First Ladies
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The new respect for seriousness in models of femininity did not extend to scholarly types—at least not in the press’s treatment of Rose Cleveland. In spite of her many intellectual achievements, reporters preferred to concentrate on what she wore. Her “Spanish lace over black silk” and “rose colored silk” both made the first page of a major newspaper,90 while a review of her book was relegated to the inside section and treated with condescension. The New York Times noted in 1885 that Rose Cleveland shared numerous writing faults “with many brilliant women and not a few men … [but she] may well be congratulated on her first book, [because although] its trappings may offend the taste of some of the fastidious, its heart beats warm and womanly.”91
Rose Cleveland’s boredom with her White House social obligations, although not explicitly stated, can be inferred from her confession that she occupied herself in reception lines by silently conjugating difficult Greek verbs.92 When her brother announced that he would marry, Rose left Washington and resumed her own life. She edited a literary magazine in Chicago for a while and taught history in New York City before moving to Italy, where she died in 1918 while caring for people stricken in an influenza epidemic.
Rose Cleveland relinquished her role of White House hostess in June 1886, when her brother married twenty-one-year-old Frances Folsom. Speculation about his marital plans had surrounded Grover Cleveland since his inauguration and several suggestions had been offered about the ideal First Lady. Various candidates’ names appeared in print, and reporters appraised each White House guest list for a potential bride. By the time more positive evidence leaked to the press in May 1886, many readers refused to take it seriously, believing this just another unsubstantiated bit of gossip.
But the bachelor Cleveland really did mean to marry and he had chosen the young daughter of his former law partner. The president had known Frances Folsom since she was born. He had bought her first baby carriage, and according to accounts of his fellow club members, had led “chubby Frankie” around by the hand when she was a youngster. After her father’s death, when she was eleven, Grover became in effect, although not in law, her guardian and played a role in her upbringing. As governor of New York, he invited her and her mother to be his guests in Albany and later they came to the White House. Anyone observing Grover’s attentiveness to Frances over the years might have guessed at his intentions had not the twenty-seven-year difference in their ages made marriage seem unlikely. Gossip centered more on Frances’s mother as the subject of the courtship than on the daughter.
Nothing in either the appearance of the young bride or in her actions resembled the ingénue stance of Julia Tyler, the only preceding president’s bride. Frances was all seriousness. A graduate of Wells College in 1885, she was taller than average and full-figured, and she carried herself with such authority and confidence that she might have been mistaken for a much older woman. Advertisers who freely appropriated her picture to sell their own products portrayed her as a mature individual. Flimsy, virginal white dresses had been the typical costume of young women in antebellum America, but the vogue now was the matronly shape, even for twenty-one-year-old Frances Cleveland.
The young bride became one of the most popular First Ladies of the century. Women imitated her hair style and lined up by the thousands to catch a glimpse of her at White House receptions.93 Presidents’ wives would hear her singled out for years to come, alongside Dolley Madison, as one to imitate.94 The president had attempted to divert some of the attention from Frances and provide a refuge for them both by setting up a second Washington home. The possibility of the president dividing his time between an official residence and a private one had been debated since the earliest days of the republic, but the Clevelands were the first to work out the details very successfully. At the time of his marriage, Grover informed his sister: “I shall buy or rent a house near here where I can be away from this cursed, constant grind.”95 “Red Top,” as reporters dubbed the house, offered the Clevelands a retreat, with a magnificent view of the Potomac, and except during the busiest part of the White House social season, they could live there and arrange for the president to commute to his office.96
Frances Cleveland received many requests that she champion one reform or another, but she refused to associate her name with any cause. An advocate of temperance (she had toasted her own marriage with mineral water), she would not impose her beliefs on others and blithely served wine at all White House functions. Temperance advocates could hardly reprove her since she reportedly had her own wine glasses removed at the start of the meal. Although her receptions were frequently described as elegant, she offset possible charges of elitism by scheduling regular events for Saturday afternoon so that working women could attend.97
The image of Frances as a sweet, gracious lady contrasted sharply with her husband’s reputation as boorish and morally corrupt. During his first campaign for the presidency in 1884, rumors had spread when he acknowledged that he supported a child whose mother he had never married. During the reelection campaign of 1888, stories circulated that the president physically abused his young wife.98 When a Worcester, Massachusetts, woman wrote asking Frances Cleveland if the reports were true, the First Lady felt obliged to issue a disclaimer unique in American history. These were “wicked and heartless lies” aimed at Grover, Frances wrote, and “I can wish the women of our country no greater blessing than that their homes and lives may be as happy and their husbands may be as kind, attentive, considerate and affectionate as mine.”99
The voters may have taken her word on that matter but many of them faulted Grover in other areas. His attempt to make a lower tariff the central issue of the 1888 presidential campaign backfired, as so often happens when a complex issue is injected into a popular election. Grover had not been generous with veterans’ pensions, and, as the first Democratic president since the Civil War, he was vulnerable to charges of having treated southerners too kindly. When the votes came in, the incumbent lost to Benjamin Harrison in the electoral college, although not in the popular vote.
