Episode 8: Mourning the President
Host Teri Finneman and guest Jodi Kanter discuss how several first ladies performed the role of mourner in chief following the deaths of their husbands.
TRANSCRIPT
Teri Finneman: Eleanor. Dolley. Mamie. Jackie. They were the nation’s original influencers. Some were fearless, some were fragile. All left their mark on the nation’s history. In this podcast, we'll reflect on the fascinating legacies of the women forever tied to the White House. I'm your host, Teri Finneman, a journalism historian who studies media portrayals of first ladies with production editing by Bella Koscal. This is the First Ladies podcast.
(0:43): In 235 years, only about two dozen women have experienced the role of being a first lady burying her presidential husband. Eight women lost their husbands to illness or assassination during the presidency: Anna Harrison, Margaret Taylor, Mary Lincoln, Crete Garfield, Ida McKinley, Florence Harding, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Jackie Kennedy. Yet even first ladies whose husbands died years after leaving office, such as Martha Washington and Nancy Reagan, became national symbols of grief for the country.
In today's episode, my guest Jodi Kanter and I discuss our upcoming book chapter about first ladies and presidential mourning.
Jodi, welcome to the show. We're going to do something a little different today, as you'll be the one who's hosting the first half of the show since we worked together on this chapter about presidential mourning. So, you're going to be asking me about some of the earlier first ladies, and then I'll resume my hosting duties later in the show and ask you some questions. So, I'm going to go ahead and turn the hosting over to you.
Jodi Kanter (1:50): Great. Thank you, Teri. Fun to be on with you. So, I want to ask first about the first first lady. Martha Washington is obviously the first presidential widow. How did she set a precedent for future first ladies?
Teri Finneman: Yeah, you know, it's really interesting to think about the Washington funeral because George Washington did not want a big, fancy funeral. He wanted something that was just very simple and quiet, and of course that did not happen. Instead, as word started to spread that he had died, literally throngs of people descended upon Mount Vernon, and it became a huge spectacle, and this is something that actually lasted for quite a while across the country because, of course, news spread very slowly at the time. And so it took time to go from newspaper to newspaper to hear that the first president had died. So, there actually ended up being observances throughout the country, like different communities had their own mourning ceremonies as well. And there was actually a federal proclamation that asked everybody in the country to wear a black armband as a sign of mourning for 30 days.
(3:02): But as far as Martha Washington herself, she didn't actually take part in any of the public funeral processes. Now, she's believed to have been part of the planning, but she did not make an appearance at the funeral or any of these other events. Instead, her role was much more private, and so she ended up receiving tons and tons of letters of sympathy, and, you know, with praising her husband and all that he had done. She, interestingly enough, got some letters asking for locks of her husband's hair. And even more interestingly, they had expected that this was going to happen, and so after the president died, they literally clipped off some locks of his hair for family members. So, they actually did mail some of his hair to fans, which was a very unusual finding that I had. But she ended up getting so much mail that Congress actually ended up giving her free postage rights so that she was able to respond to all of these people.
(4:09): And Mount Vernon really became a tourism site with all of these people, even long after he had died, showing up in tribute to him. And so, then she became a hostess, basically, for all of these people who just kept showing up at her home. But one of the things that I talked about in our chapter that I found to be really notable and that I think still set a precedent that is carried out today is the government, Congress, John Adams, actually, asked if George Washington could be buried in what is now Washington, D.C., instead. And Martha really didn't want to do that. She –and George’s wishes as well – were for him to remain at Mount Vernon, but she realized that, you know, he belonged to the nation.
(5:05): And so, she agreed that her husband's remains could be removed and moved to Washington, D.C. Now, as we know today, that ultimately did not happen due to various bureaucracy, but it's still really notable to point out that Martha realized that her own private wishes needed to be passed over for what was best for the nation even though she didn't really want to do that. It worked out for them in the end, interestingly enough, but I thought that was really notable that she gave in like that.
