Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Edith Wilson: the Seat of Untold Power with Rebecca Boggs Roberts

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

Historian Rebecca Boggs Roberts joins Sharon on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting to talk about her upcoming book, Untold Power. Long time listeners are no strangers to the lives of First Ladies, and today we talk about Edith Wilson, who was so much more than just her husband’s wife. When she met Woodrow Wilson, she was an independent, fashionable small business owner, and she had no plans to stand in the shadows. Thank you to our guest, Rebecca Boggs Roberts. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: Rebecca Boggs Roberts Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Researcher: Valerie Hoback Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome. So glad you're here with me today. Y'all, here is a first lady you need to know more about because she was basically running the country after her husband was completely incapacitated by a stroke. Yes, I'm talking about Edith Wilson. And we are chatting today with author Rebecca Boggs Roberts, who has a new biography out called Untold Power. Comprehensive biography of Edith Wilson. And my goodness, you are going to find out some stuff in this conversation that I promise you didn't know. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am very excited to be chatting today because Edith Wilson is the seat of untold power. She absolutely is. I mean, I think that if anyone knows anything about her at all,

power. She absolutely is. I mean, I think that if anyone knows anything about her at all, it's that for a few months in 1919 and 1920, she acted as the executive while Woodrow Wilson was very sick. But her whole story, she lived to be 89. And so that chapter is just a thin slice. And you don't understand her at all, if that's the only part you're looking at. And frankly, a lot of Americans don't even know that. A lot of people are going to be listening to this and be like, what? What? Right. Well, in part because she was really good at keeping it secret. Yes.

Okay. I want to start at the beginning here. But before we go back in time to the beginning of Edith Wilson's life, I want to know, first of all, how did you become interested in her? And what made you think, you know what I need to do is write a biography of her? Right, in all my free time. I wrote two books on the suffrage movement and was out sort of on tour-ish talking about them, especially around the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. And inevitably, somebody asked me about Edith. There's some narrative out there

that Woodrow Wilson finally changed his mind on the 19th Amendment because she was whispering in his ear, which is totally not true. She was anti, but somebody asked me about it almost inevitably. And so to answer those questions more accurately and more fully, I started looking into her. And first of all, the books that do exist about her really concentrate on the eight years she was married to him and the rest of her life is neglected. But also, they reduced her to a stock character, like naive rural Rube who was taken advantage of by conniving political experts, or like the most devoted Mrs. Woodrow Wilson she could possibly be who was doing everything out of ideal womanhood. She was the biggest proponent of that one, by the way. Or some thought of her as this like Lady Macbeth Machiavellian, you know, grabbing the reins of power type. All those are wrong. All of them are a little bit right. But no stock character can be entirely accurate. It's too one-dimensional. And so I got so annoyed with these

characterizations of her that neglected that she was a whole, real, complicated person that I decided to write my own biography. And it became kind of my pandemic project. It got some attention among publishers. I got a really nice contract from Viking, and out it comes on March 7th. Tell us a little bit, because I know people in my community are always very curious, about the behind the scenes of writing a work of this magnitude, of researching the life of a historic figure. What does it take? What did you have to do to be able to put together the materials to write this book? And what was the writing process like for you? So it was a pandemic, which I recommend in some ways and not others, right? I couldn't get anywhere. I was working, but I wasn't commuting. The job I had

was getting ready to open a new museum, and we didn't open on time. And so I just personally had more hours to devote to a side project. So it was a huge amount of digital research. And then one of the tricky things about Edith and a lot of women in American history is that no one was documenting their lives, especially if 100, 150 years ago, no one expected Edith to be in the public eye at any point. And so the only source for information about her childhood is her, herself, her memoir, which is like demonstrably untrue at some points. And so you have to take her as an unreliable narrator of her own life.

So that, I have to say, was one of the trickiest parts of the research was I couldn't verify things like, was her grandmother really overbearing? And so I'd have to kind of add context around these different stages of her life. And fortunately, she lived through fascinating times. And so that actually became ultimately one of my favorite parts of the research was kind of recreating Gilded Age Washington, things like that, to put her in a time and place when I couldn't put her in an otherwise verifiable context. Let's go backwards in time to the beginning of Edith Wilson's life. Of course, she was not born Edith Wilson. To speak

to the point you were making earlier, we tend to view First Ladies as very one-dimensional characters, in part because until more recently, no one was writing their life story. And we know them only in the context of their relationship to their husband. So take us back to Edith Wilson's childhood. You mentioned that she grew up in Virginia. And I would love to have you just sort of start at the beginning, give us a really quick zoom through her young life. So she was born Edith Bowling in Wytheville, Virginia, which is in that little southwest corner of Virginia, close to North that little southwest corner of Virginia,

