Episode 10: The Other First Ladies
From Thomas Jefferson’s daughter to James Buchanan’s niece to Grover Cleveland’s sister, other women have stepped into the first lady role and, unfortunately, been mostly forgotten. Mary Stockwell gives these women their rightful place in history.
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.
(0:42): For the past 100 years, Americans have gotten used to the spouse of a president serving in the first lady role, but historically, it hasn't been uncommon for someone else to do the job. From Thomas Jefferson's daughter to James Buchanan's niece to Grover Cleveland's sister, other women have stepped into the White House position and unfortunately been mostly forgotten. Today's guest, Mary Stockwell, gives these women their rightful place in history in her upcoming book chapter about first lady stand-ins.
Mary, welcome to the show. Why did you become interested in studying first ladies?
Mary Stockwell: I think like anyone growing up in the 1960s, I thought Jackie Kennedy was spectacularly beautiful. I had Jackie Kennedy paper dolls, and to find out that she had a not perfect marriage with JFK always made her even more fascinating to me. The first first lady I wrote about was Mrs. Monroe. I'm fascinated by James Monroe because he tried so hard to get the Indians out West where I live and the American Southerners to live side by side. I said I gotta write about his spectacular wife, but I think I'm most interested in the Wilson family, and they're the ones who made me fascinated by first ladies.
Woodrow Wilson, I wrote a biography of him a while ago, he's not like people think. He is not a kind of a buttoned-up Presbyterian. He was very romantic. He loved women. All the women in his life, from his mother to his wives and daughters. And to see how Ellen Wilson, the Wilson daughters, especially Margaret, and then Wilson's second wife, Edith Wilson, helped him in his presidency, I think they're – they're fascinating to me.
(2:28): I've been damaged by Edith Wilson, the second wife. She said, “I actually don't like being first lady. I don't like doing all this hosting and partying. I wish some reporters would finally say, ‘Stop using this term even.’” She made me think, is it a tougher job to be a hostess than I've been thinking? Maybe if we look at women who weren't the wives of these men, we can see a job that we all require. It's not in the Constitution, but it might be more difficult than we think, and almost all of the stand-in first ladies I've discovered were happy to leave the White House.
Teri Finneman: Yeah, so let's get into talking about some of these women. Thomas Jefferson's daughter Patsy was the first person to fill the first lady role who wasn't the spouse of the president since her mother had died. So, in other words, it actually became a norm fairly early on for a non-spouse to serve in this role. You note that she was extremely close to her father, since virtually all of their immediate family had died by the time they got to the White House. How did she perform the role of a stand-in first lady?
Mary Stockwell (3:37): Well, I'm beginning to think about her, she's almost a carbon copy of Thomas Jefferson. Since he shaped her so perfectly: her intellect, her taste, even her appearance was like him. But when she was finally called upon to come to the Executive Mansion and to be at his side, she was a presence. I call her that. Her job, I believe, was to tone down some of the criticism about the relationship with Sally Hemings. She came to the White House for the first time, 1802 and 1803, just as this story struck, and her goal was simply to sit with the president, host receptions for him, go to church on Sunday when he didn't go to church, to go to balls, to go to horse races, to appear to be a gracious daughter, to prove to the world that Thomas Jefferson was first and foremost a family man of her and her twelve children, and not this rumored slave woman.
(4:42): She would deny to the end of her days that Sally Hemings had children by her father and it's when that story is kind of reverberating in the background and you realized that she was there as a young girl in Paris when Sally Hemings comes over to be a maid to her younger sister, Maria. She must have known that Sally was pregnant and was coming back against her will to America in 1789, and even though she never spoke about what this must have done to her, she kept that exterior calm and refusing to deal with rumors of any kind, and she was at her father's side to just be a presence in the Executive Mansion was important. And also intriguing to me, she comes back in 1806 and 1807, just as Thomas Jefferson's very successful presidency started to unravel.
You know, he's won us Louisiana, Lewis and Clark have come back, he's defeated the Barbary pirates, and now suddenly, he's got the English Navy after all of our ships, and she stays with him, and that, so to me, she was a presence, a silent presence, saying this man is wonderful.