Jodi Kanter: So interesting. Such a different relationship to mourning than many of the future first ladies would have. I want to ask you next about Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln. So, Lincoln was the first president assassinated in the country, although he wasn't the first to die in office. Both William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor died of illness in the preceding two decades, but Lincoln's death in a public setting as the Civil War ended was a shock to the nation, and his funeral has been described as the most elaborate and momentous funeral in American history. So, what was Mary Todd Lincoln's role in this?
Teri Finneman (6:23): Well, interestingly enough, not much. Not much. You know, one of the things that I want to say about Mary first is that I think she's been treated very, very unfairly by history. I mean, this woman and everything that she went through, I just have so much sympathy for her. I mean, before her husband's death, she had already lost two little boys. She served as first lady during the horrible Civil War that created divisions within her own family, and then she gets to a point where finally the war is over. Finally, there is a moment to think that happiness could be back again, and then literally her husband is murdered right in front of her. I mean, everything that she has gone through is just horrific to think about. So, I mean, it's no wonder that she had so many struggles. So, after her husband's murder, of course, he was moved to the house across the street from Ford's Theatre, and, you know, Mary's, of course, absolutely hysterical. I mean, who wouldn't be, right?
(7:26): Yet, the men who were present at the time tending to the president were just not very sympathetic of her and, in fact, found her to be an annoyance almost with her hysterics and how upset she was and kept removing her from her husband's room, which then, of course, you know, upset her more obviously and so the press reported on this and described, you know, she was in great agony. She was almost crazy, right, and really hyping up her hysteria, which I mean frankly, I think is an understandable reaction that she had. So, after the president's death, she goes back to the White House, and she actually locks herself inside the White House. And so, she doesn't take part in any of the funeral processions or anything. She is just too upset. She confines herself. She has very limited interaction with other people as she is trying to cope with what has happened to her.
(8:27): And so meanwhile, outside of the White House, you know, other people are organizing this just monumental funeral with a funeral train that made its way across the country and back to Illinois, where he would ultimately be buried. It was a three-week ordeal from the time that he was killed until he was finally buried back in Illinois and, as you mentioned, this has been called the most elaborate and momentous funeral in American history. Everybody in the nation was shocked and impacted by what happened.
So, it's interesting to think about how there were some similarities here with Martha Washington in that Mary just did not participate, but one thing that she did stick up for that was different from Martha is she said no when other people were trying to dictate where her husband was going to be buried. She drew a line in the sand on that one and snapped out of her grief long enough to fight back on that.
(9:25): So, people in Springfield essentially wanted to bury her husband in a public square where he would serve as basically a tourist attraction, and Mary was not on board with that at all. She wanted him to be buried in more of a quiet part of the town, and she ultimately won, but she made some enemies in the process for standing up for herself. But what was also really interesting in the press coverage about her mourning is that within a month of the assassination, all of these stories started to appear in newspapers that she had foreseen the president's death, which was really interesting because spiritualism obviously was very in vogue during this time. You know, people believed in that.
And so, it's almost as if this was providing a sense of comfort, a sense of explanation, as to how something like this could happen. So, in a way, Mary's role as mourner in chief in these stories were trying to provide some kind of comfort to the nation during this time, but I mean, this obviously affected her for the rest of her life. She dressed in mourning garb for the rest of her life, and this was something that obviously she did not get over and I mean, who would?
Jodi Kanter (10:42): Let's talk next about Lucretia Garfield, who virtually no one today remembers even though she also lost her husband to assassination. You've said that learning about her was your favorite part of this project. What made her and her presidential mourning so interesting?
Teri Finneman: Yeah, I really did. You know, my focus on first ladies is to bring to light the stories of first ladies who have been virtually forgotten, who nobody really talks about and certainly Crete Garfield, I mean, if you went up to anybody on the street and you said Crete Garfield, they would have absolutely no idea who you're talking about, which is really a shame because I so enjoyed learning more about her. I only focused on this very brief period of her life, and I would like to really learn a lot more and, you know, one of the things that so interested me about her in this chapter in particular is that Jackie Kennedy tends to get all of the attention for presidential mourning and putting on a funeral service that the nation was, you know, captivated by and putting on this stoic presence, and really it was Crete Garfield who sets this standard, you know, back in 1881 already.
