THE MOST POPULAR BOOK on the 1920s emphasizes enormous contradictions in the American scene. At the same time that individuals experienced great strides in their personal lives, the nation took one giant step backward into “normalcy.” A country tired of sacrificing for war and weary of high-minded slogans about “making the world safe for democracy” reverted to old ways that emphasized personal comfort and national isolation.1
Nowhere is the contradiction more apparent than in accounts of women’s lives. The view of the 1920s as “roaring” gives only half the picture. It is true that contraception and cosmetics became more available and acceptable; Freud and flapper fashions offered new freedoms. Electric appliances promised to diminish the time required for housework (if standards of acceptable cleanliness did not rise concurrently) and old barriers that had stood between the sexes, in matters such as smoking in public, dropped. Women increased their percentage of the labor force, and 450,000 of the new jobs were in the professions.2
But the decade had a less exuberant side, one that showed disillusionment and restraint. Some women approached their new opportunities with suspicion, while others refused to change or did so only reluctantly. Reliable contraception information and equipment did not reach all women who would have used it, and only a small percentage of women eligible went out to vote in 1920.3 The number of female physicians actually declined in the decade as did women’s share of college enrollment, and three out of every four women who earned college degrees went into fields commonly considered “women’s work”—teaching and nursing.4
This paradox of apparent freedom circumscribed by old, strong traditions shows up in the lives of the three First Ladies of the 1920s. Warren Harding’s landslide victory over James Cox in 1920 brought into the White House Florence Kling Harding, considerably more conscious of the value of good public relations than any of her predecessors but, at the same time, extremely narrow in her outlook. At Warren Harding’s death in 1923, charming Grace Goodhue Coolidge captured the nation’s attention. With her dropped waistlines and raised hemlines, she epitomized current flapper style. Not until she had left Washington did she reveal her considerably more serious side in the poetry she published. After Calvin Coolidge chose “not to run” in 1928, an erudite, well-traveled Lou Henry Hoover became First Lady, and for all her demurrals about merely “forming a backdrop for Bertie,”5 she gave some remarkably feminist speeches. All three of the presidents’ wives who moved into the White House in the 1920s sought to present themselves—their educations, marital arrangements, participation in their husbands’ careers, and views on women’s roles—in ways that reflected contemporary standards without offending those whose views remained less modern. Together they set the stage for many of the innovations for which Eleanor Roosevelt gained credit in the 1930s and 1940s.
None of the three was young by the time her husband took the presidential oath. Florence Kling Harding, at sixty-one, was the oldest woman yet to assume the job of First Lady. She made a point, however, of appearing energetic and youthful, and in the 1920 campaign, she seemed every bit as up-to-date as the twenty-nine-year-old wife of Warren’s Democratic opponent. Both major parties had looked to pivotal Ohio for names to head their tickets that year and both had settled on former newspapermen who had moved on to politics, James M. Cox to the governor’s seat and Warren Harding to the U.S. Senate. The men’s parallel careers had not, however, included similar wives.
In a campaign interview with a New York reporter, James Cox’s young wife sounded as sweet and docile as an antebellum matron, concerned only about her children and the “price to pay” if her husband won the 1920 election. Florence Harding at least appeared more in control of her life as she insisted that victory would not affect her marriage (which was later rumored to have contained a great deal of discord) and that nothing could “disturb our serenity and happiness.” Margaret Blair Cox, who had graduated from an elite eastern girls’ school, described her interest in gardening and canning while Florence ignored the domestic side of her life and stressed her part in her husband’s career. “Some people in Ohio will tell you she is the better politician of the two,” the reporter Ann O’Hagan wrote, adding that even Warren admitted that his automobile was the only thing he possessed that “Florence did not have a desire to run.”6
The new acceptability of cosmetics assisted Florence considerably in her determination to appear young and vigorous. Married for almost thirty years to a man five years her junior, she had grown adept at camouflaging the difference, and even her enemies agreed that she usually succeeded in looking younger than her years. She employed lace inserts and wide velvet ribbons, often studded with a bauble, to cover neck wrinkles. Instead of accepting the comfort of flat shoes, she wedged her feet into the then fashionable pointed toes with toothpick heels. Daily appointments with a hairdresser kept every gray hair marcelled tightly in place, and liberal applications of rouge suggested, at least from a distance, the rosy glow of youth.
The 1920s rewarded a different kind of youthfulness than had been the vogue in the first half of the nineteenth century. Instead of the innocent, ingénue stance of the antebellum period, the preferred model in the 1920s suggested adventure, glamor, and sophistication. Movie stars and aviators had replaced sober reformers as the “most admired women in America,”7 and all three of the 1920s First Ladies reflected that change. Even the scholarly Lou Hoover released a formal photograph of herself, swathed in white fur and peeking almost flirtatiously from behind a fan.8 Florence Harding’s wardrobe of plumed hats and pearl-studded satin gowns could have competed with those of a Hollywood starlet.9
By far the most successful of the three in conveying energy and glamor was the youngest, Grace Coolidge, who at forty-four showed some of the fun-loving rebelliousness for which she had been known in her teens. A sorority member at the University of Vermont, enthusiastic dancer, and Boston Red Sox fan, she was among the first to arrive at parties and the last to leave. She longed to try whatever was new, from smoking a cigarette to bobbing her hair and traveling in an airplane. That she recognized her marriage to a successful politician limited her opportunities is clear from a statement she made soon after moving into the White House. “Being wife to a government worker,” she wrote, “is a very confining position.”10
Grace’s description of herself should not obscure the fact that, unlike any of her predecessors, she had attended a coeducational university and prepared for a career of her own. Although Lucy Hayes (1877–1881) is often credited with being the first president’s wife to have graduated from college, hers was a women’s academy that did not offer the same curriculum that would have been offered to men students. Grace Coolidge earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Vermont and then went on for additional training so that she could teach the deaf. Many nineteenth-century presidents’ wives had taught school, but only temporarily, in order to earn some money and perhaps put some distance between themselves and their parents. Their letters convey little sense of education as a career or lifelong interest. Grace Coolidge worked only three years between her college graduation in 1902 and her marriage in 1905, but she maintained a permanent interest in training the deaf. After her husband’s political career ended, she served on several boards and committees dedicated to improving conditions for the hearing-impaired.
Lou Henry Hoover’s degree in geology also came from a coeducational university, Stanford, where she studied with the same professors who had taught her husband. Of the three, only Florence Harding followed a traditional woman’s course of study, but her training at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music equipped her for the time when she had to support herself and young son. Any American young woman searching for a model in the 1920s had three examples of presidents’ wives who had prepared to take care of themselves. That each chose to join forces with a politically ambitious husband is another matter.
Divorce statistics suggest that Americans ended their marriages in the “roaring twenties” more often than in any preceding decade,11 and here, too, examples stood at the top of political life. Short-memoried reporters, who seemed to imply in 1952 and 1956 that Adlai Stevenson was the first divorced man to win the presidential nomination of a major party, would have profited from a close look at the 1920 election. Both Florence Harding, whose husband headed the Republican ticket, and James Cox, the Democratic hopeful, had been divorced from their previous spouses. Florence had sued her first husband for desertion in the 1880s, and Cox had split with the mother of his three children in 1911.12 Neither breakup received much attention in the 1920 campaign, however, perhaps because each side considered restraint advisable in light of its own vulnerability.13 The divorces may have seemed irrelevant since both had occurred well in the past and, at the time of the campaign, all the principals had either remarried or died. A prominent woman journalist, who interviewed both candidates’ wives for an article in a popular magazine, wrote the entire piece without mentioning either divorce.14
By the time she became First Lady, Florence Harding had been married to Warren for nearly thirty years—time in which she had shown two powerful traits which her enemies and supporters agreed she excelled in: willfulness and determination. While still enrolled in the Cincinnati Conservatory, her energies had turned more to play than to the piano, and she had joined in with a hometown group of young people known as the “rough set” because they took up among other sports the new fad of roller-skating. One of their number, Henry A. De Wolfe, was particularly attractive to her, perhaps because her father detested his heavy drinking and playboy attitude. When Amos Kling, Florence’s father, forbade her seeing Henry, she promptly married him and six months later gave birth to a son.15
The young couple’s attempt to run a roller-skating rink in nearby Galion failed, and Henry quickly tired of the responsibilities attached to being head of a family. Before their son had reached two years of age, he deserted Florence who had little choice but to return to Marion. The story persisted for years that she had taken her son and slept in an abandoned house the first night back rather than humble herself by appealing to her father for help.16 Her in-laws supplied some money; Florence gave piano lessons; and eventually her father came to her rescue, but she had learned an important lesson about the costliness of dependence and never allowed herself to become quite so defenseless again. After her divorce, she let her father adopt and raise her son while she set out to try again.
