Swain Susan - First ladies: leading presidential historians on the lives of 45 iconic American women

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Swain, Susan.

First ladies : leading presidential historians on the lives of 45 iconic American women / Susan Swain and C-SPAN.First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61039-567-0 (EB)

1. Presidents spousesUnited StatesBiography. I. C-SPAN (Television network)II. Title. III. Title: Leading presidential historians on the lives of 45 iconic Americanwomen.

E176.2.S84 2015

973.09'9dc23

2014047710

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

I get by with a little help from my friends

C-SPAN is directing any royalties from the sale of this book to the non-profit C-SPAN Education Foundation, which creates history and civics teaching materials for middle and high school teachers and students.

CONTENTS

T his book is an outgrowth of C-SPANs special yearlong history series, First Ladies: Influence and Image produced by our network between February 2013 and 2014.

During this series, each first lady had her own ninety-minute program (although certain early first ladies had only a segment within a program), generally featuring two historians/biographers as guests, with video and photographs from places associated with her life. Each chapter in this book has been crafted from the interviews with these programs featured guests. Our goal with this book is to present a collection of expert opinions in those experts own words. To achieve this, our interviews have been transcribed and then excerpted in a style consistent with many prior C-SPAN books. Questions have been omitted to achieve a conversational essay style. The transcripts were minimally edited in an attempt to preserve the individual voices and perspectives of our interviewees. As we edited, we took care to remain faithful to each contributors original meaning. Brackets and ellipses were used where words or phrases were, respectively, added or deleted within paragraphs. An extra space between paragraphs in an essay signals that we pieced together non-sequential portions of the program in order to more cohesively tell the first ladys story.

The chapters presented here are long excerpts from our programs about the first ladies, but we did have to make choices about what to include. In keeping with C-SPANs public affairs mission and our commitment to providing the public with the entirety of the programs we produce, the complete videos and transcripts of every First Ladies program in our series are available online at www.c-span.org/firstladies.

F rom Martha Washington to Michelle Obama, most of the forty-five women you will read about in this book are famous because of the men they married. Nonetheless, many of the significant moments of our American presidents lives were affected in no small measure by the contributions of their wives.

Martha Washingtons tending to her husbands Continental Army troops and her skills at diplomacy helped George Washingtons effort to successfully fight the British, setting the stage for his presidency. Abraham Lincolns frontier style was polished by well-bred Kentuckian Mary Todd, who encouraged Mr. Lincolns political aspirations even after his initial electoral defeats. In the early days of the twentieth century, Helen Taft actively lobbied President Theodore Roosevelt for her husband Wills advancement to the White House, even though its commonly held that he preferred his eventual position as chief justice. By agreeing to marry him, widower Edith Galt lifted the spirits of the deeply grieving widowed president, Woodrow Wilson, as a world war loomed. And more recently, in the Johnson household, Lyndons political aspirations were greatly supported by Lady Birds business prowess. All of these presidential couples are framed in the public consciousness as partners, yet the life stories of the presidents tend to become the stuff of legends, while their wives stories, and their contributions to American history, are much less well-known.

This is the reason why, for the better part of a year, from Presidents Day 2013 through February 2014, C-SPAN took on the task of adding greater dimension to the biographies of the first ladies with a special series called First Ladies: Influence and Image, which I was privileged to host. This book is an outgrowth of the television series and both are unique in offering this wonderful collection of insights by fifty-six of the countrys top contemporary authorities on first ladies.

A word on what you are about to read: the chapters in this book are not capsule biographies of the first ladies. Drawn from edited transcripts of our television interviews with our first lady experts, the chapters use the narratives of our contributors to add humanity and color to the basic facts of the first ladies lives.

You will discover in this book several big themes that cross the generations of women who have occupied the White House. One is the frequent loss of presidential children, tragedies which struck first ladies Martha Washington, Mary Lincoln, Jane Pierce, Ida McKinley, Grace Coolidge, Jacqueline Kennedy, Barbara Bush, and others, reminding us that even those who live lives of relative privilege cannot escape the limitations of contemporary medical knowledge.