First Ladies (29 page)

Only the servants and a few friends were on hand to greet the Tafts when they arrived at the White House, but their accounts emphasized that the new president and his wife reacted very differently. Helen remembered that as soon as her eyes lit on the presidential seal, she immediately thought, “and now that meant my husband.”
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William was more sanguine, and according to separate accounts of two of the servants, he threw himself into a chair and said, “I'm President now and tired of being kicked around.”
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William Howard Taft's discomfort in high political office and Helen's zeal to achieve perfection in her role had an effect on both their lives, more disastrous for her than for him. His weight, always on the
rise when he was feeling dissatisfied with himself, rose to 340 pounds, the highest in his life, and necessitated the installation of a new bathtub. Helen, then forty-seven years old, suffered a stroke two months after the inauguration, impairing her speech so severely that she had to work for the next year to relearn how to form sounds. Newspapers described Helen as suffering from a “nervous breakdown,”
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which kept her away from the White House during the summer of 1909. For several months after she returned to Washington in October, she made only token appearances that did not require her to speak.

Missing the social events constituted the least of Helen's regrets—she could rely on her sisters or her college-aged daughter to substitute for her—but her illness necessitated her absence from important decisions of her husband's administration. One Taft biographer, who admitted to assuming “speculative privilege,” pointed to the irony of the situation. “Seven months after the election, it was [Helen] not her husband who proved unable to handle the stress … [and] the dramatic ironies multiply when it is remarked that she—his prod, his alter ego, his voice—lost the power of speech and became totally silent just when he needed her most.”
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Judith Icke Anderson concluded that Helen's absence gave William a chance to be “his own man” and that he acquitted himself remarkably well. Although he feared that historians would judge his a “humdrum” administration, he believed he had performed well enough. When the split within the Republican party promised to end his presidency after only one term, he wrote to his wife that he was content to retire “with the consciousness that I have done the best I could…. I think you and I can look back with some pleasure in having done something for the benefit of the public weal.”
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President Taft's inclusion of his wife's accomplishment along with his own is not remarkable. Well before he took on the country's highest political office, national magazines had spoken openly of her influence on her husband. In its March 1909 issue, the
Ladies' Home Journal
informed its readers that the new First Lady had a touch of domesticity and a healthy respect for the arts but was most remarkable because of the mentor role she played for her husband. Her “intense ambition” had helped propel him into the job and she remained his “close confidante.” “Had it not been for his wife,” the
Journal
readers learned, “Mr. Taft would never have entered the Presidential race.”
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In the beginning of his term, she sat in on important discussions, justifying her presence by claiming to keep him awake. She accompanied him on political forays and golf outings. One acquaintance characterized
their relationship as resembling that of “two men who are intimate chums.” Helen's demurral that her “active participation in [her] husband's career came to an end when he became President” rings a little false in light of so many descriptions to the contrary.
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Helen lost little time in taking charge at the White House. Unlike Edith Roosevelt, she did not care for the company of women and she dispensed with the meetings of cabinet wives. If given the choice, and as First Lady she was given her choice on many things, she preferred staying close to the center of power rather than being shunted off on a peripheral social mission. She had frequently complained that on campaign trips her husband was “taken in charge and escorted everywhere with honor while I am usually sent with a lot of uninteresting women through some side street to wait for him at some tea or luncheon.”
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While Edith Roosevelt had proceeded as confident administrator, keeping herself aloof from the details of White House management, Helen involved herself in every tiny matter. She insisted that her vigilance could save money. The Roosevelts had attempted economizing but had judged it inappropriate to try saving anything from the president's salary or living allowances. Helen Taft harbored no such reservations. Since the chief executive's salary had just been increased from $50,000 to $75,000, she resolved to budget carefully so that $25,000 could go into the family's personal bank account. Like most of the objectives she set for herself, she succeeded in this one and accumulated $100,000 dollars during the four-year term. Her zeal during the first two years alone resulted in an $80,000 nest egg which the president bragged to his aide was a “pretty good sum.”
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New economies were effected by revolutionizing the running of the White House. A housekeeper replaced the steward because Helen decided that “no man, expert steward though he might be, would ever recognize [what needed to be done].”
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Elizabeth Jaffray, the woman hired, insisted that she had not set out to obtain the White House job, but “this rather outspoken, determined [Helen Taft]” was very convincing and Jaffray found herself “swept into the position.”
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Later, Jaffray had further opportunities to witness the First Lady's commanding presence when orders came down for comparison shopping to economize and for the scrutiny of every expenditure.

