First Ladies (8 page)

In 1880 the Republicans cruised to another four years in the White House, easily electing James Garfield in spite of the stench of the stolen election of 1876. Unquestionably, Lucy Hayes had done more than her share to dispel the odor.

At the time, some women faulted Lucy for her silence on woman’s rights, attributing it to lack of courage. A few historians have made similar remarks. But I have long thought this was an unrealistic view
of a First Lady. Politics is a way of life. A politician’s career is crowded with decisions about issues to support, issues to oppose, issues to avoid. I do not see how anyone can expect the woman who has shared his political journey—in Hayes’s case from Congress to the governorship of Ohio to the White House—to take political positions which he regards as wrong and possibly ruinous.

Reporters called Lucy Hayes “Lemonade Lucy” because she refused to serve liquor in the White House. She is one of our most underrated and misunderstood First Ladies.
(Hayes Presidential Center)

Politics, we should always remember, is the art of the possible. Every time a politician—and many First Ladies have been politicians—backs an issue, he or she makes a judgment call. Is it worth backing? Can anything be achieved by backing it? Is there any support out there if I back it—or am I being asked to commit political suicide? Can other equally important issues and causes be derailed or damaged if I back this one?

Lucy Hayes demonstrated her political shrewdness by limiting her crusading to temperance and bettering the lives of the poor. She never wavered in her decision to ban liquor from the White House. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union was able to use her as a symbol, even though she never joined its ranks. At the end of this First Lady’s career, the WCTU paid Daniel Huntington, one of the best artists in the country, to paint her portrait. Even here Lucy managed to defuse potential reproaches from critics of the Union’s headstrong tactics. Journalist Mary Clemmer Ames, who sometimes functioned as Lucy’s covert spokesperson, urged that the portrait be considered “a tribute to Mrs. Hayes—to the grace and graciousness of her womanhood… not to any one thing she has done, but to herself, for all she is.”

The portrait, which shows Lucy in a wine-colored dress with simple lace collar and cuffs, includes in the background a female figure leaning on a vase from which flows a stream of water. This was the First Lady’s only concession to the WCTU’s desire to use the portrait to send a message. It is Lucy Hayes the gracious woman who dominates the foreground, with proud eyes and a mouth that emanates generosity and strength.

—

N
EARLY FORTY YEARS LATER, ANOTHER PIONEERING
F
IRST
L
ADY
launched a crusade that sent a message to her President, as well as to
the people. Ellen Axson Wilson, Woodrow Wilson’s first wife, managed this feat in the brief eighteen months fate allotted her in the White House. In some ways she is our most forgotten First Lady. Not only is she often grouped with invalid spouses such as Letitia Tyler, Caroline Harrison and Ida McKinley but she has been overshadowed by the woman Woodrow Wilson married fourteen months after her death.

I have always been fond of Ellen Wilson, not only for the cause she backed but because she had a daughter named Margaret, who had an excellent singing voice. Ellen herself was a gifted painter who had given up her career to marry Woodrow Wilson. She staunchly encouraged Margaret’s desire for a musical career, in spite of the fact that her father was President. Who says lightning can’t strike twice in the same place?

Born in Savannah, raised, like Woodrow Wilson, in a segregated South, Ellen Wilson never saw herself as a crusader for radical reform. But she was a woman who believed all our citizens deserved the basic rights that America seemed to guarantee everyone in the pursuit of happiness. While few Presidents have equaled Woodrow Wilson in broadcasting this message to the entire world, his administration, dominated by conservative southerners, was curiously blind to racial injustice at home.

Many progressive whites and blacks had hoped Wilson would play a leading part in breaking down the Jim Crow practices that prevailed in the federal government. Instead, by the summer of 1913, six months after Wilson was inaugurated, there was more, not less segregation in all departments of the government. Over twenty thousand angry black Americans from thirty-four states signed a protest to the President, urging him to change this policy.

Around this time, Ellen Wilson had tea with Charlotte Wise Hopkins at the White House. Mrs. Hopkins was one of those early women “doers,” as Lady Bird Johnson calls them. She was a force in the District of Columbia branch of the National Civic Federation, which was committed to better living conditions for the poor, regardless of race, creed, or color. The First Lady listened with dismay to Mrs. Hopkins’s account of the way thousands of Washington’s blacks were living in shacks in fetid alleys, some of them only a short walk from the Capitol.

Mrs. Hopkins blamed segregation, which made it impossible for blacks to buy homes in many parts of Washington. Not only did she have a diagnosis but she had a cure: model homes which could be built inexpensively, with plumbing, electricity, and running water—amenities most of the alley shacks lacked.

Within a week Ellen Wilson was visiting the alleys with Mrs. Hopkins. They had picturesque names—Logan’s Court, Goat Alley, Willow Tree. She also visited 109 model homes which the Civic Federation had built and talked with the residents, without letting them know that she was the First Lady. The next day she became a stockholder in the company that was building these homes, the Sanitary Housing Company—and soon agreed to become the honorary chairman of the woman’s department of the National Civic Federation.

These gestures swiftly became public knowledge. Suddenly concerned congressmen were touring the alleys, and everyone in Washington society was discussing how to improve them. A committee of fifty prominent Washingtonians gathered to draft an “Alley Bill” that would clear the slums of the shacks and erect model homes in their place. Ellen Wilson invited the committee to the White House for tea. At another meeting, held in a private mansion, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, considered the greatest orator of the era, addressed the group. “The most eloquent speech here tonight,” Bryan said, pointing to Ellen, “is the one that has not been made at all, for actions speak louder than words…. As crowded as my days are, I feel that if the wife of the president can find time out of her busy days to be here and to work for this cause, I can too.”

