 Thank you so much for being here for this talk with the National Archives Foundation. I'm Rebecca Boggs Roberts. My new book is called Untold Power, the Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson. Edith Wilson was Woodrow Wilson's second wife. She married him in 1915 near the end of his third year in office. His first wife had died in 1914. And if anyone knows anything about Edith Wilson, it's that in 1919, when Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke and was unable to complete all of the duties of the office, it was Edith Wilson who stepped in and she decided who met with him, she made decisions, she drafted public statements, and she kept the extent of his illness a secret from almost everyone, including the President himself. That's really not her whole story. It can't be anyone's whole story. And if you are surprised that Edith Wilson took on that role for herself when she faced it in 1919, then you really weren't paying any attention to her before that. She showed again and again that she was the kind of person who would take things in her own hands, even if it was an avenue she had never gone down before, even if it was a world that was somewhat unfamiliar to her. She had confidence in her own abilities and she just kind of figured it out. And I first got interested in Edith Wilson because I've written a couple of books on suffrage and I was giving a lot of talks about suffrage, especially in the year before the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. And regardless of who I was talking to or what venue I was in, someone would always ask me about Edith Wilson. There was some narrative out there in the world that Woodrow Wilson might have changed his mind and supported the 19th Amendment because she whispered in his ear, because she told him to. It's completely wrong. She was anti-suffrage. He really only changed his mind for reasons of electoral math. But the questions were so predictable that I started looking into Edith Wilson to be able to answer them more accurately because I knew I'd get them. And when I started following up on her story, I just became fascinated by who she was and the role that she played. So who was she? Let's start with her childhood. She was born in Withville, Virginia, Withville's in the southwest corner of Virginia. This is a picture of her at age three. She looks really grouchy. My working theory is she was grouchy because she's wearing pants. It is the only picture I've ever seen of Edith Bowling, Gull Wilson, when she's not beautifully dressed. Her maiden name was Edith Bowling. She was actually descended from Pocahontas, a descent that her family took very, very seriously. She outlined it generation by generation in her own memoir. And it was sort of a signal that her family's ancestors had been in Virginia since earliest colonial period and descended from literal royalty in the form of Princess Pocahontas. But by the time Edith came along in 1872, the family was not especially fancy. They lived in this house in Withville, Virginia, and it still exists. I actually took this picture from the roof of the hotel across the street. The building on the very far right is not part of it. If you can see, there are storefronts on street level and then one level of living quarters. And then that third level is actually a false gable. That's not a real story. The other thing you can see from this picture is how close the mountains are, right? This really is the foothills of Appalachia. So in that funny little warren of rooms on that second store above those storefronts was Edith and her siblings. She was the sixth of nine kids, her parents, both grandmothers, an aunt, a couple of cousins, and that was the permanent residence. Then there were always people visiting, overstaying their welcome. Her father was a judge in town, there were law students around. It was crowded up there. And Edith easily could have gotten lost in the shuffle. But she had a grandmother who singled her out. This is her grandmother bowling. Grandmother bowling was a little terrifying, actually. She kind of ruled the roost from this rocking chair throne. And that item on the back of the rocking chair is the tan skin of a dead dog. It's very gothic and weird. And grandmother bowling was telling Edith that she was special, that she was smart, that she should trust her own opinions, and she deserved to have the confidence that she innately had. Meanwhile, her other grandmother and her mother's mother and her mother and herself, actually, were indoctrinating the daughters in that ideal womanhood of the Victorian Southern era. So they were telling the girls they needed to be submissive and pious and pure and domestic. So Edith was getting these conflicting lessons from her earliest days. And I don't want to spend a lot of time psychoanalyzing somebody 150 years after their death, or their birth. But I do think that those competing grandmother lessons can explain a lot about Edith, that she was really much more naturally inclined to the confidence and the trust of her own opinions. But she was being told that she had to appear pious and domestic. And so she was often cloaking her own confidence in these ideals and pretending that she was not as smart and strong as she was. But she was those things. And in fact, one of the first things she did was get out of Withville. This is teenage Edith. She moved here to Washington, D.C. She had an older sister who was married and living here in town, and Edith came to come visit her in 1890. So 1890s Washington was really booming. It was the Gilded Age. The city was adding all kinds of population, but also really kind of going on a public works binge. So the streets were being paved, streetcar system, lighting, trees. And so a lot of wealth was coming into the city to take part of that Gilded Age boom. It became actually as fashionable to have a winter house in Washington as it