The woman who became the wife of the twentieth president of the United States had attended Ohio’s Eclectic Institute (later renamed Hiram College), a school her parents and other members of the Disciples of Christ Church had helped found. James Garfield also began his studies there in the early 1850s but he quickly transferred to the considerably more prestigious Williams College in Massachusetts, where his good looks and charm earned him immediate popularity. His prowess in debate attracted many women friends and even he seemed unsure why he continued an almost dutiful courtship to a serious and shy Lucretia Rudolph back in Ohio.
James’s first mention of Lucretia in his diary indicates that her abilities first attracted him. While both were still at the Eclectic Institute, they had been selected to speak at a school ceremony, and James judged his own performance poor; but Miss Rudolph’s speech, he wrote, was “full of good, practical, sound commonsense and elegantly and eloquently expressed.”57
About a year later, after he had broken off a romance with another woman, James’s thoughts turned again to Lucretia, whom he alternately praised and criticized. She had, he admitted, “a well balanced mind, not of the deepest and most extensive kind but logical and precise.” Yet he could not deny that he found her dull and he concluded that she “is either studiously concealing [her social nature] or she does not possess it.” Her views on women’s rights alarmed him: “There are some of her notions concerning the relation between the sexes which, if I understand, I do not like.”58
Until James and Lucretia married in 1858, their courtship never followed a smooth line and they both showed real doubts. When they were separated, James raised his expectations of what she meant to him and then found himself disappointed when they met. One vacation went so badly that James seemed ready to terminate the court-ship—until she showed him her diary where she had expressed her strong feelings about him, thus convincing him she had “depths of affection that I had never before known that she possessed.”59 After he returned to Williams, her correspondence became full-blown love letters in which she wrote of “walking in the warm sunlight of your love” and he responded that he looked forward to the time when “I will have you in my arms again.”60
James Garfield confessed at one point in the courtship that he did not feel about Lucretia as he thought a bridegroom should but then abruptly, in the fall of 1858, when Lucretia was twenty-six and employed as a teacher, he told her to proceed with plans for their simple marriage rites. She had her own doubts and right up to the time of the ceremony worried about losing the autonomy she had enjoyed—earning her own money and making her own decisions. Just weeks before the wedding, Lucretia warned James: “My heart is not yet schooled to an entire submission to that destiny which will make me the wife of one who marries me.” She determined to try her best, even though her “heart almost broke,” she wrote, “with the cruel thought that our marriage is based upon the cold, stern word duty.”61
In the first years of her marriage, Lucretia continued to live almost as a single woman. She kept her teaching job, and since she and James boarded with another family, she had few housekeeping chores. Her husband’s election to the state legislature a year after their marriage meant that he was frequently absent from home, and when the Civil War started, he enlisted. James made very clear that he considered their marriage a mistake, and although Lucretia accepted much of the blame, she thought him “a little hard.”62 While his letters were often brusque and judgmental, hers repeatedly promised to attempt to conform to his demands and become the submissive helper he required: “I am going to try harder than ever before to be the best little wife possible,” Lucretia wrote in March 1860. “You need not be a bit afraid of my introducing one of those long talks [that strike in you] such a terror … ever again.”63
On their fourth wedding anniversary James coolly appraised their time together as unsatisfactory but concluded that both partners deserved credit for trying. Lucretia, who had become aware of his attentions to a New York widow and confronted him on the matter, learned in late 1862 that James did not wish to continue with his wife “any[thing] other than a business correspondence.”64 After four and one-half years of marriage, Lucretia calculated that she and James had spent less than five months together.65 They both understood that the separation was partly voluntary and that theirs was a troubled union.
Had something not affected the course of this marriage, it is unlikely that James Garfield’s political career would have proceeded as it did, but Lucretia became increasingly docile in the 1860s and her husband’s attitude toward the family changed. In part the alteration may have resulted from grief. Within a few months of each other, two of their children died—their first daughter at age three and then, only weeks later, an infant. In 1867 Lucretia and James went to Europe, a kind of second honeymoon,66 and soon after their return she convinced him that they should move the family, now numbering three children, to Washington. The house they built at Thirteen and I Streets became their residence for much of the year.
