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 me she was a femme fatale. she lured wilson into a second marriage when his wife was barely dead. she was a lady macbeth. kind of throne manipulating him when he had a stroke. i hear more now that she was a racist family of slaveholders a lover of robert e lee and she was anti-feminist because she didn't want to a constitutional amendment for women to have the right to vote next please. what i've discovered is a much more complex. it is wilson. wrote a book on woodrow wilson for a series on the presidents i discovered a wilson. i didn't know very romantic very emotional very deep feeling i'm discovering. who edith really is i'm working with molly on her book and like first lady's memoirs. her memoirs fascinating and that third picture there on the right. i've been to the library of congress and i've read her papers, especially edith's papers when she was trying to put this memoir together, and i've learned a lot from all of this next please. i'll write my first point. you can't understand edith wilson if you don't understand woodrow wilson's attitude towards women. this is a very sensitive topic now if i say wilson women most people will say like that wonderful picture. i found these kaiser wilson he was against the constitutional amendment giving the women the right to vote at least for a long time. he was president. this makes you think that wilson is a kind of dour figure who hates women doesn't want them to succeed has has nothing to do with them or nothing too good to say about them. quite a discovered. nothing can be farther from the truth. i can't think of another president for whom women were so important. they were his advisors his counselors from the time. he was a little boy with his mother all the way up through having the wives and children. he looked at women as intelligent supportive and he needed there not just their adoration not their support, but he needed them working with him when he was a a student when he was a professor and then he he was president next, please this is just a short list of the women who played a key role in his life from his mother all the way up through edith. the wilson comes through most of his biographies is again dower dark sigmund freud wrote a horrible portrait of him as a woman hating a kind of a man worshiping person again. nothing could be farther from the truth all of these people in his life mattered to him and he turned to women for counsel help support and especially once he was president both of his wife's first ellen and then edith out. we're closer to him than i have to say. they were advisors. they were helpmates. i this might be a stretch but sometimes i think of them the way maybe valerie jarrett was in the white house helping obama. they did a lot more than the typical things. you would think of a woman should do in that position. and that includes, you know again being a supporter helping with speeches. they even helping make policy decisions and edith is going to fit right into this this need and this love wilson has of women next please. which he becomes the first lady she does again. it happens right after wilson's wife has died. he meets her through his through his doctor. she's brought into the white house. she's a washington widow to help margaret wilson and help helen bones the cousin who are brokenhearted wilson falls in love with her and immediately even before they're married. she begins to help him. i'm not saying make policy decisions, but she listens to his troubles. she listens to a speeches and she begins to help him crafting a lot of his ideas of the two amazing things she will do when she's in the white house. the first one is she's the decoder. she will decode and code all the secret messages going back and forth to europe and world war one and she will also handle thing called the box. wilson put all of his papers from everybody who needed a decision and a box on his desk at night. he'd read through them. he type up his answers. she was right there with them again. she always said i didn't formulate policy, but he certainly bounced ideas off of off of me next please. it's october 1919. wilson has a stroke and the nation is in a crisis. these are the men i could think of who are in a crisis of either illness or assassination and they had a few days a few weeks a few 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 totally sound from a stroke, but he was physically weak. what should have been done think of yourself you be edith wilson and you try to figure out what would you do at this time? what if you were wilson's daughters? what if wilson had had a son and something like this had happened? what should have been done to help this president? next please. she makes a decision. she makes a decision and this is the second thing i've discovered about her. she takes on the role of chief of staff. her role of chief of staff is almost identical. to the definition of chief of staff that you can find in chris. whipple's book the gatekeeper where he shows how hr haldeman created this role in nixon's presidency. that's exactly what edith wilson was doing 50 years before it's wilson's doctors who encourage her to keep continued doing what she did before sitting with wilson and helping to make decisions or that just watching and make decisions. she decided yes, i'll do what they're recommending. i'll every everything will come to me first if it's something that a department or senator can decide i'll send it back if wilson must decide it. i will type it up in a tabloid form. i'll show it to him and make the decision. i'll make sure the decision is implemented. again it she never used the term gatekeeper. she never used the term chief of staff but when you read her against what's coming 50 years down the road, that's exactly what she did next, please. next. okay. why did she do it? to save her husband did her doctors. tell her if he has something to live for. meaning the presidency he'll survive, but she also believed completely in his agenda, which was to stop republicans like henry cavillage who were out to destroy both what he wanted on an international stage of a national stage. they lost the fight for the league of nations. they lost the fight for the treaty of versailles, but they tried and she also said he made two more important decisions that are forgotten when she was a chief of staff. he he. stopped all leases for oil and government land. he said that's going to lead to corruption which it does in the next presidency. he also vetoed the volstead act. didn't want prohibition his his decision was overridden, but he kept trying to do the progressive things. he thought were necessary things like keeping the doors of immigration open, and she said if if i can serve in this position to help him win his agenda, then that's what i'll do next, please. i would recommend his story and don't just look at edith wilson. don't just look at hr hallman who will come up with a real chief of staff physician. look at people in the next 50 years who did a similar thing to her and judge her against them or evaluate her very creative role. she played against them. there was another woman in under fdr who acted as a chief of staff again de facto informal and that's missing a hand especially in his second term. she was a gatekeeper. she helped to push so much legislation through but we think of her. okay two minutes. i see it. we often think of her as well. she was this is what she wore. this was the dress wasn't she a bubbly person? no, she was a chief of staff next, please. might be a stretch but there was a relative in the future who stepped in a crisis to act as an acting chief of staff as robert kennedy who stepped in after the bay of pigs and became the real gatekeeper and counselor somebody jfk could trust performing a similar role to what either did next please. i think the person she was most like i would compare to admira william leahy, especially in fdr's final year in office. fdr was sick much much sicker than wilson was and he