my name is nancy keegan smith, and i'd like to welcome you as flares vice president to tonight's program. thank you to our partner american university school of public affairs who has been so supportive of our endeavor. and to our flare institutional members writer university white house historical association, massachusetts historical society the gerald r ford presidential foundation and our two newest institutional members the national first lady's library and the center for presidential history at southern methodist university. i programmed tonight is called taking a new look at edith wilson and should be a fascinating discussion of edith's influence on the role of first lady. the panel moderator is dr. catherine sibley professor of history and director of the american studies at saint joseph's university. panelists in order i think our doctor mary stockwell retired professor of history and department chair at lords university who writes on the american west 20th century politics and especially woodrow wilson. our second panelists will be rebecca roberts curator of programming at planet word a museum of words and language in washington, dc. and our third panelists will be dr. stacey cordray who holds the dentists and von johnson endowed chair in theodore roosevelt studies at dickinson university in north dakota here. more biographic information on each panel is available on the flare website at flair-net.org. we will be taking questions at the end of the program, which should be email to first ladies 2021@gmail.com. now with great pleasure. i turn over the the program to my friend and scholar dr. catherine sibley. thank you so much nancy what a lovely introduction of our exciting panel this evening, and it's so lovely to have you all here. thank you so much for coming and it is my great pleasure to open up with our first presenter. who is dr. mary stockwell, and i'm so excited to hear what she has to say about edith wilson. thank you all. all right. thank you. my slides there they are. thank you so much. um, thanks for inviting me. thanks for everyone at flair. thanks also to the rosie the support technical support. thank you. let me say i wish i could say a lot about edith wilson, but what i want to do tonight is simply to kind of give you some of my overview my first insights and then make three points about it that i have found fascinating next, please. i don't know if you have had this experience about edith wilson, but when i talked to her about people that i'm writing about her a woodrow wilson, i often get hit with a negative response. i say she's got what i call negative charisma. there are some people in history no matter what you do. you can't quite bring them out of darkness. they seem to be always. uh, there's something there that's mysterious and dark i mentioned i've got to mention alexander hamilton one of my favorite people when i was growing up people thought terribly of him. no matter what you said. you couldn't see anything nice spot hamilton. thanks to lynn manuel miranda who's brought him out of the darkness now and he's a great heroin america. but i and unless edith gets a musical. i don't know if it will ever happen for here's what people tell thanks to lin manuel miranda, who has brought him out of the darkness now. he is a hero in america. unless edith gets a musical, i do not know if it will ever happen for her. here's what people tell me, she was a femme fatale, she lured wilson into a second marriage when his wife was barely dead, she was a lady mcbath behind the throne, manipulating him when he had a stroke. i hear more now that she was a racist, a family of slave holders, a she was a lady macbeth behind the throne, manipulating him when he had a stroke. i hear more now that she was a racist, a family of slave holders, a lover of robert e. lee, and anti feminist because she did not want a constitutional amendment for women to have the right to vote. next, please? well i have discovered a much more complex edith wilson. i wrote a book for woodrow wilson for a series on a presidents, i discovered a wilson i did not. emitonal and deep-feeling. i am discovering who edith really is. her memoir is fascinating, and i've gone to the library of congress and read her papers. so far as i've put this no more together and learn a lot from all of this. next, please. all right, my first point, you cannot understand edith wilson if you do not understand woodrow wilson's attitude towards women. this is a very sensitive topic, if i say wilson and women most people will say, like that wonderful picture, that he is kaiser wilson, he was against the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, at least for a long time when he was president. this makes you think that wilson is a dour figure who hates women, does not want them to succeed, has nothing to deal with them or nothing good to say about them. but, i have discovered nothing could be further from the truth. i cannot think of another president for whom women were so important. they were his advisers and counselors from the time he was a little boy all the way up through his wives and children. he looked at women as intelligent, supportive, and he needed, not just their adoration, not just their support, he needed them working with him when he was a student, when he was a professor, and when he was president. next, please. this is just a short list of the women who played a key role in his wife. wilson comes through most of his biographies as dour, dark. sigmund freud wrote a horrible portrait of him as a woman hating, man worshipping person. again, nothing could be further from the truth. all of these people in his life mattered to him, and he turned to women for council, help, support, and especially once he was president. both of his wives, first ellen and then edith, were closer to him than they were advisers. they were helping, this might be a stretch. sometimes i think of them the way valerie jarrett was in the white house helping obama, they did a lot more than a typical thing she would think a woman should do in that position. that includes, again, being a supporter, helping with speeches, even helping make policy decisions. edith is going to fit right into this need, and this love wilson has of women. when she becomes the first lady, again, it happens right after wilson's wife has died. he meets her through his doctor, she has brought into the white house, she is a washington widow, to help margaret wilson and the cousin who are broken hearted. wilson falls in love with her and before they are even married she begins to help him. i'm not saying make