First Ladies (2 page)
Authors: Betty Caroli
7. Breaking Precedents and Reaffirming Old Ones (1933â1961)
9. New Dimensions to the Job of First Lady (1974â1993)
10. A New Generation in the White House (1993â2008)
Photographs follow pages
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LIKE MANY HISTORIANS OF
women's records, I was not initially attracted to the prospect of writing a book on presidents' wives (Hillary Rodham Clinton had not yet made the kind of headlines that encouraged serious discussion of the job of First Lady). What value could there be in studying a group of women united only by the fact that their husbands had held the same job? The 1970s and 1980s had finally focused attention on women who achieved on their ownâwho, then, would want to read about women who owed their space in history books to the men they married? If presidents' wives had remained “footnotes to history,” perhaps that was what they deserved.
My curiosity was piqued when I looked at what had been published on the subject. Even a cursory reading of the standard reference work on women revealed a striking pattern among presidents' wives.
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Most of them came from social and economic backgrounds significantly superior to those of the men they married. Many of the women wed in spite of strenuous parental objection to their choices, and some of the men were younger than their brides. Recurring phrases hinted that the women assumed more control over their lives than I had imagined, and I began to wonder if I had mistakenly assigned them a free and easy ride alongside their prominent husbands. Several of the wives had eased the financial burdens of their households by managing family farms, teaching school, and working as secretaries after their marriages. Other information pointed to a pattern of early exposure to politics, and I was struck by the number of uncles, fathers, and grandfathers who had at one time held political office. Perhaps the women deserved a closer look.
As soon as I examined the women's unpublished letters, I was intrigued. Who could read Lucretia Garfield's poignant puzzlings in
the 1850s about what being a wife meant and not then go on to learn how her marriage turned out? What about the indomitable Sarah Polk whose blunt letters and letters of others singled out as particularly opinionated and astute? Who would not want to read what the magazines of the 1840s said about her? Was the handwritten memorandum on the subject of Mary Lincoln's insanity trial to be believed? What about the mysterious Eliza Johnson who was much maligned as a hill woman of little education? Why did her son, then enrolled at Georgetown, write her a beautifully penned, grammatically perfect letter and ask her to “excuse the mistakes”? These and dozens of other questions arose.
I was encouraged by the amount of material available. Because of the prominence of their husbands, First Ladies left more complete records than most of their contemporaries. Evidence on mid-nineteenth-century presidents' wives is rather scant, but even the little-known Eliza Johnson, wife of the first president to be impeached, had her biographer (who went after information about Eliza like a detective intent on solving a crime). Several First Ladies, including Julia Grant, Helen Taft, Edith Wilson, and most of those who lived in the White House after 1963, published their memoirs. I was convinced that all this record keeping could help elucidate not only the First Ladies' lives but also the lives of their countrywomen. A few dozen examples from two centuries of American history cannot be taken to represent all womenâno one would claim that they doâbut where else could a researcher find so much material about women who moved consecutively through American history?
A handful of presidents' wives achieved great fame, of course, but others of equal or greater interest and significance have been allowed to drop into obscurity. Nearly 170 years before Jackie Kennedy charmed Paris, James Monroe's wife, Elizabeth, was dubbed “la belle américaine” in the French capital. Abigail Adams's injunction to John to “remember the ladies” became a familiar feminist refrain in the twentieth century, while her daughter-in-law, Louisa, wife of John Quincy Adams, was almost forgotten. Yet Louisa Adams showed considerable courage when she set out to travel alone from St. Petersburg to Paris during the Napoleonic Wars. Eleanor Roosevelt's break with precedents is well documented, especially her agreement to meet regularly with women reporters, but her predecessor, Lou Hoover, gained little credit for the feminist speeches she delivered on national radio or for the fortitude she showed in her personal life. Living in China during the Boxer Rebellion, she witnessed gun battles in front of her house but refused to show fright or to flee. Such
courageous women surely deserved more attention than they had received.
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I was also fascinated by the evolution of the title “First Lady.” In 1789, crowds accustomed to the pomp of royal persons heralded the wife of their new president as “Lady Washington.” Usage soon changed, however, because in its adolescent decades, when the United States reaffirmed its democratic vows and “plain folks” politics, a “First Lady” made no sense at all. Presidential campaigns that boasted of candidates' humble origins, including log cabin births and little formal schooling, could hardly fasten noble-sounding titles on the wives of the winners. The women were addressed as “Presidentress” or “Mrs. President” or, as was frequently the case, not mentioned at all outside Washington.
Eventually the country's familiarity with its chief executive grew and expectations changed. Poverty and inexperience became somewhat less valuable stepping-stones to the highest office; railroads and mass circulation magazines made presidents more familiar figures across the continent. In response to a firm preference in the United States for married men at the political helm, wives began to travel with their husbands on official trips, and they assumed a popularity of their own. It is not insignificant that Lucy Hayes (1877â1881) accompanied her husband on the first trip a president ever took from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific and also heard herself heralded by a contemporary journalist, Mary Clemmer Ames, as the “first lady of the land.”
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Ames's use is not the first documented appearance of “first lady” although that argument has been made.
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Emily Briggs, under her pen name “Olivia,” had already employed the term in an 1870 newspaper column describing etiquette in the presidential household: “President Washington meant to practice republican simplicity,” “Olivia” wrote, “[but] courtly ways did creep in. For instance, at Mrs. Washington's receptions in both New York and Philadelphia, the first lady in the land received precisely after the manner of Queen Charlotte's drawing room levées.”
