by Bill Fawcett
HIS LITTLE TURNIP
There are no official records, but this was a treasured family tale: At one point in the American Revolution, the father of future First Lady Anna Harrison felt his daughter would be much safer with her grandparents. The problem was that to get to the grandparents he had to pass through the British lines and onto British-held Long Island. To accomplish this, the father tried a dangerous ruse. He dressed in a British Redcoat’s uniform and carried his young daughter in a small sack on his back. When stopped, he explained that the sack contained turnips for the British commander of occupied Long Island. He and the turnips were allowed to pass.
PARTY POOPER
Letitia Tyler hated being First Lady and the social responsibilities that entailed. She was the first wife of John Tyler, the tenth president, and she died while he was president. She refused to attend most of the parties held in the White House, which were admittedly less than somber affairs at which much alcohol was consumed. While the revelers danced and drank, she spent her evening in a wheelchair in her bedroom reading the Bible.
DOUBLE DUTY
Sarah Polk was not only First Lady but also acted as her husband’s private secretary. As such, she had a good deal of direct influence on the running of the government. She was said to have done an excellent job. No other First Lady was as involved in the actual day-to-day running of the government except, perhaps, Eleanor Roosevelt. Even the major, if unsuccessful, efforts of Hillary Clinton on medical care are overshadowed by Eleanor’s many successes.
PLEASE NO
Zachary Taylor was elected president on the strength of his military record. He was a successful general who had won many battles fighting on the nation’s frontiers. That was also where both he and, even more so, his wife, Margaret, were most comfortable. Zachary Taylor’s wife shared the hardy life of a frontier soldier with her husband for almost forty years before he was elected president. She only reluctantly joined him at the White House and avoided all functions of any sort. What she did do was spend a lot of time in her room. Her favorite practice while there was to smoke a corncob pipe.
While Zachary could not pass on the honor, each night before the election his wife would pray he would lose. He won. But then the gods are sometimes perverse in granting wishes. A short time after taking office, Zachary Taylor died. The First Lady quickly packed up and left the city.
RAISE YOUR HAND
Millard Fillmore met his wife, Abigail, as a student in a class she taught. He was a late-educated son of a farmer and eighteen when he was attending school. It took some time for the young man to convince her family to allow him to marry the older woman. The family kept stalling and their engagement stretched out to seven years. Finally, in 1826, they felt that Millard had waited long enough and the couple were married in a simple ceremony.
BOOK OF THE DECADE CLUB
Both Abigail and Millard Fillmore were avid readers. They had, in a time when books were expensive, accumulated a library of nearly two thousand volumes before Millard was elected president in 1849. After moving into the White House, the couple was astonished to discover that there was nary a book in the building. They finally prevailed on Congress to give them a $2,000 budget, with which Abigail then bought books for what was the start of the White House library, personally selecting each one. This library may be the only positive thing either of the Fillmores is remembered for.
ANYONE THERE?
Mary Todd Lincoln was an avid spiritualist. She constantly held séances in the White House, hoping to contact her lost children and others. When Lincoln was reelected, she also had a strong premonition of his death and often commented on her feeling of doom. When her fears were fulfilled by John Wilkes Booth, she retired to the upstairs of the White House and eventually, because she suspected Andrew Johnson had been part of the plot, virtually squatted there for a month before leaving Washington. Later she let her life be ruled by spiritualism and her unshaken belief in charlatans. They were one of the two of the reasons Mary Todd Lincoln was eventually sent by a court to a mental asylum in 1875. The other was the insistence that she be committed by her last remaining son, Robert.
HANDMAIDEN
Imelda Marcos was not the first. In one four-month period while her husband was in office, Mary Todd Lincoln purchased over three hundred pairs of gloves.