(12:05): Now, I'm going to give just a little bit of background here because so many people aren't familiar with the Garfields that I think it's important to set up some context of what their situation was. So, at the time that James Garfield was shot, Crete was actually in New Jersey, as she had been very ill. They had only been in office for a few months at this point, and she had virtually no time to enjoy it because she became very, very sick. And so she was at the Jersey Shore basically trying to, you know, recover, and her husband went to the train station to go up to New Jersey to meet with her for a vacation, and it was when he was at the train station that he was shot.
Now, as word got back to Crete in New Jersey, it was quite an amazing coincidence that Ulysses S. Grant was actually staying nearby. And so when he got word that this had happened, he immediately went over to the first lady's house, and what better person to talk to her, really, because this is a man who had lived through the Civil War, had seen many people shot himself, and he reassured her and said, you know, from everything that I've heard, he should be able to survive this.
(13:20): I just think that's an amazing moment in history to know that these two people had that moment in time before Crete tried to get herself back to Washington. Now, you know, talk about having the worst day ever, right? So, you hear that your husband is shot and you're trying to get back to him. So, she's taking a train back to Washington and the train breaks down outside of the city, and she’s stuck waiting for a replacement to come. I mean, just, I have so much empathy for her on how absolutely horrible that had to have been to be delayed even further. But she does get back to Washington, D.C. By this time, rumors are spreading that the president had died. He had not, and so she finally gets back to the White House and some of her friends tell her, you know, you are going to really need to be strong. And she looked at them and said, I can do it, which is such a remarkable, remarkable moment, I think.
(14:20): So, she went in and saw the president, who was obviously still alive at that time, and it's really interesting to think about the comparisons with Mary Lincoln, because as Mary Lincoln was sobbing and saying, please, please speak to me, right, she never got that opportunity, whereas with Crete Garfield, she had another 80 days, almost 80 days before her husband died that she was able to talk to him and have that time, and so the press really framed her, Crete Garfield, as being a national symbol of strength and family devotion. And, you know, she came out of the room with the president, and she was in control. I mean, the doctor was quoted in the press praising her for how much self-control, how she behaved so admirably, right, which was really, really telling of what was said to be valued in women at the time. And it's interesting, again, how that contrasts with Mary Lincoln's experience.
(15:20): Another tie back to Mary Lincoln is that people were very well aware that Mary Lincoln was not treated well financially after her husband died and that she had struggled with money. And so as soon as people heard that James Garfield had been shot, they essentially started a Go Fund Me, right. I mean, obviously, they didn't have the Internet back then, but it was the exact same concept. They started a fund to raise money for Crete so that she would be taken care of in the event of the president's death, which I thought was really, really interesting.
Now of course, James Garfield did not survive. Just the medical treatment at the time is so horrific, I don't even want to get into it on this show. It was very difficult to read. That certainly played a key role in his death, and so he ends up dying, coincidentally, in New Jersey. They went back to New Jersey towards the end of his life, and he ends up dying there.
(16:22): And, very briefly, Crete, of course, you know, sinks to the floor and has a hard time taking this in, but she very quickly gets back in control again. She meets with Chester Arthur, the new president. You know, her first instinct is that she wants to immediately go back to their home state of Ohio, but like Martha Washington, she came to realize, you know, no, the mourning also belongs to the nation and so we need to go back to Washington and have a formal service there. So, they have a brief service in New Jersey and the minister who tended to it was quoted in the press, again praising how in control she was during this entire time, how stoic she was, you know, praising her for that.
(17:10): And so, when they get back to D.C. on the funeral train, she's wearing this big black veil, which again, is kind of reminiscent of the Jackie Kennedy funeral framing, but unlike Jackie and more modern first ladies, Crete doesn't participate in the public events in Washington, D.C. She stays at the attorney general's house and is very private. Her husband is lying in state in the capital. She privately, with friends and family, goes to see him. So, she doesn't take part in any public proceedings, but still, she's constantly being reported on, on how she’s holding up. And so, in the press, she has a very public presence.
