First Ladies (20 page)

During the war years Lucy became a great favorite with her husband's comrades and she began then to achieve what eventually became an almost legendary reputation for kindness and simplicity. One story had it that several of the soldiers had decided to embarrass a new recruit by convincing him to take his mending to the “sewing lady” down at the colonel's cabin. Shirts in hand, the youth knocked at Hayes's cabin door and when he announced his purpose, Lucy Hayes got out her needle. When he returned to the others, they were waiting for their laugh but learned, to their disappointment, that he had accomplished his mission. When the other soldiers pointed out that the “sewing lady” was the colonel's wife, he stuck to his initial judgment that whoever she was she had treated him kindly.
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Years later when she was living in the White House, a Civil War veteran came to be photographed and, so that he would have the appropriate insignia on his uniform, First Lady Lucy Hayes sewed it on for him.
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Close behind the stories of Lucy's kindness were those illustrating her dedication to her husband's welfare. During one wartime separation she had received a telegram informing her that he had been
wounded near Washington, D.C. Although she lacked specific details on his whereabouts, she left her three children, including one she had been nursing, and set off to find Rutherford. Her search took five days, but when she located him, she took charge of his care and then escorted him and several of his comrades back to Ohio to recuperate.
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By the time the Civil War ended, Rutherford B. Hayes had been elected to represent his Ohio district in the U.S. House of Representatives, and Lucy left her children with relatives in Ohio so she could join her husband in Washington. Her strong abolitionist views had led her to favor a punishing reconstruction policy for the South, and she became an avid observer of congressional debates on the subject. When she returned to Ohio, Rutherford wrote that he missed seeing her “checkered shawl” in the gallery, and she replied that he should send her more details of the debates.
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He had already informed his mother that “Lucy finds politics very pleasant in all respects.”
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With the elevation of her husband to the Ohio governorship in 1868, Lucy assumed a more active role. Although her children were still young (the last to survive was born in 1871), she traveled around the state with her husband to visit prisons and mental hospitals. When the Democratic legislature refused to appropriate money to start a home for children orphaned by the war, Lucy worked with others to collect voluntary contributions. Then, when the home had been started, she lobbied friends in the legislature to have the state assume financial responsibility for its operation. Lucy appeared to be occupied on many fronts, and Rutherford wrote his brother-in-law: “Lucy employs herself about the soldiers' orphans … about the decoration of soldiers' graves and about the deaf and dumb pupils at the Reform Farm for boys.”
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Each time Rutherford registered a political success, Lucy's excitement grew, although she recognized that her enthusiasm was not shared by her children.
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As speculation grew that Rutherford would be nominated for the presidency, Lucy gleefully reported that even the family cook was caught up with the prospect of moving to “the top of the ladder.”
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As soon as the 1876 presidential campaign began, reporters zeroed in on the sober Lucy Hayes and contrasted her with the fun-loving Julia Grant whom she meant to replace. Some accounts still concentrated on appearances and the
New York Herald
described Lucy as “singularly youthful” and “a most attractive and lovable woman.”
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But as the campaign went on, the
National Union
speculated in its column “Gossip About Women”: “Mrs. Hayes is said to be a student of politics
and to talk intelligently upon their [
sic
] changing phases.”
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Few people could recall similar claims for a prospective First Lady since Sarah Polk moved into the White House in 1845.

The results of the 1876 election could hardly be called a victory for anyone since the count was so contested that a commission had to decide who had won, but on March 5, 1877, simply dressed Lucy stood in a prominent place at Rutherford's public inauguration.
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In this first appearance in her new role, she signaled that she would neither compete with fashion models nor disappear—as many of her predecessors had done. Public approval was overwhelming in the next few months, and even the politically unfriendly
Philadelphia Times
reported: “Mrs. Hayes deserves the thanks of every true woman for the stand she has taken against extravagance in dress.”
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Six months later the same paper reported that the White House showed “a refreshing absence of pretension and formality.”
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Employees at the executive mansion underlined these glowing reports with their own compliments, noting that Lucy remembered each employee with an individually selected Christmas gift and invited employees to the family's Thanksgiving table.

The saintly image was not effortlessly achieved. Although the Hayeses spent freely from their own considerable personal fortune, Lucy fostered a reputation for being economy-minded. She carefully preserved her clothing receipts to prove her frugality,
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and when Congress refused to appropriate funds for refurbishing the executive mansion, she searched attic and cellar for old pieces of furniture to put back into service. She relegated the billiard table to the basement and used the space it had occupied for a conservatory to produce the fresh flowers that she liked to dispense to sick friends, lonely orphans, and journalists who wrote kind things about her. One White House steward, who had served every president since Abraham Lincoln, reported that Lucy Hayes brought a “new atmosphere” to the executive mansion.
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This was not exactly the change that the phrase “New Woman” promised. Rather than exemplifying strength and independence, Lucy's model stressed demureness and solicitous attention to those around her. Instead of emphasizing her college education, she operated entirely within the definition of “wife” as that word had been used since colonial days when it was, as a matter of course, combined with “good” to mean a woman “obedient to her husband, loving to her children, kind to her neighbors, [and] dutiful to her servants.”
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If Lucy Hayes failed to portray exactly the innocent youthfulness that had been so favored in the White House in the 1830s and 1840s, it
was a difference of style, not substance. Hers was only a matronly version of the “goodness” of Emily Donelson and Angelica Van Buren who had so charmed Jacksonian America.