Teri Finneman (5:59): Emily Jackson was another first lady stand-in and under quite controversial circumstances. Andrew Jackson's wife, Rachel, lived to see her husband win the presidency, but died of a heart attack before the inauguration. Andrew Jackson blamed the political attacks on his wife, who was married before him, for her death. So therefore, their niece Emily ended up taking Rachel's place as hostess in the White House. You found she was determined to join the grand dames of Washington society, but her time as first lady was filled with endless controversy. Tell us what happened.
Mary Stockwell: Well, it suddenly dawned on me. I have read so much about Jackson, studied so much, written so much, and I finally realized the only person who ever stood up to him and lived to tell about it was his niece, Emily Donelson Jackson. She comes to the White House to be his stand-in hostess when her Aunt Rachel dies. She is mesmerized by everything she sees. She's mesmerized by the clothes, the manners of men and women in Washington, and she's quickly taken under the wing of all the cabinet officers’ wives and also Mrs. Calhoun, the wife of the vice president, John C. Calhoun. And she's a teenager, she's young. She has no experience in the real world. She's also been trained in good, solid, Christian morals by her Aunt Rachel.
(7:28): And when she has to deal with this woman by the name of Peggy Eaton, a beautiful 25-year-old girl who happens to be the wife of the secretary of war, she simply says, “I will not have a, you know, a trollop like this in the White House. I will not invite her to anything.” What was so terrible about Mrs. Eaton? Mrs. Eaton had been married before she married the secretary of war. Her husband was a sailor. She had three children with him, but the rumor was that when her sailor husband was off to the Navy that she took up and had an affair with Eaton. She might have even killed her husband, that was the rumor. But since she had probably had relations with that second husband before marriage, she was banned from the White House.
(8:20): I think when Andrew Jackson looked at Peggy Eaton, he saw Rachel Jackson, and he told his niece, “You will invite this woman. You will invite her even to the christening of your daughter born here in the White House, or you're going home,” and she would not relent. I call her a princess standing up against King Andrew. I find it – we might find this baffling today, why something like this would cause such a commotion, but eventually, Andrew Jackson's entire cabinet had to resign over this failure of this young girl to allow Peggy Eaton to come to any event at the White House. Only the postmaster general's wife was saved. She liked Peggy Eaton.
It's amazing to think that grown men would do everything that their wives said, that the president could be governed by what his niece said, but he ranted and raved in the White House. He would say, “The whole country's watching me. If I don't get the women in my house in order, they're not going to think I can run this country.”
(9:25): She never backed down. Jackson sent her back home to Tennessee. He relented, brought her back, but she developed tuberculosis, and she eventually had to leave the White House. But it was an interesting battle between a little girl and a grown man who had stood down the Creek Indians in the bank of the United States and the British at New Orleans. I still find it baffling to understand, maybe because we live more in a world of Washington scandals, but given the morality of the time, she stood up to him and said, “No, I won't demean the White House by allowing this naughty woman in.”
Teri Finneman (10:01): It is quite the story for sure. Let's move on to talking about another first lady stand-in who was also quite young. In fact, many of these that we're talking about today are quite young. So, Angelica Van Buren was only 20 years old when she became White House hostess in 1838 for her father-in-law, Martin Van Buren. She only served a few years, but what did you learn about her influence?
Mary Stockwell: I call her straight out of central casting. If I was doing a Warner Brothers classic about the perfect early 19th century White House hostess, it would be this beautiful Angelica. When she marries Martin Van Buren’s son Abraham, that would be November 1837. She comes back to the White House New Year's Eve in 1838 in the midst of this depression when Martin Van Buren hasn't invited anybody to the White House for quite some time.
She comes into this reception on his arm, and she's gorgeous. They call her a Roman goddess. Dark hair piled up in curls, dark eyes, very personable, very friendly, and she greets everyone. She has a wonderful first few months bringing life to the White House, friendly with everyone, well-spoken, well-educated, quite a charmer.
