While Edith Roosevelt had proceeded as confident administrator, keeping herself aloof from the details of White House management, Helen involved herself in every tiny matter. She insisted that her vigilance could save money. The Roosevelts had attempted economizing but had judged it inappropriate to try saving anything from the president’s salary or living allowances. Helen Taft harbored no such reservations. Since the chief executive’s salary had just been increased from $50,000 to $75,000, she resolved to budget carefully so that $25,000 could go into the family’s personal bank account. Like most of the objectives she set for herself, she succeeded in this one and accumulated $100,000 dollars during the four-year term. Her zeal during the first two years alone resulted in an $80,000 nest egg which the president bragged to his aide was a “pretty good sum.”64
New economies were effected by revolutionizing the running of the White House. A housekeeper replaced the steward because Helen decided that “no man, expert steward though he might be, would ever recognize [what needed to be done].”65 Elizabeth Jaffray, the woman hired, insisted that she had not set out to obtain the White House job, but “this rather outspoken, determined [Helen Taft]” was very convincing and Jaffray found herself “swept into the position.”66 Later, Jaffray had further opportunities to witness the First Lady’s commanding presence when orders came down for comparison shopping to economize and for the scrutiny of every expenditure.
The celebration of their silver wedding anniversary in 1911 gave the Tafts another opportunity to appreciate a material gain. Helen dispatched invitations to four or five thousand people (she could not recall the exact number), and although some of her friends thought gifts inappropriate, she saw no reason to discourage generosity. The response was overwhelming. One White House employee confessed that he had not known so much silver existed in the world. The head of U.S. Steel, Judge Elbert Gary, who hardly knew the president, sent a silver tureen reputedly two hundred years old and worth $8,000. A congressman’s wife described the rather bizarre party scene in which one guest, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, took center stage in her “electric blue suit, flesh colored stockings and gold slippers, [kicking about and moving her body] sinuously like a shining leopard cat,” while other guests made “ sotto voce inquiries” about how much each had “put up” for a gift.67 The president attempted to head off criticism by ordering that none of the gifts go on display, but Helen showed much less embarrassment and treated the presents as money in the bank: later she attempted to have the Taft monogram erased on one piece so that she could recycle the silver as a gift for someone else.68
While Edith Roosevelt’s influence on her husband had been quiet and private, Helen Taft’s was rather publicly documented. Early in their marriage he had called her his “dearest and best critic … worth so much to me in stirring me up to best endeavor,”69 a description she took every bit as seriously as he. Her contemporaries commented repeatedly on her competitive nature, and one biographer later reinforced their conclusion that “without her ambitions, [William Taft] would probably never have become President.”70 Although she did not include cabinet meetings in those she attended (as Rosalynn Carter would later do), she stayed close by the president’s side whenever political discussions occurred in social settings. One aide reported that Helen supplied her husband with names and numbers he forgot, and during parties, whenever “some important politician took the President aside for a private talk, they would always be joined by Mrs. Taft as soon as she realized the situation.”71 Helen made no secret of her differences with the president, and she announced that she would serve wine at White House dinners although “Mr. Taft does not drink.”72
Personnel decisions interested her particularly and she frequently based her judgments on subjective or irrelevant considerations. One visitor overheard her countermanding her husband on an important nomination, because she found the individual in question “perfectly awful and his family are even worse. I won’t even talk of it.”73 She engineered the recall of an American ambassador to France, a man judged by Theodore Roosevelt as the most capable in the service,74 because he had slighted her on her honeymoon in London more than twenty years earlier. Easygoing William Taft confided to his friends that he would have forgotten the whole matter and let the man remain at his post but Helen proved less forgiving.
The complexity of Helen Taft’s association with her husband’s administration is hinted at in her memoirs where she refers to William as “Mr. Taft,” except in the presidential years when she frequently switches to “my husband.” She did not relinquish the White House power base without a fight. Suspecting that Theodore Roosevelt wanted to reclaim the presidency in 1912, she pushed her husband to fight hard for the party’s nomination.75 When Theodore Roosevelt accepted the nomination of the Progressives, thus splitting the Republicans and guaranteeing a Democratic victory, William Taft noted that Helen was too pleased with her correct evaluation of Theodore’s motive to worry much over losing the election.
Thus, Helen Taft’s stint as First Lady ended after only one term. Her illness had rendered her far less effective than she had planned and her one permanent contribution to the capital was a cosmetic one, although not insignificant. During the years she spent in the Orient, she had become fond of Japanese cherry trees and she saw no reason why they could not survive in Washington’s climate. She arranged for the planting of several thousand, thus providing for one of the capital’s biggest tourist attractions, the annual spring blossoms.
Helen Taft had engineered her flight from Ohio many years earlier and she had no intention of going back just because her husband had lost an election. After a period in New Haven where William taught classes at Yale Law School, the Tafts returned to Washington in 1921 when he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court. Even after his death in 1930, she remained in the capital. When she died in 1943, she was buried beside him in Arlington National Cemetery, the only First Lady to be interred there at the time.