DOUBLE TROUBLE
When a young Julia Grant was a child, she was struck on the side of her head by an oar. This had a permanent effect on the later First Lady’s vision. The blurred and double images permanently caused by the accident meant that she had trouble simply walking across a crowded room without bumping into guests or the furniture. To avoid this she adopted a sideways walk that helped only a little. Surgeons offered to correct the problem, but in what was probably a good decision considering the state of medicine at the time, Ulysses forbade any operation.
SEEING MORE THAN MOST
On at least two occasions, Julia Grant gave good reason to believe in the psychic abilities she claimed to have. The first was the day of Lincoln’s assassination. An invitation arrived for General Grant to attend the same play at Ford’s Theater. Instead she wrote her husband that they should leave Washington immediately. He complied and took her to Philadelphia. Grant was also a target in the assassination plot of John Wilkes Booth. Years later, when the Grants were living in Chicago, Julia had another premonition in 1871 that featured fire and smoke. She convinced her husband to cancel an appearance that night and leave the city. The couple was miles away when the Great Chicago Fire broke out destroying four square miles of the city.
POOL AND THAT STANDS FOR PLANT
The pool table that was brought into the executive mansion by Andrew Jackson, which caused quite a ruckus, was as unacceptable to Lucy Hayes, wife of Rutherford B. Hayes, the nineteenth president, as alcohol, dancing, and other soul-destroying vices. As a devout Methodist, she ordered the table removed and the Billiard Room became a conservatory filled with her favorite plants.
FOR HER BRAINS
The first of the First Ladies who was a college graduate was Lucy Hayes. She graduated from Illinois Wesleyan Woman’s College with highest honors in 1850.
PRESIDENTIAL DISCRETION
James Garfield was a model for too many future presidents. His propensity for having affairs and mistresses was notorious. He opened the low moral ground for many of our modern day leaders. Even before he was married to Lucretia (he called her Crete) Rudolph, James Garfield was involved in a number of affairs. Crete forgave and married him, feeling that her own withdrawn nature was part of the problem. It was a pattern that would follow the couple for their entire marriage. As a representative, and even president, Garfield’s eye roamed. This was an open secret and well known even beyond Washington. When the president was assassinated in 1881, the long-suffering widow was the object of national sympathy. Over $350,000 was raised in a subscription drive to ensure the former First Lady’s financial security and Congress also voted her a $50,000 payment and $5,000 annual pension.
PITY IT DID NOT STICK
On May 20, 1895, while Grover Cleveland was president, the income tax was declared by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional. Don’t you wish they had stuck to their guns? It was reinstituted by constitutional amendment to pay for World War I.
YA BET
Neither U. S. Grant nor his wife, Julia, was the type to hesitate when challenged. Grant proved this on many battlefields. His wife had her own determination. While the presidential party was out west and being shown a Virginia City silver mine, the prominent banker John. W. Mackey bet the president a silver dollar that Mrs. Grant would not go down into the mine and look at the head of the shaft. When the First Lady was told that the wealthy mine owner had bet against her courage, she promptly walked into the mine.
YOUNGER THAN SPRINGTIME
By far the youngest First Lady was Frances Folsom Cleveland, the wife of Grover Cleveland. She was only twenty-one when, in 1886, she married the widowed, forty-nine-ye
ar-old president. It was the first wedding ceremony in the executive mansion. She wore a twenty-one-foot train on her gown in a ceremony that was held in the evening before less than fifty close friends. President Cleveland deleted the word “obey” from her vows (women’s lib was alive even then). They were a seemingly happy couple and after Grover Cleveland was reelected, Frances gave birth to the first child of a President to be born in the White House.