(11:20): Then she goes on a belated honeymoon to England and to France, and she sees how the court of Queen Victoria treats Victoria and how France treats Louis Philippe. She sees the gorgeous ceremonies, the gorgeous gardens. She comes back to America and she says, “I'm going to institute some of these practices in the White House.” And it's one of those times where you cringe, knowing what's going to happen, and I realize we live in this media bubble where we constantly watch a first lady, don't make a mistake and ruin your good press. I think of Melania Trump when she wore that coat - I don't care about things, do you? And I think that damaged her reputation. Well, the same thing is going to happen to Angelica. She comes to the White House. You no longer can come up to her and shake her hand in the receiving line. She, like Queen Victoria, places herself on a raised platform and the guests are supposed to come and somehow make obeisance or homage to her in some way.
(12:24): She needs a little bit of money to redecorate the White House. She set out, “I don't like these outdated colors.” She demands a little over $3,000 for new wallpaper, then she says, “I want a beautiful lawn,” much like the gardens of the royal families in Europe, and whenever she serves her meals, she's fluent in French. It must be a full French menu. When she does that, instantaneously the women of Washington, the men of Washington, the United States of America, turns against her. It's the panic of 1837, and everyone's out of a job, everyone's struggling. She actually, I believe, helps bring down her father-in-law because they're heading into the 1840 election, and the Whigs had been waiting for something to bring this Democrat down.
(13:17): And a fellow by the name of William Ogle, who is a representative from Pennsylvania, the Whig Party, he gives a three-day speech against her on the floor of the House of Representatives, attacking Van Buren, attacking his family. It was called the Golden Spoon speech, April 14, 15 and 16. And he doesn't tear her apart by name because that would be ungentlemanly-like, but you know who he's talking about. He reads her French menus and mocks them. He mocks the search for new wallpaper. He mocks the search, the sitting up on top of the dais, making everybody obey them, bow to them. It's the beginning of painting Martin Van Buren as an out-of-touch, elite, rich man. That's going to be how the Whigs defeat them, and who do they turn to? William Henry Harrison, who had been a wealthy man, but he turned his back on wealth when he was 18, came out West, joined the Army, fought the British, fought the Indians, defeated Tecumseh.
(14:21): All they needed was to get Harrison that log cabin and that cider, and they were off and running and Martin Van Buren goes down to defeat. I have to add one more tragic thing. In that final campaign year, Angelica stepped away from her duties. She was pregnant with a baby girl who died in the spring of 1840, and by the time the election was coming, she was pregnant again.
The baby would be born after her father-in-law left office in 1841, but I wonder, there's no surviving evidence, but I wonder what damage this horrible attack on her did to her pregnancies. She never got involved in politics again. She moved North, lived with her husband, went back to Europe, wrote a beautiful few journals on her travels, but I don't know if she was ever aware how clueless she was and how she helped to bring down the presidency of her father-in-law.
Teri Finneman (15:18): Priscilla Tyler was the daughter-in-law of John Tyler, who became president when William Henry Harrison died after just one month in office. Although Leticia Tyler was alive at the time, Priscilla fulfilled the first lady duties and was often more popular than the president. She served for three years before John Tyler married Julia following the death of his first wife. What was noteworthy about her time as first lady?
Mary Stockwell: She was an actress. I think that was the most noteworthy thing, and when I looked for an image and all the writings about her, I kept saying she was a creature who always seemed to be in the light. She had a wonderful childhood with a famous actor father. She lived on a beautiful farm where she had this beautiful sunlit summer house where she could write poems and play by herself.
When her mother died and the family lost all its money, she joined her father on stage, and she liked being in front of the limelight, and they would play great roles together including Lady Macbeth. She was Desdemona in Othello, and she played a role called Virginia with her father, who played Virginius about these ancient Roman times when she meets this young man. She meets a son, Robert Tyler, who is the son of Senator Tyler of Virginia.
(16:42): She marries him thinking, “Oh, I can step out of the limelight, have a quiet life.” Very quickly, her father-in-law's vice president and then president and he asks her, “Will you be my hostess?” She does such a tremendous job because she's already been on the stage, and she almost handles it like an actress. And again, a memorable story about her I could not forget it from the moment I learned it, she walks into her first reception at the White House and there are mirrors everywhere in the mantels and there are candles up reflecting all this light in the room. All she has to do is get to her seat next to Daniel Webster and she'll be fine. She faints from sheer excitement and joy of it and Webster has to carry her away. Her husband is quite jealous, throws a big bucket of water on them. They are a bit silly and they go down in the press as silly, but she is considered quite ladylike and charming to have survived it.