Frances packed up to leave the White House but she instructed the servants to take good care of all the furnishings because she expected to be back in exactly four years. When history proved her right and the Clevelands returned to Washington in 1893, they brought a young daughter with them, and again they rented a separate residence to protect the family from excessive attention.
This second Cleveland administration was marred by a devastating economic downturn, perhaps the worst of the century. Thousands of businesses collapsed, and serious unemployment in the cities was exacerbated by depression on the farms. In the end, the president turned to a Wall Street syndicate to help him borrow the gold needed (for a commission, of course) and sell the bonds that would restore faith in the Treasury.
It was during this second term that a second daughter, Esther, was born to the Clevelands—the first to be born to a president in the White House. By the time the Clevelands left Washington to settle in Princeton, New Jersey, they had a third daughter, and later they had two sons. Grover Cleveland did not live, however, to see them all mature, because he died in 1908 at age seventy-one.
Five years later his widow remarried, thus testing for the first time the perquisites that had been assigned to presidents’ widows. It had never been quite clear whether the franking privilege and the pension, both generally accorded all former First Ladies who requested them, constituted a reward for services each had rendered or represented some sort of recompense for her husband’s work. Frances Cleveland had not sought a pension after Grover’s death, but she continued to avail herself of the franking privilege, even after her remarriage, adding only a final surname “Preston” to her signature of “Frances Cleveland.”100 Before she died in 1947, she had amassed a string of firsts—the first to marry a president in the White House (the Tylers had married in New York City), the first presidential wife to serve two noncontinuous terms, and the first presidential widow to remarry after her hus
band’s death. Perhaps because she was a young bride, the public tolerated her doing what several of her predecessors had unsuccessfully attempted—keeping a distance between the president’s private residence and the White House.
What stands out most about Frances Cleveland, however, is the extent to which she underscores a change in style for First Ladies. Coming almost exactly forty years after Julia Tyler, Frances made no attempt to imitate the other woman’s immaturity and almost childlike egotism. Rather than sitting on a raised platform to receive her guests in imitation of royalty as Julia Tyler had done, Frances was the model of simplicity and maturity, even though she was still in her twenties.
The serious model continued in the White House with Caroline Scott Harrison (1889–1892) but once again it was the seriousness associated with domesticity rather than with scholarship, public action, or a career of her own. In her youth, she had shown exceptional talent in both music and art, and after graduating from the Oxford Female Institute in Ohio, she had taught music in Kentucky. After her marriage to Benjamin Harrison in 1853, those interests gradually lost out to the demands of her husband’s career. She enlisted in the appropriate women’s organizations, and after her husband’s election to the United States Senate, she dutifully moved the entire family to a rented suite in Washington.101 Although her mother had described Caroline in her young years as showing no interest at all in domestic chores, she was singled out by contemporaries as the “best housekeeper the White House has ever known,”102 and characterized by her biographer as “by nature strongly domestic … [choosing] to remain in the background.”103
Every administration refurbished the White House but Caroline Harrison wanted to make major structural changes, a course long overdue for a building whose cornerstone had been laid almost a century earlier and not rebuilt since 1818. Architects went to work on plans and came up with two. The first outlined minor alterations, and the second, which the First Lady favored, projected a whole new look, including the addition of a large office wing on one side and a “historic wing” on the other, with conservatories for plants and flowers stretching across the grounds to give the enclave the look of a European palace.104
Congress drew back from supporting such luxury and the Harrisons had to settle for much less. Caroline ordered the vermin exterminated, the floors repaired, and the furniture fixed. After she had arranged in the spring of 1891 to have electricity installed, she began a renovation program to replace the open fireplaces and spits that had been used for cooking.105 In modernizing the President’s House, the First Lady was following, rather than setting, the national style. Electric appliances were being heralded as introducing a new age and some people even hinted at an eventual “servantless kitchen.” “Perfectly controllable cooking,” easy laundry, and effortless cleaning were all in the near future, one home economist argued, for wives who mastered the elements of scientific management.106
Part of the new emphasis on household management, apparent in the table of contents of the nation’s women’s magazines, resulted from a change in immigration patterns. Irish and Swedish daughters had willingly taken jobs in other people’s homes during the middle of the nineteenth century, but their numbers had fallen off by the 1890s, to be replaced by Italian and Jewish women who shunned domestic work. Caroline Harrison had grown up in a home where Irish maids did all the work,107 but she found fewer of them available for hire in her own home. The servantless kitchen, and how to manage it, developed into a major topic for debate.