In a city of 4,000 people, an ambitious young piano teacher could not have remained long unaware of the charming, handsome newcomer who had just bought part ownership in one of Marion’s newspapers. The publisher, Warren G. Harding, had a sister who studied piano with Florence, and soon teacher and newspaperman met. That Amos Kling vehemently opposed his daughter’s having anything to do with Warren increased his attractiveness immensely.
By the 1880s the Hardings ranked below the Klings in Marion’s hierarchy, although a few years earlier that would not have been the case. In 1860 when Florence was born, her family lived in an apartment over their hardware store, but circumstances changed as Amos Kling prospered in real estate and business. By the time Warren began to court Florence Kling, her father was one of the most important men in town. Warren’s parents both practiced medicine and his mother later acquired midwife certification, but their specialty, homeopathy, paid none too well. Warren, who had prospered during his first few years with the Marion Star , had bought out his partners and built himself a handsome house on one of the town’s best streets. Such considerations mattered far less to Amos Kling than the persistent rumor around town that Warren had Negro ancestry. Marion, Ohio, was not integrated in the 1880s, and racial prejudice was strong. In such a setting, the ancestry of a new, young man in town became the subject of considerable speculation. Some of the locals insisted they detected Negro features in Warren.
Continuing a long tradition, the future First Lady married against strenuous parental objection, and in this particular case, the objection remained so strong that Amos Kling did not speak to his daughter for seven years. The small ceremony at Warren’s new house in 1891 united a divorcée, one week short of celebrating her thirty-first birthday, with a promising businessman, then twenty-five. Some of their friends detected a mother-son relationship in the match and they pointed out that Warren had always been very attentive to his mother, taking her fresh flowers every Sunday or, if he could not go, arranging for someone else to make the delivery. Now he transferred that filial devotion to his wife, making her his conscience, bookkeeper, and monitor. For the fun part of his life he evidently went elsewhere—at least two women friends left accounts of the time they spent with Warren, and his poker-playing friends supplied their own recollections of his participation in their games.17
Florence had her own reasons for entering the marriage—she came from the same generation that had produced many women who insisted on independence. Born in the same decade as First Ladies Helen Taft and Ellen Wilson, Florence Harding kept her rebellions closer home than they had—she married local young men whom her father detested and then worked hard to prove him wrong.
Florence devoted herself to Warren’s career as though her own reputation were at stake. His mother, Phoebe Dickerson Harding, who was something of a career woman herself, had warned Florence to keep the icebox full and both eyes on Warren. Florence lost no time stopping at the Star office to see how the business—and Warren—operated. She remained for fourteen years, first streamlining the bookkeeping system and then organizing a home delivery service to boost circulation. One of the carriers whom she hired ran for president himself later, and he recalled how she had taken over the Star. “She was a woman of very narrow mentality and range of interest or understanding,” Norman Thomas wrote, “but of strong will and within a certain area of genuine kindness. … It was her energy and her business sense which made the Star.” According to Norman Thomas, Florence complemented her husband’s enormous affability by overseeing the advertising and circulation while Warren supplied “the front … a joiner … popular.”18
As for the other part of her mother-in-law’s advice, Florence dutifully pedalled her bicycle home to cook Warren’s dinner, but her domesticity did not extend to maternity. She showed little interest in the son from her first marriage, and by Warren she remained childless even though one of his women friends reported that he would have very much liked to have a child. It was “Florence [who] would not hear of it,” he said, and he explained that she took “tiny white pills” to avoid conceiving.19
The control over her own life that had been so conspicuously absent from Florence’s first marriage showed up in other ways in her second marriage. She involved herself in each of Warren’s campaigns: from state senator he moved to lieutenant governor and then, after losing a bid for governor in 1910, to the United States Senate in 1915. In the early days, she accompanied him on the lecture tour, impressing some of his managers as “meanly accurate in calculating expenses.”20 By the time Florence arrived in Washington, one politically active woman observed in her a “ruthless ambition to become First Lady” as she “constantly worked and made Warren work toward that end.”21 Florence once confided to Norman Thomas’s wife that Warren got into a lot of trouble when she was not around so she limited those opportunities whenever possible. During his Senate days, she encouraged him to give his interviews at home so that she could participate, and she kept up with the issues so that eventually Warren’s campaign manager pronounced her “one of the best informed women in the country.”22
When, as the wife of an Ohio senator, Florence first arrived in Washington in 1915, she lacked the celebrity status that she might have liked. But she could prepare for success. Alice Roosevelt Long-worth who, with her husband Nicholas, socialized with the Hardings in their Senate days, reported that Florence kept a little red book with the names of people she meant to get even with when she got the chance. In the meantime, the handsome senator from Ohio appeared on many guest lists and even Alice included him at her poker table. She waited until he was dead to write: “He was not a bad man, just a slob.”23
Florence had spent too much time around the newspaper office to remain unaware of the value of good publicity, and she added some dash to her own image by associating with the capital’s wealthy, risk-taking social leaders. One of Florence’s closest friends became the legendary Evalyn Walsh McLean, when Evalyn was looking around for some “serious” cause to “save,” as she put it, her husband, Edward, from “dissipation.”24 Dabbling in politics and associating with politicians would divert him, she thought, from his playboy ways. The daughter of an Irish immigrant who made his fortune in Colorado mining and then spent the remainder of his life enjoying the money and spoiling his children, Evalyn had married a man every bit as fun-loving as she. On their European honeymoon, $200,000 proved insufficient to pay the bills. Back in Washington he concentrated on running the Washington Post, which he owned, and she engineered a highly publicized social life for them and spent money as though it would never run out. On one shopping trip, conducted comfortably from her chauffeured Rolls Royce, she admitted to paying $5,000 for a St. Bernard dog for her daughter (although the girl had requested a poodle).25 On another day, Evalyn purchased the famous Hope diamond, reputed to bring tragedy to whoever owned it, and then attempted to negate the curse by having a priest bless the gem.26
Such extravagance fascinated small-town Florence Harding, and Evalyn admitted that she grew fond of Florence, who could be haughty and nagging, “her mouth a revelation of discontent.”27 The unusual friendship between the two very different women continued until Florence’s death. Evalyn, who rarely admitted to caring what anybody thought about her, confessed she was flattered to have an important politician’s wife seek her advice.28 Florence knew where to place herself when the cameras started rolling, but she knew where to draw the line, too, and on one occasion, when she feared being photographed beside a cigarette-smoking Evalyn, she knocked the offending article from her friend’s mouth.
The careful housewife’s dependence on the flamboyant Evalyn McLean represents one of several inconsistencies in Florence Harding’s life. When Warren’s name came up for consideration for president in the 1920 campaign, she intensely wanted the glory of victory but she feared the disastrous exposures that a national campaign could bring. Warren had already been linked romantically with at least two women, and one of them, a Marion housewife, had frequently vacationed with her husband and the Hardings. Because the woman’s husband was in poor health, he removed himself from the scene for long recuperative jaunts to the West Coast, and Florence, who had had one kidney removed in 1905, was often ill. Their absences left their spouses considerable freedom, causing speculation in Marion about what they did in their time together.29
Warren Harding’s other reported romance involved a much younger woman who had developed a crush on the senator while she was still a high school student and had first aroused Florence’s suspicions. Nan Britten later published a book about her involvement with Warren Harding and thus became the first (but not the last) to divulge the details of her own sexual liaison with a president. Like her latter-day counterparts, Judith Exner (who publicized her relationship with President John F. Kennedy)30 and Kay Summersby (who described the time she spent with then-General Dwight Eisenhower during World War II), Britten waited until the other principal was dead before going public.31
Britten titled her account The President’s Daughter, although at the time of her daughter’s birth, Warren was still a senator. The book details how Warren helped young Britten move from Marion to New York City and find a job. On trips the two took together, Warren registered her in hotels as his niece. With that record and that visibility, her relationship with Warren could hardly have escaped sharp-eyed Florence or his colleagues, and Florence had good reason to fear the close scrutiny of a national campaign.
Even if fear of exposure of her husband’s active extramarital sex life had not deterred Florence, she had other misgivings. While she would have liked to think that matters of life and death did not depend on such things as the stars, she could not free herself from the belief that they did. A medium whom she frequently consulted had predicted that Warren would win the presidency but that disaster would follow: Warren would die in office and Florence, soon afterward. When he won the nomination, Florence was widely quoted as saying she saw only tragedy in his future.32
Her own poor health also concerned Florence. Her one remaining kidney frequently became infected, swelling to several times its normal size and causing great pain. She had barely escaped death once when she had chosen to rely on her Marion homeopath rather than on other doctors who had advised surgery, and she understood that her luck might not hold the next time.
