First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  In spite of his own and Ellen’s misgivings, Woodrow took the job as the best of his offers and soon he was complaining that his boss, M. Carey Thomas, was younger than he, forgetting that it was a question of five days and that both were only twenty-eight. After three years at Bryn Mawr, Woodrow confessed he had been “for a long time hungry for a class of men,”93 and he escaped with relief to Wesleyan College where he became an enthusiastic sports booster. An alumnus recalled years later that Professor Wilson ran up and down the sidelines at football games, exhorting Wesleyan players to victory.94 In 1890 Woodrow moved on to the better known Princeton.

  Frances Wright Saunders, in a carefully researched biography of Ellen Axson Wilson, portrays the rest of the Wilson marriage as a partnership, with Ellen playing an important, background role in Woodrow’s success while, at the same time, pursuing her own interest in art. More than a skilled hostess, she translated German texts for Woodrow95 and worked out administrative arrangements which he, when he became president of Princeton, offered to the faculty for their acceptance.96 She traveled on her own and continued to paint and sell her work.

  That view of Ellen Wilson fails to give adequate weight to the evidence that shows her repeatedly sacrificing her own time and energy so that Woodrow could have more pleasure and rest. When he received an invitation to travel, she encouraged him to go while she stayed home with the children. He explored the Chicago Exposition in 1893 and then she made the trip later.97 He traveled through Europe twice on his own and then she went with one of their daughters. As a student of government and an advocate of the parliamentary system, he was drawn to Britain, but Ellen headed for Italy’s art treasures.98

  Although Ellen knew that one of Woodrow’s trips was financed by a “wealthy widow around the corner”99 and that other journeys involved meetings with women, she refused to appear jealous. Frances Wright Saunders concluded, after an examination of the letters between Woodrow and his wife, that Ellen knew of her husband’s long involvement with a divorcée, Mary Hulbert Peck, but rather than feed gossip and harm Woodrow’s political chances, she treated Mary as a family friend.100 Woodrow indicated that he regretted his relationship with Mary Peck as a “contemptible error, … a madness of a few months, … [that left him] stained and unworthy,”101 but he continued to correspond with Mary until his wife’s death.

  The youngest Wilson daughter, Eleanor, wrote two books about her parents, and she described a considerably more self-sacrificing Ellen Wilson than did Saunders. Eleanor saw her mother as accepting the fact that she could not provide sufficient gaiety and laughter for Woodrow. He remained the center of the family—a loving, funny clown who could recite more senseless verses and perform more facial contortions than anyone else she knew. Even her adoring account indicates, however, that he divided his life into compartments, with women confined to the audience. His daughters, all of whom favored woman’s suffrage before he did, failed to change his mind. When time came for them to enter college, he rejected more intellectual settings, which, as a Princeton professor and president he could certainly have arranged, and sent the older two to the nearby Woman’s College of Baltimore (later renamed Goucher College) and the youngest to St. Mary’s in North Carolina where, he hoped, she could unlearn her Yankee accent.102

  Plans to make southern belles of his three daughters had obviously failed by the time the Wilsons moved into the White House because all three had chosen careers. Margaret, the eldest, worked hard to become a concert singer and while her father was in office she found opportunities to perform more plentiful than they would ever be again. Jessie, the dreamer and Phi Beta Kappa key-holder, had abandoned plans for foreign missionary work in favor of work in a Philadelphia settlement house. Eleanor, the youngest, reflected some of her mother’s interest in art and enrolled in Philadelphia’s Academy of Fine Arts to study commercial illustrating.103

  Although they had been exposed to publicity when their father had served as New Jersey’s governor, the Wilson daughters were unprepared for the attention focused on them after he became president. Magazines took such an interest in them that one congressman’s wife confessed she was sick of reading about them. “They are more before the public than any other White House family I have known,” Ellen Slayden wrote. “T[heodore] R[oosevelt] personally never let the public forget him, but the ladies of his household—until Alice took center stage—preserved a well-bred privacy.”104 Even Woodrow complained that he might be a public figure, fair game for all reporters, but he did not think his wife and daughters fell into the same category.