In escaping the limitations imposed on the wife of an Ohio judge, Helen Herron Taft journeyed around the world more than once and to a place at his side at the top of American political power. However, she never put much effort into helping other women engineer easier escapes. Like other First Ladies before her, she refused to take a public stand in favor of woman’s suffrage and never supported reforms for her sex in general. In 1912, President Taft appointed Julia Lathrop to head the newly formed Children’s Bureau, but there is no evidence that Helen influenced this first appointment of a woman to such a post.76
The only Taft daughter, Helen Taft Manning, compiled an entirely different record. Raised partly in the Philippines and in Washington where she received considerable attention as a cabinet member’s daughter, the younger Helen chose the privacy of an academic life and the satisfaction of a career of her own rather than a share in her husband’s. After being graduated from Bryn Mawr, she earned a doctorate at Yale and then published in the field of British colonial history before taking a job at her alma mater, first as dean and then as history professor. She expended considerable energy in achieving female suffrage, and while her mother had complained of being isolated with “a lot of uninteresting women,” Helen Taft Manning worked most of her life in a women’s college.
The women whom the elder Helen Taft sought to avoid may have been considerably less schooled and less stimulating than the ones whom her daughter met a generation later. Education and leadership opportunities had begun to widen, and more women felt confident to voice their own opinions. First Lady Taft’s role in that change should not be neglected because, for all her faults, she introduced a stronger model in the White House. She made no additions to the First Lady’s staff, but by abolishing the cabinet wives’ meeting and inserting herself in more substantive discussions, she showed her disapproval of a limited “woman’s sphere.” If her influence was sometimes petty and unfair, it should be pointed out that she, like other women of her time, had often been confined to taking control over small matt
ers. She worked with what she had.
The degree to which a more substantive, less purely social role for the president’s wife was becoming common rather than exceptional is apparent in the brief tenure of Woodrow Wilson’s first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson (1913–1914). Although she lived little more than a year in the White House and was seriously ill much of that time, she took a prominent leadership position in housing reform and had her name attached to the slum clearance bill that Congress passed at the time of her death. That such a reticent woman, who admitted she was more interested in painting than in politics, should have been drawn into a major reform effort suggests that it would be difficult for any woman in her place to withdraw completely from a public role.
Woodrow Wilson’s presidency (1913–1921) coincided with the dropping of many barriers against women in politics. In 1912, the summer his fellow Democrats chose him as their standard-bearer, Jane Addams, the settlement leader, stood up at the rebellious Bull Moose Convention to second Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination for a third term. In 1917, Jeannette Rankin, a thirty-seven-year-old former teacher and social worker from Montana, broke Congress’s old tradition of no women members when she took her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In August 1920, near the end of Woodrow Wilson’s second term, Tennessee ratified the nineteenth amendment. Overnight millions of American women acquired exactly the same power at the ballot box as their husbands and brothers.
Such an assault on the old male monopoly of politics perplexed Woodrow Wilson, the first president since Andrew Johnson to have been born in the South. Although Woodrow eventually came out in favor of the suffrage amendment, he acted reluctantly, moved less by conviction than by the realization that he could not arrest change. He had, after all, been raised in a Presbyterian manse where he was accustomed to hearing the male head of the household speak not only for the family but also for God, and he did not easily transfer authority to women. Few men outdid Woodrow Wilson in appearing to like women, but rather than treating them as intellectual equals, he expected them to supply his support system: bolster his ego and laugh at his jokes.
Beautiful women who knew how to conceal their brains beneath adoring glances and innocent repartee were especially welcome in his presence. Youth did not necessarily attract him—indeed, he called all the women he liked, even the middle-aged ones, “My little girl”—and he exacted from all those who wished to be counted as his friends a juvenile obeisance to his views and an unquestioned acceptance of his courtesies. In the list his daughter compiled of the women he admired most, southerners predominated.77
His first wife, Ellen Axson of tiny Rome, Georgia, might not at first glance appear a likely candidate for Woodrow’s attention. Like her husband, she grew up in a Presbyterian manse and in her case, both grandfathers had also been men of the cloth. Ellen showed little interest, however, in following the examples of her mother and grandmothers. Her father pronounced her as a youngster too “obstreperous and independent” for her own good,78 and she dreamed of going to New York to study art as her teacher had done.79 That plan was deferred, however, while Ellen attended a local women’s college. Then her mother died, leaving Ellen, the oldest of four children, to help raise the younger ones. Just as she was finally working out the possibility of combining serious art study and family responsibilities, young Woodrow Wilson came through her town and imposed another complication. He renamed her “Eileen,” and pursued her with what one historian called “among the greatest love letters in the English language.”80
Ellen put Woodrow off, pleading first that her family needed her and then pointing out that he could hardly think of supporting a family on his income. Both her excuses ring a little hollow, however, because when Ellen, at age twenty-four, inherited some money of her own after her father’s death, she left the brothers and sister and headed north—not to Baltimore where Woodrow had gone to pursue a doctorate in political science, but to a boardinghouse on New York City’s West Eleventh Street and art classes nearby.