(17:46): She just is the quintessential, perfect hostess, greeting everyone, even foreign dignitaries with brilliant conversation, brilliant food. She is the one stand-in first lady when she has to leave because her father-in-law is going to get married, she has a twinge of, “Oh, will she be able to do it? I want this job” and she kind of looks back for a few months with regret, but then she forgets, and when the Civil War breaks out, she ends up living in Alabama, and it's like Gone with the Wind. She writes about watching everything burn to the ground, and she remains in Alabama until the end of her life, knowing full well what I did doesn't mean anything now. It's all forgotten in these times but quite the actress.
Teri Finneman (18:34): Well, and that's exactly why we're doing this chapter, right? These women have been forgotten, and so, it's important. So, if anybody knows a first lady stand-in, it's Harriet Lane. She was the niece of James Buchanan and served in the years right before the Civil War. You note that she broke the mold when it came to stand-in first ladies. How so?
Mary Stockwell: She knew she was going to take on this position, so in some respects, she knew she would be the first lady because she was the pampered niece and ward of her uncle, James Buchanan, and she had traveled with him already to England, where he was the ambassador from the United States to Great Britain, and there was something about her. I wouldn't say she was a great beauty, but she had a kind of charisma that made everyone, including Queen Victoria, wild for her. Men followed her, students at Oxford University cheered her, noblemen wanted her hand in marriage. Queen Victoria called her ambassador’s wife - that is a title only for the wives of ambassadors. So, she comes back to America already having this experience of intense fame, and when her uncle is elected president, she decides I'm going to make an impression.
(19:50): She will be the first lady. She's going to make an impression, and she finds a dress in the last shop she goes to in Washington, D.C., a gorgeous white dress, silk with purple flowers everywhere, and she tells the woman, she's only about 26 years old, she tells the lady running the shop, “Now lower the neckline two and a half inches. I want them to see my decolletage.” They didn't want to do it, but she said, “Do it, that's the style in Paris,” and at the inaugural ball, here comes in James Buchanan, tall man, white haired, distinguished in a black velvet suit, but when she comes behind him in this gorgeous dress, so low cut, she wrapped the purple flowers around her hair, too, the men followed her all night long.
(20:41): The women at first disliked her. They thought she was quite scandalous, but the next day, she was the hit of the inauguration. Women everywhere lowered their necklines, and she became not just a fashion plate, but she became famous for her parties. Again, she had a party for Queen Victoria's son, Edward, who would become Edward VII. He disliked everybody, but he spent his time at the White House going from room to room with her. A delegation came from Japan. Most couldn't even speak Japanese, and everybody absolutely loved her, and they would say, “Ah, Harriet, you know, what an experience to know her.” People came to her more like you would a first lady now, asking for her help and causes. The Ojibwe nation, the Chippewa came to her and said, “Can't you do something about alcohol being sold illegally in reservations?” And she did.
(21:39): She was interested in hospitals and sick children, and she was just maybe the one bright light in a very, very terrible time. Also, too, there were always rumors about James Buchanan. Was he gay? Was he straight, as we would say today. I think she brought a lot of, you know, sex appeal to the White House. You didn't think so much about his sexuality as you did about her. She was truly a sex symbol for her time, very charismatic. But when it was all over, she stepped away, never looked back. Very, very tragic life. Her husband and her two sons died, and she was left alone when she was still pretty young. She comes back into society when Frances Folsom, the wife of Grover Cleveland, also young and beautiful, invites her back to the White House, and she causes a sensation in a black velvet dress with diamonds.
(22:32): She's also invited to the coronation of Edward VII, and she kind of remains a society figure. She's in Washington until then, but the money she donates at her death, it's still helping people at Johns Hopkins University. She was a fascinating person. She would probably have her own reality show if it was today. She was that charismatic.
