Episode 4: The Wartime First Ladies

Thomas Balcerski discusses the contributions that first ladies have made during wartime from the Revolutionary War to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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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): George Washington. Abraham Lincoln. Franklin Roosevelt. It's not a surprise that the presidents we tend to learn the most about are associated with wars, but what tends to get left out of history books is the contributions that first ladies have made to wartime efforts. From visiting soldiers in hospitals to Meatless Mondays to trips abroad, U.S. first ladies have also been leaders assisting their commanders in chief.

In today's episode, we visit with historian Tom Balcerski, who is an expert in early American history. Tom, welcome to the show. Why did you become interested in studying first ladies?

Tom Balcerski (1:24): I've always been fascinated by presidents and first ladies as a topic, and I have to admit I came into the study of first ladies primarily through studying American presidents. And it's actually, I think, a process or a flow that reflects many who come to the first ladies sort of after having been interested in the presidents and it also, I think it's very much indicative of how first ladies are kind of studied and have been perceived in scholarship.

They're always sort of the second figure, the person behind the president, quite literally as wife or mother or helpmate, and it's always been there for a kind of interest of mine that's been lurking in the background from my days beginning the study of history through graduate school and now as a professor. And I took on, for the first time, the formal study of first ladies some years ago when I came to Harriet Lane Johnston, who was the niece of President James Buchanan, the subject of my first book. And so, after having studied Buchanan and his presidency, I came to Harriet Lane, Harriet Lane Johnston. So, I do think it came sort of as a kind of corollary to studying American presidents.

Teri Finneman (2:38): We're delving into war history today, so what are the main overall contributions that first ladies tend to make during wartime?

Tom Balcerski: First ladies have been vital contributors to American conflicts, whether they be those that have taken place at home or abroad. First ladies, like their presidential partners, have been, therefore, I think, helpfully nicknamed by different sayings, and so we have the commander in chief – you might say there have been first ladies in chief.

We have other roles that the president has served using that same suffix, “in chief,” and so I think first ladies can get the same treatment. They've been mothers in chief to the soldiers on combat duty. They have stewarded our national resources, and they've provided actual physical care to the nation’s wounded. These are just a few of the roles that first ladies have played through the years. They've really evolved, as has the presidency, to take on more official or formal duties that seem to us to be more political.

(3:41) And so they have calmed the nation through the new means at the time, whether it be radio or television, and now social media. They've also given speeches and been at the forefront alongside American allies and, more recently, they've been able to actually visit the front and to be abroad in the very places where the conflict is happening. All in all, first ladies and the first ladies of war have been there all along, and I think it's been only recently that we've seen their vital contributions as so-called hidden figures to America's war efforts.

Teri Finneman: Martha Washington obviously wasn't first lady yet during the Revolutionary War, but she still served a first lady role to her commander husband and the nation at the time. What were her contributions to the war effort?

Tom Balcerski (4:29): Martha Washington was our very first first lady by some means. We can disagree or agree on when the first lady term is used, so she wasn't necessarily called that. In fact, one of her nicknames was Lady Washington, another moniker that she earned through her presence as a spouse in the encampments during the Revolutionary War. She’s also been called the mother of her country. So, she is prototypical of the first ladies even before her time as spouse to President Washington.

That being said, it's her time as first lady or really spouse to George Washington during his field command during the Revolutionary War that puts her, in my mind, as our first first lady to have participated quite personally during wartime.

 (5:18) So, some of the things that she did was to, well, quite literally, travel from her home in Mount Vernon in Virginia to wherever George Washington might be during the revolution. She traveled each year, particularly during the period of the winter encampment. So, she's there alongside Washington and the Continental Army at some of the coldest winters recorded and some of the darkest hours for the army at Valley Forge in Morristown and then later into Pennsylvania and Westchester County.