And then, of course, in the Ohio ceremony that they have, she's part of that, very public again, praised for how calm, how heroic she has been throughout this entire ordeal. And then, it's really interesting to think about her widowhood and how she spent that essentially developing the first presidential library, you know, committing her time to building her husband's legacy, getting all of his books and papers in order, and devoting her life to that mission.
(18:18): And then, another final interesting tidbit of this topic is that Lucretia Garfield lived through three presidential assassinations. So, she was alive, of course, for Lincoln's, and then her own husband’s, and then she was still alive when William McKinley was assassinated later. So, this is a woman who saw so much history during her life, and I think so much more needs to be learned about her.
Jodi Kanter: Thank you. Yes, more on her, I hope. I, just from the interview and the working on the chapter, learned a lot. I definitely would have been somebody who did not know hardly anything about Lucretia Garfield, so thank you. Finally, I wanted to ask you about Florence Harding, whose legacy is still shadowed to this day with the myth that she poisoned her husband. How did that story come about?
Teri Finneman (19:21): Yeah, you know, I wanted to make sure that this was included in the podcast because I was so disappointed we didn't have enough room in the book chapter to get into this. I mean, there's so many other first ladies we could have included. I mean, there could be a whole book written about first ladies in mourning because there's just so much to say, so I really wanted to make sure we touch on Florence because, you know, she's a first lady who not only had to deal with the mourning but had to deal then with this very vicious rumor. So, we think today about all the misinformation on social media that exists. I mean, none of this is new. None of this is new. There was misinformation back then, except for in this case, it was spread through a book. And so, there was a man named Gaston Means who ended up writing a book that included this lie that Florence Harding poisoned Warren Harding and caused his death.
(20:14): Now, why this took off, it's hard to say because Gaston Means had a criminal background and shouldn't have been believed. But again, think about our misinformation age today and how people believe things that they shouldn't. So. it's really no different, but the Hardings had just – they were in the process of this huge trip out West, this monumental tour. You know, Washington, D.C., up to Alaska. They were in California when he died, huge, huge trip. And so, he ended up dying, getting sick on this trip, obviously, and then dying from a heart attack. And so, this rumor took off that she poisoned her husband, and it got legs for a couple of reasons. One is that it became much more public after Warren's death that he had cheated on Florence before, so therefore, oh well, that must make sense. She was mad about the affair, so she had him poisoned. That's why he died, right?
(21:12): I mean, even though the affair had taken place many, many years earlier, it wasn't even anything recent. She had, you know, long known about this. And then another reason that the rumor took off is because Florence didn't allow an autopsy to be done, which I mean, that's her right, right? So, these just two factors are what gave this thing the legs that it did, and I think it's really disappointing to Florence's legacy because she did do so much for the country with her newspaper career first is interesting enough and a show on its own, but also as a political campaigner and as a first lady.
So, it's really unfortunate that her legacy has been tarnished by this, but what's interesting to note is that the press after his death, which then there was another presidential funeral train from California to Washington, D.C. I mean, we think of Lincoln’s as being long from D.C. to Illinois. This one spanned the entire country, and it's estimated that three million people turned out and lined the railroad tracks to see his funeral train go by.
(22:21): So, you know, it's really interesting to see in the past how people responded to presidential deaths. And Florence, like these other first ladies we've talked about in the book, was really praised in the press for her great bravery and courage during this time. And so, it really shows you what they were valuing and how a first lady should behave.
Teri Finneman: All right, so now that we've finished the first part of the show, I will come back to my regular role as host and we'll turn it over to you. So, I want to move on to the Roosevelts next. It's really interesting because I've done oral histories with older journalists who were young when Franklin Roosevelt died, and all of them remember that day. And I remember when talking to them, I still remember them talking about this. I mean, after 12 years, Roosevelt was the presidency, right, for so many of these people. Eleanor, notably, was not with her husband when he died in Georgia. So, how did she perform the role of mourner-in-chief?