  Ellen Axson Wilson received particularly close scrutiny. A month after the inauguration, the Ladies’ Home Journal published two of her landscapes in full-color pages and noted that one painting had been exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and that others had been shown in Chicago and Indianapolis.105 Good Housekeeping106 and Current Opinion107 carried similar stories. Ellen’s domestic interests and abilities were not ignored and there were the usual speculations about the cost of her wardrobe. She felt moved to defend herself when one newspaper reported that on one of her shopping trips she had bought seven new gowns ranging in cost from $200 to $300 each. The actual amount spent had been much less, as she proved with the receipts which showed two gowns, one hat, one “waist,” two pairs of gloves, and some fabric to repair old clothes—all for a total of $140.84.108

  The intricate political maneuvering that had appealed to Helen Taft held little interest for Ellen Wilson, but she was not opposed to acting as an intermediary to promote Woodrow’s career. He was out of town in March 1911 when William Jennings Bryan, three times nominated to head the Democratic ticket, came to speak at Princeton. Ellen had to make her own decision about what to do. She invited the Bryans to dinner and then wired Woodrow to get back in time. When questioned later about her motives, Ellen replied that she had thought it the kind thing to do, but historians have seen it differently and have emphasized the importance of Bryan’s support in Woodrow’s attaining the 1912 nomination.109

  Ellen Wilson edged toward advocating the vote for women but refused to take a public stand on the issue. The experience of her middle daughter in Philadelphia’s slums had influenced her and she was quoted as saying in March 1913: “The arguments of my Jessie incline me to believe in the suffrage for the working women.”110 Such a statement left unclear Ellen’s opinion on votes for nonworking women or on just how the change should be effected—so that it could not possibly have embarrassed the president who had not yet come out for suffrage on the national level.

  Much safer than suffrage as a “cause” for the president’s wife was housing, and in the same month as her husband’s inauguration, Ellen Wilson started her own investigation of Washington’s slums. While enlarging the electorate might be controversial, amelioriating housing was more acceptable, because the fallout from slums hurt everyone, resulting in epidemics, increased infant mortality, and absenteeism. The very reforms that had first been advocated to improve housing had in fact worsened conditions in many cities by razing dilapidated buildings without providing replacements. By the beginning of the twentieth century, housing had become a major reform movement throughout Europe and the United States.

  Washington’s slums, hidden away from view because many of them were in the back alleys where only local residents passed, needed stricter law enforcement and more funds if they were to be improved. The thousands who lived there, mostly blacks and recent immigrants, lacked the political clout to act for themselves but their poor health and high mortality rates left little doubt of their need. Ellen Wilson’s first scheduled visit had to be postponed because of a smallpox outbreak.111 When she finally saw the dilapidated and filthy housing, she was appalled and became determined to work for congressional appropriations to provide clearance money. A White House maid, well acquainted with the poverty of the capital’s black neighborhoods, went home after meeting Ellen Wilson for the first time and told her daughter that she thought they had “an an
gel in the White House—she’s talking about helping the poor and improving housing.”112

  The First Lady’s reputation for caring about the problems of black neighborhoods contrasted with the president’s poor record in that area (although it may well be, as their middle daughter charged, that Ellen Wilson’s support for segregation of the races was stronger than Woodrow’s). During his first administration, the president either condoned or encouraged the introduction of segregation in government departments where it had formerly not been the rule—in offices, restrooms, and lunchrooms of the Post Office Department, the Treasury Department, and the Bureau of Printing and Engraving where large numbers of blacks and whites had worked together. After visiting the capital in the summer of 1913, Booker T. Washington wrote to Oswald Garrison Villard, a leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, that he had “never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”113

  While President Wilson responded to these criticisms by arguing that segregation would serve the interests of blacks, Ellen Wilson set out to improve their living conditions. She designated a White House car for touring alleys and arranged a reception so that housing reformers could present their case directly to congressmen. Ellen Wilson’s involvement in slum clearance gave the topic a respectability and urgency that it had not had, and one co-worker jokingly remarked that no one could move in polite society without a thorough understanding of alley housing.114 By February 1914, the relevant legislation, known as Ellen Wilson’s bill, had been introduced in Congress.