She's also, in a way, trying to manage as best she can the Mount Vernon estate, only to find in one of her absences that the British Army actually invaded and – raided, I should say, Mount Vernon at one point, and it was fortunately saved from destruction. Martha was a mother of four during her lifetime but by the time of the revolution, she had lost three of those children prematurely, so her only surviving son, John Parke Custis, who went by Jacky, had been wishing to serve in the Continental Army and to join the effort.

 (6:19) She actually refused Jacky that request until 1780 when he did, in fact, join up with his father-in-law George Washington as an aide-de-camp. Sadly, Jacky [Custis] will die the next year of yellow fever, one of the dreaded camp diseases, and Martha Washington, who was not in camp at that time, rushed to be at her son's side only to find that he had passed away before she arrived.

So, in some ways, too, she's another prototype of future first ladies during wartime. They offer members, their own family, whether they be sons or grandsons or nephews, and we find that Martha Washington lost her child, her last child, to war. And so, for that reason, she seems very much like the very first line – in a long line of examples of first ladies who have supported American wars.

Teri Finneman (7:09): Let's skip ahead to Mary Lincoln and the Civil War. Mary has gotten a bad reputation over the years, quite unfairly, I think. You write that “to an extent greater than any first lady before or since, she was devastated by the ravages of war.” Obviously, the assassination of her husband was directly related to the war, but talk about how her family ties to the South created their own ravages.

Tom Balcerski: Oh, absolutely. Mary Todd Lincoln was Southern born. She's from Kentucky. Ironically, of course, Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky as well and moves on to Indiana and then Illinois. But the Todd family’s roots in the South and in Lexington are deep. They also have a branch that moves to Illinois, and that's partly why – that's why, really – Mary Todd ends up in Springfield and then finds her way into a marriage with Abraham Lincoln, having four children as part of that marriage. By the time that 1860 rolls around and Abraham Lincoln's elected to the presidency, she's already now lost one of her children to illness.

Unfortunately, during the four years of the Civil War, during the four years and a month or so of the Lincoln presidency, she will lose a second son during that war and, in time, her third son. After the war, Tad will die, and her only surviving son, the one surviving Lincoln child, Robert, actually will commit her to an insane asylum.

(8:31) She loses her husband, Abraham, during the war to assassination, and so she's in mourning for the rest of her life, and that's why I sort of imagine her as the most, kind of, personally afflicted. But her family is the other part of the story, the Todds. Of the Todd family, she was close to some of her surviving siblings, but she did have siblings fighting for the opposition, for the Confederate States of America and that army.

She also had a half-sister, Emily Todd Helm, who wasn't a secessionist but a Todd who came to Washington, D.C., in December of 1863 and lived for a time with the Lincolns at the White House, creating quite a suspicious situation and public dismay and uproar that you would have kind of a traitor living among the ranks of the president. She also wanted to obtain a license to sell cotton from the Lincoln White House, and so she was there for her own financial reasons. President Lincoln rebuffed that, and at that point, she lost all relations and never spoke again to her sister.

(9:36) And it should be pointed out that two of her three half-brothers ended up dying actually in the fighting. So, she lost really her entire family in the process, her extended, really her family. She was born into the Todd family, and she was left with so very little at the end of the war.

Teri Finneman: Many people don't tend to hear about Mary's significant contributions to wounded soldiers during the Civil War. Tell us more about that and the things that she did.

Tom Balcerski (10:02): Well, Mary Todd Lincoln, like so many of the women of Washington at this time, were looking for ways to contribute to the war effort, but she was in the position as the spouse of the commander in chief to really be a symbolic participant in that contribution. So, after the very first battle at the Battle of Bull Run in the summer of 1861, she will be among the first to visit these makeshift hospitals that no one really had thought would be necessary to house what would end up being thousands and hundreds of thousands over time – across the four years – of Union wounded and ultimately deceased. And this visitation schedule will continue all the way through the four years of the war, something that is often overlooked as, as you say, by historians and the general public.

While she would be visiting the soldiers, she would meet with them, spend time with them, bring small little gifts of fruit or candy, and then will go and write letters on their behalf, especially those who have lost limbs and their ability to write to family members.