In spite of these misgivings, Florence put her best effort into getting Warren nominated and elected. Early in the primary campaign when his determination flagged, she stymied his attempt to drop out by seizing the telephone from him and shouting to his campaign manager on the other end that they were in the race until “hell freezes over.”33 When people came to Marion to assess the candidate, she was unfailingly courteous to all, smiling agreeably when they ran over the hedge and trampled the grass so thoroughly that the yard had to be graveled. On questions of politics she curbed her inclination to speak out and deferred to Warren, even though more than one of her friends thought she found it trying to learn at her age to appear submissive.
Florence held strong ideas about when to use the press and when to keep quiet. When a Wooster College professor published pamphlets outlining Warren’s black ancestry, Warren and his campaign advisers were uncertain how to react. The candidate wanted to go public with the explanation he had already given his friends—that the story persisted because of his family’s record of giving aid to slaves escaping on the underground railroad. Florence decreed otherwise and ordered a cancellation of the denial that Warren’s staff had drafted.34 Some charges, if treated as unworthy of response, would eventually die down, she reasoned, and no statement on the matter came out.
Warren Harding won the 1920 election (garnering sixteen million popular votes to Cox’s nine million), and preparations began for an inaugural celebration to outshine all previous ones. Edward McLean, who headed the inaugural ball committee, planned a party that would combine, his wife wrote, “the liveliness of ten July fourth celebrations with the ending of a victorious war.”35 The Republican National Committee, having a more modest celebration in mind, balked at spending that kind of money and dropped sponsorship of the official inaugural ball so that the McLeans hosted their own party at their Friendship estate outside Washington.
The expensive, private initiation of the Harding administration set the tone for what followed, and the Hardings persisted in acting as though they operated above and apart from the rules governing other people. In spite of a constitutional amendment prohibiting the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors” the Hardings kept a well-stocked bar in the private quarters of the White House. While official “dry” receptions were held downstairs, the president would be upstairs, Alice Roosevelt Longworth reported, surrounded by his friends and all brands of whisky, playing cards, and poker chips, thus presenting an atmosphere more appropriate to a saloon than to the residence of a head of state.36 The First Lady was left to move between the two worlds, adding a touch of schoolteacher rectitude while keeping the drinks fresh.
In honing a public image as a nonimbiber, Florence reflected typical First Lady behavior, not restricted to the prohibition years. Until Betty Ford’s post–White House confession that she was an alcoholic, presidents’ wives regularly objected to accounts that they consumed alcoholic beverages and to photos showing them with drink in hand. The temperance movement itself rarely caught their fancy, however, and except for Lucy Hayes, no First Lady became an outspoken advocate of the cause.
To ensure the most favorable publicity possible, Florence carefully honed her relationship with reporters—the men became “my boys” to her and the women “the girls.” One Washington veteran recalled that Florence invited newspaperwomen to cruise down the Potomac with her on the presidential yacht and then startled the group by slapping one of them on the back and exclaiming, “Well here we are, all girls together.”37 She even invited women reporters to interview her and then, wearing a rose-colored negligee, she spoke with them in her bedroom.38 Although Ohioan Jane Dixon of the New York Telegram was a personal favorite with Florence, she never showed her preferences and reporters responded by treating her well. Although some of them found her haughty,39 much of what they wrote was not unflattering. Her claim that she gave them important, newsworthy information is difficult to substantiate because she said she asked them not to name her as a source, and none of them did.40
The intentional management of the press extended to virtually every area of Florence’s life. Rather than divulge just how precarious her health was, she attributed frequent and sometimes lengthy absences to food poisoning, thus giving the public a picture of a much healthier First Lady than was actually fact. A life-threatening attack of nephritis, which she suffered in August 1922, was not reported for several weeks and then not in detail.41 Her two grandchildren did not visit her in the White House so that photographers had no opportunity to catch her in grandmotherly poses that might focus attention on her age.42 Mindful of the anti-German sentiment that lingered in America after World War I, Florence tailored her ancestors accordingly. Although a prominent historian has concluded that Florence was descended from German Mennonites,43 she carefully credited her “French grandmother” with teaching her excellent posture and good taste in clothes.44
In spite of her expertise in public relations, Florence showed little skill at managing the White House. Nor did she seem to care. The 1920s did not place the same importance on domestic skills as had been the case at the turn of the century, and none of the First Ladies of the 1920s spent much time honing her domestic image. Florence had managed only modest-sized houses in Marion and Washington, and she lacked the preparation for taking on an establishment as large and complex as the executive mansion. On first meeting with its staff, she seemed unsure of herself, saying first that she would find a new housekeeper and then that she would retain the old one. Ex-president William Howard Taft, who stopped by the Harding White House to offer advice, judged her completely unprepared for that side of the job.45 She did make one innovation in the staff, adding a Secret Service agent to the usual retinue of housekeepers, maids, and stewards, and then assigning him sundry tasks that had little or nothing to do with her safety. The surveillance that Eleanor Roosevelt so disliked began in the Harding administration when Florence decided she could use extra help to chauffeur her clairvoyant or keep watch on Warren.
Florence tempered her feminism so that it either fit accepted standards or remained very private. Photographers snapped her voting alongside Warren in November 1920,46 but a surprisingly feminist letter that she composed in the White House remained unmailed. A woman had solicited Florence’s views on careers for women, and the First Lady replied that one career was about all any couple could manage. “If the career is the husband’s,” Florence wrote in 1922, “the wife can merge her own with it, if it is to be the wife’s as it undoubtedly will be in an increasing proportion of cases, then the husband may, with no sacrifice of self respect or of recognition by the community, permit himself to be the less prominent and distinguished member of the combination.”47
In line with her view that the White House belonged to everybody, Florence worked hard to make it (and herself) available to visitors. One of the maids recalled how Florence would run down the steps to greet tourists,48 and on New Year’s Day she stood to shake hands with thousands of guests even though she needed two days in bed to store up strength for the ordeal and two days to recuperate.49 Her prediction to Evalyn McLean that being First Lady meant “nothing but work, work, work”50 proved accurate, and she insisted on expending considerable energy on the job, even when she was seriously ill.
In the end, the calculated secrecy that Florence used in dealing with the press worked against her. Neither she nor her husband (who had a long history of high blood pressure and symptoms of heart disease)51 had supplied accurate health information, and the public had little preparation for their deaths. On the fatal western trip in the summer of 1923, Warren’s doctor had issued a bulletin citing food poisoning resulting from eating bad crabs when in fact none had been consumed. When the president died on August 2, many people questioned the cause and some even suggested foul play with Florence as the culprit.52
The affable, charming man who had attracted Florence had continued to exert his strong magnetism all the way to the White House. He had himself noted a major personal weakness when he laughingly told a group of reporters that his father had been grateful Warren was not born a girl or he would have been “in the family way all the time.” He could “not say no.”53 On the political level, this inordinate desire to please showed itself in a zigzag course of appointments and actions. Although his cabinet included some of the best minds of the time, it also included some crooks, because Warren Harding had never learned to tell one from the other. One wag of the time had it that the difference between the first president and the current one was that while George Washington could not tell a lie, Warren Harding could not tell a liar.54 The value of having the experienced Charles Evans Hughes as secretary of state and the hardworking Herbert Hoover as secretary of commerce was offset by two others who later went to prison: Albert Fall, secretary of interior, and Warren Harding’s old friend, Attorney General Harry Daugherty.
The extent of scandal in President Harding’s administration had not yet become public when he died in August 1923, and his last recorded activity was listening to Florence read from the Saturday Evening Post a glowing account of his presidency. The train carrying his body across the country for burial passed the largest crowds seen since Abraham Lincoln’s death, with a million and a half people gathering in Chicago alone to pay their respects.55
Florence made the cross-country trip with her husband’s corpse, attended memorial services in the capital, and then traveled to Ohio for the burial. It was during the stop at the White House that she made her famous nocturnal visit to the president’s bier. Evalyn McLean, who had stayed with her friend, reported that Florence had gone down in the middle of the night to the coffin in the East Room and had stood for a long time talking to it. She sounded more like a mother addressing a dead child when she finished: “They can’t hurt you now.”56
With very little time to live, Florence stayed for a while at the Willard Hotel in Washington and then returned to Marion. She had neither forgotten nor discounted the fortune-teller’s prediction about her own death and she recognized the signs of further deterioration in her health. Her trusted homeopath died in the summer of 1924, and the following September, when Evalyn McLean came through Ohio in her private railroad car, Florence announced that this would be their last visit. Weeks later, fifteen months after Warren’s death, she was dead.