Jodi Kanter (23:25): Well, in some ways I think Eleanor followed Lucretia Garfield's example in terms of her immediate response and the attention it received in the press. She was described as dignified and courageous and generally admired for her containment in her emotional response. In fact, in addition to that, some journalists noted that she seemed very concerned about other people and how others were experiencing the loss. There's a story about when she first saw President Truman after Roosevelt died. Truman was trying to be solicitous and said, “What can I do for you? What can I do for you?” And she said, “Well, the real question is what I can do for you because you're the one in trouble now.”
(24:34): And that was sort of typical of her response. The other thing that I think was typical that I noted in my writing was that she wrote a telegram to her children that was very, very short and basically said, “Father has slipped away. It's our job to carry on. He would like for you to carry on and finish your job.” So, that was her notification of her sons. Now it should be said that Roosevelt not only had been president for an unprecedentedly long time, he also had had health problems for a very, very long time, a variety of them.
(25:27): And they were getting worse and he was getting weaker and more ill, and so because of all of that, I think his death could not really be described as a shock the way that some of the other presidential deaths were. Certainly, the assassinations were. So therefore, it was sort of a long process and Eleanor wasn't with her husband in Georgia when he died. She instead was representing the White House back in D.C. at a benefit event. She had a very busy schedule as first lady.
(26:25): I think in a lot of ways she is the first modern first lady and she was present at Roosevelt’s funeral, which had many of the same characteristics that we are familiar with today in terms of, well, there was a long funeral train. Eleanor had to go back to D.C., and then back to Georgia, and then back to D.C. again and it was a very, very large funeral, and it followed Lincoln's example of having a riderless horse in the procession. People were lining the streets of the funeral train.
(27:19): So, a lot of the ceremony that we are used to today. One thing she did not do and she had explicitly discussed with Franklin years before was that she did not have him lie in state at the Capitol. They both felt that that was a distasteful practice, and they agreed they wouldn't do that. Eleanor also said she didn't want any flowers at the funeral, although despite her making that public announcement, there were lots of funeral flowers at the White House ceremony. And then, I think one other thing is that she, in the name of carrying on in a very business-like no-nonsense way, she vacated the White House very quickly. I think it was less than a week before she was moved out.
(28:26): This was not because the Trumans wanted her out. They told her she could stay, but she wanted to get on with it and get back to New York, where she lived and get back to her work. Eleanor was a very politically active first lady before Franklin's death, and that continued very much in the aftermath of his death, and for many, many years until the end of her life. That included being a civil rights activist and being representative to the United Nations and lots and lots and lots of writing and speaking. So, she really did what she told her sons to do, which was to carry on and she had a lot to do, so she got right down to it.
Teri Finneman (29:20): Obviously, there can't be a chapter about presidential mourning without mentioning Jackie Kennedy, who as we've talked about before. Her mourner-in-chief activities were watched by virtually everyone on television in 1963 and still talked about to this day. What actions did she take before and after the funeral that made her mourning so legendary, do you think?
Jodi Kanter: Well, one of the things that made it legendary was the assassination itself. You know, Kennedy did not finish out a full term as president because of the assassination. The assassination happened in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Jackie Kennedy was sitting right next to her husband when he was shot and her clothes were spattered with his blood, and one thing I found really interesting was that in the immediate aftermath of his assassination, for I don't know, I think about 48 hours, she was encouraged time and time again to change out of the skirt that she had on, the outfit that she had on for the motorcade, and she insisted on not changing because she wanted people to see what had been done to her husband.
(30:52): Sometime between those 48 hours and the funeral, she kind of regrouped and decided that was not really the image that she wanted people to remember and wanted to have his – asked that his funeral be modeled after President Lincoln's funeral, and it was. It was a very large funeral with lots of ceremony. The one way in which it differed importantly from Lincoln's funeral had to do with the first lady herself. It was traditional at that time for the first lady to ride in the funeral procession. Jackie insisted that she walk. She wanted to walk for a good portion of the procession.
