First Ladies Read online

  FIRST LADIES

  FIRST LADIES

  From Martha Washington

  to Michelle Obama

  REVISED AND UPDATED EDITION

  Betty Boyd Caroli

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Caroli, Betty Boyd.

  First ladies : from Martha Washington

  to Michelle Obama / Betty Boyd Caroli. — Rev. and updated.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-19-539285-2

  1. Presidents’ spouses—United States—Biography.

  I. Title.

  E176.2.C37 2010

  973.09’9—dc22 2010014673

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the United States of America

  on acid-free paper

  FOR LIVIO

  Acknowledgments

  IN THE YEARS SINCE I completed the first edition in 1986, I have become even more aware of the valuable aid that scholars and archivists generously give each other, and I am happy to acknowledge here the dozens of individuals and institutions who contributed to the research and writing of this book.

  Members of the Institute for Research in History Reading Group on Cities generously enlarged their mission to include First Ladies in urban studies, and I am grateful to the following for their comments on portions of the manuscript: Cathy Alexander, Jane Allen, Selma Berrol, Barbara Blumberg, Elizabeth Hitz, Nora Mandel, Jean Mensch, and Carol Neuls-Bates.

  Two conferences stimulated my thinking on the subject. In April 1984, Betty Ford hosted a meeting in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to explore the role of modern First Ladies. Hundreds of people, including journalists and White House curators, two ex–First Ladies, and the daughters and one granddaughter of other First Ladies exchanged views on how the role of presidential wife had changed. In December 1982, Barbara Welter chaired a New York City conference where newswomen and academics, colleagues of First Ladies, and statisticians evaluated the role of Eleanor Roosevelt and her predecessors. I benefited greatly from both meetings.

  The presidential libraries have furnished a great deal of information, and I am grateful to the staffs of the libraries of Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Gerald R. Ford. In the case of two recent presidents whose libraries were not ready for use when I needed them, I had help from Madeline MacBean Edwards, assistant to Rosalynn Carter, who supplied material on the Carter years, and from Helen McCain Smith, press secretary to Pat Nixon. Rosalynn Carter generously answered many questions not dealt with in her autobiography, First Lady from Plains.

  Although I attempted to use as many primary sources as possible, I relied heavily on the research and interpretations of historians and political scientists who had gone before. In the course of studying Ellen Wilson and Lucy Hayes, I called on their respective biographers, Frances Wright Saunders and Emily Apt Geer, both of whom responded far beyond what I had a right to expect. Joy Scimé, who wrote a doctoral dissertation on the subject, clarified my thinking on federal regulations on the employment of women in the 1930s. Douglas Lonnstrom and Thomas Kelly, Co-Directors of the Siena Research Institute, shared results of their polls of historians and political scientists. Lester Meigs forced me to consider more carefully what I had written. Margaret Klapthor at the National Museum of American History answered many questions. Phyllis Deutsch assisted in the first stage of the research, and Carl Sferrazza Anthony, who researched the topic of First Ladies for years and published two fascinating volumes on the subject in 1990–1991, helped me throughout the research. Rita Cooley, Professor of Politics (now Emerita) at New York University, was an inspiring mentor when I first knew her, and she has continued her enthusiastic aid beyond the granting of my degree. Lewis Gould offered many helpful suggestions.

  Among the many historians and curators who answered my queries were Elizabeth F. Abel, Town Historian of Stillwater, New York; Dale Irene Maugans, of Lawnfield, the Garfield home in Mentor, Ohio; Herbert S. Gary, of the Warren G. Harding House in Marion, Ohio; Lawrence E. Wikander, the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Room, Forbes Library, Northampton, Massachusetts; Betty J. Gallagher and Dale C. Mayer of the Herbert Hoover Library; Mary Ellen Andrew, Elmira College; John Dobson, Library of the University of Tennessee; Mark E. Neely, Jr., of the Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum, Fort Wayne, Indiana; Kathleen Jacklin, Cornell University Libraries; Polly B. Johnson and Vera Weeks of the Pierce Brigade, Concord, New Hampshire; Arlene C. Palmer of the New Britain (Connecticut) Public Library; and Betty Monkman, Associate Curator at the White House.

  Staffs of the following institutions also responded to my requests for information: the Western Reserve Historical Society; the Historical Department of Spiegel Grove, in Fremont, Ohio; the Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints; the Cincinnati Historical Society; the Albany Institute of History and Art; the Chicago Historical Society; the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society; the Library of the State University of New York at Oswego; the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe; the Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield; the University of Alabama Library; Yale University Library; the Virginia Historical Society; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Mount Vernon Ladies Association; the Princeton University Library; and the Library of Congress.