  Had she come into the White House half a century earlier, Ellen Wilson would almost certainly have stayed in the background, hidden as much from public view as the slums that she now worked to publicize. She had suffered the usual initial qualms about becoming First Lady and had tried to bolster her ego by outfitting herself for the inauguration in “the most wonderful gown I’ve ever had.”115 Her apprehension that she would not measure up had increased after she arrived in Washington, and before setting out for the traditional pre-inaugural visit to the White House, she burst into tears. Her youngest daughter, observing her mother’s discomfort, predicted then that the White House would “kill her.”116

  Family responsibilities piled on top of official ones when two of the Wilson daughters had White House weddings within six months of each other. Not long after Jessie’s big ceremony in November 1913, Ellen’s health began to fail. She had spent the entire summer of 1913 in New Hampshire, but a few weeks back in Washington wiped out all the gains she had made. A kidney disease, later diagnosed as Bright’s disease, debilitated her and, although she seemed to rally at the time of her daughter Eleanor’s marriage in May 1914, she soon worsened. By August 1914, it was clear to everyone except her husband that she was dying.

  The housing bill that she had championed still lay in congressional committee where there was unanimity on the abysmal quality of alley residences but little agreement on who should pay for improvements. After word of Ellen Wilson’s deteriorating health reached Capitol Hill, the Senate quickly approved the measure so that she could be told before she died. The House of Representatives acted the next month on this, the first piece of legislation to be passed with such direct and public assistance from a president’s wife. Other First Ladies had acted behind the scenes—Ellen Wilson’s influence made headlines, and at least one major newspaper concluded that a demanding schedule had figured in her death. She had died, the New York Times reported, of Bright’s disease, “aggravated by a nervous breakdown, attributed to the exactions of social duties and her active interest in philanthropy and betterment work.”117

  Until her death on August 6, 1914, Ellen Wilson insisted that her only objective in life had been to make life more comfortable for her husband and daughters, but her record is more complex. Naturally shy, she shooed away photographers and refused to appear on the platform with Woodrow. Yet she was often there to support her husband on public occasions. When he broke tradition and addressed Congress directly, she and her daughters set their own precedent by seating themselves prominently in the gallery to hear him.118 Only a little of the rebellious young artist from Rome, Georgia, remained in the White House Ellen Wilson, but she permitted her paintings to be exhibited, sometimes under the name “E. A. Wilson” so as to disguise the origin of the work, and when they sold, she donated the proceeds to charity. Nonpolitical and insecure, she showed that even a very reticent First Lady can make a difference.

  Other presidents’ wives had died in office but none for almost twenty years and none so early in a chief executive’s term. Caroline Harrison had succumbed only months before her husband’s administration ended, but Woodrow Wilson had almost three years to serve when Ellen died. Because his daughters were all busy with their own families or careers, he asked his cousin, Helen Bones, who had helped Ellen as social secretary, to assist him in running the White House. It was Helen who invited her friend Edith Bolling Galt to the White House one March afternoon in 1915, thus setting the stage for Woodrow’s remarriage.

  The first meeting between the president and the attractive, forty-three-year-old widow was entirely accidental, Helen Bones later wrote. She had not reckoned with the possibility that the same rainy weather that forced her inside that day, with her friend Edith in tow, would also terminate the president’s golf game. As they all sat down to take tea together, Helen Bones observed the almost immediate attraction between her cousin Woodrow and her friend Edith. After months of gloom, the president finally laughed.