Teri Finneman: Mary McElroy is someone I've wanted to know more about, but so little is known about her. She was the sister of Chester Arthur and you found out that she actually hated the job of stand-in first lady, which she only did for a few months of the year during the social season. What did she hate about it?
Mary Stockwell (23:17): She – I have to tell you this. I actually found an interview she gave when she was older. It's in I think the Knickerbocker Press of Albany and thank you to the New York Public Library for finding it and scanning it, but she confessed to a young female reporter that she absolutely hated it, primarily because women made her job so terrible. She said women were cruel to her, and she especially hated the Russian ambassador's wife who would come to every event and would make constant comments against religion, get into fights with religious leaders, and leave every party in ruins. And she said nobody but a woman knows how much women can ruin your life, so I find that – I smiled a bit.
(24:10): She liked the men she entertained, and she said, “Oh, men are so easy to handle. Just talk to them about what they're interested in and you've won them over.” She said, also, “I like politics. They like politics. So, I just say, well, what's going on in politics?” And she had a wonderful time with them. She especially loved the historian George Bancroft because he had been – he had served in administrations before he served with James K. Polk, and he had a boatload of stories, so she loved him.
She loved younger women, girls in their teens and early 20s. She said they had no artifice, so her niece and her own daughter helped her with these gigantic receptions. Sometimes, she'd have 3,000 women in the White House on one day for a reception. She also said another thing she didn't like about this time serving her brother was that even though it was 20 years down from the Civil War, she said that animosity was still filling up everything. She said the North and the South are still fighting within the walls of the White House, and said I did my best to just calm everybody down and to be happy.
(25:17): She, again, she walked away from it, never looking back, and when she gave this great interview in retirement, she said, “No one remembers me. Nobody will,” but I can't think of any other first lady who confessed, either stand-in or real, “I do not like this job.”
Teri Finneman: Rose Cleveland was another presidential sister to fill the first lady role until her brother, Grover, married Francis during his time in office. She was highly educated and was the first lesbian to serve as first lady. Tell us more about her interesting life.
Mary Stockwell (25:51): Well, she, too, shocked in her dress. She had quite a dress that she had her first White House reception in. She wore her hair short, not piled up in a bun. She looked like she had just stepped off stage seeing Carmen. It was a black satin dress, all lace, all showing, very low cut. There was a comment about her people made: she sometimes appeared bored at receptions like she was conjugating ancient Greek verbs. I don't know if that's true, but what I found interesting about her was you really need to read everything she wrote. I've read things, like she's very pro-woman. She's very supportive of women. She did not like women that much, at least not as her fellow intellectuals. She had written a bestseller right before her brother got into the White House about George Eliot, the novelist, the English woman novelist.
(26:48): And I've always read, you know, oh, she wrote about it. She was very flattering. I read the essay. She absolutely tears George Eliot apart. She didn't seem to have, again, any sympathy for women as women. She understands the concept of humans. She would say, “I understand humanity and not necessarily what women or men are,” which I found fascinating. You can't quite put her into a feminist, you know, slot. She despised George Eliot, said she couldn't write. Somebody like Byron could write, not George Eliot. But what I found fascinating is if you read deeper into her writings, she is the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, and she became fascinated with Catholic medieval Europe, and this is shocking, but it happened in the late 19th century, the Protestant thinkers suddenly start appreciating what went on for a thousand years in Europe, and the Catholic Church was the intellectual leader.
(27:48): Churches started to look Gothic, museums look Gothic, and she wrote beautiful things about Charlamagne and beautiful essays on Joan of Arc and monks and knights, and she said, “These people burned with a great love for something greater than themselves.” She was most mesmerized by Khadija, the first wife of Muhammad, and she said Khadija was the perfect wife because she knew who Muhammad was, and she loved him for who he was and that every human being needs that in their life. You've got to find someone who sees you and knows who you are. So, there's this deep romantic streak in her writings. She wrote a novel about how true love always wins out, about a troubled young man and a wealthy heiress. She finally found that love.
(28:42): She found it in Evangeline Whipple, who was the wife of two older men, one a very famous minister by the name of Reverend Whipple, and they fell hopelessly in love when they met after she was out of Grover Cleveland's White House. They had quite a romance. Their letters are published to this day, and they moved to Italy together, and I found it fascinating that she found one more person to be mesmerized and in love with, and that was Saint Augustine.