policy decisions but she listens to his troubles, his speeches, and begins to help him craft a lot of his ideas. the amazing things she will do when she is in the white house, the first thing, she is the decoder. she will decode and code all the secret messages going back and forth to europe in world war i. she will also handle a thing called the box. wilson put all of his papers from everybody who knew latest sitting on a box on his desk. at night he went through them, he would tape his answers, she was right there with him. she always said he was someone to bounce ideas off of me. next, please. in october, 1919 wilson has a stroke, the nation is in a crisis. these are the man i can think of, who are in a crisis of either illness or assassination. they had a few days, weeks, hours to live, i also thought of zachary taylor who had five days to live. nobody had really been in a position like wilson, where he was mentally sound from a stroke, but he was physically weak. what should have been done? think of yourself. be edith wilson and figure out what you would do at this time. what if you are wilson's daughter. one of wilson had had a son and something like this had happened? what's should have been done to help this president? next, please. she makes a decision, and this is the second thing i've discovered of her. she takes on the role of chief of staff. she took on the role of chief of staff, it is almost identical to the definition of chief of staff that you can find in the chris whipples book, the gatekeeper, where he shows how h.r. haldeman created this role in nixon's presidency. that was exactly what edith wilson was doing 50 years before. the doctors encouraged her to do exactly what she did before. sitting with wilson and helping him make decisions, just watching him make decisions. she decided, yes, i will do what they are recommending. everything will come to me first. if it is something that is department or senator can decide i will send it back. if wilson must decided i will type it up and i will show it to him. he will make the decision, i will make sure the decision is implemented. again, she never used the term gatekeeper, she never used the term chief of staff. but, when you put her against what is coming 50 years down the road that is exactly what she did. next, please. why did she do it? to save her husband, the doctors tell her he needed something to live for, meaning the presidency, he will survive. she also believe completely in his agenda. he wanted to stop republicans like henry lodge who are out to destroy what he wanted on both a national and international stage. they lost the fight for the league of nations, they lost the fight for the treaty of versailles, but they tried. she also said he made two more important decisions that were forgotten when she was the chief of staff. he stopped all leases for oil on government land, he said that is going to lead to corruption, which it does in the next presidency. hey also veto the volstead act, he did not want prohibition. his decision was overturned but he kept trying to do the progressive things he thought were necessary. things like keeping the doors of emigration open. he said if i can serve in this position to help him win his agenda that is what i will do, next, please. i would recommend historians don't just look at edith wilson or the chief of staff position, look at people in the next 50 years who did a similar thing to her, and judge her against them or a evaluate it very creative role she played against them. there was another woman under fdr who active as a chief of staff. again, de facto, informal. especially in his second term, she was a gatekeeper, she helped to push so much legislation through. two minutes, i see it, we often think of her as well. this is what she wore, this was her dress, she was bubbly person. no, she was a chief of staff. next, please. it might be a stretch, but there is a relative in the future who stepped in in a crisis as an acting chief of staff. robert kennedy stepped in after the bay of pigs and began the real gatekeeper and councilor, somebody jfk could trust. performing a similar role to what edith did. next, please. i think the person she was most like i would compared to admiral william leahy, especially in fdr's final year in office. fdr was much sicker than wilson was. he helps make major decisions about the presidency, for the president in that critical final year of office. he is doing the same thing, informally, he is considered a great hero but edith is suspect for what she did. next, please. my final thing, i will wrap this up fast, she dismisses everything she does. she dismisses it, i did not do anything that important, i did not do anything that critical, i just stepped in like any wife would, any first lady would, but she created a role that has been going to become much more important as 20th century goes on. historians have dismissed her. i learned about this, you see that writing tablet. she filled writing tablet after writing tablet with her memoirs and out of that will come her autobiography. next, please. in her autobiography she is under immense pressure to prove her femininity, this is the most shocking thing i learned about all the publicity materials for the publisher. you keep saying your feminine, you keep saying you're just a good, sweet woman. to be chief of staff you have to be tough, so she is always in this position of denying what she did. we still, as historians, follow that instead of saying what did she do to become a real leader at a critical time in american history? next, please. my two final slides. i began to realize there is a rhetoric to the chief of staff position, i learned this because, again, working with molly who is a professor of rhetoric. she is putting together this great book on first ladies and their memoirs. there's a big book on william leahy, peter baker's book on james baker as a chief of staff. i began to hear it is emailing job for manly man, a manly president. all of these things are great because they are such man. like linebackers protecting the quarterback. they are like bouncers throwing drugs out of a bar. this land damages our view of edith because she is a woman. she has to just be the first lady, she stepped in the breach of a terrible tragedy and kept wilson's presidency going for at least a year. i think if she was a man she would be admired for it. had she been thomas woodrow wilson jr. she probably would have had great books about her. the chief of staff is a manly thing, we see it as the position of helping the president. my last slide, please. this is a