First Ladies (22 page)

On September 19, 1881, when James Garfield succumbed to the infection that gathered around the bullet lodged in his spine, he became the second president to be killed by an assassin, and this less than twenty years after the first. Talk of senseless “martyrdom” encouraged an outpouring of sympathy to the widow and children, whose pictures had become familiar to people all over the country. School youngsters, summoned to special memorial programs, heard how “poor Mollie Garfield” (the President's daughter) let “a tear [roll] down her cheek.”
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Congregations listened as ministers chronicled how James Garfield's family had figured in his meteoric rise from poor boy to president. Individual, unsolicited contributions to Lucretia and her children eventually amounted to more than $360,000 or about seven times the chief executive's annual salary.
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For the first time in history, the presidential widow participated in her husband's public memorial services. William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and Abraham Lincoln had all died in office but, in the style of the time, their widows deemed the public ceremonies too trying to attend. Lucretia Garfield assumed a prominent part in the funeral and made a point of letting the crowds see her, even insisting that the curtains be left open in her railroad car, much as Jacqueline Kennedy, eighty-two years later, kept on a blood-stained suit so the people “can see what they have done.”
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During the brief time that Lucretia Garfield served as First Lady, she kept a White House diary that shows that she could deal firmly with critics. A newspaper correspondent who came to complain about some of the president's advisers got nowhere with Lucretia. “I made her understand,” Lucretia wrote in her diary, “the President knew not only the men around him but also knows what he is about.”
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When a writer on etiquette insisted on a “special appointment” with the president's wife, Lucretia treated her severely, and later, after the two women had talked, Lucretia decided that she had been seen as “wax in the [etiquette writer's] hands.” “This is only the beginning,” Lucretia complained in her diary, “of the petty criticism which might worry me, if I would let it.”
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When a temperance advocate came to request a continued ban on alcohol in the White House, Lucretia pointed out that “drinking wine at a respectable dinner was so small a factor in
bringing about the intemperance of the country that I felt there was great inconsistency in giving it so much importance.”
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The former schoolteacher who had liked having her own money stopped short of advocating the vote for women, and her husband phrased his own disapproval in rather strong terms. When Elizabeth Stanton had invited him to address the 1872 suffrage convention, he refused: “While I heartily sympathize with all efforts that will elevate woman and better her condition, I do not believe suffrage will accomplish that result. Had I no other reason for this opinion, the recent [radical] tendencies of the suffrage movement in this country would confirm me in the correctness of my conclusion.”
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James Garfield insisted that political differences between husband and wife would lead to divorce: “The suffrage movement is atheistic in a great measure and it must logically result in the utter annihilation of marriage and family.”
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Although Lucretia Garfield appeared to share her husband's view of suffrage, she showed a great deal more understanding than he of the particular problems of her sex, and she sometimes tempered the pettiness and moralizing that characterized his thinking. The contrast between the two is obvious in an exchange of letters concerning the conduct of a Maine senator. A rumor circulated in Washington in 1875 to the effect that James G. Blaine, a Republican contender for the presidency, had many years earlier become a father only six months after his wedding date. “How does this story strike you?” James Garfield wrote his wife. “If it is true, should it have weight with the people in the Presidential campaign?”
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Lucretia replied that she had previously heard something similar but she had not given the story much importance. “If it is true, it ought not to affect the voters very much unless it should have been considered more honorable by the majority to have abandoned the woman—seduced. My opinion of Mr. Blaine would be rather heightened than otherwise by the truth of such a story for it would show him not entirely selfish and heartless.”
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Lucretia frequently based her judgment of men on how they treated women. As for Roscoe Conkling, the New York senator who openly courted a married woman, Lucretia objected that he had acted improperly on two counts, compromising the reputation of the woman in question and neglecting his own wife: “History will write him down for just what he is—a peacock.”
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Not yet fifty years old at the time her husband was murdered, Lucretia lived another thirty-six years, dedicating most of that time to his memory. She supervised the preservation of his papers, one of the
most extensive and complete of any set left by a president, and although she had plenty of opportunity to destroy documents illustrating the troubled phase of her marriage, she never did so. Not until the 1960s, more than forty years after her death, did her family consent to placing those revealing letters between Lucretia and James Garfield in the presidential collection.
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That correspondence reveals a very different woman from the one described in her husband's diary or in accounts published during her lifetime. The letters show an intelligent, capable woman who reluctantly relinquished her own autonomy in favor of her husband's career. She had not started out that way, but she became, as one of her contemporaries pointed out was frequently the case with politicians' wives, a “quiet and noncommittal little moon revolving around a great luminary.”
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Despite the “little moons” epitomizing traditional femininity in the White House, women outside were enlarging their sphere of activity in the late nineteenth century. Spurred on by better education, the power of unity in their national organizations, and their greater acceptance in the professions, they branched out into new fields. Some women even earned high fees for speaking in public. Anna Dickinson, a Philadelphia Quaker, became a popular lecturer in the 1870s when she addressed more than one hundred audiences in one year and earned more than the president of the United States.
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Since women had only recently been accepted as speakers to audiences that included men, some of her popularity may have resulted from curiosity. Many subjects were still considered beyond her grasp or appropriate awareness. When she lectured on immigration, she was often heckled, and when she discussed prostitution, critics pronounced it one subject that a young unmarried woman (such as Dickinson) should know nothing about.
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That women could now speak up in public (and get paid for it) suggests that ideas about womanliness were shifting in late nineteenth-century America. Models took more substantial forms than had been the case in the antebellum period. The old emphasis on youth had not entirely disappeared but the most admired woman was now taller, more rounded, and more imposing than the shy, innocent, emaciated maiden so fashionable a few decades earlier. Advertisements pictured stout women, often “of a certain age” to tout their household appliances and beauty aids. The bustle, with its emphasis on a large posterior, returned, and the preferred dress fabrics were weighty and ornate, so heavy that only a large woman could manage them easily, England's Queen Victoria, whose name came to apply to much of the
furniture and clothing of her time, was in her seventh decade by 1880 and the solidness and rectitude that she exemplified seemed embodied best in a mature woman. This new vogue was underlined by what happened in the White House in the 1880s—two presidents who had no wives installed their serious, mature sisters as substitute hostesses rather than choosing ingénues.

