First Ladies (24 page)

By all accounts Ida had been a vigorous young woman whose physical and mental condition deteriorated rapidly in the first years of her marriage. In just three years' time, she had lost her mother, with whom she had been very close, and two young daughters. She never recovered her strength or came out of the depression that followed these tragedies.

Although accurate medical opinion on Ida McKinley is difficult to find, there is every indication that her illness was very real. After the delivery of her second child, she may have suffered from phlebitis, making unassisted walking difficult, and she also had seizures, resembling epilepsy (although the name for the disease, still so misunderstood in the nineteenth century, does not appear in newspaper coverage of her). Even in the McKinley household, the nature of Ida's illness remained outside the bounds of acceptable discussion. Her niece, who spent considerable time with Ida, remarked after her death that she had first heard “epilepsy” in connection with her aunt in a political campaign and she had assumed it was part of the opponents' plot to discredit William McKinley.
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The grief and limitations Ida experienced in her adult years represented a big change from her youth. In Canton, Ohio, where she grew up, her family had been prominent for two generations and one of her grandfathers had started the town's major newspaper.
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Nurturing bigger ideas for her schooling than Canton could satisfy, Ida enrolled first in an academy in Delhi, New York, then in a Cleveland academy before finishing at Brook Hill Seminary outside Philadelphia.
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To round out her education, she went off to Europe with her sister on an eight-month tour. The teacher who chaperoned the girls later complained that she had found Ida so obstreperous that she had contemplated abandoning her charges and going off on her own.
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Back in Canton, Ida continued in her independent ways by going to work in her father's bank at a time when middle class young women eschewed paid labor,
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By some accounts Ida even managed a branch, but whatever her official title, she had taken it not out of necessity but because she wanted a job. Young William McKinley, new in town and from much less advantaged circumstances than hers, appealed to young Ida so much that she vowed to marry him. Her parents made
an imposing Canton house their wedding present and the young couple appeared started on a fairy-tale marriage—until the deaths of both their children and the onset of Ida's illness.

While the loss of her daughters appears to have precipitated Ida into depression and disability, her husband rushed into politics, making his first run for Congress in 1876. For the rest of their marriage, as he progressed through several terms in the legislature, to the governorship of Ohio and finally the presidency, Ida developed a reputation as one of the most demanding invalids in American history. Unlike many of her predecessors who had relied on their poor health to excuse them from unwanted official tasks, she insisted on a central position for herself at every public event.
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She frequently summoned her husband from important meetings in order to ask his opinion on ribbons for a new dress or some other trivial matter. During his governorship, the McKinleys lived in a hotel across from his office in Columbus and each morning when he went to work, he turned and waved to Ida from the street. Then precisely at three in the afternoon, he stopped whatever he was doing to signal her again and wait for her to respond with a swish of white lace.

In the White House, Ida continued to insist on occupying center stage even though she was too ill to be more than just physically present. Each time the president left Washington, Ida was at his side, waiting to be escorted out on the train platform to acknowledge crowds at every stop. Wherever she went in Washington, a special exit route had to be prepared in advance so that she could be removed quickly in case she had one of her seizures.

The seating arrangement at formal dinners was adjusted so that the president could always sit near her. At the slightest sign of one of her attacks, he would take a white handkerchief that he carried especially for this purpose and throw it over her face. William Howard Taft, a guest on one occasion, reported hearing a hissing sound while he was talking to the president and before anyone knew what had happened, the president had shrouded his wife's face from view. While William McKinley continued his conversation as though nothing unusual had happened, Ida remained rigid in her chair and then when the seizure had passed, she removed the handkerchief and resumed her conversation.

William McKinley's solicitous attention to his wife earned him the reputation of a saint. A brochure in 1895, later expanded into a kind of publicity release, predicted that he would go down in American history among the country's greatest heroes. “It was an example,”
Century
magazine wrote effusively after his death, “which even sin
respects and the criminal can admire. … Knowledge of this exceptional domestic relationship … passed … beyond our geographical boundaries and reached even the people and the courts of Europe.”
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Others thought William McKinley went too far. They pointed out that for twenty years he had renounced almost all pleasures, except work, in order to nurse his wife. The one diversion he still permitted himself—smoking several cigars a day—had to be enjoyed away from home because Ida did not care for the odor. The magazine
Nation,
at odds with President McKinley over the Spanish-American War, noted a few months before his death that he was “likely to be known as the mildest mannered President that ever suffered long and was kind in the White House,” but
Nation
wondered if “flabby good nature” was what the country needed.
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William made no attempt to control Ida's outbursts of bad manners, and she frequently snapped back at people. One White House guest was amazed when Ida pointed a finger at a startled woman and announced: “There's somebody who would like to be in my place and I know who it is.”
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Popular magazines included many formal, posed pictures of Ida McKinley in the 1890s but failed to prepare people for how ill she seemed in the flesh. Rows of delicate, expensive lace and lots of diamonds, her favorite jewel, gave her a doll-like appearance, and one young congressman's wife, meeting Ida McKinley for the first time, described her in terms more fitting an inanimate object than a person: “The first glimpse [of Ida McKinley] … made me ashamed of coming.… She sat propped with pillows in a high armchair with her back to the light. Her color was ghastly, and it was wicked to have dressed her in bright blue velvet with a front of hard white satin spangled with gold. Her poor relaxed hands, holding some pitiful knitting, rested on her lap as if too weak to lift their weight of diamond rings, and her pretty gray hair is cut short as if she had had typhoid fever. She shook hands with us lightly, but didn't speak.”
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Ida's one demonstration of strength and stamina came after her husband's assassination in the summer of 1901. She had accompanied the president to Buffalo but had not gone with him to the exposition where he was shot as he stood greeting admirers. As the dying president was being carried away, his thoughts ran to his wife (“Be careful how you tell her”).
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Escorted to his bedside, Ida amazed everyone by appearing much stronger than she had been for some time. At first she begged to die with him, then composed herself and accompanied his body back to Ohio for burial. Before her death six years later, she oversaw the building of his mausoleum and planned for the dedication of his monument.

