First Ladies (33 page)

Evidence mounts on several sides that Edith Wilson's influence in her husband's administration has been greatly overrated. Edith had never shown any interest in politics, although in the romantic early days of their marriage, she had sat alongside him while he studied official communications. After his death, she refused political involvement, and when Eleanor Roosevelt appealed to her for a statement in support of a woman candidate, Edith cited her forty-year record of obliviousness to politics.
¹⁴²

Most telling of all, in assessing Edith Wilson's influence, is the nature of the criticism leveled at her. Her alleged dominance occurred only during Woodrow's illness, from September 1919 until early 1920. A time of great tumult in the United States, this period included a miners' strike and a government injunction against mine leaders, a steel strike, the continuation of the fight over the peace treaty, and the deportation of aliens. Yet through all these difficulties, the complaint leveled at the White House was a lack of direction, an unwillingness to act—hardly evidence of a powerful leader. When the attorney general, Mitchell Palmer, began his wholesale attack on people he suspected of being disloyal, the president's secretary futilely begged Edith to see that her husband acted.
¹⁴³

Edith had married a man who rarely listened to women on any substantive issue, and only his debilitating stroke placed him in a dependent position so that rumors could thrive about his wife running the country. Her memoirs describe how during his illness she abandoned ideas that differed with his rather than risk upsetting him. When the fight over the League of Nations became particularly acrimonious, for example, she reported that she had suggested to Woodrow that he compromise rather than hold out for what might be a losing proposition. She quickly reversed herself, however, when he accused her of deserting him.
¹⁴⁴
At least one student of the Wilson administration concluded that Ellen Wilson, had she lived, might have exerted strong influence on a sick president and possibly convinced him to accept Senator Lodge's amendments concerning the
League of Nations.
¹⁴⁵
Such a judgment reinforces the interpretation of Edith Wilson as nonpolitical, interested only in Woodrow's health and happiness. It is ironic that Edith should have gone down in history as the “Mrs. Wilson [who] virtually took over the reins of the White House,”
¹⁴⁶
while Ellen Axson Wilson has been almost forgotten except by researchers who resurrect evidence of her strength and talent.

Edith Bolling Galt Wilson survived her husband by thirty-eight years, and when she died in 1961, she was buried beside the president, a tradition begun by Martha Washington. Every widow who had remarried and become First Lady had chosen burial beside her second husband rather than by her first. Edith had lived only eight of her nearly eighty years as Woodrow's wife, but those few years brought enormous publicity. Two full-length biographies
¹⁴⁷
detailed the influence she supposedly exerted in the White House and virtually all accounts of her husband's life assessed her role. She had been called “Gatekeeper Extraordinary”
¹⁴⁸
and “surrogate President.”
¹⁴⁹
Yet the consensus is that she described her role as accurately as anyone when she wrote that she simply looked out for her husband's health.

Her role during Woodrow's illness demonstrated another potential trouble sport in the presidential system, whose weaknesses Woodrow had studiously pointed out. In a parliamentary government, which he had favored, the prime minister functioned as head of his party, more dependent on other party members than was a president who won power in a popular election. The prime minister's term of office is more flexible, and elections take place in response to current needs and problems, while the president's term is a fixed four years. Woodrow Wilson's second term had almost eighteen months to run when he became ill, and members of his family thus had the opportunity to make decisions that in other government systems would have been handled by fellow party members. Not until the passage of the twenty-fifth amendment in 1967 was that power vacuum officially filled. Under that amendment, Congress could designate some “body [other than the Vice President and the Cabinet]” whose judgment of a president's incapacity could be used to relieve him of his official duties. Although not explicitly mentioned in the amendment, the president's spouse was understood by some people to be able to participate in that decision.

Edith Wilson's prominent tenure as First Lady capped the institutional changes made by Edith Roosevelt, the public and influential participation of Helen Taft, and the acknowledged reform leadership of Ellen Wilson. Together, the four women altered the meaning of
the title they held. What had been unusual before 1900—the contribution of significant work of their own—became common among presidents' wives in the next two decades: three of them wrote books about themselves or their families, and the fourth, Ellen Wilson, left a sizeable collection of her own paintings.

To comprehend their cumulative impact, it is necessary only to ask what if they had acted otherwise. What if Edith Roosevelt had refused to acknowledge White House mail directed to her and had not hired a secretary to handle it? What if she had confined herself to family matters and delegated all First Lady mail to her husband's staff? What if Helen Taft had not admitted to an important role in shaping her husband's career, keeping him off the Supreme Court until he had a chance to be president? What if Ellen Wilson had not used a deathbed wish to encourage passage of a slum clearance bill that carried her name? What if Edith Wilson had not controlled access to a sick president? What if she had failed to write her account of that period? The answer is that the job of First Lady would have retained its nineteenth-century character rather than taking on the marks of the twentieth.

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.