The sum of Florence Kling Harding’s influence on her husband’s political career remains difficult to assess, partly because she destroyed much of the physical evidence that could have helped define it. Of the 350,000 documents that survive of the Harding administration, few relate to her political views or activities although hundreds of thank-you notes addressed to her suggest that she was not idle. She contributed to the enigma of her role by juxtaposing strong and blatant claims of her own power alongside demure self-effacement. She smiled obligingly when her husband’s friends called her “Duchess” in a not altogether complimentary tone. She seems to have held strong opinions and expressed them freely. Some historians who have evaluated the evidence have concluded that Florence’s influence on her husband has been exaggerated, but most of her contemporaries insisted it was real, and many of them offered specific instances to support that point of view.
Harry Daugherty, the campaign manager who later served in the Harding cabinet, reported being summoned to the White House one evening to referee an argument between the Hardings on the wording of a presidential address. In the end, Florence got her way.57 Secretary of State Hughes called Florence “her husband’s most faithful counselor.”58
Nicholas Murray Butler, a guest at the White House during a discussion about accepting a mansion as a residence for the vice president, reported that it was Florence Harding who applied the veto. Senator John Henderson’s widow had offered to donate her house on Sixteenth Street for the use of the vice president, but Florence Harding would not hear of accepting the gift. “Not a bit of it,” she fumed, according to Butler, “I am going to have that bill defeated. Do you think I am going to have those Coolidges living in a house like that? A hotel apartment is plenty good enough for them.”59 Whatever the reasons, Congress turned down the gift and the vice president remained without a permanent official residence for forty more years.
To the widespread view that politicians’ wives should form a social backdrop, Florence Kling Harding, as she always signed herself, offered a notable exception. Early in her White House tenure, she had reportedly inquired of a senator whom he judged the most successful First Lady in history. When he replied, “Dolley Madison or Frances Cleveland,” Florence Harding retorted, in what might be considered a slogan of her mature years: “Watch me!”60 She only partly concealed her partnership in her husband’s political decisions and yet she received little of the criticism leveled at her predecessor, Edith Wilson. For a woman whose husband admitted her influence, she died popular with the nation, although not with those who worked closely with her. Few of the Hardings’ friends would contest the view that she imposed a strong discipline on herself and that she showed exceptional determination throughout her life.
Unfortunately, the “narrow mentality” that Norman Thomas had identified years earlier prepared her poorly for strong leadership. Her tendency to judge issues in terms of the people involved and how they treated her was also a fault. Poorly educated in matters of government but richly endowed with ambition, she determined, like many women of her generation, to hitch her own career to her husband’s because the time had not yet come, as she predicted it would, when a couple might profitably choose to put their combined energies into the wife’s career.
No one ever accused Grace Goodhue Coolidge, who followed Florence Harding into the White House, of exerting influence on her husband’s political decisions. Not long after her marriage, she had prepared to go hear her husband speak but he had stopped her with a laconic “Better not,” and that separation between politics and family continued for the rest of their time together. While he progressed from state representative to mayor of Northampton, then state senator, lieutenant governor and governor of Massachusetts, Grace and her two sons remained in half of a house they rented in Northampton. After his work took him to Boston, Calvin commuted home on weekends. “I knew nothing of the conducting of [political] affairs,” Grace later wrote, “considering that they lay outside my province. If I had manifested any particular interest, I feel sure that I should have been put properly in my place.”61
Calvin Coolidge had made clear his contempt for his wife’s general education when, early in their marriage, he quizzed her on Martin Luther and her answers did not satisfy him.62 He gave no indication that he ever consulted her on any important question. She had to learn from friends of his decision not to run in 1928 because he had not bothered to tell her. By her own admission, her monthly meetings with wives of cabinet members did not go beyond social schedules and the “insoluble problems which have confronted Cabinet hostesses since Martha Washington’s day.”63
It would be wrong, however, to conclude that Grace played no part in Calvin’s success. He had announced that “the business of America is business,” and he proceeded to act as though government were an arm of business. In his appointments and in his actions on tax and tariff matters, he paid careful attention to the needs of the business community. Having a wife who did not divulge her opinions on any important matter fitted in with his image of the president as corporate head.
But she was hardly inconspicuous, and Calvin profited from her visibility. For a politician who found it very difficult to show interest in the people around him, having a wife who charmed everyone she met was a decided advantage. Grace was frequently photographed hugging children or playing with her pet racoon or her dog, Rob Roy. Florence Harriman, who was acquainted with several presidents, pronounced Grace’s “vivacity and savoir faire … the administration’s greatest success.”64 Grace characterized her role as Calvin’s “safety valve.”65 A 1926 New Yorker profile described her as his “psychological frame” and after offering the supreme accolade—a comparison with Dolley Madison—concluded: “Few White House chatelaines have been so genuinely popular in Washington.”66 Good Housekeeping included Grace on its list of most admired women, the only one without a profession of her own, and the Pictorial Review praised her for complementing her husband’s personality and giving him “the light touch.”67
Visitors to the White House who had a chance to see Grace Coolidge in action reinforced this view with their own stories. When their son John brought his fiancée to dinner, she was noticeably nervous and, although the daughter of a governor and accustomed to meeting important people, she could not quite manage her plate of fish. A large piece plopped on her lap. The president broke the ensuing silence with his New England twang: “Miss Connecticut has spilled on her lovely gown,” and it remained for a thoughtful First Lady to provide the talcum powder.68
At official receptions, the president curtly nodded to people and quickly passed from one obligatory handshake to the next while Grace’s exceptional memory for names and her genuine concern for guests’ comfort made them feel at ease. People meeting her for the first time reported they liked her immediately. A tourist who managed to get an invitation to one of the twice-weekly receptions confessed that she felt awkward and feared she would do something wrong, but the president’s wife assured her that would only make her more interesting.
The sharp contrast between charming Grace Coolidge and taciturn Calvin mystified many of their closest friends. The only child of a Vermont engineer and his wife, Grace showed such irrepressible humor and outgoing personality all the way through the local schools and the state university that nobody, least of all her mother, could see what attracted her to the rather eccentric lawyer whom she married. Not long after their wedding, the Coolidges attended his tenth reunion of the Amherst Class of ’95, and another young wife remarked to her husband that she could not see “how that sulky, red-haired little man ever won that pretty, charming woman.” Dwight Morrow, whose wife had made the comment, offered his own opinion that they would all hear one day from the sulky little man, and his wife replied, “Yes, but through [Grace].”69 Like many First Ladies, Grace apparently recognized somewhat sooner than others the potential for success in the man she married.
Many stories emphasize the impish sense of humor that Grace and Calvin Coolidge shared, and that trait may explain their attraction to each other more than any other. That they perceived incongruity and humor in diverse ways increased the magnetism. She had been watering flowers at Clarke Institute for the deaf where she taught when she happened to look up one morning and see a man shaving himself near the window.70 What drew Grace’s attention was the felt hat he had planted firmly on his head when his only other garments were his underwear. Grace laughed so loudly that he noticed her and very soon he arranged a meeting to explain to the slim, dark haired teacher that he anchored the hat on his dampened hair in order to help control an unruly lock of hair.
