First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  Political differences with the Democratic Roosevelts enticed Edith to take an uncharacteristically public role in the presidential campaign that pitted Franklin Roosevelt against Republican Herbert Hoover. Though Franklin’s wife, Eleanor, was Theodore Roosevelt’s niece, she had campaigned against Theodore, Junior, in the New York State election in 1928. Edith, therefore, felt justified in speaking out against Eleanor’s husband in the 1932 election. Her endorsement of Herbert Hoover made the front pages of the country’s newspapers in August 1932. Her appearance at a large Madison Square Garden Republican rally in October received similar notice.

  Edith could not always control contacts between the two branches of Roosevelts, as her daughter-in-law pointed out. In the Philippines in 1933, Theodore, Junior, was asked by a reporter why his younger brother was yachting with Franklin Roosevelt back in New York when it was well known that the two sides of the family were political foes. Theodore, Junior, hesitated, uncertain how to answer, but Edith spoke up from across the room: “Because his mother wasn’t there.”26

  For the most part she lived quietly the years between her husband’s death in 1919 and her own death in 1948. Rather than write the memoirs of her marriage or of her years in the White House, she teamed up with her son Kermit to produce a volume on her illustrious ancestors.27 When her children decided to publish a book on travel, she contributed a chapter in which she suggested that at least one woman who seemed fully occupied in the jobs that marriage had given her recognized what she had missed. “Women who marry,” Edith wrote, “pass their best and happiest years in giving life and fostering it … and those born with the wanderfoot are sometimes irked by the weight of the always beloved shackles.”28 By diplomatically refusing to cite which of the shackles she connected with her job as First Lady, Edith Roosevelt added a final enigmatic note to a remarkably successful tenure in the White House. Like many presidents’ wives who preceded her and others who would follow, she decided that the job required a little distance between herself and everybody else. Few of the others had her self-confidence to make that work.

  Helen Herron Taft, who succeeded Edith Roosevelt in 1909 when William Howard Taft became president, lacked Edith’s quiet control but greatly outdistanced her in personal ambition. Born in southern Ohio in 1861, Helen (known as “Nellie” to family and close friends) had determined very early to escape that region, not only because of a desire for adventure but because of the narrow limits she perceived for herself if she remained there.

  Being a woman complicated the escape, she realized, and she fretted over her lack of options. At age eighteen she wrote in her diary that she doubted she would ever marry, and at twenty-two, she explained why: “I have thought that a woman should be independent and not regard matrimony as the only thing to be desired in life.”29 Helen tried teaching, one of the few jobs open to middle-class women like herself and one that many used to leave home, but she found that an imperfect solution. “I do not dislike teaching when the boys behave themselves,” she wrote, implying that much of the time they did not.30 Her mother, more content with the routine of life in southern Ohio, counseled her daughter not to attempt too much.31 Helen knew she had musical talent but not of the magnitude to justify planning a career around it, and church work did not appeal. Depressed by the lack of alternatives, she admitted that she cried a lot.32

  With the purposefulness that marked her entire adult life, Helen Herron enlisted the help of two of her friends to start a Sunday afternoon “salon” where “specifically invited” young people could “engage in what we considered brilliant discussion of topics intellectual and economic … . We were bent on improving our minds.”33 Showing an unusual ability to predict who in Cincinnati would eventually achieve most success, Helen invited the two Taft brothers: William Howard, who would later become the first man to serve as both his country’s president and chief justice, and his younger brother Horace, who founded the Taft School in Connecticut.34

  The young attorney, whom she called Will Taft, was soon squiring Helen to Cincinnati social gatherings, including the then popular “German” dancing party.35 His letters literally begged for her attention and approval, and when she complained that he did not put high enough value on her opinions, he tried to reassure her: “I know no one who attributes more weight to [your opinions] or who more admires your powers of reasoning than [I.]”36 Bouquets of flowers arrived at Helen’s house with Will’s cards, some of them asking forgiveness for “inconsiderate words and conduct” and others declaring, often in German, his love for her.37

  Years of insecurity about her appearance and social skills made Helen Herron wary of all compliments, no matter how genuine, and she demanded reassurances. Her diary shows ample evidence of self-criticism, and she repeatedly judged that she had behaved like “a goose” or failed to invent a witty rejoinder. When she accused Will of “reasoning” himself into loving her, he replied patiently in his careful script that he was genuinely attracted to her “high character … sweet womanly qualities and … intellectual superiority over any woman I know.”38

  Helen Herron refused Will Taft’s proposal for marriage at least twice before accepting in 1886 when she was twenty-five. A three-month European honeymoon, with a $1,000 price tag, was her idea, although he worried they could ill afford it and finally rebelled when she filled their itinerary with too many visits to the opera.39

  Back in Cincinnati, William practiced law and Helen attempted to settle into quiet wifedom. She gave birth to three children and helped start the city’s Orchestra Association but made no secret of her unwillingness to continue such a monotonous life indefinitely. William’s appointment to solicitor general in 1890 and to a federal circuit judgeship in 1892 raised the dreaded prospect that she might pass her entire adult life as the unnoticed wife of an unimportant judge.