(11:07) She would sit there and dictate, take dictation and write these letters. By 1863, she was making as many as three visits per week to hospitals within Washington, D.C., which itself, by that time, had become the most fortified city in America, with all of its encampments and forts surrounding it. And so, she was living in a war zone during her entire time as first lady.

Not surprising, she was also able to literally go to the front – that is to say not very far from the White House – just a few miles were the initial fortifications of the capital, and she, for various reasons, was in sort of disagreements constantly with members of Lincoln's cabinet, including Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. So, it was with some, I'm sure, pride, that she reported that after one visit to Fort Stevens that she felt that the fortifications were not sufficient, a report that she made known directly to the secretary of war.

Teri Finneman (12:06): Let's move ahead and next discuss Edith Wilson, who was heavily involved in her husband's career during World War I. Discuss the extent of her political involvement, which has been very controversial.

Tom Balcerski: Absolutely. Edith Wilson is another one of these figures who's emerged recently through good scholarship and new books on the topic as truly the power, the first lady behind the throne. She effectively ran the nation as the chief executive for a period of time, following her husband's stroke in the fall of 1919, and for at least several months beyond that, and even until the very last – his very last day in office in March of 1921 was by his side and helping to direct the traffic around the president, along with other gatekeepers like Admiral Cary Grayson. She was, though, specifically a supporter and a kind of confidant of Woodrow Wilson during the period of World War I, which was only about a year and a few months from America's more direct involvement in military preparations and war.

(13:11) So, in 1918, the real primary year of the Americans fighting in Europe during World War I, she is at the very outset in the room where the cabinet voted to press for the Declaration of War, and she's actually talking to cabinet secretaries, getting reports on the latest armaments or troop movements at the front, and she's also literally with Woodrow Wilson every step of the way from the Day of Armistice, November 11, 1918, through all his travels into Europe, twice, particularly for the peace conference talks at Versailles, and is like, as I said, the woman behind the throne after his stroke in 1919.

Teri Finneman: She also played a more traditional first lady role by setting an example of sacrifice in wartime. Talk about some of her personal work, including moving sheep onto the White House lawn.

Tom Balcerski (14:06): Edith Wilson, Woodrow Wilson's second wife, came in without children of her own and at a time when Woodrow Wilson was bereaved from the death of his first wife, and from the very sort of moment of their meeting, she made Woodrow Wilson her chief priority. And that meant his health, which was always tenuous because he suffered from hypertension and stress, that she would be with him every day, sort of insisting on exercise, riding horses, golfing, and taking walks. So, she goes from that – a kind of leisurely world as wife and supportive partner of Woodrow Wilson – to now having to be a very different kind of public figure.

After war is declared, she will spend her time less so golfing and more so visiting the Red Cross. For example, the canteen, the large canteen that was at Union Station. She actually also got involved, you might say, in the propaganda machine that the Wilson administration put into effect, including specifically writing tracts to warn servicemen going abroad to Europe to avoid transmission of sexual diseases through protection.

(15:15) All social life and all social functions stopped. She took it upon herself to scrimp and scrape wherever she could. One of the ways she did that was to actually implement bans on the everyday necessities of life, like gasoline. It was Gasless Sundays. Like meat, in the daily diet of the White House, it was Meatless Mondays and even wheat, in the same, was Wheatless Wednesdays. And yes, she then had the idea, famously, to close the grounds of the White House, which were still at that time open to the public's access, and to allow sheep to graze its lawns. The wool that grew that season was then sheered and auctioned off, with the proceeds going to the American Red Cross.

Teri Finneman (15:55): The contributions of Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II could fill an entire podcast, if not an entire podcast series on its own. So, when you were researching her, what did you find to be the most notable of everything she did?