Although Calvin’s taciturnity is well established, evidence that he possessed a sense of humor is less easily assembled. Yet Will Rogers, who should have known, applauded the Vermonter’s joviality but pronounced it too subtle for most people to appreciate. Calvin never played for the big laugh but rather for the slow, long reaction, Rogers pointed out, and he offered this example to illustrate his point. Once Rogers had invited the president to hear him and then added, as an after-thought, that an excellent quartet would be singing too. Calvin Coolidge, who had sat silently through the invitation, perked up at the mention of music and said, “Yes, I like singing.”71
About his wife’s cooking, Calvin Coolidge was merciless. He delighted in dropping one of her freshly baked biscuits on the floor and stomping his foot loudly at the same time to emphasize its lack of delicacy, and he suggested that her pie crust recipe should go to the road commissioner as a substitute for the paving material currently used. Grace, who had no illusions about her ability as a cook, took this as well as his other ego-deflaters in the same imperturbable way. Sometimes she came back with some of her own, frequently zeroing in on his reputation as a man of few words. On one of their weekend cruises on the Potomac, Calvin had sat silently through an entire meal without so much as acknowledging the two women seated beside him. The next morning, one of the women entered the dining room as Calvin was inquiring of Grace where the two guests were and heard Grace explain that they were resting because they had been “exhausted by your conversation last evening.”72 Calvin’s refusal to say very much led to many stories, including one about two men discussing the Coolidges. The first man pointed out that Grace had taught the deaf to speak, and the second responded, “So why didn’t she teach Cal?”73
Grace Coolidge appeared to accept with equanimity this quirk in her husband as well as his frugality, which she had encountered very early in her marriage. When they returned from a one-week honeymoon in Montreal, cut short so Calvin could campaign for election to the local school board, they moved into a hotel suite in Northampton, Massachusetts. A few months later, they rented the quarters which they continued to occupy until Calvin won national office. When the local hotel went out of business, the Coolidges purchased the supplies so that for years their linens and silverware carried the marking “Norwood Hotel.”74 Grace told the joke on herself of how Calvin, soon after their marriage, had presented her with socks to be darned. Since there were fifty-two pairs of them, she decided that he must have been saving them for some time, and she inquired if that was the reason he had married her. “No,” he had answered, “but I find it mighty handy.”75
On only one subject did Calvin forget his frugality. In purchasing clothing for Grace, he could be extravagant. Nothing was too good for her. When he saw a particularly striking dress or hat, he brought it home for her to try and she cooperated by wearing his selections even when her friends pronounced the colors too flamboyant or the styles inappropriate. While he was still a struggling lawyer, saving postage costs by sending his secretary out on foot to deliver bills, he paid $19.98 for a rose picture hat for Grace and no one recalled his regretting the expenditure.76 In the White House, he pouted if she wore the same gown twice, causing her secretary to conclude that she had never seen a man who took more interest in his wife’s clothes than did Calvin Coolidge.77
Grace’s natural dignity and determination to remain just what she was earned her the praise and the satisfaction that no clothing extravagance could have matched. She arrived in Washington, conspicuous as the wife of the vice president, but with little experience outside small towns. Rather than try to compete with other, more sophisticated women, she relaxed in what she was, and later confessed that she could not remember a single embarrassing moment. She recalled that at her first big party, she had stood in a “simple gown by a village dressmaker” and received guests alongside the hostess “resplendent in a gorgeous creation of brocaded white satin by Worth…. It was all very gay and I had a wonderful time.”78
Grace Coolidge’s ingenuousness was as complete as Florence Harding’s artifice and stood her well in the paradoxical 1920s. Rather than making her seem stupid, her casualness appeared refreshing to Washingtonians accustomed to formality and pretentiousness in First Ladies. As wife of the vice president, Grace presided capably over meetings of Senate wives but she rarely missed a chance to play the comic. On one occasion when someone stood up to thank her for providing ham and potatoes, she banged a fork on the table and reminded the group: “Don’t forget I brought a cake too.”79
Although Calvin Coolidge permitted his wife to give no interviews while she was in the White House, her exuberance generated so many stories that the public felt an acquaintance with her as with few other First Ladies. On shopping trips to the local department stores, she was often recognized. When a salesclerk remarked on her resemblance to the First Lady and suggested that she must often be mistaken for her, Grace murmured, “Sometimes I am,” and continued her shopping.80
Her husband laid down strict rules for Grace’s White House tenure, and she followed them in the manner of an obedient child. Once when she had decided that the White House stables provided an excellent opportunity, she secretly outfitted herself and went out with a riding instructor. The next day Washington papers carried prominent headlines: “Mrs. Coolidge Learns to Ride.” At breakfast the president read the item and then turned to his wife: “I think,” he said, “you will find that you will get along at this job fully as well if you do not try anything new.”81
That dictum continued to limit her activities for the rest of her husband’s term. When she appeared one day in a stylish culotte outfit, Calvin suggested that none of the Coolidges had ever worn anything like that and she returned it. He bragged that no photographer had ever caught him with a cigar in his mouth, although he chewed one frequently, and she carefully confined her smoking to private places.82 On one of the rare occasions when Grace found herself out dancing and having a good time at a party, someone volunteered, “I wish your husband could have been here.” Grace replied quickly, “If he were, I wouldn’t be.”83
In explaining her White House years, Grace Coolidge projected the same detachment that later characterized Eleanor Roosevelt’s statements. Grace wrote, “This was I and yet not I—this was the wife of the President of the United States and she took precedence over me; my personal likes and dislikes must be subordinated to the consideration of those things which were required of her.”84 Not until her husband’s presidential term had ended would she express herself more fully.
The most extensive remodeling of the White House since the turn of the century was done during the Coolidge administration but Grace had little choice in undertaking her part in it. The Office of Public Parks and Buildings had informed the Coolidges in 1923 that the mansion had deteriorated badly and needed extensive renovation, but work did not begin until early 1927.85 The president’s family moved to a house on Dupont Circle and then took an extended summer vacation in South Dakota. When Grace returned to Washington, she obtained Congress’s permission to accept period pieces to furnish the White House, but Americans were not in a generous mood and few gifts arrived. Her own offering was a coverlet which she had crocheted, one small square per month, for the Lincoln bedroom.
The Coolidge sons, John (born 1906) and Calvin, Jr. (born 1908), absorbed some of Grace’s view that politicians’ families should remain in the background. When Calvin, Jr., received a letter addressed to “First Boy of the Land,” he responded: “You are mistaken in calling me the First Boy of the Land since I have done nothing. It is my father who is President. Rather the First Boy of the Land would be some boy who had distinguished himself through his own actions.”86
This particular anecdote was recalled by Grace Coolidge after Calvin, Jr.’s death. In the summer of 1924 when his father was about to be nominated to run for a term of his own, Calvin, Jr., got a blister on his toe. He left it unattended, developed blood poisoning, and died within days. Whatever ideas the Coolidges had about preserving privacy in the White House, this tragedy thrust them even more into the national spotlight, and hundreds of thousands of messages poured into Washington. The president’s wife wore black and tempered her usual gaiety, but she resumed a full schedule within weeks.
A woman with Grace’s spirit might have brought a new dimension to the job of president’s wife but she chose to accede to the wishes of her husband and limit her activities to those her predecessors had made traditional—working with the Girl Scouts and giving receptions. When prevailed upon to give a speech, she injected a note of humor by using sign language which she had learned in her work with the deaf, a language which no one else in the room understood. She remained the most uncontrolling of individuals, never seeming to mind how many guests showed up unannounced for lunch or when she would learn what Calvin expected of her next. When White House staff inquired about her travel plans, she frequently replied that they should inform her as soon as they learned the answer from the president.
If observers perceived her as mysterious, they were mistaken—she simply waited until she left the White House to “come back to myself.”87 In 1930, the year after Calvin’s term in Washington ended, she published a poem, “Watch Fires” which began:88
Love was not given the human heart
for careless dealing.
Its spark was lit that man might know
Divine revealing.
After her husband’s death in 1933, Grace gave interviews and published an article, “The Real Calvin Coolidge” in which she revealed a great deal about herself. In the nearly quarter of a century that she survived her husband, she matured beyond the childlike woman who had been First Lady and began to speak out on such issues as early intervention in World War II. She sold the house she had shared with Calvin (and the furniture in it), toured Europe, and then went to live with a friend in Northampton. When the WAVES came to train at Smith College, she offered them the use of her house.89 Her work to win better education for the deaf continued until her death in July 1957.
Calvin’s choice of a political career almost certainly limited his wife’s actions. Her writing and other activities after his death indicate that she might have thought more than people gave her credit for, but she kept well within the traditional boundaries that Calvin had set. What she might have done in other circumstances, without the constraints imposed by marriage to the president, remains unknowable, but she herself related an anecdote which lends interest to the question. A painter came to the White House to do her portrait, in which he rendered her uncharacteristically solemn. When Grace’s son asked why, the painter replied: “Because I once saw in your mother’s face a look of resignation.”90
That kind of acceptance is not apparent in portraits of Lou Henry Hoover, who replaced Grace Coolidge in the White House in 1929; and in other ways, the two women differed. Rather than reflect the comic-serious split of Grace Coolidge, Lou Hoover showed many of the same contradictions that marked interpretations of Herbert Hoover’s record.91 Historians have continued to debate whether President Hoover remained stubbornly tied to the past in evaluating possible solutions for the Great Depression or anticipated many of Franklin Roosevelt’s answers. Did those four years under Herbert Hoover show excessive reliance on volunteerism to end hardship or did they introduce a steady increase in the role of centralized government? Was Herbert Hoover efficiently hardnosed or was he deeply involved in and responsive to people’s suffering? Lou Hoover’s record remains just as paradoxical, because in many ways she helped make way for an activist and modern First Lady while remaining, herself, very much a retiring gentlewoman of the nineteenth century.