Ida McKinley's tenure as First Lady raises more questions about the country than about her. Sick and depressed by the deaths of three of the people closest to her, she could hardly be expected to exemplify the “new woman” (although her youth, when she worked in her father's bank, showed evidence that she had a mind of her own). What is more interesting is the public's easy acceptance of an invalid as First Lady—a role which seemed to demand no more than a doll-like figure propped up against some cushions.

Mary Baird Bryan, whose husband lost to William McKinley in the elections of 1896 and 1900, made a far larger intellectual contribution than Ida to her husband's career and would have brought an entirely different outlook to the job of First Lady. Only thirty-six and barely old enough to meet the constitutional requirements for the presidency, William Jennings Bryan was nominated by the Democrats in 1896. He had already achieved a reputation as the “boy orator” from Nebraska, The McKinley-Bryan campaigns raised large questions about the direction of the country, about the continued political dominance of the rural areas over the cities and about how to finance a national government that was assuming more and more responsibilities. An economic downturn in the first half of the 1890s made change imperative, and William McKinley, with his proposed higher tariff, appealed to some voters, while William Jennings Bryan moved others with his pleas for “free silver.”

When Bryan delivered his famous “cross of gold” oration to the 1896 Democratic convention, his wife of twelve years was sitting in the gallery. Mary Baird Bryan had more than a casual interest in the response because she had helped research the speech. Since her marriage, she had tailored her intellectual interests and most of her energy to Will's career, and it was to assist him that she had entered law school, where she placed third in the class. Neither housekeeping, nor clothes, nor social affairs held much interest for her, and she frequently admitted that she was happiest while checking references for her husband at the National Library. A career of her own had never appealed but she thought his “a mind … worth working with and working for … [so that I was] willing to plod through heavy books in order to give him the leading thoughts, and help form for him a background of erudition which he was too busy to acquire unaided.”
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Three times nominated and three times defeated for the presidency, William Jennings Bryan stood as a major figure in American politics for more than three decades, but his wife, whom most of his biographers consider a major force in his success, remains almost
unknown. From the time the two met in Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1879 until Will's death at the conclusion of the Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925, the Bryans formed a partnership, and no one who knew them well assigned Mary an insignificant role. A Washington newspaper in 1892 commented on her “excellent” judgment and on her skill in revising her husband's speeches.
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An early Bryan biographer thought Mary's mind “more analytical” than Will's,
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and later students have concurred. Political historian Louis Koenig described Mary as a shrewd judge of people and her husband's “chief aide and counselor.”
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Louise M. Young, in a biographical sketch of the elder Bryan daughter, Ruth, who made history herself, described Mary as a “remarkable woman who left a strong imprint on [Ruth's] character … [and was] far abler than [William Jennings Bryan] in intellect and judgment.”
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A spunky young woman, Mary Baird had not immediately taken a liking to young Will Bryan, but when she learned that he did not drink, smoke, or swear and that at college he regularly carried a Bible around under his arm, she decided: “I preferred marrying a man who was too good rather than one who was not quite good enough.”
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The courtship proceeded with difficulty since her school, affectionately known as “Angels' Jail,” did not permit its students to socialize with the local college men. Elaborate subterfuges had to be worked out for the young couple to meet at the home of a cooperative faculty member or during one of Mary's purported visits to a “sick mother.” When the deception was uncovered, Mary was expelled from school but she did not alter her resolve to marry Will. Mary's mind, once made up, rarely changed on anything, and she reminded Will before they were married that she expected him to respect her views. “So NOW I want you to understand that I mean … what I say.”
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After their marriage in 1884, Will struggled to start a law practice, first in Illinois and then in Nebraska, while Mary began her legal studies and helped start a Sorosis chapter. She made no secret of her lack of interest in domesticity, explaining matter-of-factly, “[I] naturally do not like housework.”
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When he proposed running for Congress in 1890, she countered that their short residence in the state and the needs of their three children made a wait prudent. When he ran anyway and won, she packed up the children, ranging in age from nine months to six years, and moved them to Washington. For the next four years, the Bryans boarded with a family across from the National Library so that Mary could divide her time between the children and the book stacks. On the days Will was scheduled to speak in
the House, she stationed herself in the gallery, ready to nod an approval or signal caution with a frown.
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The contrast between Ida McKinley and Mary Bryan could hardly have been more marked, as
Harper's Bazaar
pointed out in the campaign of 1900. Although not openly taking sides, the magazine implied a certain criticism of Mary Bryan when it described Ida as “a gentle sedative to the typical woman of today who aims to do too much … an inspiration to all women … a revelation of the glory of the woman at home … and a First Lady who exalts mere womanliness above anything that women dare to do.” Mary Bryan's competence was noted: “[She is a ] woman of action, a successful woman, a full-fledged lawyer … whose mind is a storehouse of information on all subjects that pertain to her husband's duties and ambitions.” Such activities evidently rendered Mary less feminine, although her contribution to her husband's success was clear: “It was said that the speech in Congress which first brought Mr. Bryan into national prominence was written by his wife, [and if he wins] she will bring an intellectual character … even perhaps a salon [to the White House and will] compel women to think about issues of the day.”
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