(31:51): She wanted to be seen and the press responded very positively to her performance. Both in the funeral procession and before and after, they described her as courageous and dignified and heroic. I think you mentioned the word heroic with respect to one of the earlier presidents, so she was very savvy about how she wanted the funeral to go and it was – she didn't do the very, very detailed planning. She just told people she got a book, a record from the archives of Lincoln's funeral, and she handed it over and she said, “Here, model it after this, just do what it says in here.”
(32:50): So, she did that and the thing that is maybe most notable about her performance as a mourner in chief is the way she led the story, reframed the story after JFK's funeral. A couple weeks later, she invited a journalist named Theodore White, Teddy White, to her house, and she knew that he was writing an article about the assassination, and she came to that meeting to tell him how to remember the Kennedy presidency and she used a metaphor.
(33:42): She compared it to the time of King Arthur's Camelot, which she knew the most about from a musical, which had actually been written by one of JFK's classmates, and she quoted the lyrics to the title song about “once there was a spot.” Oh dear, I can't remember. Essentially, there will never ever be another Camelot. This kind of magical place that the nation was, she wanted to say, during Kennedy's administration, and Teddy White, although he personally knew that this was not quite the whole story, felt that the least he could do for her was to publish the story she wanted out there. So, he did, and even today, people refer to the Kennedy administration as Camelot.
Teri Finneman (34:50): So, unlike Mary Lincoln, who struggled with her husband's sudden death as well as Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan endured the opposite, years of losing her husband to Alzheimer's. How did she manage mourning for so long of a period of time?
Jodi Kanter: Well, one of the answers to that question is that she managed it in intense privacy. She asked for privacy from the press, and she pretty much got it. She stayed in the house with Reagan much of the time, and she never went further, for the first several years at least, than the Reagan Library, which was about a 40-minute drive from their home in California. She also was the orchestrator of her husband's funeral. In the meantime, I should say she made a few public appearances, but very few and always kind of representing her husband or her husband's disease, Alzheimer's, which I'll come back to in a second.
(36:08): But she, unlike Jackie, she didn't hand anyone a book and say, “Do this.” She actively chose every single thing about the funeral, including which tenor was going to sing “Ave Maria,” for example. I mean, all these very small details, and she managed the big picture. She managed – you mentioned a kind of cross-country funeral. Reagan’s was a cross-country funeral, too, and not only was it across the country, but it demanded very specific timing because both Reagans wanted the burial to take place during sunset at the Reagan Library.
(36:55): So, she made it all happen and then the postscript to her mourning, I think, is a very surprising one, and I think is maybe not so widely known, which is that she really became a very quiet, in her style, activist on behalf of stem cell research. At the time, stem cell research was the most promising work being done on a couple of different diseases, including Alzheimer's, and she did things like call senators, and she wrote a letter to George W. Bush appealing to him on this issue.
(37:50): And there's a real sense, among her friends who were interviewed, that this really gave her life a purpose after Reagan died that was connected to him, it was a way of being connected to him. But, just to close out on Nancy Reagan, the other thing I think people maybe don't realize, I didn't realize, I knew that he had been sick for a long time, but after he announced his Alzheimer's to the public, Reagan lived another decade. So, for a decade, Nancy Reagan nursed him and tended to him and did her mourning in private and she spoke, when she did speak, she spoke about how lonely it was, and I think that kind of loneliness is very hard to imagine.
Teri Finneman (38:58): And then our last question of the show is why does studying first ladies matter?
Jodi Kanter: I think it matters for lots of reasons. One of those reasons is that the first lady is a model for the country about behavior in general, and specifically in this case, how to mourn. And I think in that way, the first lady can be a representative of her time. We can look to what was going on in Eleanor Roosevelt's culture, for example, with the Great Depression and the changing of women's work, and sort of connect that to her performance of mourning. But also, they can change the culture. They can do things that are unexpected and that then set a precedent for future first ladies. So, that's some of what, why I think it matters.
Teri Finneman (40:08): All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us today.
We hope you enjoyed the show. Tune in next time to uncover more untold histories of the nation's first ladies. I'm Teri Finneman, and this is The First Ladies podcast.
Show music credit: "Winning Elevation" by Hot_Dope.