After the Alley Bill was introduced in Congress, Ellen went to work on the conditions in which women and blacks labored in government offices. She visited the Post Office Department and was appalled by the lack of light and air and the deplorable rest room facilities. She went to Postmaster General Albert Burleson, an ultraconservative Texan, who gave her the standard Washington runaround. At a White House luncheon, an angry Ellen Wilson brought up the problem in a very determined way with Colonel Edward House, one of her husband’s
top aides. Soon the whole table was listening to the agitated House assure the First Lady he would do something about it.

Ellen made similar inspections of the Government Printing Office, where conditions were equally deplorable. Soon in the black ghetto of Washington, D.C., praise was being showered on Ellen Wilson. She was described as a “noble woman” who had set an example that black Americans hoped other white women would follow.

Ellen Wilson sent this message while maintaining a full-time pace as First Lady, with the usual White House round of entertaining politicians and visiting diplomats. She also functioned as her husband’s adviser and partner, going over his speeches with him, discussing his legislative program, doing research on problem countries, such as Mexico, with whom Wilson almost went to war in 1914.

Suddenly, on the advice of her doctor, Ellen sharply curtailed her activities. She retreated to a summer cottage in New Hampshire, where she painted and communed with nature and exchanged longing letters with her equally lonely husband in the White House. When she returned to Washington, the doctor still urged her to rest. He did not have the heart to tell the President or the First Lady that she was suffering from Bright’s disease, a fatal kidney disorder for which we still have not found a cure.

Ellen took only part of his advice. She summoned the energy to superintend the weddings of her daughters Jessie and Eleanor and presided at state dinners and receptions. But she noticed how easily she became exhausted. On March 1, 1914, she slipped and fell on the polished floor of her bedroom. She never recovered from this accident. In a letter to a relative, she described the fall as “sort of an all around crash.” Gradually, Ellen read the truth in her doctor’s mournful eyes. She was a dying woman.

One spring day she visited the rose garden on her nurse’s arm. The gardener was working on a design that Ellen and he had created. “It will be so lovely, Charlie,” she said. “But I’ll never live to see it finished.”

Throughout this slow, sad decline, the First Lady continued to take a strong interest in her slum clearance program. But the Alley Bill was stalled in Congress by segregationists and obstructionists. Inevitably,
in the summer of 1914, Ellen Wilson slipped away. Her husband, frantic with anxiety and grief, barely left her bedside, in spite of the ominous war clouds that were gathering in Europe.

On the morning of August 6, it was apparent that Ellen would live only a few more days, perhaps only a few hours. She reached out for Woodrow’s hand and whispered: “I would go away more peacefully if my Alley Bill was passed by Congress.” Wilson’s secretary, Joseph Tumulty, rushed to the Capitol with this request, and the Senate passed the bill on the spot. The House of Representatives made a solemn promise to pass it the next day. Tumulty dashed back to the White House with the news. Less than an hour later, Ellen Wilson smiled at her husband and daughters and died.

I would be exaggerating if I said Ellen Wilson started a mass movement. But one woman watched and remembered that a First Lady could back causes that subtly—and perhaps not so subtly—opposed the policies of her husband’s administration. The shy, plain wife of Wilson’s assistant secretary of the Navy, she was much too busy raising five children and playing adoring second fiddle to her handsome husband to imagine herself presiding at the White House. But Eleanor Roosevelt was a very perceptive woman. She undoubtedly grasped the inner meaning of Ellen Wilson’s quiet crusade.

—

T
HE
W
HITE
H
OUSE HAS SEEN ITS SHARE OF COMPLEX MARRIAGES, BUT
none has been quite as complicated as Eleanor Roosevelt’s union with Franklin D. Roosevelt. On one level they loved—or at least esteemed—each other. Their letters are addressed to “Dearest Babs” and “Dearest Franklin.” Uninitiated readers would assume they were exchanged between deeply affectionate spouses—and to some extent they would be right. But initiates knew that beneath this veneer of affection was a gulf of simmering anger which frequently boiled up as exasperation throughout their White House years and more often manifested itself in Eleanor’s prolonged absences.

Mrs. Roosevelt had the same mildly panicked reaction as other First Ladies when her husband was elected President of a Depression-racked America in 1932. In her case, she feared she would be reduced to a ceremonial figure—a podium person—by the hoary weight of tradition. One story has her weeping bitter tears on election night and exclaiming: “Now I’ll have no identity.”

She swiftly shook off the podium tradition and proceeded to reinvent the job on her own terms. Claiming that her wheelchair-bound husband, crippled by polio, needed her as his eyes and ears, hands and feet, she became the most ubiquitous First Lady in history. She hurtled around the country, inspecting everything from prisons to coal mines, speaking in Boston one night and Des Moines the next and Denver the next, often taking stands on the issues of the day that left the President’s spokesmen red faced and floundering.

I am sometimes amazed by how many otherwise reliable historians accept FDR’s crippled state as the explanation for Eleanor Roosevelt’s hyperactivity. Every President, not merely FDR, stayed pretty close to the White House until the airplane brought almost instant mobility. The White House is, after all, the President’s office
and his
home. The claim also suggests that, because he was confined to a wheelchair, FDR was
unable to
leave the White House, when we know he was one of the great campaigners of the twentieth century. Some of his most famous speeches were delivered in Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and other bastions of the Democratic Party.

No, Eleanor Roosevelt left the White House repeatedly because she was not happy there. She was not happy in any house with her husband. Moreover, she felt free to differ with her husband’s positions on a wide range of issues because she saw herself as something other than a wife or partner.