As with much of womens history, her story is generally relegated to second tier when talking about her husband, so it is a pleasure tonight to have william hazlegrove here to share his expert perspective and thoughts on her contributions to history. His new book is a look at her role after wilson suffered his debilitating stroke. This latest book is just one of 13 of his books. After his talk books will be , available to purchase and im sure he would be happy to sign them. Please be sure to connect with us through our website and social media so we can keep you uptodate on our Upcoming Events and exhibitions. We will be opening our latest exhibition on october 28. It is called evolving elections. It looks at the 1916 and 2016 elections. Which we will all be glad his history some. One of our most popular events, vintage game nights, is coming up. Please ask any of the staff who is here on how to get involved. Without further ado, william hazlegrove. [applause] mr. Hazelgrove thank you for coming and for the National Trust for letting me speak here. I want to start with an overview and then we will go through the story, i will probably talk like i write, i just go off. Lets start there. Burns had an interesting quote in his book thats really threw me, which was that edith wilson was almost the president. Is a fairly conservative historian. I thought it was a strange thing to say. He went on. I will read a little bit from the book. Insisting she never made a single decision on public affairs, ms. Wilson failed to acknowledge the commanding nature of her role. In determining the daily agenda and formulating arguments she , executed the physical and most of the mental duties of the office. He went on to say that edith wilson did not become the first female president as some asserted, but she came close. She considered herself more a lady in waiting to her husband than an executive. She was in a position to act where he can only react. I thought it was a very strange thing for him to go off to say. That set me off to the papers of Woodrow Wilson. First thing i started to notice, i thought would approach it like this how ill was Woodrow Wilson . , you would have to have a power vacuum to take over the presidency. Ive read lots of secondary sources. I Read Everything i could find on it. The range went from one end to the other. Some people said he was very sick, but some people said he recovered after six weeks which simply was not true. Dr. Weinstein talked about him, this is the last time i will go back to this book. And a biographical history, he writes the symptoms indicate that wilson suffered an occlusion of the right artery which resulted in paralysis of the left side of his body. And loss of sensation on that , i know iematoma botched that. There was a loss of vision in the left field of both eyes, clear vision only in the half field of his right eye. Wickedness of muscles on his left side and tongue and learned accounted he had difficulty swallowing and impairment of speech. He was severely setback by this stroke. We had a situation where the sitting president in 1919 has a severe stroke. Edith wilson has only been married to him for five years, has two years of schooling, and is at the center. The doctor basically tells her, youre the one who can step in. He was a leading neurologist at the time. There was only answer for someone who had a stroke or a heart condition, and that was the rest cure. It basically told people, going to your house, live your life as an invalid and hopefully nature will heal you. So, the doctor turned to edith and said, listen, he is only going to heal if you take over, and no stress reaches them. If he gets stress at all, he will die. Wilson is confronted there with a choice. He knew she had worked with wilson, we will get into that more. Take over the presidency, or your husband will die. Adding to this, Vice President asked aboutnd even this what about Vice President marshal . The wilsons saw him as sort of lowbrow. His famous quote was what we really need is a really good cigar, which we still need. [laughter] mr. Hazelgrove they did not tell him about wilsons stroke. It said, nobody is going to mention this again. The doctor was also at the center of this. He put out press releases on wilsons health. We had a lot of things about the health of the president recently, but the thrombosis that Woodrow Wilson suffered from we now have beta blockers and other things that can help, for wilson it was called nervous exhaustion. In the United States, everybodys job depends on who remains in power. The men around edith told her that she was the person to do this. So, it began after that. The question comes to us, who was edith wilson . Was she a singular person, a remarkable person who could rise to the occasion or someone caught in an extraordinary situation . Edith is a southern girl and came from the south after going to school for two years. Her schooling stopped after that. She had a grandmother who filled in the blanks and a very literate father. Her brothers went to school. She was stuck in woodville and wanted to get out. So, she married a guy named norman galt. He was older. I dont think it was a very intimate relationship. They think that it was her way to get out. He had a Jewelry Store in baltimore. Norman died at one point, and edith stepped in. Again, this is very interesting, because, early in her life, she was confronted with death on a very large scale. In one year, her son died, her baby, her husband, and her fatherinlaw died. Edith had a choice at this point. Most people told her, take the Jewelry Company and let it go. She decided to keep it, hired two people to run it, and took no salary. It was failing and severely in debt, and she brought it back. At this point, edith is becoming a woman of means. She is in her 40s, she buys an an automobile. She was the first woman to get a drivers license in the district of columbia. She was a progressive woman of her time. She started traveling. One day, she was out, and we will cut over to Woodrow Wilson at this Woodrow Wilsons point. First wife had died, and he and dr. Grayson were motoring along, and they went by edith and Woodrow Wilson asked who she was. Grayson tells