he helps make major decisions about the president's for the president that critical final year of office again doing the same thing. informally he's considered a great hero, but edith is often suspect for what she did. next please. my final thing i'll wrap this up fast. she dismisses everything she does she dismisses it. i didn't do anything that important. i didn't do anything that critical. i just stepped in like maybe any wife would any first lady would know she created a role which is going to become much more important as a 20th century goes on historians have dismissed her i learned about this dismissal say that writing tablet. she filled up writing tablet after writing tablet with her memoirs and out of that will come her her autobiography next please. an inner autobiography. she's under immense pressure to prove her femininity. this is the most shocking thing. i learned about all the kind of the publicity materials for publisher. you keep saying you're feminine you keep saying, you're just a good sweet woman. to be chief of staff you've got to be tough. so she's always in this position of denying what she did. we we still i think has historians followed that instead of saying what does she do to be a real leader at a critical time in american history? next please. my two final slides i began to realize that there's a rhetoric to the chief of staff position and i learned this because again, i'm working with molly who was a professor of rhetoric and she's putting together this great book and first ladies a memoirs. and i began i read chris whipple's book again. there's a big book and william leahy the big peter baker's book on james baker on jesus staff and i began to hear this. that's a manly job from manly man working from manly president and aren't all these guys great because there's such men like linebackers protecting a quarterback or like bouncers throwing a drunk son of a bar this damage. is then our view of edith because she has to be a woman. she has to be just first lady that she stepped in in the in the breach of a terrible tragedy and kept wilson's presidency going at least for a year. i think if she was a man she'd be admired for like you saying to she had been thomas woodrow wilson jr. that probably be great books about her right now. maybe we can sunday get past that idea that a chief of staff is a manly thing and we see it as a position of helping the president my last slide, please. this is a famous picture. i've always seen it but and when historians write critically about her that she was this lady macbeth behind the throne kind of telling the drooling woodrow wilson what to do. this is in her memoir. she was proud of this picture. she said no, this is me. this is 1920. i like to think he's be towing the whole stud act right now. she thought it was this helpmate, but still there's that quality of a she shouldn't have been doing this this person behind the throne next please. take a look at this picture. we would never ever think anything negative about james baker james baker secretary. i'm sorry james baker in his role as chief of staff for reagan and i think the bushes he was there to help not to in any way get in the way of reagan. he was in there to make sure that his his agenda was fulfilled and then and then he was the gatekeeper to do that. my theory is edith was the first two whether you thought think she should do it or shouldn't have whether we will see her like again, probably not with a 25th amendment and the anti-nap autism act, but she was a much more important person maybe than we 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'll 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 and i will say i came to edith wilson. i've got a biography of her coming out next year because i've written a couple of books about suffrage and whenever i gave talks about suffrage people ask me about edith. there is some narrative out there that maybe she was whispering in wilson's ear to make him finally reluctantly support the 19th amendment just totally untrue. she was as mary said against federal suffrage, but there is this notion out there that she was you can call her lady macbeth, you know some kind of manipulative power behind the throne and if you don't think that of her you think she is this sort of country bumpkin who didn't have much education who won the presidency the president's heart because she was so pretty who had no business holding the power that she did when wilson had a stroke and let's be clear. she did have no business holding that power right? no one elected edith to anything and whether she did it well or not. it's 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, i think everyone is so surprised that this lovely little edith wilson. took on a role like that. is that she very much wanted it that way. she cultivated this image of herself as this extremely feminine extremely background person who was just doing everything she could to support her very brilliant husband and her memoir while fascinating it's not always true. she says some things are embroider some things or leave some things out that are demonstrably wrong. and so she very very much curated her image as this feminine helped meat as opposed to as a strong ambitious person so we could all be forgiven forgetting her wrong, but the truth is if you do just a little bit you shouldn't be surprised by what she did at night in 1919 at all. she telegraphed over and over and over again. what kind of a person she was starting from her childhood and with phil 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, but her grandmother was formidable. terrifying in some ways and edith was the sixth of nine children seven of eleven born six of nine surviving. so she was in the middle of a pack of this big family that had come down in the world after the civil war they lost their plantation and moved to this storefront in with phil, virginia, and she was this grandmother's favorite and so even though she didn't have a lot of formal schooling which is not unusual for a woman of her class and status and time period she did she was educated. she wasn't pumpkin and she or her grandmother bowling her mother's her father's mother very much taught her to trust her own confidence and trust around 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 which were who were deep into the cult of true womanhood about you know, don't let your back hit the back of the chair and be submissive and pious at all times. so edith, i think a lot of the conflict we see later is that she was actually this confident strong grandmother bowling believed her to be but she had to pretend she was this feminine help me that her mother wanted her to be and that's i think the under without psychoanalyzing her too much the underlying story of edith a lot. so she's in with film. she goes to school twice neither was a huge success after her second year of school. she wanted to go back but at that point she had three younger brothers who were due to go to school and there wasn't enough money to educate a daughter. so she goes to washington here. i'm sitting in washington dc right now because one of her older sisters had married a man named alexander gold. so she gets to washington in 1890 and 1890 washington was gilded age booming. it was a really interesting place to reinvent yourself if that's what you wanted to do, and she did so she didn't have any money, but she had social status and she had enough of a sort of veneer of sophistication that she was at the opera all the time and she met interesting people and she learned to be fashionable and she became what she thought she wanted to be and she ended up marrying a man named norman galt her sister. her sister's husband's cousin picture, please. this picture is from this time period i love this picture because she's so confident. she's so beautiful. she's so just owning who she is and 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 bootstraps, you know american dream that she would have been given credit for if she were a man