Two more children were born to the Garfields, and James began to take greater interest in his older sons’ education, drilling them in Latin and Greek and urging Lucretia to brush up on her knowledge of languages so that she could help, too. He did not lose interest in other women and even had to make a special trip to New York to retrieve compromising letters he had sent to a woman friend there, but more and more of his time centered on family activities. In 1873, after fifteen years of marriage, he wrote to his wife, “The tyranny of our love is sweet. We waited long for his coming but he has come to stay.”67
Whatever James Garfield meant in that letter, his actions did not show that he considered his wife an important part of his social life in the capital. Between 1872 and 1874, his diary records that he accepted dozens of invitations, only three of which involved Lucretia.68 The Garfields rarely invited people to their home, and Lucretia understood that Washingtonians found her dull. One man wrote his daughter after an evening with the Ohio congressman and his wife that they were probably “very good people … but a plainer, stiffer set of village people I never met.”69
By the time James Garfield won the Republican party’s nomination for president in 1880, Lucretia had become a seasoned political wife in the nineteenth-century meaning of the term. She avoided all controversy and kept her opinions to herself. Newspapers extolled the Garfields’ exemplary family life, and Republican party literature bragged that its candidate, born in a log cabin, had made a “fortunate marriage [to] a farmer’s daughter … refined, intelligent [and] affectionate. [She] shared his thirst for knowledge and his ambition for culture,” but, the Republican party emphasized, she was no bluestocking: “[She has] the domestic tastes and talents which fitted her equally to preside over the home of a poor college president and that of a famous statesman.”70 In that brief but telling description of Lucretia Garfield, nothing remained of the young bride who had described herself twenty-two years earlier as in no mood for “submission.”
Unfortunately Lucretia Garfield, who had been ill with malaria and absent from the capital, had only a few weeks in the White House before her husband was shot on July 2, 1881. Most of her record as First Lady comes from the weeks she kept vigil at her husband’s side until his death nearly three months after the assassination attack. The entire country monitored the president’s condition through frequent medical bulletins and newspaper accounts that made a stoic martyr of Lucretia. “The wife of the President is the bravest woman in the universe,” one newspaper reported.71
On September 19, 1881, when James Garfield succumbed to the infection that gathered around the bullet lodged in his spine, he became the second president to be killed by an assassin, and this less than twenty years after the first. Talk of senseless “martyrdom” encouraged an outpouring of sympathy to the widow and children, whose pictures had become familiar to people all over the country. School youngsters, summoned to special memorial programs, heard how “poor Mollie Garfield” (the President
’s daughter) let “a tear [roll] down her cheek.”72 Congregations listened as ministers chronicled how James Garfield’s family had figured in his meteoric rise from poor boy to president. Individual, unsolicited contributions to Lucretia and her children eventually amounted to more than $360,000 or about seven times the chief executive’s annual salary.73
For the first time in history, the presidential widow participated in her husband’s public memorial services. William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and Abraham Lincoln had all died in office but, in the style of the time, their widows deemed the public ceremonies too trying to attend. Lucretia Garfield assumed a prominent part in the funeral and made a point of letting the crowds see her, even insisting that the curtains be left open in her railroad car, much as Jacqueline Kennedy, eighty-two years later, kept on a blood-stained suit so the people “can see what they have done.”74
During the brief time that Lucretia Garfield served as First Lady, she kept a White House diary that shows that she could deal firmly with critics. A newspaper correspondent who came to complain about some of the president’s advisers got nowhere with Lucretia. “I made her understand,” Lucretia wrote in her diary, “the President knew not only the men around him but also knows what he is about.”75 When a writer on etiquette insisted on a “special appointment” with the president’s wife, Lucretia treated her severely, and later, after the two women had talked, Lucretia decided that she had been seen as “wax in the [etiquette writer’s] hands.” “This is only the beginning,” Lucretia complained in her diary, “of the petty criticism which might worry me, if I would let it.”76 When a temperance advocate came to request a continued ban on alcohol in the White House, Lucretia pointed out that “drinking wine at a respectable dinner was so small a factor in bringing about the intemperance of the country that I felt there was great inconsistency in giving it so much importance.”77
The former schoolteacher who had liked having her own money stopped short of advocating the vote for women, and her husband phrased his own disapproval in rather strong terms. When Elizabeth Stanton had invited him to address the 1872 suffrage convention, he refused: “While I heartily sympathize with all efforts that will elevate woman and better her condition, I do not believe suffrage will accomplish that result. Had I no other reason for this opinion, the recent [radical] tendencies of the suffrage movement in this country would confirm me in the correctness of my conclusion.”78 James Garfield insisted that political differences between husband and wife would lead to divorce: “The suffrage movement is atheistic in a great measure and it must logically result in the utter annihilation of marriage and family.”79
Although Lucretia Garfield appeared to share her husband’s view of suffrage, she showed a great deal more understanding than he of the particular problems of her sex, and she sometimes tempered the pettiness and moralizing that characterized his thinking. The contrast between the two is obvious in an exchange of letters concerning the conduct of a Maine senator. A rumor circulated in Washington in 1875 to the effect that James G. Blaine, a Republican contender for the presidency, had many years earlier become a father only six months after his wedding date. “How does this story strike you?” James Garfield wrote his wife. “If it is true, should it have weight with the people in the Presidential campaign?”80