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In the same column, “Olivia” referred to President Grant's wife, Julia, as “first lady.” Even earlier, a British journalist traveling through the South during the Civil War reported overhearing a reference to Jefferson Davis's wife, Varina, as “first lady of the Confederacy.”
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I noticed that dictionaries gradually began to include “First Lady” but only after the country's attention had been drawn to Washington.
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Before the 1930s, city and county legislators voted on matters of immediate concern, and their names, rather than those of national
leaders, appeared during debates over government services. Then the New Deal drew power to Washington, World War II added a large dose of unifying patriotism, and the media cemented the shift to Washington. Thanks to photograph-filled magazines, by the 1950s Americans knew more about Mamie Eisenhower's bangs, her recipe for fudge, and her preference for pastels than they did about their mayors or state representatives.
George E. Reedy, Lyndon Johnson's press secretary in the 1960s, underlined the changed focus when he recalled a trip to Washington
D.C.
he had taken in his youth. Although Calvin Coolidge was president, Reedy admitted he had not yet heard of him, and the only lasting memory young Reedy took away from that visit to the White House was of having viewed Grace Coolidge's portrait.
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Reedy could not have ignored the fact that schoolchildren in the 1960sâeven those who had never gone near the capitalârecognized not only President Johnson but also his wife and daughters and perhaps even his dog, Little Beagle Johnson, all of whom had appeared on national television.
The use of “First Lady” seemed to flourish in spite of deeply felt, very logical objections to it. Women who held the title detested it, and Jackie Kennedy initially forebade her staff to use it.
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Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., judged the term “deplorable” and began a search for a substitute.
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As more women sought elective office for themselves, the question arose about what to call their husbands, and jests were made about “First Mate,” “First Gentleman,” or “First Spouse.” None of these objections had any effect, however, and popular magazines continued to publish prominent articles about the current “First Lady,” while television correspondents superimposed their own stamp of approval on the phrase.
The title seemed, in part, to reflect a continuing infatuation in the United States with royalty. Even after insisting they had rejected all the trappings of a monarchy, Americans continued to adopt royal terms, referring in the early decades of the republic to the president as “His Majesty,” his residence as “the Palace,” and his parties as “holding court.” When such references disappeared from coverage of the president, they continued to be used for the women at the White House. In the 1850s, James Buchanan's young niece, who served as his official hostess, was praised as “our Democratic queen,” and in the Republican administration that followed, Mary Lincoln became the “Republican queen.” A century later, Abigail McCarthy, the writer and ex-wife of a presidential candidate, likened Jackie Kennedy's job to that of Princess Grace of Monaco,
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and Margaret Mead, the
anthropologist, was quoted as saying: “Kings and queens have always focused people's feelings and since we're not very far from a monarchy, the President's wife, whoever she is, has little choice but to serve as our queen.”
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Aside from being there as a symbol, what is the role of a First Lady? The Constitution mentions no assignments for the chief executive's spouse, and yet she has become a prominent part of the presidency. Most Americans presumably know better than the 1920s immigrant who, when queried about who stood to succeed the president, responded “the president's wife.” But anyone who watched television coverage of the 1985 Geneva Summit Conference might wonder why Nancy Reagan received so much attention or why President Reagan appeared in front of the United States Congress at the summit's end and thanked his wife for being “an outstanding ambassador of good will for us all.”
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As though to lend importance to all the questions about White House wives, they have expanded their roles while the office of vice president continues to have a rather ill-defined and somewhat obscure profile, the subject of many jokes. For example, the nineteenth-century journalist Emily Briggs suggested in ironic jest that American women remained unenthusiastic about acquiring the vote because they feared they might be called on to act as vice president.
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Men who held the job have remarked on the uselessness of their assignment. John Adams, vice president under George Washington, declared his job “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”
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Thomas R. Marshall, Woodrow Wilson's vice president, jokingly compared the role of second-in-command to “a man in a cataleptic state; he cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain; and yet he is perfectly conscious of everything going on about him.”
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Thomas Marshall did well to note the limitations of his job. Few people remember his name, while Edith Wilson acquired a reputation as one of the most powerful of all First Ladies. After Woodrow's stroke in 1919, she controlled the flow of communications between him and everyone else, thus prompting Massachusetts Senator Lodge to complain, “A regency was not contemplated in the Constitution.”
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Regardless of such objections, the First Lady, with little public debate and no constitutional amendments, evolved a role of considerable power. Both outspoken Eleanor Roosevelt and reticent Bess Truman were named during their husbands' administrations as among the “most powerful people in Washington,” while the vice presidents were conspicuously absent from such lists. President Ford, whose
wife, Betty, explained that she resorted to “pillow talk” to convince her husband of her point of view, admitted that she was frequently successful. Her opinion had carried weight, he said, on some very controversial issues, including the pardon of Richard Nixon. Rosalynn Carter admitted that the enlistment of a president's wife in almost any project is of inestimable value. By 1986, Nancy Reagan was credited with elevating the job of First Lady to a kind of “Associate Presidency.”
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With the powerful Clinton duo in the White House, reporters routinely relayed the views of both the president and First Lady on important issues and appointments.
Since the institution of First Lady is an American one, it seems reasonable to ask what in the United States provided for such growth. Did a quirk in the presidential system nurture it? Or did it develop out of peculiarly American attitudes about leaders? The answer probably lies in both areas.