close to North Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. And she was the sixth of nine surviving children. And the Bolings were very proud of their lineage. They descended from Pocahontas. And she actually wrote down generation by generation all nine steps that descended her from Pocahontas in her own memoir. And that was important because there's this first families of Virginia thing that, you know, the earlier you got there and the more you had to do with civilizing, I'll put in quotes, the more bragging rights you had. So they were very proud of this whole bowling descent and the ancestor who had married Pocahontas. They, however, were much richer in pedigree and lineage than they were in actual cash because they had been planters in the James River Valley. And like a lot of families, when the Civil War happened and they actually had to

pay their labor, that became untenable and they could no longer keep the plantation life if it weren't based on slavery. And so they moved to this property that Mr. Bowling owned in Wytheville. And it's really funny. It still exists. And on Main Street of Wytheville, there are three storefronts right on Main Street. And then above each storefront are funny cramped little rooms that connect to each other sort of. Some of them do. Some of them don't. It's really a maze. And not only were there the nine bowling children and

the parents, both grandmothers, a couple of aunties, various hangers-on, cousins who would stay for a while, law students back and forth. I mean, it was crowded up there. And hard to stand out, right, in that crowd, especially as a mere girl. Edith had a couple of really formative things in those years. Both of her grandmothers lived with them, and her mother's mother, and her mother herself, actually, were these very feminine, very traditional proponents of the cult of true womanhood, which was that Victorian ideal that women were submissive and pious, and they excelled at the domestic arts, and that was all they wanted to hope for was this excellence on the home front. And so,

Mrs. Bowling and her mother were absolutely inculcating that in the girls. By contrast, Mr. Bowling's mother, who by all accounts was totally terrifying, was much fiercer. And she chose favorites among her grandchildren, and Edith was her absolute favorite. And she was sending this, you are smart, you are independent, you can do what you want message, which in the 1870s, 1880s is pretty radical. It was all very much dressed up in tradition. It's not like they were telling her she could go to medical school. And so Grandmother Bowling taught her to read and write, taught her her Bible, taught her French, which was a mixed blessing because Grandmother

Bowling had taught herself French, and so her pronunciation was a little eccentric. But she sort of picked Edith out of this crowd and singled her out for greatness. And so Edith had these conflicting, fierce grandmother telling her to be independent and smart, and lovely feminine grandmother telling her to be pious and submissive. And I think you see that conflict throughout her life. She actually temperamentally was much more like the fierce grandmother, but she cloaked it and hid it behind the trappings of the hyper-feminine grandmother. And so she's a bundle of contradictions till the day she dies. But I think without analyzing her 150 years later too deeply, I think a lot of it stems from her basic temperament being

overridden by this cultural standard. I think that's such a fascinating observation that she was getting these messages from two people who had a lot of impact on her. She sort of absorbed them both. Right. And she kept their, I mean, she got out of Withville when she was 18. She moved in with a sister who had married someone here in Washington. So she moved here to Washington, which in the 1890s, Washington was just booming. It was a fascinating place to reinvent yourself if that's what you wanted to do. I mean, all of those Gilded Age writers, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, they have characters who moved to Washington because the

social scene here was so much easier to navigate than the, you know, hidebound ballrooms of New York. And so Edith comes to Washington in that world, and really kind of relies on the lessons of grandmother bowling much more so than the ones of grandmother Logwood. She goes to the theater every night, she masters the weird public transportation in Washington, which at the time was horse drawndrawn buses. She becomes, somewhat to her surprise, because she doesn't have any money at all, fashionable. She's quite beautiful. And she becomes sort of a sought-after young woman in town and plays that pretty well, like understands that's her ticket. And she didn't really rely on anybody after that. She married a man named Norman Galt,

who was the owner of kind of the Tiffany's of Washington, the silver and jewelry store here in Washington. When he died after only a few years of marriage, she inherited Galt's. So she became a small business owner, which was unusual for a woman in 1908, to put it mildly. But she was already sort of exerting her independence in interesting ways. She was the first woman to get a driver's license in Washington. And she tooled around town in this little electric car. And electric cars, they were basically golf carts, right? They were golf carts sort of dressed up to look like Victorian carriages. But car makers knew that they were attractive to women because you didn't have to