was to have a summer house in Newport. And Edith, young, beautiful Edith, caught the eye of a man named Norman Galt who ran Galt's Jewelers. This is the interior of Galt's Jewelers. It was the high end jewelry and silver store here in Washington and had been here since 1800, since Washington was really more or less a construction site. Norman Galt sounds like a perfectly nice guy. He was 12 years older than Edith. He was a little fussy, maybe a little humorless, maybe a little uptight, but he was awfully smitten with her and he was very kind. And she in her memoir dismisses Norman in about a page and a half. She just moves very quickly right on through their marriage, but he was security and he was status because he ran this high end business. And they did have one baby that didn't live beyond three days, so they were childless. But they enjoyed a life of some status and privilege. They bought this house on DuPont Circle. The left side of this duplex was theirs. Not huge, but very elegant in a fashionable neighborhood. And when Norman died in 1908, he left Galt's to Edith. So she inherited a successful business and was able to keep it herself. His father was dead. His brother was an invalid. They had no children. There was no man in the picture to challenge her independence in running Galt's. So she became a woman of unusual status in 1908. She had her own money and she had control over it. And because she was a widow, she didn't need a chaperone. And because she had no children, her time was her own. And she was really good at it. That wealthy woman-about-town role was something that she really enjoyed. She went to Europe every year. She was always beautifully dressed. And she became the first woman in Washington to get a driver's license. She became known for tooling around town in this little electric car. These electric cars, top speed 13 miles an hour, were marketed to women because they were a lot cleaner and less noisy and difficult than gas cars. They even had bud vases on the dashboard to make them more feminine. And if you can see in this picture, she's steering it from a sort of tiller apparatus there from the bench seat. And it was something that Mrs. Galt was known for in other memoirs of the time. People mentioned Mrs. Galt zipping around town in her little electric car and the crossing guard at the corner of Pennsylvania and 15th when she had to go from her Dupont Circle House to her Pennsylvania Avenue store, he would always wave her through no matter what the pedestrians were doing. So that's who she was when she caught the eye of the president. She was this wealthy, independent, beautiful woman of means and status. She was 42 the year that she was first introduced to the president. And she said she wasn't going to marry again. She turned down a few suitors. She wasn't particularly interested in changing the life that she had fought for, the life that she had imagined back in Withville. She was enjoying it and was not necessarily looking to give it up necessarily. So meanwhile, Woodrow Wilson, who had first been elected in 1912, this is his family, from the left there, daughter Margaret, first wife Ellen Wilson, daughter Nell, daughter Jesse, and the president. He was elected in 1912. Ellen died in 1914. And by all accounts, he really was heartbroken. They had been married over 30 years and these daughters had, two of them had gotten married. Nell and Jesse got married in his first couple of years in the White House and moved out. Margaret was trying to be a singer. And so she was embarking on a nationwide tour trying to build a career. So she wasn't around. So he was kind of rattling around alone in the White House. And he was brokenhearted and he had really counted on Ellen as a confidant. And he missed her terribly. And he missed his daughters. And his doctor, Kerry Grayson, was worried about him. He was depressed. And Kerry Grayson was a good friend of Edith's. Kerry Grayson was courting a woman named Alice Gertrude Gordon, known as Altrud, who was a very close friend of Edith's. And Edith sort of participated in their on again, off again, roller coaster romance. And so it was Kerry Grayson who came to Edith at the beginning of 1915, just a few months after Ellen Wilson died and said, I want you to come to the White House and make friends with them. They're lonely. The only person left at the White House doing any sort of first ladying was Helen Bones. Helen Bones was Woodrow Wilson's cousin. She's on the left of this picture, Kerry Grayson in the middle, Nell Wilson McAdoo, the youngest daughter on the right. They're at the races in this picture. And he said, make friends with Helen Bones. She's stuck in that White House. The president is depressed. Go be friendly. And Edith said, no, I don't want any part of federal Washington. That's not my world at all. And Grayson said, you don't need to be part of federal Washington. They're there in mourning. There's no federaling to be done. Just go be nice. And so Edith befriended Helen. They would regularly go for walks in Rock Creek Park and then they'd go back to Edith's Townhouse and DuPont Circle for tea. And one day Helen insisted that they go to the White House for tea instead. And that was surprising. They had never gone to the White House for tea. And Edith was really hesitant to do that because her boots were a mess. They had just been walking in the park. And Helen insisted. She said, we won't see anyone. You can take the elevator up to the private quarters. And we will just have tea and don't worry about your boots. It's a total setup. Edith goes to the White House, muddy boots and all. They take the elevator up to the private quarters. The elevator doors open. And who's there but the president and Kerry Grayson. They all have tea together. It seems like the president was smitten more or less at first sight. He really did fall in love with her from the moment those elevator