  For an ambitious woman who had decided to pursue a vicarious career through her husband, the need to intervene in his decisions was obvious. In the case of Helen and William Taft, the choice to enter elective politics appears more hers than his. Her father and maternal grandfather had both served in Congress and, unlike her husband who preferred the law, she enjoyed the excitement of a campaign. The prospect of putting herself forward as the candidate apparently held no interest for her, although William laughingly predicted early in their marriage that if they ever got to Washington, it would be because of an appointment for her. Even after he had won election to the presidency, he wrote that he felt a little uncomfortable in the new office but “as my wife is the politician … she will be able to meet all the issues [and] perhaps we can keep a stiff upper lip.”40

  Women of Helen Taft’s generation exercised few political rights on their own. In the four states that had provided for female suffrage before 1910, popular prejudice against women in high office was almost as great a barrier as were discriminatory laws. The lower echelon offices that women sometimes captured, such as justice of the peace or sheriff, did not appeal to Helen Taft. When she was seventeen, she had gone with her parents to visit their friends in the White House, fellow Ohio Republicans, Rutherford and Lucy Hayes, and Helen had stayed for a few days. She later admitted that she had been impressed and that she had set her sights at that time on becoming First Lady.41

  An opportunity to move closer to her dream came in 1900 when President William McKinley selected William Taft to head a commission to the Philippines. Even the nominee was surprised by the offer and said the president might just as well have “told me that he wanted me to take a flying machine.”42 When her husband hesitated, unsure about what the job entailed, Helen urged him to accept, although her ideas were no clearer than his. “It was an invitation from the big world,” she later wrote, “and I was willing to accept it at once and investigate its possible complications afterwards.”43 While some of her friends and relatives worried about unknown diseases and other dangers for the Taft children, she packed them up and moved them halfway around the world. Her only regret in leaving Cincinnati, s
he later wrote, was relinquishing the reins of the city’s Orchestra Association.44

  Helen Taft’s decision to seek status and power through her husband’s career is in marked contrast to other women, also born in the 1860s, who made names for themselves on their own. A sampling of a few of Helen’s contemporaries indicates a variety of routes to public prominence, but few of them involved conventional marriages. Jane Addams (born 1860) rejected marriage entirely in order to concentrate on her own work in settlement houses, reform, and peace; Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch (born 1867) waited until age thirty-two to marry and, after giving birth to two children, tried to integrate them into her career of settlement house director; Charlotte Perkins Gilman (born 1860) risked criticism by divorcing her first husband and giving him custody of their daughter so she could pursue her own career as speaker and writer.

  Helen Herron Taft lacked none of the drive of these contemporaries of hers, but she chose the older route to the top—through her husband’s career. The Philippine assignment, which lasted four years and eventually led to governorship of the islands, marked an important step for both of them. William gained administrative experience, and Helen learned to manage a large staff of servants who, she frequently pointed out, did not always follow her orders but appeared more valuable to her after she no longer had their services. When she published her autobiography in 1914, she used more than half of its 395 pages to describe the four years she spent in the Philippines and only a fraction to discuss an equivalent length of residence in the White House.45

  As the consort of the Philippines governor, Helen lived more luxuriously than she ever had before or would afterwards, but her insistence on perfection in every detail resulted in a nervous exhaustion that sent her to Europe for rest.46 In 1904 when the invitation came from Washington for William to return to the United States to enter the cabinet, she worried privately how they could live on a secretary of war’s salary. President Roosevelt’s chiding her that Edith “never minded not having champagne” did little to cheer her up.47

  William Howard Taft accepted the chance to become secretary of war, and Helen faced up to a different set of wifely duties when she returned to Washington. Cabinet wives still engaged in the leaving of cards, and Helen was expected to call on the spouses of other cabinet members and set aside one day each week to receive them at home. It all added up to a routine she described as “monotonous stress.”48 Holding less than first rank annoyed Helen, who clearly had become accustomed to the deference accorded the top of the foreign community in the Philippines, and even the prospect of accompanying her husband on official missions abroad did not make up for the loss.

  Helen bided her time in Washington as patiently as she could, always ready to speak up when she thought she could advance her husband’s ascent to the presidency. That he might receive a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court appeared one of the obstacles she faced, and she had already made clear her opposition to that. While the Tafts were still in the Philippines, President Roosevelt had held up the possibility of a Supreme Court appointment for William Taft, but both Helen and William’s mother urged him to refuse. By 1906 when another vacancy on the court revived the prospect of putting the scholarly William Taft on the country’s highest court, Helen was back in Washington and could speak more directly on the subject.