The last essay she wrote, she found a copy of his soliloquies, which is his much more detailed description of his conversion to Christianity than his confessions, and she found it in a bookstore in Rome, translated it. I think her best piece is the 45-page introduction to it where she describes this kind of vibrant, burning heart of Saint Augustine, who, like her, looked for real love, and he finally found it in God, and it just, that driving heart, if she was alive today, I'm sure she'd have a PhD. She'd be a professor, a writer, and we would see her on, I don't know, MSNBC or Fox nightly. She would have been quite a pundit, but a very powerful intellect. To me, she was a scholar more than anything else.
Teri Finneman (29:58): Margaret Wilson was a first daughter first before assuming the role of first lady after her mother Ellen died, and before her father was remarried to Edith. We've mostly focused so far on how first lady stand-ins performed the role in the White House, but really, Margaret Wilson's life after the presidency was probably more interesting. What did she do after?
Mary Stockwell (30:23): She was amazing. She had the same look as her father, same character, restless yearning, and she was dissatisfied with everything in her life. She would tell her family, “It's not enough. It's not enough.” She leaves college. She tries to become a singer. She's a recording artist. She's with her father in every campaign, but oh, she aches to get beyond it to something greater. She had many offers of marriage. She didn't want to get married. She had to support herself.
She only had a little stipend from her father, but she tried to go – after her father died – she worked in advertising in New York. She tried a few other things in business, and one night she's in the New York Public Library, and she runs across a book written by a Hindu mystic. She stays so long reading this gorgeous book about Hindu mysticism and the way to God through the Hindu practice, not the Christian practice.
(31:25): She had tired of Christianity, especially her parents’ faith. She decided, “I must go all the way to India, and I must participate in an actual ashram, and I must learn yoga, and I must learn this the way of this Hindu thinker.” She goes, and she eventually dies in Pondicherry, India, at an ashram. Her sisters are alive and beg her to come back. Her older sister, or younger sister, I'm sorry, Eleanor, she will live for quite a while, and she begs her to come back during World War II. “Leave this place. It's not safe,” but she never leaves it. She said, “No, in Hinduism, I found what I could not find in Christianity. I have found my way, you know, to the actual contemplation that God had.”
And when she died, you see little snippets about her in the papers in America and kind of say, “Oh, remember her? She was Woodrow Wilson's daughter, but she went Hindu.” She's gone Hindu, and she's laughed at.
(32:26): She did translations of major works of Hindu literature that Joseph Campbell, the famous writer, would get credit for later. She's been totally forgotten. I know I tried to track her down in the “Histories of Religion in America.” She gets no mention. She's that forgotten for the role she played there in bringing Hinduism and yoga to America, but what an interesting lady. Maybe my favorite of all of them.
Teri Finneman: And then our final question of the show is why do you think studying first ladies matters?
Mary Stockwell (33:02): I sometimes find the way people talk about first ladies may be too reverential, almost in whispered tones. They're these perfect creatures, this perfect queen. I don't like what happens when you swing 180 degrees around and then you slam these women. For example, the way Edith Wilson is constantly attacked. There needs to be a story somewhere in the middle where we look at all these women who are married to presidents or who did their duty and serve presidents, the men in their life, because their story of that relationship with that president is at the heart of that presidency. I've been having fun on this project going back, reading every old biography on so many presidents and the women in their lives, whether wives or not wives, come up in just a few sentences. No, there are bonds there, human bonds we have to look at.
(33:56): I think we need to see first ladies as more ambitious than we've ever seen them, and I think we need to see stand-ins as people who show the job that, for some reason, we demand these women do: to be the perfect hostess, to be the perfect mate, to be the perfect something at the heart of the American experience. We should ask ourselves, why do we do that? But oh, the books and studies that are waiting to be done, are delving more deeply into I believe the presidency, through the women in the lives of the presidency. They're waiting to be written.
Teri Finneman: All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us today.
Mary Stockwell: Thank you for asking me.
Teri Finneman: 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.