doors opened. And I'm going to pause sharing for a minute to talk a little bit about their courtship. So the reason we know he fell in love at first sight is because their love letters survive. So throughout the year of 1915, they wrote to each other daily, sometimes twice a day. And his letters somewhat surprisingly for Woodrow Wilson's reputation as an intellectual snob and a sort of moralistic Calvinist, his letters are quite racy. They're very romantic. They are at times even a little steamy. And as a historian, you don't always get that unvarnished look at someone's personal presentation. These private letters are curated for an audience of one. They're not expecting me to be reading their mail 100 years later. And so Woodrow Wilson really showed a very deep romantic streak in these letters. And from the very beginning, he's telling her perfect and wonderful and beautiful she is in every way. Even more interesting, considering this is a woman who had never had anything to do with federal Washington, in fact had resisted federal Washington, her letters from the very beginning are asking about politics, wanting to know more about politics. So he proposed marriage five weeks after they met. She turned them down. She felt like they needed to get to know each other better, but agreed to keep seeing him, hoping maybe, you know, she could catch up. And literally the day after that first proposal, he wrote her a letter that was just on and on about my heart breathes for you and you're the ideal woman. She wrote him a letter back saying, you know, I kind of want to go back to one of the things we were talking about last night. Do you really think William Jennings Bryan is going to resign as Secretary of State? If he does, who do you think is going to take his place? Maybe you should consider nominating me. This is before women could vote nationwide. This is a woman who has never been involved in politics whatsoever, playfully, kind of half playfully suggesting herself as Secretary of State should William Jennings Bryan resign. And that mood sort of kept up throughout the spring of 1915. He would write a gushy-gushy letter about I want to kiss your eyelids, and she would write back, hey, what's going on with the Karanze government in Mexico? It really feels like there's a rebellion a day down there. Or, you know, it's time for you to write another letter to Germany about the sinking of the Lusitania. And I really would like a chance to edit that. He did let her edit it. She was not a fan. She had major changes to that letter. And so from the beginning, she is wanting to know the inside of politics. She even said at one point, much as I love your love letters, which would make any woman proud and happy, what I really like is when you tell me what you're working on. And he finally caught on. He finally heard her say that. And he didn't stop with the kiss your eyelids stuff, but he would accompany his love letters with big packets of legislation and correspondence and letters from diplomats. He taught her his personal cipher, so that she could decode letters from some of his agents overseas. And, you know, security issues be damned. He would messenger these big packets of primary documents to her house on 20th Street. And it wasn't patronizing. He wasn't just saying, oh, you know, you funny little girl. I don't know what you're going to make of all this political stuff. He really did want to hear her opinion, and he really did come to value her judgment. And Woodrow Wilson was not a man who had a very broad spectrum of advisors. He didn't seek a lot of input. He was very confident in his own opinions, but he always did need two or three close confidants. Ellen Wilson had been one of them. And throughout the summer of 1915, Edith becomes not only one of them, but the first among them. She sort of slowly supplants his other advisors as his most trusted source. So he proposed again, and she said, should marry him if he lost. She was willing to marry him, but she really didn't want any part of the White House. And she, you know, the job of First Lady is kind of bananas in general, but she also really didn't want to be seen as social climbing. She said, I don't want people to think I want the office, not the man. And when she said she'd marry him if he lost the 1916 election, all he seems to have really heard is, I'll marry you. And he started telling everyone they were engaged. And by the fall of 1915, she had come around. She said, you know, I mean, win or lose, I will marry you. And she had a lot to give up. You know, every so often you'll see an analysis of those letters where someone will say she was just being a coy Southern woman and saying no when she met yes and playing hard to get. And I really don't think that's fair. The life of independence and status she enjoyed before she met him was something that was, she really had to be ready to sacrifice. And she would have sacrificed a lot to marry anyone, but to marry the president and give up all privacy. She really had to be ready to do that. But by 1915, she said she was and they were married in December of 1915. They were not married at the White House. They were married at her townhouse in Doopunt Circle. And then 1916 was a campaign year. So they went on the trail and Edith was pretty good at it. She never gave interviews and she didn't take on clauses the way that contemporary first ladies do. But she was, she always looked beautiful and she shook all the right hands and she made all the hosts feel important and there had been some concern about how she might be received, especially because he married her so quickly after Ellen's death. There was some concern that especially some of the new women voters who were being added state by state. 