Such an image did not fail to find rewards. Even women reporters who had begun to work in the capital could not praise Lucy Hayes enough. Mary Clemmer Ames, one of those favored with Lucy's flowers because of a kind story she had written about the First Lady, responded in a sugary description of Lucy that might have pleased the White House but could only have brought consternation to feminists who urged more autonomy for women:

The state of womanhood star-like doth shine,

Regina, reigning at Love's holiest shrine.
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Lucy Hayes, the same woman who had once defended “violent” measures to achieve equal pay for women, now worked very hard for no pay at all. She oversaw large receptions and on nights when she had nothing scheduled, she received callers. Perhaps she considered her overwhelming popularity adequate recompense. Hers became the most familiar woman's face in America. Advertisers used her picture, without her approval, to promote household products,
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and popular magazines carried photographs of her, often with her children or flowers or animals. Longfellow, Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes toasted her in words.
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Ben Perley Poore, a famous Washington reporter at the time, judged that she had become more influential than any president's wife since Dolley Madison.

Even her husband, who suffered from charges of having attained the office unfairly and heard himself taunted as “His Fraudulency,” admitted that Lucy had become extremely popular: “It is very gratifying to see,” he wrote in his diary in May 1879, “the heartiness and warmth of friendship for Lucy. Her large warm heart and lively sympathy for or with all around her, with a fair share of beauty and talents, have made her wonderfully popular.”
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If he had not entirely decided what guaranteed approval for a president, he at least recognized the value of a popular wife.

Some Americans, including Washington's more sophisticated set, found the Hayeses impossibly dull, and they singled out Lucy as a tight-lipped moralizer. The family's decisions to attend the unfashionable Foundry Methodist Church, hold prayer meetings each morning, and sing hymns with their friends on Sunday evening were generally attributed to her influence. Lucy's storytelling and mimicry may have delighted her family, but the diplomatic corps and more traveled Washingtonians were not amused. In a short story, “Pandora,” which
Henry James published in 1884 and which was generally understood to refer to the Hayes administration, a witty, sophisticated character says: “Hang it, there's only a month left: let us be vulgar and have some fun. Let us invite the President.”
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Henry Adams's novel
Democracy
, written at the end of the Hayes administration, drew an unflattering picture of “the President's wife” who remained unnamed but whose likeness to Lucy was clear. Midwestern in origin and rigid in her views, the First Lady in
Democracy
lashed out at anyone who did not share her opinions. She insisted that “in her town in Indiana, a young woman who was seen on the street in such clothes [as were then worn in Washington] wouldn't be spoken to,” and when a woman guest in the story mildly criticized the president, his wife became furious and vowed, “See if I don't reform you yet, you jade!”
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Even people who did not share the tastes of Henry James and Henry Adams objected to the Hayeses' ban on alcohol. Rutherford had not always abstained from strong drink. In his youth, he had enjoyed a glass or two of wine with his friends at the Literary Club,
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and he never advocated state prohibition of the sale of alcohol.
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His presidency coincided, however, with a powerful surge in temperance sentiment and both he and Lucy realized that refusing to serve alcohol in the White House could win votes without causing any personal inconvenience. Lucy had the example of her parents who had pledged never to touch alcohol, and both she and Rutherford found repulsive the drunkenness they sometimes witnessed at Washington parties. “The exclusion of wine from the list of refreshments has turned out exceedingly well,” the president explained. “There is a good deal of dissipation here … disgraceful things were done by young men made reckless by too much wine. Hence the necessity for our course is obvious and is commended in unexpected quarters. … We shall stick to it.”
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As he prepared to leave office in early 1881, he elaborated in his diary that the decision was right: it was favored by friends in the temperance movement and it helped keep votes in the Republican column.
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The suspicion that political expedience, as well as personal preference, figured in Lucy Hayes's ban on alcohol in the White House emerges from evidence of several kinds. Lucy actually served wine at her first White House dinner, honoring two Russian dukes, and then responded to the outburst of criticism by changing her course. Her failure to participate in the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the most important voice in urging a ban on liquor, is even more revealing. Lucy Hayes never joined the WCTU, an omission that cannot
be explained on the grounds that she steered clear of all such organizations since she accepted a national office in the Women's Home Missionary Society. Lucy's biographer, Emily Apt Geer, concluded that although Lucy did not drink alcohol, she was “not adamant” about abstinence in others. A chance remark to this effect, overheard by temperance advocates, so angered them that they changed plans and did not name their Washington chapter for her.
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The WCTU's reputation for militance displeased Lucy, and Rutherford evidently encouraged her to keep a distance from the WCTU president, Frances Willard. On one of Lucy's trips to Chicago where she expected to meet Willard, Rutherford had counseled her to “smother [Willard] with politeness but promise her nothing.”
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Whether or not alcohol was served in spite of the ban remains uncertain. The reporter Ben Perley Poore insisted that state dinners included a course, called “Life Saving Station” by those in the know, that provided alcohol to anyone who requested it “with the strongest mixture going to those needing it most.”
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President Hayes countered that the joke was on the tellers. He had given orders, he said, that flavoring be added to the punch and some people had mistaken the extract for the real thing.

Whether it was Lucy or the president who stood more firmly behind the ban remains unclear but she clearly took the blame.
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To taunts about her “dry dinners” and nicknames of “Lemonade Lucy,” she replied in terms particularly revealing about how she viewed her role: “It is true I shall violate a precedent; but I shall not violate the Constitution, which is all that, through my husband, I have taken the oath to obey.”
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Because temperance was an immensely popular cause in the 1870s, Lucy gained many friends for her stand. When she accompanied her husband on a seventy-one-day trip to California, temperance supporters flocked to her train to obtain her autograph and cheer her on. The crowds became so thick at one point that her youngest son, traveling with her, mingled with the others and got his mother to sign his album several times before she noticed him.
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At one stop, women held up a silk banner imprinted with the biblical quotation, “She hath done what she could.”
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