Undoubtedly, the Hoover presidency suffered from the economic problems well advanced (but little recognized) before he took office. Descent into serious depression came rapidly. Although the Hoovers moved into the White House in March 1929, confident and optimistic about their chances for success, the president lost his halo within months. The stock market crash in October 1929, multiple business failures, and rising unemployment all added to his problems. Before his term ended, the Bureau of Labor Statistics would report that one in four Americans was jobless, lending credence to the judgment that this was the most devastating depression in the country’s history. While its causes were numerous, its solution appeared unclear, and the president reluctantly reexamined his own views about the role of government.
“It is not the function of government,” he liked to say, “to relieve individuals of their responsibilities to their neighbors or relieve institutions of their responsibilities to the public,”92 but in his first year in office he set up the Federal Farm Board with half a billion dollars at its disposal to assist farmers with their surpluses. Later he approved creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend money to banks and businesses. When asked about her own interests and accomplishments, Lou’s pronouncements were just as puzzling and incomplete: “My chief hobbies are my husband and my children,” she explained in 1921,93 failing to note that she had given speeches on two continents in behalf of a long list of causes and that her translation into English of a Latin mining text had won an important professional award.
The remarkably parallel lives of Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover began the same year (1874) in small Iowa towns less than one hundred miles apart but did not intersect until twenty years later when they met in California. Lou’s youthful interests had run closer to those of boys than of most girls. With only one sister, eight years younger than she, and a sickly mother, Lou’s energy drew her to her father who introduced her to the pleasures of camping, horseback riding, and hiking. When time came for college, she chose first a normal school that boasted “the best gymnasium west of the Mississippi”94 and then switched to a teacher’s college from which she earned a certificate in 1893. Neither of those schools nor a clerking job in her father’s bank satisfied Lou, and not until she had a chance encounter with geology did she find her direction. A public lecture by a Stanford professor led her to enroll in the university as the only woman majoring in geology.
Herbert Hoover’s route to the same department in the same university had been more direct, and during Lou’s freshman term, he was already a senior. Shy and awkward, he had a reputation as a minor campus leader—a reputation resulting more from diligence than from charisma. That tenacity paid off when he looked for employment. He started out at the Reward Mine Company in Nevada City, California, pushing a cart for $2.00 a day, ten hours a day, seven days a week, but never felt, he later wrote, “like a downtrodden wage slave.”95 Perhaps he understood, even at twenty-one, that his Stanford degree would soon separate him from his co-workers who were mostly unschooled foreigners. Carefully saving some of his earnings, he returned to San Francisco and took an office job where he surprised his employers by demonstrating modest typing skills. When an offer came to supervise an Australian mine for $600 a month, he took it, and by the time he was twenty-four, he was earning, by his own calculation, about $40,000 a year.96
Lou Henry learned that a Stanford degree in geology, when earned by a woman, got fewer job offers, and she taught school for a few months before Herbert wired his proposal from Australia. He wanted to accept an invitation to head China’s mine program if she would go along as his wife. Almost from their first meeting, the Hoover partnership had a particularly international and ecumenical quality. In order to catch a ship for China the next day, they rushed their marriage ceremony, and because they could locate neither a Quaker minister (Herbert’s religion) nor an Episcopalian (Lou’s faith), they settled for a civil ceremony performed by a family friend who happened to be a Catholic priest.97 With little time to pack for their honeymoon, they filled their suitcases with books on Chinese history and culture, so that they had plenty to read on the long trip to Tientsin.
Within months of arriving in China, the Hoovers found themselves in the middle of an attack, supported by the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, to rid the country of all foreigners. In late 1899, a secret society, called I Ho Chuan [literally, The Harmonious Fists but always referred to by Westerners as the “Boxers”], began to launch violent attacks on the parts of the international community that had an influence on the local economy and culture, such as railroad construction, missionary work, and mining. The Hoovers quickly decided that expeditions into the country’s interior were too perilous for Lou, although she had originally intended to go, and by June 1900, Herbert called in all his workers.
To protect themselves, Tientsin’s foreigners barricaded themselves in their homes along the edge of the city behind a wall fashioned out of bags of sugar and grain. Then they watched their numbers multiply as Chinese nationals, who had aligned with outsiders by converting to Christianity or taking jobs with international companies, asked for refuge. Supplies became scarce as days stretched into weeks. A herd of dairy cattle furnished milk and meat, but the closest water source lay outside the barricade and residents had to sneak out at night with buckets. With only two physicians to tend the wounded, Lou Hoover volunteered to help, even though that required dodging bullets to ride her bicycle to the makeshift hospital.98
Because their own house at the edge of the settlement seemed particularly vulnerable, the Hoovers moved to a friend’s residence at the center of the compound but then returned just before their area came under attack. An American journalist, who had taken refuge in the Hoovers’ house, told how Lou had run to the door at the first shelling to see where it had hit. A big hole in the backyard told her the answer. Expecting other shellings to follow, she sat down in the living room and dealt herself a game of solitaire. Even though a Japanese soldier in front of her house was blown to bits and the post of the stairway behind her splintered, she continued turning over the cards.99
Although she lived in Tientsin for less than two years, Lou developed a lifelong interest in China, particularly in porcelains of the Ming and K’ang Hsi periods. She added Mandarin to the other languages she spoke fluently—an achievement her husband never matched—and after they left China she kept his very limited Chinese vocabulary usable by relying on Mandarin whenever she needed to communicate privately with him in the presence of others.
With their usefulness in China ended, the Hoovers moved to London, the world’s mining capital during what Herbert called “the golden age of mining.” Herbert became a partner in Bewick, Moreing and Company and until 1908, when the partnership ended, their “Red Roof” house served as home base for their family and as a gathering place for London’s foreign community. Herbert had undergone no social metamorphosis since college. Conversational awkwardness still marked him in all discussions but those of mining—one woman described him as “the rudest man in London”100—but his wife’s charm compensated and drew guests to their table.
Lou’s balancing of household management and travel in the first decade of her marriage invites comparison with Louisa Adams a century earlier. When two sons were born to the Hoovers (1903 and 1907), Lou took them on the road almost immediately: Herbert, Jr., left London to go to Australia when he was five weeks old and his brother, Allan, began his first trip to Burma at the same young age. The parents, after circling the globe more than once with their sons, insisted that infants traveled more easily than adults. After 1908, the family moved less, but Herbert still ran mining consulting offices around the world from San Francisco to Petrograd. In one year (1910) his wife and sons joined him in the British Isles, France, Russia, Burma, Korea, and Japan.101
While her children were still toddlers, Lou Hoover undertook her one enduring intellectual achievement—the translation into English of a sixteenth-century text on metals. Agricola’s De Re Metallica offered a significant challenge because its German author, George Bauer, had coined some of the terms when he published the work in Latin in 1556. Finding English equivalents required extensive knowledge of both science and language—an unlikely combination in one person, as reviewers pointed out when the Hoovers finally finished the task after five years.102 When the work was privately printed in 1912, with both Hoovers sharing equal billing in its translation, it won the Mining and Metallurgical Society’s gold award and considerable attention from the scholarly community.103
When war broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914, the Hoovers were in London preparing to return to California, but Herbert delayed his trip to assist stranded Americans find sailings home.104 Just a week before he was finally scheduled to leave, he undertook the job of overseeing food distribution to Belgium and northern France. Under German occupation, most Belgian cities were near starvation, and farmers, who made up only about one-fifth of the population, fared almost as poorly. Herbert Hoover accepted the job without pay, a generosity he could well afford, because, as he later wrote, “My aggregate income from professional activities in various countries probably exceeded that of any other American engineer.”105 In any case, he did not expect the job to last long. The knowledge that it would extend to “four years … a billion dollars, [and] five million tons of concentrated food … was mercifully hidden from us,” he wrote after the war was over.106
While her husband earned a reputation as an efficient food administrator in Europe, Lou Hoover traveled with less fanfare back and forth between England and the United States. In London she worked with the American Women’s Committee to set up canteens, maintain a war hospital, and operate a fleet of Red Cross ambulances.107 She even helped start a knitting factory to assist unemployed women.108 In the United States, she gave speeches to attract money for her European activities, raising $100,000 in the San Francisco Bay area alone.109 At the invitation of the Stanford faculty, she spoke to them about unrestricted German submarine warfare.110
When the United States entered the war in the spring of 1917, Herbert returned to Washington to serve as Food Administrator, and Lou complemented his role by publicizing strategies for food conservation. She invited reporters into her home to show how she achieved “wheatless and meatless days” and cut sugar consumption below the suggested limits. The same woman who would later cringe and refuse when reporters sought interviews with her in the White House allowed the Ladies’ Home Journal to publish “Dining with the Hoovers” in March 1918 and include information on what she fed her family.111 Besides acting the part of public model housewife, Lou helped start a club, a cafeteria,112 and a residence, all for young women who had come to Washington to work during the war.113
After 1921 when her husband entered President Harding’s Cabinet as secretary of commerce, Lou Hoover continued her public, activist role. The time seemed right to finish what Elizabeth Monroe and Louisa Adams had begun a century earlier, and Lou resolved to stop the mindless “leaving of cards” that had been traditional for cabinet wives since the beginning of the republic. She “rebelled at spending four or five afternoons a week at this fruitless job,” Herbert explained, and “secured an agreement among the Cabinet Ladies to an announcement that it would not be done any more.” Herbert may have exaggerated Lou’s role, but the visits ended.114
Nothing about Lou Hoover in the early 1920s suggests she would retreat from active leadership, especially of women and young people. In 1924, in the wake of revelations about the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration, she called a special conference to emphasize women’s responsibility to speak out on the dangers of dishonesty in government.115 She persuaded the National Amateur Athletic Association, on whose board she served as the only woman, to form an advisory council of athletic directors to encourage physical education for women “in every institution” in the country.116 When invited to speak to a convention of teenagers, she used the opportunity to exhort the girls to plan to combine marriage with a career, and she volunteered her own opinion that anyone who fell back on children as an excuse for not working outside the home was “lazy.”117
Lou, who had started married life with a staff of six and worked her way up, might easily have underestimated the hours of work needed to run a household, even with the new appliances available in the 1920s. But she was not unique in expecting that wives could have careers, too. More married women were working outside their homes than ever before, the percentage rising from twenty-three to twenty-nine in the 1920s.118 Although “glamorous” new jobs in decorating and copywriting were opening up to women, most women still found their jobs in low-paid drudgery—laundry, domestic, and agricultural sectors—but they were not the focus of Lou Hoover’s discussion. For her, work had brought personal satisfaction, and she seemed to assume that other wives and mothers would profit as she had done. Just how they would balance cooking, cleaning, laundry, and child care with their jobs remained unclear.
