First Ladies (39 page)

Popular Grace Coolidge kept several pets and was often photographed with her dogs or her raccoon, Rebecca. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Lou Hoover, flanked by two Girl Scouts, appears in this, the first photograph ever made of either a president or a First Lady broadcasting from the White House. AP/Wide World.

Called “Our Flying First Lady,” Eleanor Roosevelt chose air travel when most Americans refused to try it. Here she is pictured in Dallas, Texas, just weeks after becoming First Lady. Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.

Before her marriage, Bess Truman (shown fourth from left) was considered one of the best tennis players in Independence. Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Mamie Eisenhower made hostessing and fashion her chief White House interests and, in doing so, reflected the predominant American view of femininity in the 1950s. Source unknown, provided by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library.

Sizing up the White House as though it were just another of the many residences where she would make a “backdrop for Bertie,” Lou pronounced it “as bleak as a New England barn.”
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She quickly rearranged virtually every piece of furniture in it and added some of her own things from California. Within three months, nothing moveable remained where the Coolidges had left it, causing one house employee to quip that Lou would next reverse the positions of the elevator and the spiral staircase. Of more permanent importance, Lou organized a systematic cataloging of the mansion's furnishings and assigned her friend and secretary, Dare Stark, to write a book about the White House. Although Stark did not complete that project, she did publish articles calling attention to the dearth of reliable information about the house and its furnishings.
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Unlike other presidents' wives who felt motivated by their new visibility to make themselves over, Lou Hoover seemed to retreat even from the accomplishments she had. Learning a new language, high on the agendas of many First Ladies, held little urgency—she already spoke five—but when questioned about her ability, she equivocated. Other White House chatelaines had embarked on ambitious buying trips to outfit themselves beyond criticism, but Lou, whose bank account would have allowed for any extravagance, paid little attention to clothes. Rather than attempting to slice a couple of years off her age, she seemed to take pleasure, one maid decided, in looking like the grandmother she was.
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The White House staff found the new First Lady a contradictory mix of international customs and small-town America. At Christmas, when she arranged for the family to trek through a darkened house, the girls and women ringing handbells and the men and boys carrying candles, the staff dismissed it as “ghostly” and “another of Mrs. Hoover's ideas.” Although she had a reputation for liking to talk (servants called it “broadcasting”), she relied on hand signals during official parties to communicate with employees.
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Each dropped handkerchief or raised finger carried a specific command: move the guests more quickly through the reception line, or more slowly; replenish the punch.

What Lou had concocted as an efficient innovation—or perhaps a variation on the dressage exercises she learned as a rider—appeared to the staff as dehumanizing and complicated. They had trouble “reading” her, they complained, and sometimes waited carefully for a particular signal and then missed it because of the subtlety with which it was delivered. Nor did they like her instruction that they stay out of sight. Bells rang to announce the president and his wife when they
passed through the halls of the private quarters, warning employees to dart into the closest nook or hiding place. After four years in the Hoover White House, some employees could count on one hand the number of times they had actually encountered face to face either the president or his wife.

More than one disgruntled White House employee complained in print about the Hoovers' uncaring treatment. The housekeeper, Ava Long, described how “company, company, company,” often arrived on such short notice that she had to contrive out of leftovers enough servings for dozens of people. On one occasion she had shopped for six, only to learn at 12:30 that forty would arrive for lunch at one. She instructed the cook to grind up all the icebox's contents and serve the result as a croquette with mushroom sauce. When one guest requested the recipe, Long dubbed it, with a touch of sarcasm, “White House Surprise Supreme.”
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The Hoovers liked company so much, the housekeeper reported, that they dined alone only once a year, evidently oblivious to the work they imposed on their employees. Eventually Long quit the job, and her colleague, the head usher, singled out the Hoovers as among the least likeable of his bosses when he published
Forty-Two Years at the White House.
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Other observers praised Lou Hoover's interest in people as her greatest asset. She was indefatigable, they said, in her willingness to welcome groups to the White House, and in her busiest year (1932), she gave forty teas and received eighty organizations.
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Camp Rapidan, the Hoover retreat in the Shenandoah Mountains, became an extension of the capital when Lou Hoover invited representatives of the Girl Scouts to accompany her there or used the camp as a setting to speak by radio to the country's youth. Much of her generosity, including funds for a school for poor children near Camp Rapidan, was supported by her own pocketbook.

A very deep prejudice against publicizing her personal life kept secret from most Americans the more appealing side of Lou Hoover. She shared with her husband a deep resentment, he later wrote, “of the intrusion of the press and public into our family life.”
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Even he did not know, until after his wife died in 1944 and he was settling her estate, how many people benefited from her largesse. Some of those whom she had supported regularly for years wrote when their checks stopped, wanting to know what had happened. A desire to protect the privacy of people she had helped contributed to the decision to keep her papers closed until forty years after her death.
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What makes Lou Hoover's attitude toward publicity more intriguing is her willingness to take a public role as First Lady. Recognizing the value of radio, which had begun to carry inauguration ceremonies in
1925, she arranged to speak to a nationwide audience. She even set up a lab on the second floor of the White House to “test” her performances and “improve [her] talkie technique.”
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A speech professor who later analyzed recordings of the talks judged Lou's voice “tinny” but admitted that the equipment was poorly adjusted for women's voices since so few of them had the opportunity to use it.
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Unimaginative in phrasing, Lou's radio speeches to young people had a definitely feminist slant. On a Saturday evening in June 1929, when she spoke from Camp Rapidan to a group of 4-H club members, the National Broadcasting Company carried the message coast to coast. After praising the joys of camping, Lou urged her listeners to help make their homes more attractive places, a responsibility, she said, “as much the work of boys as of girls … . Just stop a second to think what home is to you. Is it just a place where mother and the girls drudge a good part of the day in order that father and the boys may have a place to come to eat and sleep? [Everybody should help] with dishes, sweeping.… Boys, remember you are just as great factors in the home making of the family as are the girls.”
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In other ways, Lou Hoover exerted a surprisingly modern and liberated influence on her husband's administration. She invited noticeably pregnant women (who had traditionally been excluded) to join her in reception lines,
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and she encouraged women to pursue individual careers. When her husband issued Executive Order 5984 in December 1932, it amended the Civil Service Rule VII to require nominations “without regard to sex,” unless the duties to be performed could be satisfactorily performed by only men or women. At least one careful student of the Hoover record believes that Lou influenced her husband's decisions in this and other matters.
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In his single term, President Hoover named seven women to positions requiring Senate approval, bringing the total up to twenty, double what it had been in 1920.
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A woman of such intellectual bent and feminist persuasion might be expected to take a dim view of the requirement that a First Lady had to greet anyone who wanted to visit her, and Lou did. After shaking the hands of more than four thousand people at one New Year's reception, she abandoned the ritual that had originated with Martha Washington. Her husband explained that her “rigid sense of duty” stopped her from abolishing other receptions: “To her it was part of the job.”
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On matters delicate to the Washington political community, Lou Hoover preferred to increase her work load rather than offend anyone. She knew she was there to ‘‘help Bert.” When a protocol feud
erupted between Dolly Gann, prominent sister of the vice president, and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, longtime leader in capital society, Lou gave two parties so that neither would be assigned precedence over the other. Such a solution caused one
New York Times
reporter to announce “a particularly Quaker victory.”
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