Lucretia replied that she had previously heard something similar but she had not given the story much importance. “If it is true, it ought not to affect the voters very much unless it should have been considered more honorable by the majority to have abandoned the woman—seduced. My opinion of Mr. Blaine would be rather heightened than otherwise by the truth of such a story for it would show him not entirely selfish and heartless.”81
Lucretia frequently based her judgment of men on how they treated women. As for Roscoe Conkling, the New York senator who openly courted a married woman, Lucretia objected that he had acted improperly on two counts, compromising the reputation of the woman in question and neglecting his own wife: “History will write him down for just what he is—a peacock.”82
Not yet fifty years old at the time her husband was murdered, Lucretia lived another thirty-six years, dedicating most of that time to his memory. She supervised the preservation of his papers, one of the most extensive and complete of any set left by a president, and although she had plenty of opportunity to destroy documents illustrating the troubled phase of her marriage, she never did so. Not until the 1960s, more than forty years after her death, did her family consent to placing those revealing letters between Lucretia and James Garfield in the presidential collection.83 That correspondence reveals a very different woman from the one described in her husband’s diary or in accounts published during her lifetime. The letters show an intelligent, capable woman who reluctantly relinquished her own autonomy in favor of her husband’s career. She had not started out that way, but she became, as one of her contemporaries pointed out was frequently the case with politicians’ wives, a “quiet and noncommittal little moon revolving around a great luminary.”84
Despite the “little moons” epitomizing traditional femininity in the White House, women outside were enlarging their sphere of activity in the late nineteenth century. Spurred on by better education, the power of unity in their national organizations, and their greater acceptance in the professions, they branched out into new fields. Some women even earned high fees for speaking in public. Anna Dickinson, a Philadelphia Quaker, became a popular lecturer in the 1870s when she addressed more than one hundred audiences in one year and earned more than the president of the United States.85 Since women had only recently been accepted as speakers to audiences that included men, some of her popularity may have resulted from curiosity. Many subjects were still considered beyond her grasp or appropriate awareness. When she lectured on immigration, she was often heckled, and when she discussed prostitution, critics pronounced it one subject that a young unmarried woman (such as Dickinson) should know nothing about.86
That women could now speak up in public (and get paid for it) suggests that ideas about womanliness were shifting in late nineteenth-century America. Models took more substantial forms than had been the case in the antebellum period. The old emphasis on youth had not entirely disappeared but the most admired woman was now taller, more rounded, and more imposing than the shy, innocent, emaciated maiden so fashionable a few decades earlier. Advertisements pictured stout women, often “of a certain age” to tout their household appliances and beauty aids. The bustle, with its emphasis on a large posterior, returned, and the preferred dress fabrics were weighty and ornate, so heavy that only a large woman could manage them easily, England’s Queen Victoria, whose name came to apply to much of the furniture and clothing of her time, was in her seventh decade by 1880 and the solidness and rectitude that she exemplified seemed embodied best in a mature woman. This new vogue was underlined by what happened in the White House in the 1880s—two presidents who had no wives installed their serious, mature sisters as substitute hostesses rather than choosing ingénues.
Chester Arthur, the widower who became president at the death of James Garfield, had almost an entire term to serve. His one daughter was much too young to take on any social responsibilities and his teenaged son was not old enough to take a wife. President Arthur could have relegated much of the First Lady work to a staff, leaving for himself final decisions on matters that had political implications. He had always shown considerable interest in living well (having brought along with him from New York his own chef and valet, the latter a “first” for the White House) and could have been expected to want to implement some of his own ideas about entertaining.
Chester Arthur’s attention to detail, especially in his surroundings, had become evident when he had surveyed the White House and then announced that he could not possibly live in a place that looked like that. He promptly arranged for Louis Tiffany, the famous New Yorker, to design changes, but the president kept a close check on the progress, going by each evening to see the resul
ts of the day’s work. When Tiffany finished, the house had a “robin egg” blue room and a red room full of eagles and flags, but much less furniture than had been there when he began because the president arranged that twenty-four wagonloads be removed and auctioned off.87 The redecorated executive mansion had its critics, but the president pronounced it an improvement over the “badly kept barracks” he had found when he arrived.88
In spite of his apparent willingness to oversee many of the details formerly handled by the president’s wife, Chester Arthur imported his sister, Mary McElroy, to act as his official hostess. He occasionally hosted dinners for men who were either single or had not brought their families to Washington, but for the formal events, he relied on his sister to even out the numbers so that guests could go to the table in two’s, like animals entering Noah’s ark. Then in her forties and the mother of four, McElroy had followed her schooling at the progressive Emma Willard’s with a completely conventional marriage. The daughter of a minister, she had married a minister, and when her brother moved to the White House, she temporarily left her own family to help him during the capital’s social season.
As though to underline the country’s new preference for older, more mature women, Chester Arthur’s successor, the bachelor Grover Cleveland, also enlisted his sister as White House hostess. Rose Cleveland, the most intellectual woman to preside over the White House up to that time, had graduated from the Houghton Academy and then gone to head an institute in Indiana.89 She had read widely, studied several languages, including Greek, and had completed a book-length manuscript on George Eliot. Her reputation as a lecturer on women’s rights was well established. Yet her entire adult life had been shaped around the needs of her mother and her brother, and when he summoned her to Washington, she dutifully abandoned her own career to assist him in his.
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