Tom Balcerski: That's right. Eleanor Roosevelt, of course, our longest serving first lady, is a subject onto her own, and the Roosevelt administration really can be thought of as first dealing and tackling the Great Depression and then fighting World War II. So, I did focus on Eleanor Roosevelt's time as first lady since the start of fighting in Europe and even from the very outset of fighting in 1939, she began to assist in her husband's preparedness campaigns and even into 1941, before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, she had taken on a role, a formal role, in the government as the assistant director of the Office of Civil Defense, where she was focusing on community preparedness for what she, quite rightly, determined would be an attack on American soil that came not too many months later.

Tom Balcerski (16:55): After war was declared on Japan and then Germany, now we're into 1942, she is now going to have an entirely different assignment. She is still writing her column, she's still giving her radio addresses, she's still doing sort of some of the same types of things that she had in her kind of quieter, more peaceful days as first lady, but now she takes on a whole new portfolio.

She takes on the physical travel for the first time overseas to very much the front, whether that be in Europe or in the Pacific, and she will do so over an incredible series of trips that cover tens of thousands of miles in 1942 and again in 1944 she will visit troops. She will inspect American bases. She will actually make these formal inspections that has consequences for the base commanders and the armies there.

(17:51) She did so in the face of public criticism that some thought she was sort of stepping outside of the role that first ladies and the spouses of American presidents should take on. She did so all the same and really in the process expanded what a first lady could do during the war.

Teri Finneman: Moving on to Vietnam, Lady Bird Johnson had the difficult task of serving as first lady during an unpopular war that not only included protests of her husband but also had two of her sons-in-law serving. So, how did she navigate this war as first lady

Tom Balcerski: The Vietnam War, perhaps more than any conflict during the 20th century, had divided the United States of America. There had been anti-war protests in World War I. There had been anti-war movements, less so in World War II. Similarly, there was some backlash to Korea after the conflict emerged, but the Vietnam War truly spawned a division or schism that America, in some ways, has been recovering from ever since.

The Johnson administration, Lyndon Johnson's political career is derailed by the Vietnam War. So, it's interesting that Lady Bird Johnson – on the whole, a public-facing, a significant first lady, arguably the most significant in terms of policy and public-facing activity since Eleanor Roosevelt – was very hesitant, I would say, to speak on the subject of the Vietnam War.

(19:23): She would sometimes receive questions from her public appearances, from the audience, from crowds that would, you know, say what about Vietnam, and she would tend to ignore them. But we are fortunate as historians that, like her predecessor, she was a very perceptive and regular observer of goings on in Washington and the White House, and she kept a diary during her time as first lady. And so, from these private records, which she publishes not long after her time as first lady, we see that she is also grappling with the significance of the Vietnam War and of her husband's leadership through it. She really was concerned that the conflict presented a challenge to her husband, who ended up having to become a wartime president almost against his own best sort of inclinations and interests.

(20:13): But there's times, too, in the journal where she could see she's sort of excited about what this war could mean and what it could mean in the fight against communism, and she's very much caught up in the same rhetoric and ideas that politicians at the time generally were.

As the fighting continues into 1966 into 67, we see her two daughters, Luci and Lynda, and their two marriages to their husbands, Pat Nugent and Charles Robb. Both have now wartime realities change. Both husbands, Nugent and Robb, will be in the military during the war by 1968. Robb, Charles Robb, actually goes to Vietnam for active combat duty, and there was not any deferment or special treatment given to him or by that, for that matter, other presidential children. That's the case also for Eleanor Roosevelt, but she does reflect a little bit in her diary much more personally now about this strange feeling she's – that overcomes her and seeing her now daughter and her son-in-law being sent off to the front like so many hundreds of thousands of soldiers have before her.

(21:23): Only then, in that year, 1968, to truly face the public anger over the Vietnam War, and this is where the peak of the anti-war movement comes to a head. For Lady Bird Johnson, it meant her speeches and her public appearances had to be much more carefully curated and selected to try to find venues that would not make her talk about whatever the subject – she was passionate about so many domestic and social issues – into a peace protest. But she could not control one very famous moment and conflict with the actress and peace activist Eartha Kitt, who came to the White House again for an unrelated event and took that opportunity to speak before Lady Bird and to Lady Bird about the disproportionate impact of the Vietnam War on African American men.

