to relieve him of his official duties. Although not explicitly mentioned in the amendment, the president’s spouse was understood by some people to be able to participate in that decision.

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.