  Edith Bolling Galt combined a good measure of exuberant independence with sufficient amounts of the subservience that Woodrow Wilson found essential in all women. A bit more stylish and sophisticated than most of the women Woodrow liked, she was accustomed to ordering her clothes from a top Paris designer and creating a stir when she drove herself around the capital in her own little electric runabout. She reported that policemen learned to halt traffic at Fifteenth Street so she could maneuver through.119 At a time when most matrons shunned close association with “business,” Edith helped manage her own jewelry store. Yet she resembled other independent women in seeing such activities as somehow unique to herself. Working to increase opportunities for other women evidently held no interest for her. Before meeting Woodrow, she had paid no attention to politics and she admitted that during his victorious 1912 campaign she could not have named the candidates.120

  The path to Edith Galt’s financial independence had been cut by accident, although she should not be deprived of the credit for picking her way across it. In 1896 when she was twenty-four, she had married a cousin of her sister’s husband. Older men had always appealed to her, she admitted, and although she “did not want to marry anyone,” Norman Galt, part-owner of the capital’s most prestigious jewelry store, pursued her “[until] his patience and persistence overcame [her].”121 Their one child did not survive infancy, and when Norman Galt died in 1908, Edith was left with considerable personal and financial freedom. While keeping some control over the jewelry business, she made several trips to Europe.

  The only president to possess a doctorate at the time of his election, Woodrow Wilson fell in love with a woman whose education was very limited. One of eleven children born to a Virginia judge and his wife, she received most of her instruction at home, then enrolled for two years at Virginia finishing schools. At least one historian concluded that, even as an adult, she wrote a “primitive … almost illegible” scrawl.122 Much more relevant to her place in history, however, was the self-confidence that allowed her to act without constant reinforcement from those around her. Years of making her own decisions had prepared her to handle new ones with relative ease, and if she ever felt the inadequacy that had troubled Ellen Wilson, she kept it to herself. While Ellen Wilson had agonized over details, including whether or not to purchase a particular piece of clothing, Edith showed little hint of caring what people thought of her or of the amounts she spent on clothing. She never offere
d to show her bills to an inquisitive public.

  Only two presidents before Wilson had married in office and each had approached courtship differently. John Tyler wed Julia Gardiner before reporters learned the intrusion tactics that they later mastered, and Grover Cleveland avoided detection by using the mails. Woodrow Wilson and Edith Galt had to conduct their nine-month courtship in the full glare of curious reporters, at first concealing their meetings under cover of Edith’s friendship with Helen Bones and with the Wilson daughters.

  Whatever inconvenience the burdens of his office imposed (and they were, no doubt, considerable, since much of Europe stood embroiled in World War I), the president’s courtship progressed rapidly. When Woodrow vacationed in New Hampshire in June 1915, Edith was there, ostensibly as Helen Bones’s guest. But a postcard written during that visit testifies to the fact that Edith’s romance with Woodrow had already matured into commitment only two months after their first meeting. Dated June 29, 1915, on the “West Porch,” the card conveys the same kind of subservience that Ellen Axson had promised Woodrow thirty years earlier in a similar situation. Edith Galt pledged “. . . with all my heart absolutely to trust and accept my loved Lord and unite my life with his without doubts or misgivings.”123

  Even after having sworn such devotion, Edith shied away from marriage to the president for two reasons. Her own explanation was that she had lived in the capital too long to have missed the public’s fascination with whoever happened to occupy the White House. Early in her acquaintance with Woodrow, she discovered that he shared her disdain for the snooping that had become a part of Washington life and for the vigor with which tourists hounded the president’s family, but she knew that the two of them together could not change those habits. Much more important, however, was the matter of allowing an appropriate interval to elapse after Ellen Wilson’s death. Woodrow was so in love he refused to acknowledge the consequences, but his advisers warned that a quick remarriage would hurt his chances for reelection in 1916. Such considerations became all the more important when rumors began to circulate that the courtship had begun before Ellen’s death.