him, and they arrange a meeting. At this point, the last thing edith wants to do is become involved with a president. They go to the white house and have a dinner, and we still have an image of Woodrow Wilson as a very austere man. He was a president of princeton. He seemed cold and aloof. But, in fact, he was more of a victorian lover. That is the best way i can put it. More like a poet. There is a great quote that says , a sentimentalist is someone who hopes things will never end and a romantic is someone who that they will. Woodrow wilson was like that, he had severe depression. So, he met this vivacious woman. He really loved vivacious inactive women. And active women. Edith was cultured but did not have a lot of weight. Wilson loved women with wit. They were intellectual equals. Ellen would have women over to the house to banter. He asks edith to marry her with in the first year. She says, your wife just died. Absolutely not. He continues and start sending her love letters. This was the texting, if you will, of the time. A number a very of very salacious love letters. He keeps having her picked up and they go for drives. He literally, at one point, goes to bed, because she says no to him. Scholars differ on this, wilson went to bermuda three times and it was curious that he never took his wife. When i was reading about him, i wondered why he didnt take his wife. His wife told him he needed to go to bermuda and relax. Mark twain was there, other bohemian types. And mary pack was there. She did not care about her husband, she was a flapper, and very witty, and wilson was smitten with her. This happened three times. Three times, he went to bermuda her about running for president and she told him he should do it. Historians are divided as to what happened, but ellen wilson said that mary pack was the only unhappiness he ever caused her. When it wilson was entertaining edith wilson had eight righthand man, in unofficial advisor, someone who had no real title. Wilson liked that, to have people who did not have official titles. This man let it be known that the letters were out there, and they could be sold to the press. Wilson freaks out and sends grayson to tell edith. Wilson goes to bed. He thinks his girlfriend is done with him. Edith writes him a letter and says, im going to stay with you. Dont worry about it. Wilson is so, i guess, uptight about the situation that she has to go to the white house and and tell himf bed that, yes, she will marry him. We see this sort of victorian lover who goes up and down and has wild mood swings. Sixmonths later that he never opened her letter. He didnt want the bad news. However, they got married. I say this lightly, but they are sort of the clintons of their time. Wilson did a strange thing with edith from the beginning. He included her in everything. He would send her topsecret papers as they were dating. She would write him back and say, i appreciate the love letters, but i really like those state papers. They are interesting. She is deciphering topsecret code for him. The fact of the matter is, edith wilson was the first person to know that world war i had ended because she deciphered the code. What does this do . This sets up what i would call the edith wilson presidency in a remarkable way. Up until then, no first lady had this sort of role. It did not exist. Wilson saw his wife as not only his lover but also his confidant, his advisor. He took all these roles and put them in one. Edith wilson was a person who had a very natural curiosity. She was a quick learner who learn by doing. She took all this information , and she was very opinionated. When wilson fired a man because he thought he was a pacifist, she told him that he was a traitor and he should get rid of them. Wilson was taken aback and said, you can hate better than anybody i know. She could hold a grudge. She was a very strongwilled woman. They would go golfing. They loved to take drives. They are doing all of this code deciphering. Lets go to the league of nations. The war ends, and they have the treaty of versailles. Wilson decides hes going over there to negotiate the end of the war. And he decides hes bringing his wife. Again, edith had already butted heads with house and some other advisors. She was slowly putting herself in as the main person. If you read other histories, people describe a nefarious variousibe all these motives to edith. They say she grabbed power. I dont buy any of that. But she was a person who was very strongwilled. She had the president s ear. His other unofficial advisers took a backseat, and they knew it and did not like it. They go over there to negotiate the piece. The peace. Wilson has a series of strokes while they were over there and it is kept quiet. The stress is incredible. This is a man that deals with hypertension by just laying down in dark bedrooms with wash rags on his face. They had no beta blockers or anything. If you had hypertension, you are expected to not do anything. You are expected to lay around. So, he comes back with the league of nations as his raison detre for the war. This is going to be the way you can look at americas mothers this is why your son died. X basically said that if one country attacks another country, all the other countries will go against that country. Henry lodge was heading up the republicans, and he hated wilson. He could not stand him. He had beaten Teddy Roosevelt in the last election who was his best friend, and he thought wilson was arrogant. He was paradigm. Two arrogant men who hate each other for being arrogant. He had determined the league would be a failure, and he started to immediately water it down. Wilsons premise was, i negotiated this. I cannot go back on what i did. He realized that lodge was not going to budge, and he made a fateful decision to go on a was. Go on a tour. Convince the American People that this was the right choice. He made that fateful decision to go on a whistle stop tour to convince the American People about the league of nations. It is 1919, and he is on train without airconditioning. He has hypertension and heart and artery problems. He is on this grueling tour. He is outside public, colorado and it is hot. He has a preamble to his massive