The celebration of their silver wedding anniversary in 1911 gave the Tafts another opportunity to appreciate a material gain. Helen dispatched invitations to four or five thousand people (she could not recall the exact number), and although some of her friends thought gifts inappropriate, she saw no reason to discourage generosity. The
response was overwhelming. One White House employee confessed that he had not known so much silver existed in the world. The head of U.S. Steel, Judge Elbert Gary, who hardly knew the president, sent a silver tureen reputedly two hundred years old and worth $8,000. A congressman's wife described the rather bizarre party scene in which one guest, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, took center stage in her “electric blue suit, flesh colored stockings and gold slippers, [kicking about and moving her body] sinuously like a shining leopard cat,” while other guests made “
sotto voce
inquiries” about how much each had “put up” for a gift.
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The president attempted to head off criticism by ordering that none of the gifts go on display, but Helen showed much less embarrassment and treated the presents as money in the bank: later she attempted to have the Taft monogram erased on one piece so that she could recycle the silver as a gift for someone else.
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While Edith Roosevelt's influence on her husband had been quiet and private, Helen Taft's was rather publicly documented. Early in their marriage he had called her his “dearest and best critic … worth so much to me in stirring me up to best endeavor,”
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a description she took every bit as seriously as he. Her contemporaries commented repeatedly on her competitive nature, and one biographer later reinforced their conclusion that “without her ambitions, [William Taft] would probably never have become President.”
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Although she did not include cabinet meetings in those she attended (as Rosalynn Carter would later do), she stayed close by the president's side whenever political discussions occurred in social settings. One aide reported that Helen supplied her husband with names and numbers he forgot, and during parties, whenever “some important politician took the President aside for a private talk, they would always be joined by Mrs. Taft as soon as she realized the situation.”
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Helen made no secret of her differences with the president, and she announced that she would serve wine at White House dinners although “Mr. Taft does not drink.”
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Personnel decisions interested her particularly and she frequently based her judgments on subjective or irrelevant considerations. One visitor overheard her countermanding her husband on an important nomination, because she found the individual in question “perfectly awful and his family are even worse. I won't even talk of it.”
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She engineered the recall of an American ambassador to France, a man judged by Theodore Roosevelt as the most capable in the service,
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because he had slighted her on her honeymoon in London more than twenty years earlier. Easygoing William Taft confided to his friends that he would have forgotten the whole matter and let the man remain at his post but Helen proved less forgiving.

The complexity of Helen Taft's association with her husband's administration is hinted at in her memoirs where she refers to William as “Mr. Taft,” except in the presidential years when she frequently switches to “my husband.” She did not relinquish the White House power base without a fight. Suspecting that Theodore Roosevelt wanted to reclaim the presidency in 1912, she pushed her husband to fight hard for the party's nomination.
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When Theodore Roosevelt accepted the nomination of the Progressives, thus splitting the Republicans and guaranteeing a Democratic victory, William Taft noted that Helen was too pleased with her correct evaluation of Theodore's motive to worry much over losing the election.

Thus, Helen Taft's stint as First Lady ended after only one term. Her illness had rendered her far less effective than she had planned and her one permanent contribution to the capital was a cosmetic one, although not insignificant. During the years she spent in the Orient, she had become fond of Japanese cherry trees and she saw no reason why they could not survive in Washington's climate. She arranged for the planting of several thousand, thus providing for one of the capital's biggest tourist attractions, the annual spring blossoms.

Helen Taft had engineered her flight from Ohio many years earlier and she had no intention of going back just because her husband had lost an election. After a period in New Haven where William taught classes at Yale Law School, the Tafts returned to Washington in 1921 when he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court. Even after his death in 1930, she remained in the capital. When she died in 1943, she was buried beside him in Arlington National Cemetery, the only First Lady to be interred there at the time.

In escaping the limitations imposed on the wife of an Ohio judge, Helen Herron Taft journeyed around the world more than once and to a place at his side at the top of American political power. However, she never put much effort into helping other women engineer easier escapes. Like other First Ladies before her, she refused to take a public stand in favor of woman's suffrage and never supported reforms for her sex in general. In 1912, President Taft appointed Julia Lathrop to head the newly formed Children's Bureau, but there is no evidence that Helen influenced this first appointment of a woman to such a post.
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The only Taft daughter, Helen Taft Manning, compiled an entirely different record. Raised partly in the Philippines and in Washington where she received considerable attention as a cabinet member's daughter, the younger Helen chose the privacy of an academic life
and the satisfaction of a career of her own rather than a share in her husband's. After being graduated from Bryn Mawr, she earned a doctorate at Yale and then published in the field of British colonial history before taking a job at her alma mater, first as dean and then as history professor. She expended considerable energy in achieving female suffrage, and while her mother had complained of being isolated with “a lot of uninteresting women,” Helen Taft Manning worked most of her life in a women's college.

The women whom the elder Helen Taft sought to avoid may have been considerably less schooled and less stimulating than the ones whom her daughter met a generation later. Education and leadership opportunities had begun to widen, and more women felt confident to voice their own opinions. First Lady Taft's role in that change should not be neglected because, for all her faults, she introduced a stronger model in the White House. She made no additions to the First Lady's staff, but by abolishing the cabinet wives' meeting and inserting herself in more substantive discussions, she showed her disapproval of a limited “woman's sphere.” If her influence was sometimes petty and unfair, it should be pointed out that she, like other women of her time, had often been confined to taking control over small matters. She worked with what she had.

The degree to which a more substantive, less purely social role for the president's wife was becoming common rather than exceptional is apparent in the brief tenure of Woodrow Wilson's first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson (1913–1914). Although she lived little more than a year in the White House and was seriously ill much of that time, she took a prominent leadership position in housing reform and had her name attached to the slum clearance bill that Congress passed at the time of her death. That such a reticent woman, who admitted she was more interested in painting than in politics, should have been drawn into a major reform effort suggests that it would be difficult for any woman in her place to withdraw completely from a public role.

Woodrow Wilson's presidency (1913–1921) coincided with the dropping of many barriers against women in politics. In 1912, the summer his fellow Democrats chose him as their standard-bearer, Jane Addams, the settlement leader, stood up at the rebellious Bull Moose Convention to second Theodore Roosevelt's nomination for a third term. In 1917, Jeannette Rankin, a thirty-seven-year-old former teacher and social worker from Montana, broke Congress's old tradition of no women members when she took her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In August 1920, near the end of Woodrow Wilson's
second term, Tennessee ratified the nineteenth amendment. Overnight millions of American women acquired exactly the same power at the ballot box as their husbands and brothers.