19th amendment hadn't been ratified yet, but some states were enfranchising women. Then maybe women voters wouldn't like that the president moved on so quickly. But actually he did very well with women voters in 1916. He barely won reelection, but he squeaked by with the votes from California, which had just enfranchised women. And the press really liked that Edith humanized him. He seemed happy and a little playful in a way that he had not been. He had this stick in the mud, you know, reputation. And she, people had high hopes that she would bring a new social life to the White House. But then of course by 1917, the U.S. was involved in World War I. And social life in the White House took a back seat to wartime First Lady. She was pretty good at that too, especially the kind of public example side of First Lady. During wartime she adopted all of the conservation efforts to save food. She had sheep mowing the White House lawn, grazing the lawn, so that the landscapers at the White House could be freed up to do other war work. She volunteered for the Red Cross. And then when the war ended, and the president insisted on going to Paris himself to negotiate the peace, she went with him. That was not non-controversial at the time. It was controversial for him to go. No president had left the country for more than a couple of days. And there was some sense that maybe he was ceding the moral high ground by getting involved in the dirty level of treaty negotiations himself. But he, you know, his whole rationale for the U.S. being involved in World War I, since we didn't have any territories, take no existential threat to the U.S., was to have a seat at the table to talk about global peace. And he was always going to go to Paris himself to ensure the U.S. was part of the talks and that he could introduce this idea of the League of Nations, which was his dream, his hope, that there would be an international pact that would ensure global peace after the war was done. So if he was going to Paris, she was going to Paris. And just by virtue of showing up, she sort of elevated the role of First Lady. No, First Lady had ever left the country while her husband was in office. And they were gone for the better part of six months. They went in the fall of 1918 after the armistice. They came back briefly in March of 1919 to close the previous Congress and open the next one. And then they went back to Paris. And there she was, you know, in the middle of the biggest news story in anywhere. She was on every stage. She was in every picture. She was on the front page of every paper. She was staying at Buckingham Palace. And so suddenly her image was everywhere and accepted as part of American leadership everywhere in a way that was really unprecedented. I mean, very few people knew the First Lady outside of Washington, let alone outside of the U.S. So now, you know, we really think of that public diplomacy role as very much part of the First Lady's brief. But Edith was the first First Lady to be seen on an international stage. She also made things easier for him. Woodrow Wilson was shy. And he was one of those people who was insecure about being seen kind of putting a toe wrong. He didn't like to not know what the rules were and who was going to do what and what his place was in the protocol. And he didn't like to be seen asking those questions. And Edith, who had barreled into every situation in her life without really knowing what to expect, had no problem saying, you know, are we dressing for dinner? Are we wearing gloves? She spoke French and he didn't. In fact, she spoke kind of terrible French because she had been taught French by that scary grandmother. And scary grandmother had taught herself French. So some of her pronunciation was a little homemade. But Edith didn't care that her French was terrible. She would just charm everybody and smooth everything over and be friendly and make it all easy on him, which is another role that a lot of First Ladies have played for their sort of self-conscious husbands to be able to smooth some ruffled feathers. And Paris was difficult. It was grueling. The number of issues that came before the president and the other treaty negotiators was just constant and of vital importance and often with very little compromise to be found. And also it was 1918. There was a flu epidemic. The president got very sick. He might not have had the Spanish flu. That was the epidemic flu of that year. But he had a flu. And he, for a few days in Paris, was really, really sick. And even when he recovered from the acute illness, he was left pretty weak. And he had never been the healthiest guy in the world to begin with. And this exhausting high stakes moment did nothing for him. When they came back here to the U.S. in the summer of 1919, the treaty fight began in the U.S. Senate. The Republicans had taken control of both the Senate and the House in the 1918 midterms. And the Senate, of course, has to ratify treaties. And there were some members who were never going to ratify that treaty, regardless of what it said. They were not going to give the president and therefore the Democrats that win. There were some who would have ratified it with some compromises. But they were especially concerned about the League of Nations. Wilson had won that fight. The League of Nations was included in the treaty. But there was a concern that this international pact that would guarantee mutual security would take the right to declare war away from Congress and make it automatic as part of this group. And so there were senators trying to find some middle ground on that. The president really wouldn't compromise. He was really all or nothing about that treaty. He had fought for it. He had made some compromises there in Paris to make sure the League survived in the way that he envisioned it. And he really was not interested in making changes for the U.S. Senate. So throughout the summer of 1919, this protracted fight didn't seem to make any progress whatsoever. And so the president decided what he really needed to do was go on a cross-country