Chester Arthur, the widower who became president at the death of James Garfield, had almost an entire term to serve. His one daughter was much too young to take on any social responsibilities and his teenaged son was not old enough to take a wife. President Arthur could have relegated much of the First Lady work to a staff, leaving for himself final decisions on matters that had political implications. He had always shown considerable interest in living well (having brought along with him from New York his own chef and valet, the latter a “first” for the White House) and could have been expected to want to implement some of his own ideas about entertaining.

Chester Arthur's attention to detail, especially in his surroundings, had become evident when he had surveyed the White House and then announced that he could not possibly live in a place that looked like that. He promptly arranged for Louis Tiffany, the famous New Yorker, to design changes, but the president kept a close check on the progress, going by each evening to see the results of the day's work. When Tiffany finished, the house had a “robin egg” blue room and a red room full of eagles and flags, but much less furniture than had been there when he began because the president arranged that twenty-four wagonloads be removed and auctioned off.
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The redecorated executive mansion had its critics, but the president pronounced it an improvement over the “badly kept barracks” he had found when he arrived.
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In spite of his apparent willingness to oversee many of the details formerly handled by the president's wife, Chester Arthur imported his sister, Mary McElroy, to act as his official hostess. He occasionally hosted dinners for men who were either single or had not brought their families to Washington, but for the formal events, he relied on his sister to even out the numbers so that guests could go to the table in two's, like animals entering Noah's ark. Then in her forties and the mother of four, McElroy had followed her schooling at the progressive Emma Willard's with a completely conventional marriage. The daughter of a minister, she had married a minister, and when her brother moved to the White House, she temporarily left her own family to help him during the capital's social season.

As though to underline the country's new preference for older, more mature women, Chester Arthur's successor, the bachelor Grover Cleveland, also enlisted his sister as White House hostess. Rose Cleveland, the most intellectual woman to preside over the White House up to that time, had graduated from the Houghton Academy and then gone to head an institute in Indiana.
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She had read widely, studied several languages, including Greek, and had completed a book-length manuscript on George Eliot. Her reputation as a lecturer on women's rights was well established. Yet her entire adult life had been shaped around the needs of her mother and her brother, and when he summoned her to Washington, she dutifully abandoned her own career to assist him in his.

The new respect for seriousness in models of femininity did not extend to scholarly types—at least not in the press's treatment of Rose Cleveland. In spite of her many intellectual achievements, reporters preferred to concentrate on what she wore. Her “Spanish lace over black silk” and “rose colored silk” both made the first page of a major newspaper,
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while a review of her book was relegated to the inside section and treated with condescension. The
New York Times
noted in 1885 that Rose Cleveland shared numerous writing faults “with many brilliant women and not a few men … [but she] may well be congratulated on her first book, [because although] its trappings may offend the taste of some of the fastidious, its heart beats warm and womanly.”
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Rose Cleveland's boredom with her White House social obligations, although not explicitly stated, can be inferred from her confession that she occupied herself in reception lines by silently conjugating difficult Greek verbs.
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When her brother announced that he would marry, Rose left Washington and resumed her own life. She edited a literary magazine in Chicago for a while and taught history in New York City before moving to Italy, where she died in 1918 while caring for people stricken in an influenza epidemic.

Rose Cleveland relinquished her role of White House hostess in June 1886, when her brother married twenty-one-year-old Frances Folsom. Speculation about his marital plans had surrounded Grover Cleveland since his inauguration and several suggestions had been offered about the ideal First Lady. Various candidates' names appeared in print, and reporters appraised each White House guest list for a potential bride. By the time more positive evidence leaked to the press in May 1886, many readers refused to take it seriously, believing this just another unsubstantiated bit of gossip.

But the bachelor Cleveland really did mean to marry and he had chosen the young daughter of his former law partner. The president had known Frances Folsom since she was born. He had bought her first baby carriage, and according to accounts of his fellow club members, had led “chubby Frankie” around by the hand when she was a youngster. After her father's death, when she was eleven, Grover became in effect, although not in law, her guardian and played a role in her upbringing. As governor of New York, he invited her and her mother to be his guests in Albany and later they came to the White House. Anyone observing Grover's attentiveness to Frances over the years might have guessed at his intentions had not the twenty-seven-year difference in their ages made marriage seem unlikely. Gossip centered more on Frances's mother as the subject of the courtship than on the daughter.

Nothing in either the appearance of the young bride or in her actions resembled the ingénue stance of Julia Tyler, the only preceding president's bride. Frances was all seriousness. A graduate of Wells College in 1885, she was taller than average and full-figured, and she carried herself with such authority and confidence that she might have been mistaken for a much older woman. Advertisers who freely appropriated her picture to sell their own products portrayed her as a mature individual. Flimsy, virginal white dresses had been the typical costume of young women in antebellum America, but the vogue now was the matronly shape, even for twenty-one-year-old Frances Cleveland.