FASHION STATEMENT
Sometimes a celebrity can have a drastic effect on what others wear. When Clark Gable took off his shirt and had no undershirt on in the movie It Happened One Night, the sales of those shirts plummeted. This also happened at the time that the darling of the media was the young and vivacious Frances Cleveland. Everything she did or wore was front page news. But the process reversed itself one long, dull summer. There was simply nothing happening and a reporter needed a story. Editors are rarely understanding by nature. So a reporter made up a story saying that Frances Cleveland had begun defying what had been the current fashion. Specifically, he wrote that she had given up that rather unusual and amusing, to our modern eyes, appliance called a bustle. This backside extender had been part of the fashion scene for several years. Once other papers reprinted the story, women simply stopped wearing bustles. This story was false, but Frances, too, soon stopped wearing one.
FORTY-TWO GUN AFFAIR
When Anna Eleanor Roosevelt married her fifth cousin, the future President Franklin Roosevelt, she was given in marriage at the altar by her uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt.
DOWNPLAYED
Ida McKinley, the wife of the twenty-fifth president, William McKinley, suffered from epileptic seizures. The couple took these in their stride and whenever Ida had a seizure, her very caring husband would place his handkerchief over her face to help her avoid embarrassment and because the lessened light seemed to help her. Once the seizure had passed, the presidential couple would continue on with no mention of it. No matter who President McKinley was with, he always stopped and gave Ida priority when she entered the room.
SLIPPERS
At the end of the nineteenth century one of the major social causes was the welfare of the aging veterans of the Civil War. William McKinley was a major advocate of such charities, which supported thousands of disabled or aging former soldiers from both sides. Ida McKinley did her part and also must have been a lightning crotchetier. The First Lady personally crocheted almost thirty-five hundred pairs of gray and blue slippers to be sold for the veteran’s charity.
LAST THOUGHTS
The affectionate relationship between Ida and William McKinley is really a classic love story. All of Washington was charmed by how close they were and how caring both were. After the president was shot, the first thing he said to his secretary was “My wife—be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her. Oh, be careful.”
ONE TIME TOO MANY
In her entire life, Edith Roosevelt made only one public statement. This was long after she had been First Lady. Edith had been a lifelong Republican, but when her distant cousin Franklin ran on the Democratic ticket, everyone thought blood would be thicker than party loyalty. They were wrong; Edith went public encouraging everyone to vote for Herbert Hoover and not FDR. Franklin Delano Roosevelt still won in a landslide.
PIPELINE
On a visit to Hawaii, while accompanying her husband on an official trip to the Philippines, Helen Taft became the first, and possibly only, First Lady to have gone surfing there. But then, Helen had always been interested in leading an exciting life. (Just to cause trouble, when younger she took up the then very unladylike habits of smoking and drinking beer in the local Cincinnati pubs.) On the same trip the couple stopped in Japan. Years later the visit paid great dividends when, in honor of it, the mayor of Tokyo sent two batches of cherry trees to assist Helen Taft is beautifying Washington.
PRODUCT PLACEMENT
Helen “Nellie” Taft was the cause of what is likely the first presidential product placement in the nation’s history. The First Lady was frustrated by the refusal of Congress to provide one of the new and modern automobiles for the president’s use. While the elite of Washington was riding in new cars, the president was still stuck in his carriage. Her reaction to the rejection was to take action herself. Helen Taft approached the Pierce-Arrow company and asked for a large discount on a vehicle for her husband. To get this, she agreed that the company could advertise that they were the official automobile of the White House.
ZZZ BANG
As a young woman growing up in Georgia, future First Lady Ellen Wilson was an avid shot. Even in later years, sleeping in perhaps the most secure building in the country, the White House, she liked to sleep with a gun under her pillow.
HOW
Woodrow Wilson’s second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, was a descendant of fabled American Indian princess Pocahontas. She was very proud of her heritage, and when allowed to name several Navy warships during World War I, invariably chose Native American names for them. One time, when a snobby French aristocrat snubbed her as First Lady (just a plebeian, you know; elected, not bred), the woman did a one-eighty and gushed all over what she thought was a different woman who was an actual Native American princess.
JUNIOR BIRDWOMAN
The first president’s wife ever to fly in an airplane was Florence Harding. Like many women of her day, she was a strong advocate of a greater role for women in all areas. She flew, but insisted on a woman pilot.