train tour to bring the issue of the League to the American people. And that if he convinced enough people of its righteousness, they would see the beauty of the League and they would pressure their own elected officials to support it. It was a terrible idea. You don't take a sick, exhausted man and put him on a 100-degree metal train car and truck him around the country, giving dozens of speeches and shaking hundreds of hands and sleeping on a train berth. It's a total recipe for disaster. And Edith tried very hard to talk him out of it. His doctor, Kerry Grayson, tried to talk him out of it. His title was secretary but functioned as his chief of staff, Joe Tumulty tried to talk him out of it. They appealed to his reason. They appealed to his politics. They appealed to his health. He absolutely would not be convinced to not go. In fact, the idea of becoming a martyr to the cause of the League was appealing to him. He thought if he died on this train trip, then what better way to go? So there was really kind of nothing for it except to go with him and save him from his own worst instincts. And so Edith and Kerry Grayson and Joe Tumulty all got on the train with him and it was just as awful as they had anticipated. He was massively overtaxed every day, even the time that they thought he might get a break when the train would go from stop to stop. Inevitably some local politician would join him on the train and bend his ear about his pet project while the train went on. He was getting no rest. He was getting so sick that he had headaches that literally blinded him, left him unable to see. And Wilson, one of his great talents, one of the ways he had managed his health in the past was that he was always able to find a place to sleep and could sleep pretty hard and fast and restore himself that way. He wasn't able to do that on this train trip at all. He was not finding a way to sleep. And so it just snowballed to the point where he was in really sorry shape. The train had swung through all the way across the west down California, was coming back outside of Pueblo, Colorado, Wilson collapsed on the train. And Edith and Kerry Grayson and Joe Tumulty had to convince him that he just couldn't go on. He couldn't go on. They had to cut the train trip short and bring him home to rest. He was very reluctant to make that decision, but ultimately he saw that he could not sustain this trip. This is September of 1919. The train trip is canceled. The train comes rushing back here to Washington. He was sort of okay enough when they arrived here in town that he could wave to the crowds at Union Station, retired to the White House to rest. And the White House is putting out these unbelievably vague statements that the President is suffering from nervous digestion that might increase to nervous exhaustion, things that are really not medical diagnoses in any concrete way, but just sort of saying, he's having a hard time, but he's going to be better soon. Don't worry about it. It's all going to be okay. On October 2, 1919, he suffers this massive stroke. His whole left side was paralyzed. He, his life, hung in the balance for a good week. Even once he was out of mortal danger, he remained a very sick man. His speech was slurred. He would find it very hard to concentrate on a conversation. He slept a lot. He was bedridden. And as Edith tells it in her memoir, she was faced with a stark choice. So Edith's memoir, sidebar, it's actually delightful. She's the first, first lady to write a memoir, and she published it in 1939. It is funny. It's frank. She's got a great eye for detail. It totally holds up in a lot of ways. It is also at points like provably un-through, and so you have to take it with a grain of salt, several grains of salt. She was invested in reputation management for herself and her husband, as all memoirs are, but you have to remember what her agenda is when you read her memoir. In her retelling of what happened next, the doctors came to her and said, he must be kept from all stress. He can't hear any bad news. He can't be out of bed for any extended period of time. If any of those things happen, he's going to die. So what does the job of a president entail? You face stress and hear bad news and get out of bed, but she's being told if he does presidential things, he's going to die. At the same time, if he steps down, he will die, because the only thing he's living for right now is to see his dream of the League of Nations realized. And if he resigns or lets the vice president step in, you will have taken away his only motivation for getting better. So if he's president, he dies. If he quits, he dies. And by the way, if he dies, there will never be world peace. So in Edith's mind, the only thing she could possibly do was do his job for him until he was better enough to do it himself. Which is, of course, preposterous. Nobody elected Edith to do anything, but that was the path she chose. And with Kerry Grayson and Joe Tumulty, the three of them decided that they would not let people know how sick he was. The word stroke was never used. And when somebody needed something from the president, they had to put it in writing, often addressed directly to Edith, and she would bring an answer. She decided who saw him, which was almost no one. She corresponded with the people who needed something. She took meetings. She drafted public statements. She made decisions about the cabinet. She took the reins of the executive branch for months. For months, this was not a couple of days until the worst is passed kind of a scenario. And with Tumulty and Grayson, she lied about it to the public, to the press, to the Congress, to the cabinet, to the vice president, to the president himself. He never knew how sick he was. Now, a word about the vice president, because you can be forgiven for wondering where he was, right? Where was the person who is actually elected to step in when