Increased discussion of wives’ roles in general may explain why the candidates’ spouses received so much attention in the 1928 contest between Herbert Hoover and Al Smith. The cosmopolitan Lou Hoover, in her subdued blues and grays and her crown of queenly white hair, contrasted sharply with Catherine (Katie) Smith, a product, like her husband, of New York’s Lower East Side. Katie’s Roman Catholicism, her city speech, and reputed weakness for excessive imbibing reinforced her husband’s unpopularity in areas of the country intolerant of such habits and beliefs. Jokes spread that if she got to Washington, she would present a vulgar model of American womanhood to the rest of the world.119 “Can you imagine,” one Texas Republican woman reportedly asked a public meeting, “Mrs. Smith dealing with foreign dignitaries? One of them might say, ‘That’s a nice hat,’ and she would answer, ‘You said a mouthful.’”120
The Democrats became so concerned with Catherine Smith’s effect on votes that the party’s Women’s Division organized speaking trips through the South. Frances Perkins paired with the wife of Charles Dana Gibson on one such assignment, and the two of them went from luncheon to tea, insisting that their good friend Katie would do perfectly well running the White House. She had a natural dignity, they argued, that would appeal to anyone who met her. As for the rumors about her drinking, they had never seen her touch a drop “even in her own house.”121
In spite of the work of Perkins and other Democratic women, some national periodicals reported the Hoover victory with sighs of relief. Finally the sophistication that had disappeared under the untraveled Florence Harding and Grace Coolidge could be restored, one magazine suggested. Frederick Collins, writing in Woman’s Home Companion the month of Herbert Hoover’s inauguration, stressed Lou’s “serenity … and … cosmopolitan background,”122 while novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, in World’s Work, pointed to Lou’s strength. Recent First Ladies had suffered under the pressures of the job—Ellen Wilson and Florence Harding had collapsed—but the athletic Lou would prove stronger, Rinehart predicted.123
Between 1992 and 2008, the popular First Ladies exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American History highlighted the women’s roles in the nation’s political history and social reform movements. Courtesy of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
Regal Edith Roosevelt reportedly never made a mistake. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Helen Taft (also seen below) raised many eyebrows when she broke precedent and rode with her husband to the White House after his inauguration. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Painter Ellen Wilson kept a low profile in her own work and in her efforts to improve Washington’s slums. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Edith Wilson showed none of her predecessor’s reticence. She thrived on the attention she received as First Lady. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Although one of the oldest First Ladies, Florence Harding made every effort to appear vital and energetic as she greeted White House visitors. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Popular Grace Coolidge kept several pets and was often photographed with her dogs or her raccoon, Rebecca. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Lou Hoover, flanked by two Girl Scouts, appears in this, the first photograph ever made of either a president or a First Lady broadcasting from the White House. AP/Wide World.
Called “Our Flying First Lady,” Eleanor Roosevelt chose air travel when most Americans refused to try it. Here she is pictured in Dallas, Texas, just weeks after becoming First Lady. Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
Before her marriage, Bess Truman (shown fourth from left) was considered one of the best tennis players in Independence. Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.
Mamie Eisenhower made hostessing and fashion her chief White House interests and, in doing so, reflected the predominant American view of femininity in the 1950s. Source unknown, provided by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library.
Sizing up the White House as though it were just another of the many residences where she would make a “backdrop for Bertie,” Lou pronounced it “as bleak as a New England barn.”124 She quickly rearranged virtually every piece of furniture in it and added some of her own things from California. Within three months, nothing moveable remained where the Coolidges had left it, causing one house employee to quip that Lou would next reverse the positions of the elevator and the spiral staircase. Of more permanent importance, Lou organized a systematic cataloging of the mansion’s furnishings and assigned her friend and secretary, Dare Stark, to write a book about the White House. Although Stark did not complete that project, she did publish articles calling attention to the dearth of reliable information about the house and its furnishings.125
Unlike other presidents’ wives who felt motivated by their new visibility to make themselves over, Lou Hoover seemed to retreat even from the accomplishments she had. Learning a new language, high on the agendas of many First Ladies, held little urgency—she already spoke five—but when questioned about her ability, she equivocated. Other White House chatelaines had embarked on ambitious buying trips to outfit themselves beyond criticism, but Lou, whose bank account would have allowed for any extravagance, paid little attention to clothes. Rather than attempting to slice a couple of years off her age, she seemed to take pleasure, one maid decided, in looking like the grandmother she was.126
The White House staff found the new First Lady a contradictory mix of international customs and small-town America. At Christmas, when she arranged for the family to trek through a darkened house, the girls and women ringing handbells and the men and boys carrying candles, the staff dismissed it as “ghostly” and “another of Mrs. Hoover’s ideas.” Although she had a reputation for liking to talk (servants called it “broadcasting”), she relied on hand signals during official parties to communicate with employees.127 Each dropped handkerchief or raised finger carried a specific command: move the guests more quickly through the reception line, or more slowly; replenish the punch.
What Lou had concocted as an efficient innovation—or perhaps a variation on the dressage exercises she learned as a rider—appeared to the staff as dehumanizing and complicated. They had trouble “reading” her, they complained, and sometimes waited carefully for a particular signal and then missed it because of the subtlety with which it was delivered. Nor did they like her instruction that they stay out of sight. Bells rang to announce the president and his wife when they passed through the halls of the private quarters, warning employees to dart into the closest nook or hiding place. After four years in the Hoover White House, some employees could count on one hand the number of times they had actually encountered face to face either the president or his wife.
More than one disgruntled White House employee complained in print about the Hoovers’ uncaring treatment. The housekeeper, Ava Long, described how “company, company, company,” often arrived on such short notice that she had to contrive out of leftovers enough servings for dozens of people. On one occasion she had shopped for six, only to learn at 12:30 that forty would arrive for lunch at one. She instructed the cook to grind up all the icebox’s contents and serve the result as a croquette with mushroom sauce. When one guest requested the recipe, Long dubbed it, with a touch of sarcasm, “White House Surprise Supreme.”128 The Hoovers liked company so much, the housekeeper reported, that they dined alone only once a year, evidently oblivious to the work they imposed on their employees. Eventually Long quit the job, and her colleague, the head usher, singled out the Hoovers as among the least likeable of his bosses when he published Forty-Two Years at the White House.129
Other observers praised Lou Hoover’s interest in people as her greatest asset. She was indefatigable, they said, in her willingness to welcome groups to the White House, and in her busiest year (1932), she gave forty teas and received eighty organizations.130 Camp Rapidan, the Hoover retreat in the Shenandoah Mountains, became an extension of the capital when Lou Hoover invited representatives of the Girl Scouts to accompany her there or used the camp as a setting to speak by radio to the country’s youth. Much of her generosity, including funds for a school for poor children near Camp Rapidan, was supported by her own pocketbook.