  President Roosevelt put great importance on his judicial nominations, declaring on one occasion: “The President and the Congress are all very well in their way. They can say what they think they think but it rests with the Supreme Court to decide what they have really thought.”49 Helen saw things differently, especially by 1906 when a Taft-for-President movement was growing outside the family. William explained in his diary that he had told the president that Helen was “bitterly opposed to my accepting the [court] position and that she telephoned me this morning to say that if I did, I would make the biggest mistake of my life.” Who scheduled the resulting meeting between Helen Taft and President Roosevelt remains unclear, but afterwards the president wrote to William Taft that after “a half hour’s talk with your dear wife,” he understood why the court appointment was not desired.50

  In 1908 when William was nominated to run on the Republican ticket for president, Helen finally saw victory in sight. William appeared less enthusiastic. “I didn’t think I was going to be foolish enough to run for the presidency,” he jested on one occasion, and another time: “I was engaged in the respectable business of trying to administer justice [but] I have fallen from that state now, and am engaged in running for the presidency.”51

  After defeating the Democrat nominee, William Jennings Bryan, in November 1908, William Taft dallied in making appointments. He sought advice, appeared to dangle cabinet jobs and then withdraw them, then seek advice again. Ten weeks after being elected, he confessed to a reporter that cabinet-making was not easy, and he waited until after his inauguration to reveal his choices.

  Helen went about preparing for the inauguration with more determination, sending her dress to the Philippines to be embroidered and confidently outlining her plans for the White House. “I had been a member of Washington’s official family for five years,” she later wrote, “and I knew as well as need be the various phases of the position I was about to assume.”52

  On the day of the inauguration, Helen Taft signaled publicly her intention to play an important role in her husband’s administration—she took the unprecedented step of riding back to the White House with him. Theodore Roosevelt had decided to leave Washington immediately after the ceremony and so could not accompany his successor. Helen was determined that she, rather than some insignificant member of the inaugural committee, should claim the vacant place of honor.53 The solution was worked out almost a week before the inauguration but kept a secret, and Helen had to rush down from her seat in the gallery before her husband had finished his speech to make sure she arrived ahead of all usurpers. Her innovation did not go unobserved. Ike Hoover, a White House steward, noted “severe criticism” of Helen’s adding a new ceremonial role to those already accepted for First Ladies.54 She felt obliged to defend herself: “Of course there was objection … but I had my way and in spite of protests took my place at my husband’s side.”55

  Only the servants and a few friends were on hand to greet the Tafts when they arrived at the White House, but their accounts emphasized that the new president and his wife reacted very differently. Helen remembered that as soon as her eyes lit on the presidential seal, she immediately thought, “and now that meant my husband.”56 William was more sanguine, and according to separate accounts of two of the servants, he threw himself into a chair and said, “I’m President now and tired of being kicked around.”57

  William Howard Taft’s discomfort in high political office and Helen’s zeal to achieve perfection in her role had an effect on both their lives, more disastrous for her than for him. His weight, always on the rise when he was feeling dissatisfied with himself, rose to 340 pounds, the highest in his life, and necessitated the installation of a new bathtub. Helen, then forty-seven years old, suffered a stroke two months after the inauguration, impairing her speech so severely that she had to work for the next year to relearn how to form sounds. Newspapers described Helen as suffering from a “nervous breakdown,”58 which kept her away from the White House during the summer of 1909. For several months after she returned to Washington in October, she made only token appearances that did not require her to speak.

  Missing the social events constituted the least of Helen’s regrets—she could rely on her sisters or her college-aged daughter to substitute for her—but her illness necessitated her absence from important decisions of her husband’s administration. One Taft biographer, who admitted to assuming “speculative privilege,” pointed to the irony of the situation. “Seven months after the election, it was [Helen] not her husband who proved unable to handle the stress … [and] the dramatic ironies multiply when it is remarked that she—his prod, his alter ego, his voice—lost the
power of speech and became totally silent just when he needed her most.”59 Judith Icke Anderson concluded that Helen’s absence gave William a chance to be “his own man” and that he acquitted himself remarkably well. Although he feared that historians would judge his a “humdrum” administration, he believed he had performed well enough. When the split within the Republican party promised to end his presidency after only one term, he wrote to his wife that he was content to retire “with the consciousness that I have done the best I could…. I think you and I can look back with some pleasure in having done something for the benefit of the public weal.”60

  President Taft’s inclusion of his wife’s accomplishment along with his own is not remarkable. Well before he took on the country’s highest political office, national magazines had spoken openly of her influence on her husband. In its March 1909 issue, the Ladies’ Home Journal informed its readers that the new First Lady had a touch of domesticity and a healthy respect for the arts but was most remarkable because of the mentor role she played for her husband. Her “intense ambition” had helped propel him into the job and she remained his “close confidante.” “Had it not been for his wife,” the Journal readers learned, “Mr. Taft would never have entered the Presidential race.”61 In the beginning of his term, she sat in on important discussions, justifying her presence by claiming to keep him awake. She accompanied him on political forays and golf outings. One acquaintance characterized their relationship as resembling that of “two men who are intimate chums.” Helen’s demurral that her “active participation in [her] husband’s career came to an end when he became President” rings a little false in light of so many descriptions to the contrary.62

  Helen lost little time in taking charge at the White House. Unlike Edith Roosevelt, she did not care for the company of women and she dispensed with the meetings of cabinet wives. If given the choice, and as First Lady she was given her choice on many things, she preferred staying close to the center of power rather than being shunted off on a peripheral social mission. She had frequently complained that on campaign trips her husband was “taken in charge and escorted everywhere with honor while I am usually sent with a lot of uninteresting women through some side street to wait for him at some tea or luncheon.”63