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Edith Wilson: The First Woman President? |
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If you’re looking for inspiring Democratic presidents before FDR, I’m afraid you’re in for some real disappointment. Clearly we need to judge politicians partly according to the realities of their own times, but I have deeply mixed feelings about someone like William Jennings Bryan (who probably would have made a better president than McKinley). And with Woodrow Wilson, my feelings aren’t even mixed: Wilson’s despicable record on issues of race and segregation and his ineffective, meddling foreign policy are enough to sink the man’s legacy in my eyes.
But Wilson’s second wife, Edith, is another story. The say that behind every great man is a great woman - it turns out that sometimes you find impressive women behind not-so-great men as well.
Wilson met Edith not long after the death of his first wife. The fashionable and independent Edith, widowed herself since 1908, was known for driving herself around Washington and shrewdly managing her own financial affairs.
After a brief courtship, the couple married at the end of 1915. As First Lady, Edith took a remarkably active role. At her husband’s side during a presidential campaign, a war, and an illness, she put aside many traditional hostessing duties and concentrated on helping manage Wilson’s affairs, acting as secretary and even handling classified information. She participated publicly in fundraising and volunteer efforts during wartime, and joined Wilson on two official visits to Europe after the conclusion of the war.
It was after Wilson’s stroke in 1919, however, that Edith took on real power. Historians debate the extent to which she made important decisions, but many have felt that she was nothing less than acting president. In any case, she tightly controlled access to her husband: “She screened all papers, business and visitors and for a time almost no one saw Wilson except Edith.” Edith denied that she handled anything more than routine administration, preferring to use the term “stewardship” to describe her role. However, the evidence suggests that Wilson was tremendously weakened by the stroke, and even if Edith only decided what matters reached him, that in itself constitutes tremendous power.
Beyond that, she influenced the affairs of Cabinet and various appointments.
When the Secretary of State Robert Lansing conducted a series of Cabinet meeting without the President, the first being in October 1919, Edith Wilson considered it an act of disloyalty and pushed for his replacement with the more acquiescent Bainbridge Colby. Wilson requested Lansing’s resignation in February 1920. As her husband began partially to recover, she also guarded access to him from advisors and other political figures. When Republican Senator Albert Fall was sent to investigate the President’s true condition, Edith Wilson helped arrange Wilson in bed to be presentable and sat through the brief meeting, taking verbatim notes.
In September 1919, Edith Wilson refused to have the U.S. accept the credentials of British representative Edward Grey who had been sent by his government to aid in the push for ratification of Wilson’s League of Nations unless Grey dismissed one of his aides who was known to have made demeaning jokes at her expense.
Some historians have sharply criticized Edith’s management, suggesting that she made a terrible presidential crisis even worse. But it doesn’t seem like she did a worse job than Wilson himself, who again made a number of awful decisions. And certainly the country was in better shape at the conclusion of Woodrow’s - or Edith’s - presidency than it was at the conclusion of Republican rule twelve years later.
From the vantage point of today, Edith Wilson reminds that the struggle for women’s equality in America hasn’t proceeded in a straight line. There was space for some elite women to have real power, at least behind the scenes, well before the feminist movements of the 1960s. And regardless of where you place her on the continuum from “helpful secretary” to “acting president,” Edith Wilson showed remarkable backbone and initiative during a real crisis.
I hope one day we’ll have a woman president in the US. But it’s also important to remember the contributions that women have already made, throughout our history, up to and including at the highest levels of politics.
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