A very deep prejudice against publicizing her personal life kept secret from most Americans the more appealing side of Lou Hoover. She shared with her husband a deep resentment, he later wrote, “of the intrusion of the press and public into our family life.”131 Even he did not know, until after his wife died in 1944 and he was settling her estate, how many people benefited from her largesse. Some of those whom she had supported regularly for years wrote when their checks stopped, wanting to know what had happened. A desire to protect the privacy of people she had helped contributed to the decision to keep her papers closed until forty years after her death.132
What makes Lou Hoover’s attitude toward publicity more intriguing is her willingness to take a public role as First Lady. Recognizing the value of radio, which had begun to carry inauguration ceremonies in 1925, she arranged to speak to a nationwide audience. She even set up a lab on the second floor of the White House to “test” her performances and “improve [her] talkie technique.”133 A speech professor who later analyzed recordings of the talks judged Lou’s voice “tinny” but admitted that the equipment was poorly adjusted for women’s voices since so few of them had the opportunity to use it.134
Unimaginative in phrasing, Lou’s radio speeches to young people had a definitely feminist slant. On a Saturday evening in June 1929, when she spoke from Camp Rapidan to a group of 4-H club members, the National Broadcasting Company carried the message coast to coast. After praising the joys of camping, Lou urged her listeners to help make their homes more attractive places, a responsibility, she said, “as much the work of boys as of girls … . Just stop a second to think what home is to you. Is it just a place where mother and the girls drudge a good part of the day in order that father and the boys may have a place to come to eat and sleep? [Everybody should help] with dishes, sweeping.… Boys, remember you are just as great factors in the home making of the family as are the girls.”135
In other ways, Lou Hoover exerted a surprisingly modern and liberated influence on her husband’s administration. She invited noticeably pregnant women (who had traditionally been excluded) to join her in reception lines,136 and she encouraged women to pursue individual careers. When her husband issued Executive Order 5984 in December 1932, it amended the Civil Service Rule VII to require nominations “without regard to sex,” unless the duties to be performed could be satisfactorily performed by only men or women. At least one careful student of the Hoover record believes that Lou influenced her husband’s decisions in this and other matters.137 In his single term, President Hoover named seven women to positions requiring Senate approval, bringing the total up to twenty, double what it had been in 1920.138
A woman of such intellectual bent and feminist persuasion might be expected to take a dim view of the requirement that a First Lady had to greet anyone who wanted to visit her, and Lou did. After shaking the hands of more than four thousand people at one New Year’s reception, she abandoned the ritual that had originated with Martha Washington. Her husband explained that her “rigid sense of duty” stopped her from abolishing other receptions: “To her it was part of the job.”139
On matters delicate to the Washington political community, Lou Hoover preferred to increase her work load rather than offend anyone. She knew she was there to ‘‘help Bert.” When a protocol feud erupted between Dolly Gann, prominent sister of the vice president, and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, longtime leader in capital society, Lou gave two parties so that neither would be assigned precedence over the other. Such a solution caused one New York Times reporter to announce “a particularly Quaker victory.”140
When time came to entertain wives of congressmen, Lou Hoover had to decide what to do with the wife of Chicago congressman Oscar DePriest, the first Negro to serve in the legislature since Reconstruction. No black had been a guest at the White House since Theodore Roosevelt dined with Booker T. Washington in 1901, and Lou Hoover understood that an invitation to Jessie DePriest could bring unpleasant repercussions. She sounded out a few of the other wives, found twelve who would not embarrass the congressman’s wife, and then gave a separate tea for them.
When word of the invitation got out, several Southern publications objected that Lou Hoover had “defiled” the White House, and the Mobile Alabama Press reacted bitterly: “Mrs. Herbert Hoover offered to the South and to the nation an arrogant insult yesterday when she entertained a negro [sic] woman at a White House tea. She has harmed Mr. Hoover to a serious extent. Social admixture of the negro and the white is sought by neither race. The negro is entitled to a social life but that the two races should intermingle at afternoon teas or other functions is inadmissible.”141
Lou Hoover’s decision to follow through with the DePriest tea, in spite of criticism, reinforced her reputation as extremely egalitarian. She drove herself around Washington and invited a wide variety of people to dinner, causing one reporter to note: “She does not keep the rules, [but] mixes the great and the near-great with the obscure and the near obscure.”142
A woman willing to brave so much controversy might have been expected to open up to the press, but she was far less open with reporters in the White House than she had been in her early days in Washington. She refused to permit either interviews or casual photographs. Her grandchildren, who resided in the White House for a few months while their father recuperated in the South, were strictly off-limits to journalists. The formal, posed studio portraits that she released, showing a perfectly coiffed, distant matron, did little to render her human or compassionate.
The Hoover White House provided such a dry spell for thirsty reporters that one of them, Bess Furman of the Washington AP, contrived to enter the family quarters by passing herself off as a Girl Scout Christmas caroler. Dressed in the traditional uniform, hair tucked under her cap, Furman went in “as one of the taller girls” and moved undetected within arm’s reach of people who encountered her everyday as a reporter. During the carols that she could not sing, Furman kept her face down, furtively taking in details so she could write an account of how a president’s family celebrated Christmas. In a burst of bravado, Furman sent a copy of the article to the First Lady, who marked it “nice story,” without ever discovering who supplied the details.143
Lou Hoover’s reticence in the White House extended to policy matters as well as publicity, thus underlining the traditional side of her view of a wife’s role. If she differed with Herbert on any significant matter, she kept the difference to herself. She tailored her own suggestions for economic recovery to fit her husband’s remedies, and her public pronouncements on how to end the Great Depression reinforced her husband’s reputation for relying on volunteerism. In March 1931, when the country edged towards the trough of unemployment, she went on radio to thank American women for their donations of food and clothing. The First Lady urged women to volunteer in one of three ways: by identifying people in need and determining how they could be helped, by working in hospitals and visiting-nurse programs, and by setting up recreation opportunities for unemployed young people.144 Even after Herbert lost the 1932 election (and Lou heard that one indignant mother had changed her young son’s name from Herbert Hoover Jones to Franklin Roosevelt Jones), she took to the airwaves to encourage “every woman in America … to consider herself a volunteer associate member of the National Women’s Committee of Welfare and Relief Mobilization … [because if people cooperate there is] ample food and clothing for us all.”145
More than most of her predecessors, Lou Hoover had exceptional ability and training for leadership, but she failed to win the country’s approval or its interest. She foreshadowed Eleanor Roosevelt in her formidable energy and active participation in her husband’s presidency. Alice Roosevelt Longworth (who was never particularly charitable to her famous cousin) credited Lou with being the first president’s wife “to take a public part on her own.”146 But Lou’s natural reticence unfortunately isolated her, so that, while she set the stage for Eleanor’s accomplishments, she came nowhere close to equalling them.
Lou also lacked Eleanor’s willingness to take risks. While Eleanor did not hesitate to disagree with her husband or introduce guests who would question his ideas, Lou preferred a safer course. She protected Herbert by inviting guests for his pleasure rather than for his growth, and then she diverted conversation from difficult topics. While other presidents’ wives sought to watch out for their husbands’ health, Lou gave the impression of standing guard against challenges to Herbert’s thinking—challenges that might have moved him in other directions than those he took.
The contrast between the two women is underlined in the letter that Lou Hoover wrote to her sons and husband not long before her death in 1944. It is a message that could not have come from Eleanor’s hand. Even from Lou, it startles. The woman who started out camping and fishing like a boy, and then proceeded to earn a geology degree equal to her husband’s, ended up describing her life as entirely peripheral to him and their sons: “I have been lucky,” she wrote, “to have my trail move alongside that of such exceptional men and boys.”147
Together, the three First Ladies of the 1920s reflect that decade well since they present contradictions and inconsistencies rather than one clear line of development. But they also form a bridge to the period that followed, and it is difficult to imagine Eleanor Roosevelt initiating the changes she did without the foundations laid by her immediate predecessors—in experimenting with the press, speaking out on important issues, and extending women’s rights and opportunities.