famous picture, i have always seen it when historians write critically about her. that she was this lady mcbath behind the throne. kind of telling the drowling woodrow wilson want to do. this is in her memoir, she was proud of this picture. she said this is me, this is 1920, i like to think he's vetoing the volstead act right now. she thought of this as helping but still at the quality of she should not be doing this. this person behind the throne. next, please. take a look at this picture, we would never think anything negative about james baker, james baker, i am sorry, james baker in his role of chief of staff for reagan and the bushes. he was there to help not to get in the way of reagan. he was there to make sure that his agenda was fulfilled. he was the gatekeeper to do that. my theory is edith was the first. whether you think she should do it or should not have, whether we will see her again but probably not with the 25th amendment and the anti nepotism act. she was a much more important person than we give her credit for being. >> thank you, thank you so much for that really enlightening presentation. and, now, it is my pleasure, and keep your questions in your heads because you will get a chance to ask some questions later on. now it is my great pleasure to introduce rebecca roberts, who will continue our discussion of edith wilson, thank you. >> thank you so much, i will say i came to edith wilson, i have a biography of her coming out next year because i have written a couple books about suffrage. whenever i give talks about suffrage people ask me about edith. there was some narrative out there that maybe she was whispering in wilson's ear to make him finally, reluctantly support the 19th amendment which is totally untrue, as mary said she was about against federal suffrage. there is this notion out there that she was, you can call her lady mcbath, some kind of manipulative power behind the throne. if you do not think that of her than you think she is this sort of country bumpkin who did not have much education, who won the president's heart because she was so pretty. who had no business holding the power that she did when wilson had a stroke. let's be clear, she did have no business holding that power, no one elected edith to anything. whether she did it well or not, it is still, or whether she had good intentions or not, it was still unconstitutional, and probably not the best thing for the office of the presidency. but, as mary said, one of the reasons everyone is so surprised that this lovely little edith wilson took on a roll like that is that she very much wanted it that way. she cultivated that image of herself as this extremely feminine, extremely background person who is just doing everything she could to support her brilliant husband. her memoirs, while fascinating, is not always true. she says an embroidery is some things, we have some things out that are demonstrably wrong. she very much curated her image as this feminine person as opposed to the strong, ambitious person. we should be forgiven for getting her wrong but if you do a tiny bit of research into edith you shouldn't be surprised of what she did at all. she telegraphed over and over again what kind of person she was. starting from her childhood in virginia, this is a picture of her on the back porch of the family house, where she was in charge of caring for her grandmother's canaries, which she absolutely hated. her grandmother was formidable, terrifying in some ways edith was a six of nine children. seven of 11 born, six of nine surviving, she was in the middle pack of a big family. after the civil war they lost their plantation and move to the store front in whitfield, virginia. and she was this grandmothers favorite. and so even though she did not have a lot of formal schooling. which is not unusual for a woman of her class and status, and time period. she was educated, she was not some bumpkin. her grandmother, her father's mother very much taught her to trust her own confidence and trust her own gut. and bolstered this idea that she was capable, and that she was independent. there was a conflicting message from her other grandmother and her mother, herself, who were deep into the cult of true womanhood. do not let your back hit the back of the chair and be submissive and pious at all times. i think a lot of the conflict we see later is that she was actually the strong confident person her grandmother believed to be, but she had to pretend that she was this feminine help me that her mother wanted her to be. i think that is the underlying story of edith she is in whitfield, she goes to school twice, neither was a huge success. after her second year of school she wanted to go back but she had three younger brothers who were due to go to school. there was not enough money to educate a daughter. she goes to washington, i am in washington d. c. right now, one of her older sisters had married a man. she goes to washington in 1890. in 1890, washington was gilded age booming. it was an interesting place to reinvent yourself that is what you wanted to do, and she did. she did not have any money but she had social status and she had enough of a veneer of sophistication that she was at the opera all the time, she met interesting people and learned to be fashionable. she became what she thought she wanted to be. and she ended up marrying a man named norman galt. her sisters husband's cousin. and, next picture please. this picture is from this time period. i love this picture because she is so confident and beautiful. she is just owning who she is. i think of, and this is from the 1890s, this is edith becoming herself. getting out of her little appalachian town and becoming herself. on her own, to a large degree. as mary said, if she were a man this would be a very different story. including the up by your boot straps american dream that she would have been giving credit for if she were a man. she has shown that she can grab an opportunity. she has shown that she can be sophisticated. she marries norman galt, it is not a love story for the ages. he is secure and in his fuss budget way, he adores her but she thinks he will do just fine. and then, they have a nice life here in washington. they have one child who does not survive more than three days, and then no more children. she becomes a woman about town, next picture. she becomes the first woman in washington to get a drivers license. she tooled about town in what she called her electric run about which was sort of a golf cart with a tiller, top speed of about 13 miles an hour but a symbol of independence. she,