  For permission to quote from the following manuscript collections, I wish to thank: Cornell University Library, the Moore Family Papers; New Britain Public Library, Elihu Burritt’s Journal; the University of Tennessee Library, the Papers of Margaret and Smiley Blanton; Penfield Library of State University at Oswego, the Papers of Millard Fillmore; Massachusetts Historical Society, the Adams Family Papers; the Virginia Historical Society, the letters of Martha Washington; the Library of Congress, the Papers of Woodrow Wilson; and the Ohio Historical Society, the Papers of Warren G. Harding.

  Among my nonacademic friends who assisted in this project were Carey Vennema, who provided a new footnote program for my antiquated word processor; Catherine Faulconer, who assisted in selecting photographs; Enid Bell, Victoria Wion, and Richard Beeson, who offered many suggestions.

  New York City is rich in libraries and I have used many of them during the course of researching this book. I am particularly grateful to the staffs of the libraries of New York University, Columbia University, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and the 42nd Street Public Library where I worked in the Wertheim Room. Librarians at Kingsborough Community Colleg
e of the City University of New York have for many years responded generously to my requests for help.

  Released time from teaching came from Kingsborough Community College (in the early stage of research) and from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The latter granted me a Fellowship that freed me from teaching during the 1985–1986 academic year, when I finished the project.

  Susan Rabiner, of Oxford University Press, not only edited this book—she helped shape it through several different versions. She is the ideal editor, both critic and friend, and I thank her and her diligent, cheerful assistants, Rachel Toor, who entered the editing process even before beginning work at Oxford, and Judith Mintz, who came in for the final version.

  Livio Caroli arrived in New York in 1965 with very little interest in American history (which he found lacking in political intrigue when compared with that of his native Venice) but he has gradually revised his opinion. His “outsider’s view” that the institution of First Lady was an interesting American invention helped convince me that the subject required a book, and he has enthusiastically supported the project to its completion.

  B. B. C.

  New York City

  September 1994

  Note to 2010 edition

  In the many years I have watched White House occupants, trying to figure out what was innovation and what was repetition, I have had the help of family, friends, and colleagues. How can I thank all those who clipped articles, called my attention to obscure sources, encouraged me to think differently? Two groups have been particularly helpful—the Narrative Writing Group and the seminar Women Writing Women’s Lives.

  As this book has grown over the last two decades, adding the records of four more First Ladies since the first edition, it became necessary to cut the previous chapters 11, “Presidential Wives and the Press,” and 12, “The Women They Married … Some Conclusions.” Those chapters, still relevant in many ways to understanding the curious job of First Lady, can be found in the three prior editions that Oxford University Press published in 1987, 1995, and 2003.

  Current usage favors not capitalizing the title of First Lady, but because the preference was different when I started this book more than thirty years ago, I have maintained the usage employed in earlier editions—I continue to capitalize the title.

  Over three decades of association with Oxford University Press, I have had the enthusiastic support of many editors, production staffs, and publicists. But the team on this edition outshines them all. I want to thank Christine Dahlin for overseeing production in this new e-publishing age; Adithi Kasturirangan for attending to marketing in a bleak market time; and Tim Bent and especially Dayne Poshusta, who contributed far more than any author has the right to expect.

  B.B.C.

  New York City

  March 2010

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Setting Precedents: The First Presidents’ Wives (1789–1829)

  2. Young Substitutes for First Ladies (1829–1869)

  3. Three Exceptions: Sarah Childress Polk, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Julia Dent Grant

  4. The Limited Promise of the “New Woman” (1877–1901)

  5. The Office of First Lady: A Twentieth-Century Development

  6. The Paradoxical 1920s

  7. Breaking Precedents and Reaffirming Old Ones (1933–1961)

  8. The Turbulent Sixties

  9. New Dimensions to the Job of First Lady (1974–1993)

  10. A New Generation in the White House (1993–2008)

  11. Turning Points

  Notes

  Appendices

  Index

  Photographs follow pages 118, 182, and 262

  Introduction

  LIKE MANY HISTORIANS OF women’s records, I was not initially attracted to the prospect of writing a book on presidents’ wives (Hillary Rodham Clinton had not yet made the kind of headlines that encouraged serious discussion of the job of First Lady). What value could there be in studying a group of women united only by the fact that their husbands had held the same job? The 1970s and 1980s had finally focused attention on women who achieved on their own—who, then, would want to read about women who owed their space in history books to the men they married? If presidents’ wives had remained “footnotes to history,” perhaps that was what they deserved.