(22:13) And in the actual event – of which there's eyewitness accounts as well as Lady Bird's own a record in her diary after the fact – she responds as honestly and openly and with her usual composure and fortitude to Eartha Kitt and said that she just hoped and prayed there would be a just and honest peace, a phrase that again echoes the political rhetoric at the time about how the Vietnam War should and could end, and that she also believed that it does not mean that the social programs that had been part of her husband's Great Society should stop. So, she also was very much for fighting crime in the streets, for better education, and for better health care for the American people, all programs that had been so much on the table just a few years earlier, and the crowd responded with applause in that moment, really appreciating how she responded to Eartha Kitt.

(23:04) So, the diaries come out two years later. It's still pretty raw and very much present issues. The Vietnam War continues beyond the Johnson administration. But in her final analysis, it's her love of country that seems to stand out and she, I think we realized, was a true patriot and ultimately a believer in her husband and the war effort.

Teri Finneman: Moving into the 1990s, Barbara Bush played a significant role spending time with troops during the Gulf War. How did she perform the role of wartime first lady?

Tom Balcerski: So, Barbara Bush is another one that, again, in a way, looks like a Lady Bird Johnson. We're very much now into the modern first lady position. There is some more evolution between the Johnson administration and George H.W. Bush, but Barbara Bush takes the very, rather short conflict, which we call the Gulf War, the First Gulf War sometimes, the liberation of Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion of it in 1990, Barbara Bush takes that conflict and makes the most of it, and in the process again changes how first ladies should behave and respond during wartime. She will visit troops at home and abroad. She will speak to military families directly at gatherings, and she will again use the available resources as spouse to the president of the United States to put her on the field of action.

(24:32) She will voice her opinions about Saddam Hussein, who was the leader of Iraq that initiated the invasion of Kuwait. She’ll call him a dreadful man, so she's wading in to the political situation as well, and once Operation Desert Shield, which was the sort of onset or kind of buildup of American troops over in the Middle East to then prepare for the liberation of Kuwait, once that gets underway, she will go to Saudi Arabia where most of the bases and troops were stationed and spend the Thanksgiving meal very famously wearing the fatigues, the camo fatigues of a trooper or a soldier, and she's there sharing, talking, and then later writing to the parents of servicemen and women about their – about how they were faring. So, there's a kind of echo as well to a Mary Todd Lincoln.

(25:22) She went to military audiences around the nation during the months of 1991 where the conflict was still happening. She gave about 39 speeches over a very short period of time. It's almost a speech a day, and by February, after the conflict had ended and the American-led coalition had expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait as part of Operation Desert Storm, she's now rallying the troops into a kind of victory celebration. And she takes on a role that again, in this whole creative way of thinking of “something in chief,” well, now we think of her as a kind of comforter in chief during the Gulf War. And so, I think Barbara Bush was a big reason why the Bush administration reached an incredible 91% approval rating at the end of the war.

Teri Finneman: And then, of course, most people today still remember Laura Bush's role supporting her husband's administration during the War on Terror. What did you find most interesting when doing your research on her?

Tom Balcerski (26:21): Laura Bush, again being the daughter-in-law of first lady Barbara Bush, being the spouse of George W. Bush, son of H.W. Bush, is very much sort of there as part of the Bush family, and the Bushes are a close-knit, large family and George W. was absolutely being groomed, you might say, for politics, and I think Laura reluctantly embraces that path for her husband. And so even after his election to first governor and then president, she wants to kind of stay true to her roots as a librarian, as an educator, and a champion of literacy and child education.

So, September 11, 2001, is a turning point for the nation and also in the life of Laura Bush, the first lady. She actually was scheduled that very day to appear at a congressional briefing before, fittingly, the Senate Education Committee about early childhood development, but from that day forward, her entire world changes.