Like many presidents’ wives, Ellen Axson showed a streak of independence in her youth that her husband lacked. While he picked his schools carefully from among the most prestigious (Princeton, University of Virginia, and Johns Hopkins), Ellen enrolled in the infant New York Art Students’ League.81 Inexpensive and student-run, the League admitted both men and women,82 and its constitution mandated equal representation of both sexes on its governing board. The League hewed to the mores of the time, however, by segregating drawing sessions that included nude models—women attended in the afternoons and the men went in the evenings.83
Not yet known as Greenwich Village when Ellen Axson arrived there, the area around West Eleventh Street already attracted a wide variety of people moving into the city. The 1880s marked the largest single decade of that century for population shift to the cities, and New York drew more than its share—not just immigrants from Europe but men and women from farms and small towns across the United States. The aspiring painter from Rome, Georgia, was not unique in her complaints of loneliness. To fill her time and help her feel more useful, she joined a reading club84 and volunteered to teach two nights a week in a “missionary school.”85
Since Ellen Axson had evidently already decided to marry Woodrow Wilson, her assertion of independence is remarkable, particularly in light of Woodrow’s disapproval. From Baltimore he wrote that he did not like the idea of her going out alone in the evening, although he hastened to add that she had every right to develop her own talents. In any case, he considered this show of independence on Ellen’s part a temporary aberration because he was convinced, and assumed she agreed, that a woman found completeness only through marriage and a family.86 Ellen showed only temporary ambivalence between accepting the excitement of art classes in New York City and the staid life of a professor’s wife. She wrote to Woodrow in strangely biblical terms: “I was indeed meant for you—that I may do you good and not evil all the days of my life.”87
Ellen Axson’s flirtation with the artist’s life may have grown out of several considerations, including the inspiration of contemporaries who had achieved national and even international reputations. Mary Cassatt, the Philadelphia painter, had been exhibiting in Paris since the 1870s, and Harriet Hosmer, the Boston sculptor, had earned wide acclaim and considerable personal wealth. Several women had exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 and two of them had won medals.88 Even women of lesser promise than these might have seen advantages in an art career. Preparation and study often occurred in private, without the necessity of enrolling at an established institution, and the work itself was performed at home, so that like a writer, an artist did not have to travel to some central place of employment.
But Ellen Axson must have also noticed that women artists who boasted large reputations had not combined their careers with marriage. Neither Cassatt not Emily Sartain (the medal winner at the Philadelphia Centennial) nor Hosmer ever married, and Hosmer had explicitly stated her reasons. “An artist has no business to marry,” she wrote. “For a man, it may be well enough but for a woman on whom matrimonial duties and cares weigh more heavily, it is a moral wrong, I think, for she must neglect her profession or her family becoming neither a good wife and mother nor a good artist. My ambition is to become the latter, so I wage an eternal feud with the consolidating knot.”89 There is no evidence that Ellen Axson knew of Hosmer’s pronouncements, but her study at the Art Students’ League stopped after one year.
In June 1885, Woodrow completed his course work for the doctorate at Johns Hopkins, and Ellen accepted his calculations that two could live “as cheaply as one and one-half.” Since Woodrow’s beginning salary at Bryn Mawr was only $1,500, he and his bride had to pay careful attention to finances. They boarded the first year with another family, and Ellen did her part in economizing by putting her painting easel away and traveling into Philadelphia twice a week to take a course in home economics. The next year the Wilsons were able to rent a house of their own and bring Ellen�
��s younger brother and sister to live with them.
The move came none too quickly because Ellen gave birth to two daughters, Margaret and Jessie, within twenty-five months. When she bore still a third daughter two years later, Woodrow concealed rather poorly his disappointment—he had written his wife that he was “glad—almost as at the thought of having a boy.”90 The future president now headed a family of four females, and under his tutelage they could also become adoring.
For a man who showed little appreciation of brainy women, Bryn Mawr was a mistake, and Ellen had her own reservations about his going there. When Woodrow was considering whether or not to take the job, he had informed Ellen that he found women speakers “manly,” giving him a “chilled scandalized feeling.”91 She replied as though she thought all women moved in an intellectual realm well below his: “Do you think there is much reputation to be made in a girl’s school—a ‘Woman’s College?’ … Can you be content to serve that sort of an institution?” Although Ellen had studied art in a coeducational school, she placed Woodrow on a pedestal far above women, and the idea that he would consider working as a subordinate to a woman was dismaying. She begged him to consider: “Can you with all your heart cooperate with the strong-minded person who conducts [the college]? The ‘Dean!’ how ridiculous! If they are going to have ‘prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,’ it would be more consistent … to exclude men altogether. … Seriously dear, I fear you would find it very unpleasant to serve, as it were, under a woman! … [It would be] so unnatural, so jarring to one’s sense of the fitness of things, so absurd … beneath you.”92
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