crank them and they didn't have that whole sort of messy, stinky smoke situation. And so they had bud vases on the dashboard because it became a cool thing for fashionable urban women to do, to tool around town. And Edith was known by all of the crossing guards and everyone else for zipping around town, top speed, 13 miles an hour in her little electric car. So she was kind of becoming the woman she wanted to be long before she became first lady. And the woman she wanted to be was this fashionable, independent, worldly, sophisticated person. How did she meet Woodrow Wilson? Woodrow Wilson was married to a woman named Ellen. She was the mother of his children. She was the wife that came up with him through politics. She was the first lady for

his first term. He was elected in 1912. She dies in 1914. And he, by all accounts, was heartbroken. They had had a close marriage. He absolutely relied on her. He was devastated. He also was really, really lonely. And his three daughters who had been unmarried young women, when he came to the White House, two of them had married and moved away. And the third one wanted to be a singer. And so she was kind of off on tour trying to make her singing career happen. So he's alone in the White House. He has this cousin, Helen Bones, who's doing the bare minimum of First Lady duties. But she's lonely too. And it's sad. And it's this big old barn of a house and they're rattling around in there. Edith, meanwhile, is living her best life. Edith, you know, has money and fashion and she's going to Europe every year and she's wearing fantastic hats.

And she's tooling around town in her car. And she had a good friend named Kerry Grayson, who was a doctor. In fact, he was Woodrow Wilson's doctor. And Kerry came to Edith and said, I want you to befriend Helen Bones. I want you to just be nice to her. She's lonely. She's over her head. She's living with her very sad cousin in this barn of a house. Just be kind. And Edith says, no way. Did Edith know who that was? No. She wanted no part of it. Obviously, she knew who the president was, but she didn't know who Helen Bones was. She'd never been to the White House. She prided herself on not being involved in politics at all. She said, that's not my world. I'm not interested in getting fancy with the White

House set. And Kerry Grayson says, you don't have to get fancy, they're in mourning. She just needs a friend. She needs someone to take a walk in Rock Creek Park with. And Edith relents, and much to her surprise, actually liked Helen Bones, and they became friends. This is all a setup. In retrospect, Cary Grayson had an agenda from the very beginning. So one day they're out walking in Rock Creek Park. Usually they went and had tea at Edith's house in DuPont Circle afterwards. And Helen insists they go have tea at the White House this time, which was surprising because Helen was pretty meek and Edith had never been to the White House. And Edith says, my shoes are really muddy. I look

terrible. We've just been tromping around the park. I'm not going to the White House. And Helen sort of weirdly insists. Ed You should have seen this coming, right? Helen says, I insist. I need to be host sometimes. No one's there. We'll go in the back elevator. No one will see your muddy shoes. It'll be fine. We'll sneak in the White House. No one will know. It's totally fine. You look great. Don't worry about it. Yeah. So they go to the White House, the elevator doors open, and there's the president and Cary Grayson. Clearly staged, right? The president is smitten from the first moment,

and just absolutely a goner from the first moment. So if Helen and Cary Grayson were plotting to bring these two together, and I absolutely believe they were, they did really well. Like they knew their man, because from the second those elevator doors opened, the president was done. Did he know about her? Or was he like, who is this muddy creature in my elevator? There had been one moment when he, Woodrow Wilson loved to go for drives around town. That was a big entertainment for him. And there had been a moment a couple of months earlier when he and Cary Grayson were driving

around town and Cary waved to Edith, who was walking down the street. And Wilson said, who's that beautiful woman? And Cary Grayson thought, that is like the first sign of life this morning man has shown me. So there had been that incident, but it's not like he knew her name or who she was or had met her before. So she gets off the elevator and is it like the parent trap where, you know, like the conspirators like disappear, leaving the room empty for the violins to play and like, oh, Mitch. It was only slightly more subtle than that. So the four of them have tea. And they invite Edith to stay for dinner. And Edith at that point says, listen, I really don't look my best. I really do

need to go home. But I'd be delighted to come back for dinner another time. And so she comes back for dinner two days later, and now she's in a gown, and she looks fantastic, and she's had her hair done, and she's got her jewelry on, and the inevitable orchid corsage, which she always wore. And she was a hit. I mean, everyone in that administration wrote a memoir. So the Secret Service agent, and the White House usher, and the social secretary, and they all talk about that night. Like what an impression she made and how lovely her voice was and how, you know, how the president just, I picture him like Pepe Le Pew or something, you know, like with the hard eyes and the, oh God. And that's another interesting undercurrent because even though the 19th Amendment hadn't been ratified, there were states that had enfranchised women. And so a lot of the president's advisors were worried that when