TELL HER
The reticent Silent Cal Coolidge was never what anyone would describe as romantic. His proposal consisted of telling Grace that “I’m going to be married to you.” While rarely speaking and never demonstrative, he did have a sense of humor, as did the First Lady. When visiting a farm, the First Lady noticed a rooster and hen going at it. She asked the farmer how often that happened and he told her several times a day. She sent him to tell this to the president. On being told exactly that, Calvin Coolidge then asked the farmer, “To the same hen?” and the farmer told him that it was with many different ones. Cal replied, “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”
COLORFUL
In 1929, the Ku Klux Klan was a political power in the South. This did not concern Lou Hoover, or her husband. On June 12, 1929, she hosted a tea and one of the guests was the wife of Illinois Congressman Oscar DePriest. The couple was African-American. No one at the tea cared about Mrs. DePriest’s race, but the South went bonkers. A week later, just to show this was no anomaly, Herbert Hoover lunched in the White House with an African-American scholar from Tuskegee College. More than his failure to act decisively at the start of the Great Depression, these acts of integration ensured Herbert Hoover would lose the Southern vote when he ran for reelection.
SIGH
“I never wanted to be a president’s wife, and I don’t want it now.”—Eleanor Roosevelt, who was First Lady longer than any other woman in history.
FIT FOR A KING
While First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt once served hot dogs to the king and queen of England.
NO RETIREMENT
After the death of their husbands, most First Ladies retire from public life. But Eleanor Roosevelt was not like most First Ladies. She soon left Washington in 1945, but only to be the new delegate from the United States to the United Nations. There, she successfully lobbied for and got that body to pass the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She kept active for the rest of her life. She acted as an adviser to President Kennedy when he formed the Peace Corps. Even more than Hillary Clinton (who is said to have idolized her, and to have heard Eleanor’s spirit talking a few times, as well, when she was First Lady), Eleanor Roosevelt was the most active and involved First Lady in the actual business of government—ever.
RESIGNED
When the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow the black singer Marian Anderson to appear before their meeting in Constitutional Hall, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the organization. She then arranged for Marian Anderson t
o perform a concert in Washington, suitably, singing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Thousands attended.
JOB PREP
While in college, Bess Truman was a track and field athlete. She often won her best event, the shot put.
BETTER STARCH IN THE COLLAR
Bess Truman was underwhelmed by the services in Washington when she was First Lady. So much so that she had her laundry mailed to be done in Kansas City, Missouri. JFK, who once described Washington as a city with “Southern efficiency and Northern charm,” seems to have agreed.
NOT IN MISSOURI
When John Kennedy was assassinated, it was decided to put a Secret Service team on every surviving president and First Lady. Bess Truman made it completely clear that they were neither needed nor welcome in Independence, Missouri, and would not even allow them on her property.
POOR PROSPECT
Mamie Doud had her choice of men when she was nineteen. She was beautiful, from a rich family, and the belle of most of San Antonio’s balls. Her father was actually put off when she took an interest in young, poor Lieutenant Eisenhower, who was stationed nearby at Fort Sam Houston. There was a real question as to whether the couple could live on a lieutenant’s pay, and no question that the young officer could not keep her in the manner she was accustomed. The first years really were very hard and Mamie had to learn a completely different lifestyle. So much so that she actually once was so exhausted she went into a coma. Then things got even worse, as her husband was shipped off to Panama, a dirty, forgotten posting with no decent housing.
Mamie Eisenhower was determined to make her marriage and life as an army wife work. It took all her efforts and nearly ruined her health, but she learned to adjust and even enjoy. When Ike was stationed in Panama, she took her friends to see the local form of entertainment, cockfights. What impressed the other base wives the most was not the event, but that not only did Mamie seem at home in the strange environment, she also won most of her bets.