When it became clear that household appliances could not substitute for physical labor, a campaign began to make paid housework more attractive. Even middle-class women, the argument went, could be drawn into other women’s kitchens if the job offered enough advantages. Much of the discussion resembled that which surrounded the enlisting of women to teach school in the preceding decades—it concentrated on pay, which reportedly equaled that of any other job available to women, and on the opportunity to learn skills that a woman could use after she started her own family. Good Housekeeping even hinted that college graduates might like to try domestic work since many of them evidently had nothing better to do after picking up their diplomas than return to live with their parents. One survey at Vassar College found that only one in four of the graduating class had plans for work or travel.108
Basic to the articles encouraging women to accept paid domestic work was the view that housework should satisfy any woman, no matter how intellectually inclined or well educated. Indeed, the woman who took a job outside her home, when economic necessity did not dictate the move, was “a snob because she wanted more material things than otherwise she would have.”109 It was bad enough that young single women were being enticed into the job market but “the case is still more serious,” Ladies’ Home Journal advised in 1887, “when a married woman, dissatisfied with a moderate living of her husband’s providing, or tempted by some real or fancied ability for business, endeavors to combine domestic duties and some money-making employment … [The result is] too often the sad spectacle of a husband rendered contemptible and his own spark of manliness extinguished by the greater, unnatural and unnecessary prominence of a selfishly energetic business wife.”110
In the face of such high praise for domesticity, politicians’ wives did well to emphasize their homemaking abilities. Good Housekeeping singled out Pennsylvania Governor Pennypacker’s wife for admiring notice because she was “most domestic in her tastes and habits. Home is to her the acme of happiness.” The wife of Iowa’s Governor was described as “perfect” because she directed all her attention to domestic chores.111 In the most conspicuous position of all stood the president’s wife, and although one Washington journalist discounted as “absurd the stories that Mrs. Harrison spends half her time in the kitchen, actually taking part in the preparation of the food, … she knows about every detail of the household and … the servants adore her.”112 Caroline Harrison gained considerable attention when she designed the cornstalk-and-flower border for the china used during her husband’s administration and then began the White House collection of china patterns that had been chosen by the preceding presidents and their families.
Caroline Harrison became ill with tuberculosis during the last year of her husband’s term. She died just weeks before the 1892 election. The death of Letitia Tyler, the only preceding First Lady to die in the White House, had occurred half a century earlier but accounts of the two women’s lives varied little. Both had directed their energies to family concerns, and only a hint of the “new woman” breaks that pattern in the latter’s record. At the time of the founding of the Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1890, Caroline Harrison agreed to help in fundraising on the condition that women be admitted to study on the same basis as men.113 It is ironic that she should be remembered for two such different achievements—starting the White House china collection and helping make one of the country’s major medical schools coeducational. Only she could have said which of the two she considered the more appropriate memorial, but it is a sign of her times that her contemporaries gave considerably more attention to the plates.
Soon after Caroline Harrison’s death, her husband lost the presidential election to Grover Cleveland and Frances Cleveland returned to the White House. By the time that administration ended, some important changes were underway. National magazines had begun to give considerable coverage to wives of presidential candidates—something unheard of in the early part of the century. Changes in transportation and communication account for part of the difference, with railroads offering presidents’ wives the opportunity to travel across the continent so that voters from New York to California could see them. Women’s magazines covered White House activities in detail so that readers from Minnesota to Louisiana could follow the antics of the president’s children and grandchildren. Before the Civil War, people outside the capital and the president’s home state rarely saw his family, but by the end of the century a national audience was beginning to develop.
By all accounts Ida had been a vigorous young woman whose physical and mental condition deteriorated rapidly in the first years of her marriage. In just three years’ time, she had lost her mother, with whom she had been very close, and two young daughters. She never recovered her strength or came out of the depression that followed these tragedies.
Although accurate medical opinion on Ida McKinley is difficult to find, there is every indication that her illness was very real. After the delivery of her second child, she may have suffered from phlebitis, making unassisted walking difficult, and she also had seizures, resembling epilepsy (although the name for the disease, still so misunderstood in the nineteenth century, does not appear in newspaper coverage of her). Even in the McKinley household, the nature of Ida’s illness remained outside the bounds of acceptable discussion. Her niece, who spent considerable time with Ida, remarked after her death that she had first heard “epilepsy” in connection with her aunt in a political campaign and she had assumed it was part of the opponents’ plot to discredit William McKinley.114