the president is incapacitated? First of all, the 25th Amendment didn't exist at the time. So the 25th Amendment, in much clearer terms, outlines what happens in the case of presidential incapacity. Before that was ratified in 1967, all that existed is some vague language in the Constitution that doesn't make it clear whether the vice president becomes the actual president or acting president. And more to the point, it doesn't make it clear who makes that call. Who is it that says the president is incapacitated? And so at the time, the logical people who might have said that, say his doctor or his chief of staff or his wife, none of them were going to say it. So there was no one out there to say the president was in trouble. At the same time, the vice president was kind of a clown. His name was Thomas Marshall. He had been added to the ticket in 1912 for the electoral college votes that Indiana would bring. He enjoyed a sort of court gesture role in the Wilson administration. He was known for his one-liners. And he wanted no part of the presidency. And he really wanted no part of being seen to usurp the presidency in any illegal or shifty way. So he really wasn't an option. He wasn't clamoring for the job and he wasn't insisting that anyone tell the truth about Wilson. I think it is also fair to ask, did Edith do anything different than the president would have done had he been more in control? And I think the answer to that is largely no. She knew his mind and his priorities quite well and she knew how he would respond to any given issue. So even if she wasn't consulting his judgment all the time, and it's pretty clear she wasn't, she knew what he would have done. The complicating factor there is that because they were also lying to Wilson and telling him he was getting stronger every day, telling him he'd be back on his feet again soon, telling him everybody still loved the idea of the League of Nations and keeping all bad news from him, his judgment became pretty terrible. He lived in an echo chamber where he still thought he had these cheering crowds that had met him at the train. He didn't know that the nation had moved on, that they were really tired of the self-sacrifice that had been asked of them in World War I and this moralistic president preaching at them. They wanted the return to normalcy that Warren Harding was campaigning on in 1920. And the president didn't get that at all. In fact, he was so deluded in his own abilities that he considered running for a third term in 1920. He was bedridden. It's outrageous, but nobody would tell him different. And he never would have survived a campaign. More to the point, if he had survived a campaign, he never would have won. But he dragged his feet for so long on stepping down and taking his name out of the running that no candidate could come forward. And the Democrats more or less forfeited the election of 1920. Now, maybe Warren Harding would have won in a landslide anyway, but it just encapsulates how deluded the president was and how far he had strayed from understanding public opinion and political reality. So even if she were taking everything to him and getting his answer on everything, his answers did not show great judgment because he didn't have all of the information. And it was also quite clear that she was not taking everything to him. So by the spring of 1920, some people did start to object to this state of affairs. The president had not been seen in public in five months. Five months. This is not the same as just not really answering all the questions at the press conference. This is not seen in public. And so some members of the press and the public started to say, you know, listen, if he's okay, let us see him. And if he's not okay, we need to know that. And so they sort of propped him up in a car and drove him around the town. He didn't actually talk or make any speeches, but they, and this is a picture of Edith looking very concerned and Kerry Grayson keeping a watchful eye from the front seat of the car. The president, this is spring of 1920, he's kind of wedged in there to make sure that he doesn't tip over. They found a cape style coat for him because he couldn't thread his left arm through the sleeve of a coat because his left side was paralyzed. And they kind of trotted him out to try to assuage some of the rumors of his incapacity. It worked ish. People were still definitely voicing concern. And so they decided to bring in a friendly reporter and stage an interview where the questions were all approved in advance by the White House. And this reporter would talk about how hardy and brilliant the president was. This is a picture from that interview. This picture is used as the cover of a lot of books about Edith because it shows her, you know, looking over his shoulder in this way. Joe Tumulty, the chief of staff wanted to use this interview to have the president say overtly that he was not a candidate in 1920. And Edith took that question out of the interview. She did not want to be the one to tell the president that he was not healthy enough to run. And if he wanted to keep this delusion out there that maybe he could be a candidate, she wasn't going to be the one to tell him different. That was a crack between Tumulty and Edith. He thought that at that point she was protecting him in a destructive way, that she had turned a corner from just keeping him happy and on into feeding his delusion. And in fact, Tumulty's notes from that interview say that Edith can in fact go to hell. He does not run for reelection in 1920. And Harding is elected in the landslide. They leave the White House when the Hardings come in in 1921. And the president never really got better. He improved a little bit, but he was an invalid for the rest of his life, which was not very long. They stayed here in Washington, bought a house in the Calorama neighborhood, and he died in 1924. Edith lived till 