stroke. Edith sees him with his head against the chair, he cannot feel anything in his left arm, he cannot hold his razor because his hand trembles. The doctor says, it is over. You have to go back. So, they go back to washington. When they get back, he seems to improve a little bit but the next night edith hears the sound and she goes up and the president of the United States is laying on the tile floor, blood coming out of his ears, he is out. It was a massive stroke. This is where edith begins. I want to go to her governing style at this point. Now, we are back where the doctor tells her you have to take over. You can do this thing. Her governing style is one of access. If president ial powers were a river they went up to the president s bedroom and she diverted it. Nothing was getting to him that was stressful. This is where you have multiple people giving different views of what really happened to the president. Hoover was very blunt. He said that the president just looked dead. He went in many times and thought that he was dead. He was essentially out. Edith began to meet people from the cabinet outside the door. If it was a problem she could readily solved d solve, she would write a note and said that the president would deal with this when the president is better. You would see these in the paper quite a bit. Her handwriting was a sort of childlike scrawl, and she was very sensitive about it. This is one thing the wilson relatives did not like in the book. Said her handwriting was childish. But you could see that the handwriting of wilson changed. People have said that she would take his hand or not and sign things. As a bill came to the president and it was not signed and he did not do anything for seven days, it became a bill anyway. You have a family who is overwhelmed. You have a lot of kids, the dog is barking, you do the best you can. The white house was locked down. The curtains were pulled. Traffic was diverted away. Wilson is upstairs. No one has really seen him should seen him. Edith is taking correspondence. Remember, we are in the age where there was no internet or fax, people wrote letters between departments. All the correspondence was coming in with no one to deal with it. Edith would literally look at it and decide what was essential and nonessential. The pile of nonessential grew until the 1950s when it was discovered in the National Archives. Tons and tons of letters were not open. She said, i will deal with this , and i will not deal with this. It was access. She would go in to the president and asked him, what do you think of this . If he could respond, he would respond and give her an opinion and she would take it back. But you had a little table set up outside his bedroom where she would meet with cabinet members. In the book, it is sort of a hodgepodge of things she was trying to do as best she could. During all this, a strange thing was happening as well. The suffragettes. But they were out there every day outside the gates. They were chained to the gates. They would flash these eight s under theirsign skirts. They were jailed, wilson did not want that to happen but they were. Some went on hunger strikes, and there was terrible press. Alice hall was a woman who was very radical in her approach. She drove wilson crazy. While edith is up late decoding, she said she would step every stay up late every night to try and get the business of the white house done, the suffragettes are out by the gate trying to get the vote. It is interesting that africanamericans have the vote almost 50 years before, and in 1919 a woman still not have a vote. History sometimes screams out at you. There were a lot of people suspecting edith was running the white house, and one senator especially did. He stood up one day and said that edith was running the white house and demanded to see the president. They knew the jig was up a little bit. There was talk of impeachment. So, they said, ok, you can see him. They dimmed the lights, they covered him up, and put covers over his left side. They put a report on the situation in mexico by his bed so he could access it. Edith was in the room to take notes. And the senator came in. The press was also speculating, and this was the moment of truth. The senator goes in, they talk, ask questions, wilson pulls it together and makes the right answers. At the end, the senator says, i am praying for you. Which way, act, senator . But it worked. It calmed people down in congress. At this point, wilson has improved some. They get a coney island chair , because he cannot sit up in a wheelchair. They get a coney island chair and modify. They set it up for him to be able to sit in the south portico and put blankets around him so when the cabinet members would meet, they could see him out there. Then they started to do a strange thing with the president. Wilson liked to watch movies. They had a guy coming from the theater who brought his projector. Wilson did not like any sound, so there was no accompaniment. Wilson would sit in the red room, they would take out the rugs, and put a big sheet from the lincoln bed on the wall and show him movies. He liked westerns. Sometimes he would get upset if there was too much action. Sometimes he passed out. One time, the guy showing the movie swore he was dead. He told edith that the president had expired, and then edith nudged him and he sort of came back to life. This was part of his routine. There is a Norman Desmond quality to it, because he started to show movies from his own administration. When he went over to paris to negotiate peace, they took movies of him using newsreels. So, he would have those put on. You have to imagine, here is this broken man watching himself at the pinnacle of his power with all the world cheering. Think of this, the white house is essentially empty now. No one really comes into it, and the press is pretty much kept away. There are very few visitors, and traffic has been diverted away. It started to feel more like a hospice. Edith is a prisoner, as well. She is devoted to him, but she cannot leave either. Then, they started to do things with the garage. They had a big limousine that wilson loved that weighed four times. They would prop him up in the c