(27:20) The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, The Pentagon, and then ultimately the aborted attack on the nation's capital, that of the plane that crashes in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, meant that the nation was under siege, and Laura Bush, at this time, now realizes her world has changed with her. But she, like her mother-in-law, like Barbara, was in a position to do something, and she felt that, at that moment, she needed to take on a new kind of portfolio and a new cause.

And so, by November, after the United States had invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to pursue Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization, she takes on a new role as an advocate for the plight of Afghani women and in a presidential first or first ladies first, she delivers the weekly presidential radio address and makes the plight of Afghani women her focus.

Tom Balcerski (28:14): She didn't know how it would land. She didn't know how American women would respond to this situation, and if they would provide solidarity and support, and to her surprise, she receives overwhelming support, and it's really from that point forward that Laura Bush becomes one of the great advocates for the – we might call it the nation-building project that takes place in Afghanistan.

She wanted to visit Afghanistan as soon as she could, and in the second Bush administration, she's able for the first time to go there in March of 2005. She meets with American soldiers who were in Kabul and particularly with Afghani women whose lives had been changed dramatically by this new nation-building effort and this new democratic government that had come into power in Afghanistan.

(29:04) She'll make two additional visits to the nation – again in 2006 and finally 2008 – and it's in that last visit that she really is taking on almost a diplomatic role that she's delivering public remarks alongside the new Afghani President Karzai and supporting his administration and American support to the Karzai government in the region. That’s something that's new, where a first lady is really, really serving in this kind of supporting our allies mode. And so Laura Bush is like Lady Bird Johnson before her: has a deeply unpopular war, not so much in Afghanistan, but in Iraq.

The second Gulf War, as it's called, the United States War in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power, to pursue what was purported to be weapons of mass destruction in the nation, brings her into direct conflict with many who in the American public wanted to prevent this war from happening, and in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, again first lady Laura Bush is attempting to kind of keep things in the domestic sphere and in her normal kind of programming around literature and education as normal, but the protests were evident enough that she had to actually cancel an event that was supposed to be about poetry, and instead she said she would not want to have a literary event turned into a political forum.

So, I think, actually, what I learned is that Laura Bush is far more politically savvy than we may have taken credit – given her credit for. She is not just a satellite orbiting around her husband, but an active participant in his foreign policy and even in his political fortunes in his reelection campaign in 2004, where she appeared at the Republican National Convention to give a speech for her husband.

Teri Finneman (30:54): Overall, why do you think studying first ladies matters?

Tom Balcerski: Well, the study of first ladies as a whole is deeply significant to American history. They are right alongside with the presidents as some of the most important, significant, and powerful people in the nation at any one time. They can affect policy changes and cultural and social changes with whatever program or cause they take up. But it's I think their nexus or intersection with war that we see first ladies having a kind of role that is unusual and extremely important to these major events that shape American history.

She, as first lady, has held down the fort as we've seen with – we didn't talk about her, but Dolley Madison during the War of 1812 and certainly future other first ladies that have sort of kept things going on the home front while their husbands were away, and that could be applied to Martha Washington.

(31:52) They visited troops. They supported military families. They have again offered their own children and relatives to the cause and thus set an example for the nation. They've made personal sacrifices to their home and their livelihoods at either the White House or back home. They've been there supporting American allies, whether it be in person, in print, or on television and radio. They've been there at moments to calm the nation, as Eleanor Roosevelt did after Pearl Harbor and Laura Bush did after 9/11, but I think most importantly is that they are literally the person most directly sustaining the commander in chief.

They are there every, every day, every hour of every day, in some cases, literally holding up, propping up, supporting emotionally and physically, the president of the United States in one of the most solemn and important duties that he has and that is having to be a leader during wartime.

Teri Finneman (32:48): Okay, well, thanks so much for joining us today.

Tom Balcerski (32:51): Thanks for having 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.