1961. She outlived him by 37 years. And in this picture, you see her with President Kennedy. He's handing her the pen with which he has just signed legislation creating the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Commission. There was some conversation about whether or not the Woodrow Wilson Memorial should be a figurative marble or bronze memorial or whether it should be what they call a living memorial, something that is actually functioning in some way. And that latter choice was chosen. So the Wilson Center, I think tank about diplomacy is actually the Wilson Memorial. So Edith spent that time after his death. She kind of became that wealthy widow about town again. She enjoyed her independence and her status. She stayed here in Washington. She traveled a great deal. But she also spent a lot of time burnishing his legacy. Every time somebody was unveiling a statue or naming something after him or creating a scholarship in his name, she was there. And she was there making sure that his reputation was presented in the way that she approved of. And I want to take your questions in just a minute, but I do want to point out that it's been interesting for me as we're kind of watching in these last couple of years of people rethinking Woodrow Wilson's legacy. There is a high school here in Washington that was called Wilson High School. It's now been renamed. I went to Princeton. The college I lived in my first two years was called Wilson College. It's now called First College. And there's a lot of revision of whether he really was this hero or whether his racism and sexism were parts of his legacy that should be considered. And what is interesting to me is that that hero vision, that reputation that we are now rethinking, is largely Edith's creation. She spent a lot of time after his death engaged in mythmaking. And so as we are rethinking Woodrow Wilson's role in history, you can recognize where that role was to some degree Edith's creation. So I am happy to take your questions. There's one that says on this topic, Wilson was known as a racist. Did Edith share his views? And if not, did she ever try to sway him away from those views? So the two big examples of Wilson's racism that have come up lately in this reputation revision are that he resegregated the civil service. So you can say that it's unfair to judge a historical figure by contemporary standards. Within his own time, he actually went backwards on race relations. He resegregated the civil service. He also did host a screening of the movie Birth of a Nation at the White House. Birth of a Nation is credited to a large degree with the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. He did both of those things before he met Edith Wilson. So her influence on his attitudes about race is not part of that particular equation. She, as somebody who was raised in the Reconstruction Era from a former slave-owning family, was not, was bigoted herself. I mean, her memoir talks about how happy her family slaves were and how they didn't know what to do with their freedom. She was not above the occasional darky jokes, the punchline of which is always how ignorant black people are. So she shared his views, whether she shared his policy, she never said, but they were both on the same page in terms of their racial attitudes. There's a question about how active Edith was in the Democratic Party after her husband's death. And the answer is not very. She did go to the 1928 Democratic Convention when Al Smith was nominated. And in fact, there were a couple of different newspaper columns that suggested she might join his ticket as Vice President, that now that women have the vote nationwide, maybe a female candidate should go forward and who better than the wife of the last great Democratic president. She really didn't want any part of official Democratic politics. She was the nominal head of the Women's National Democratic Club here in town, but she didn't ever play an official role. She did, interestingly, invite all incoming First Ladies to tea at her house, regardless of party, because she was here in town, which most First Families are not. And she would have them to tea and tell them, you know, she knew that the job of First Lady was bananas and that she was there to help in any way she could, but that was nonpartisan. Someone says, how did she get along with Wilson's daughters? So in public, everything was nicey-nicey. They might have privately resented that he moved on from their mother so quickly, but in public, they said she clearly made him happy and they wanted to see him happy. Some of their letters amongst themselves talk about how awful her family is and how she doesn't take hints very well, and so I don't know that they enjoyed each other's company all that well. Also, the youngest daughter now married Wilson's Secretary of the Treasury. So William McAdoo was not only in the president's cabinet, he was the president's son-in-law and kind of considered himself the heir apparent. And so when Wilson was dragging his feet in 1920, McAdoo really resented that because he felt like he couldn't really get a campaign going while his father-in-law was still in the picture. And when Wilson died in 1924, which was, of course, again an election year, Edith felt that Nell and McAdoo were both concentrating far too much on what this meant for him politically and less on mourning Woodrow. And so there were rifts in their relationships and I don't think they particularly stayed in touch after his death. Both Margaret and Jesse died relatively young. On the centennial year of Wilson's birth, when there were a huge number of events, Edith and Nell were kind of out on the Wilson victory tour together. What role did she play in saving his birthplace? So Wilson was born in Stanton, Virginia. His father was a Presbyterian minister and he was born in the Mans next to the church. He only lived there until he