  My curiosity was piqued when I looked at what had been published on the subject. Even a cursory reading of the standard reference work on women revealed a striking pattern among presidents’ wives.1 Most of them came from social and economic backgrounds significantly superior to those of the men they married. Many of the women wed in spite of strenuous parental objection to their choices, and some of the men were younger than their brides. Recurring phrases hinted that the women assumed more control over their lives than I had imagined, and I began to wonder if I had mistakenly assigned them a free and easy ride alongside their prominent husbands. Several of the wives had eased the financial burdens of their households by managing family farms, teaching school, and working as secretaries after their marriages. Other information pointed to a pattern of early exposure to politics, and I was struck by the number of uncles, fathers, and grandfathers who had at one time held political office. Perhaps the women deserved a closer look.

  As soon as I examined the women’s unpublished letters, I was intrigued. Who could read Lucretia Garfield’s poignant puzzlings in the 1850s about what being a wife meant and not then go on to learn how her marriage turned out? What about the indomitable Sarah Polk whose blunt letters and letters of others singled out as particularly opinionated and astute? Who would not want to read what the magazines of the 1840s said about her? Was the handwritten memorandum on the subject of Mary Lincoln’s insanity trial to be believed? What about the mysterious Eliza Johnson who was much maligned as a hill woman of little education? Why did her son, then enrolled at Georgetown, write her a beautifully penned, grammatically perfect letter and ask her to “excuse the mistakes”? These and dozens of other questions arose.

  I was encouraged by the amount of material available. Because of the prominence of their husbands, First Ladies left more complete records than most of their contemporaries. Evidence on mid-nineteenth-century presidents’ wives is rather scant, but even the little-known Eliza Johnson, wife of the first president to be impeached, had her biographer (who went after information about Eliza like a detective intent on solving a crime). Several First Ladies, including Julia Grant, Helen Taft, Edith Wilson, and most of those who lived in the White House after 1963, published their memoirs. I was convinced that all this record keeping could help elucidate not only the First Ladies’ lives but also the lives of their countrywomen. A few dozen examples from two centuries of American history cannot be taken to represent all women—no one would claim that they do—but where else could a researcher find so much material about women who moved consecutively through American history?

  A handful of presidents’ wives achieved great fame, of course, but others of equal or greater interest and significance have been allowed to drop into obscurity. Nearly 170 years before Jackie Kennedy charmed Paris, James Monroe’s wife, Elizabeth, was dubbed “la belle américaine” in the French capital. Abigail Adams’s injunction to John to “remember the ladies” became a familiar feminist refrain in the twentieth century, while her daughter-in-law, Louisa, wife of John Quincy Adams, was almost forgotten. Yet Louisa Adams showed considerable courage when she set out to travel alone from St. Petersburg to Paris during the Napoleonic Wars. Eleanor Roosevelt’s break with precedents is well documented, especially her agreement to meet regularly with women reporters, but her predecessor, Lou Hoover, gained little credit for the feminist speeches she delivered on national radio or for the fortitude she showed in her personal life. Living in China during the Boxer Rebellion, she witnessed gun battles in front of her house but refused to show fright or to flee. Such courageous women surely deserved more attention than they had received.2

  I was also fascina
ted by the evolution of the title “First Lady.” In 1789, crowds accustomed to the pomp of royal persons heralded the wife of their new president as “Lady Washington.” Usage soon changed, however, because in its adolescent decades, when the United States reaffirmed its democratic vows and “plain folks” politics, a “First Lady” made no sense at all. Presidential campaigns that boasted of candidates’ humble origins, including log cabin births and little formal schooling, could hardly fasten noble-sounding titles on the wives of the winners. The women were addressed as “Presidentress” or “Mrs. President” or, as was frequently the case, not mentioned at all outside Washington.

  Eventually the country’s familiarity with its chief executive grew and expectations changed. Poverty and inexperience became somewhat less valuable stepping-stones to the highest office; railroads and mass circulation magazines made presidents more familiar figures across the continent. In response to a firm preference in the United States for married men at the political helm, wives began to travel with their husbands on official trips, and they assumed a popularity of their own. It is not insignificant that Lucy Hayes (1877–1881) accompanied her husband on the first trip a president ever took from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific and also heard herself heralded by a contemporary journalist, Mary Clemmer Ames, as the “first lady of the land.”3

  Ames’s use is not the first documented appearance of “first lady” although that argument has been made.4 Emily Briggs, under her pen name “Olivia,” had already employed the term in an 1870 newspaper column describing etiquette in the presidential household: “President Washington meant to practice republican simplicity,” “Olivia” wrote, “[but] courtly ways did creep in. For instance, at Mrs. Washington’s receptions in both New York and Philadelphia, the first lady in the land received precisely after the manner of Queen Charlotte’s drawing room levées.”5 In the same column, “Olivia” referred to President Grant’s wife, Julia, as “first lady.” Even earlier, a British journalist traveling through the South during the Civil War reported overhearing a reference to Jefferson Davis’s wife, Varina, as “first lady of the Confederacy.”6