was two. And so the house that he was born in had not been preserved as a Wilson memorial because he didn't really have many ties to it. But there wasn't another great option for a place to preserve either. He had spent some of his childhood in Georgia in South Carolina. He had moved around as his father had moved from church to church. And while he had been a professor at Princeton and then president of Princeton University, Edith had no ties to Princeton. That wasn't necessarily the right place to memorialize him either. So she actually was instrumental in preserving the Stanton, Virginia house and creating the foundation that made it the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace Museum and Presidential Library. It was before the Presidential Library Official Act. Now Presidential Libraries are run by the National Archives. Wilson's was not because it preceded that law. But the Museum in Stanton, Virginia, which is considered his birthplace and his Presidential Library, was to a large degree preserved because of Edith's efforts. And if you go through there, they've got some great research there. If you go through there, minutes of meetings and stuff, you can see that she cared about what color the napkins were at the events there. She really was pretty hands-on. Someone says, what happened to the Galt Silver Company? What a good question. So Galtz was here in Washington until I think 2002. She kept it. She owned it through her time as First Lady. She did sell it ultimately to the man who was managing it for her. So she was the last member of the Galt family to be involved in Galtz. And so then it passed through a couple of different managers. But it really was an institution here in Washington for a long time. And because it had been here when Washington was new and because it was this very high-end business, you can trace its relation to a lot of different presidential... Thomas Jefferson bought a tea set from Galtz. When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, he left a debt at Galtz because Mary Todd Lincoln was something of a spendthrift. So it really was part of city history and federal history for a very long time. Somebody asks, in her later years, did she have any contact with other presidents and First Ladies? I did mention she did host these teas for First Ladies. She did really like the Kennedys. By the time they won election in 1960, she was a very old woman. She died the next year at age 89. But she was very happy to see a Democrat back in the White House. And she really thought that their youth and style was going to bring great things. She did have some ties to the Roosevelt as well, the Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration and Eleanor Roosevelt, who was very good at the public visibility side of the First Lady job, when FDR announced U.S. involvement in World War II, when he made his speech from the floor of Congress announcing war. Eleanor invited Edith to sit with her in the box to remind everybody of the last time America had gone to war and a previous president who had rallied America behind a global cause. Did Edith influence Wilson on women's suffrage? So Edith was anti-suffrage. I wish I could explain why. Why was this business-owning, car-driving, independent woman not interested in women having their full rights as citizens? I don't know. She never said. I do think some of it is that it was just sort of a class question. There was something a little not nice about the suffrage activist. And certainly once the National Women's Party started picketing the White House in 1917 and very directly criticizing Widger Wilson, she really hated that. But even before that, she found them distasteful. Had she wanted social cover to join the suffrage movement, she could have had it. There were plenty of fancy society ladies in the movement, including Daisy Harriman, who was involved in Wilson's administration. But I think there is just part of Edith who found it inappropriate, going back to that Cult of True Womanhood lesson from her earliest days. And the anti-suffrage movement was filled with women who said, we run the private sphere, we raise the children, we run the homes, that's important, that's vital, and if we want to be involved in the men's sphere and the public sphere, we are somehow undermining the importance of the roles we already have. And you heard echoes of that argument a generation later with the ERA, so she wasn't an outlier there. So I think Edith just at some level found it inappropriate or unfeminine to support suffrage. Wilson dragged his feet on the federal amendment for a very long time, came up with a series of rather lame excuses for why he didn't support a federal amendment. When he did change his mind in 1918, it really was for reasons of electoral math. More states were enfranchising women. There was a real fear that those women were all going to be Republicans because the Democrats were seen as the stumbling block to enfranchisement. And he could count the votes as well as the next guy and realized that the Democrats needed to reposition themselves on federal suffrage because it was gonna start happening and it was gonna start hurting them. So I really don't think Wilson suddenly became enlightened on the brilliance and independence of women. I really think he just did the math. I'm gonna do a quick scroll through this chat just to make sure that I haven't missed any questions because I know we are getting really down to the end of our time here. And I think I have answered everything that you all have to contribute. Thank you so much. Those are great questions. I really appreciate you all being here and being so engaged. The book again, and it's just been out for two weeks so I think you can find it almost everywhere, is called Untold Power, the Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson. I'm Rebecca Roberts. Thank you so much for being here.