he was up for reelection in 1916, women voters would not like that he had moved on so quickly. And it would be a strike against him with those new voters. And Edith was hesitant. She was hesitant. She had a lot to give up, right? She had this great life. And she was worried people would think she was, as she said, marrying the office, not the man, like a social climber. She was very worried about being seen as someone who was grabbing on to the White House in an unseemly way. And so their love letters are amazing. This was my favorite part of doing the research. Because first of all, his are racy. Like, pencil neck professorial Woodrow Wilson just was steamy in his love letters. And she would write back, like, yeah,

yeah, yeah, you want to kiss my eyelids. That's really lovely. Can we talk about William Jennings Bryan? Do you think he's going to quit as Secretary of Defense? And who do you think's going to take his place? I mean, it is from the very beginning, he's just gushy, gushy, gushy. And she's saying, that's lovely. Now can we talk about the situation in Mexico for a little while? League of Nations, let's trot it out. I don't want to hear any more about my eyelids. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Especially presidents of old, we tend to view them as black and white pictures. We don't view them as like men who write love letters, like I want to smooch your eyeballs.

That's not our picture of them. And a big reason that it's not our picture of them is because they were all so self-conscious, right? Like those self-important men who knew they were making history, when they wrote important letters to diplomats in Russia or whatever, they wrote these very stilted, very public letters that they knew would be read generations later. And so they curated their persona. When he was writing to his girlfriend, not so much. And it's one of the great things about writing women's history is because personal letters are a huge part of your source, especially for women that didn't have a big public role,

official public role. And their letters are so human. And they make the men in their lives seem so human, that it's just a really delightful way to read history, because it's just not as curated. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio!

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all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. So they decide eventually to get married. And people are always a little surprised that they decided not to get married at the White House. Yeah. I mean, the gossip columns were not happy

about that. They thought that he was doing her dirty by not giving her the White House. Yeah. Can you talk about, of course, people love White House weddings, right? What was heating up. And so a big social splash just didn't seem right. And so they got married at her house, which it doesn't exist anymore. But it was this sort of elegant, narrow townhouse in DuPont Circle, where they had to take out all the furniture to fit in the guests. And there were only 50 guests, but it really fit 20. So they crammed them all in there. They had a private wedding. And she hadn't wanted this at all. I mean, when she finally agreed to marry him, which took a while, she said, I'll marry you if you lose re-election. I'll marry

you if you're not the president anymore. And he didn't hear the if. He just heard, I'll marry you, right? So he starts telling everyone they're engaged. And finally, she comes around and says, all right, I'm in. I'll marry you, win or lose. But she really didn't want the big pomp. I think that also would have fed into the social climbing narrative, right? If the first time everybody sees her in public is a 2,000-person, seven-course wedding. So the simple ceremony at home helped counteract the I want the office, not the man narrative.

What kind of ring does a president buy for a woman who owns a jewelry store? This is where my mind goes. Yeah, stakes are pretty high, right? Yeah. Your first standards have to be real challenging to meet, especially a president who's not vastly independently wealthy. Right. And not great at the jewelry. He picked out some lovely things over the course of their time together, but it was not his strength. He did get a lot of advice. And that's one of the great things about everyone else writing a memoir too.

You know, like he loved that she loved orchids. He said that she was the only woman he knew who could wear an orchid on everyone else. The orchid wore the woman. And so he was constantly sending her orchids. And like, I buy orchids at the Safeway down the street. You couldn't do that in 1950. Trader Joe's orchids. Trader Joe's orchids, exactly. 1915, not so much. And so the White House usher has in his memoir, this conversation about having to race all over town off season, whatever day or night to find orchids to make sure the president's girlfriend gets the flowers she wants. So he had this whole staff participating in the romance. He had, yeah, he had lots of advice. Yeah, I can only imagine the pressure. I mean, it's challenging enough

when you're just like trying to buy a ring for your girlfriend under normal circumstances. But when you are the United States President, and she literally owns a jewelry company. Right. And every newspaper in the country wants to see it and talk about it. And they did. I mean, the coverage, once they announced that they were getting married, the headline the next day is, President Wilson, too wed, goes ring shopping today. You can be sure people were trailing him, right? There's so much to talk about, about Edith Wilson. And I want people to read your book, so I'm going to leave some of it to mystery. But we have to talk about what she is most famous for,

which, as you mentioned, is her basically acting as the president during a time period when Woodrow Wilson becomes incapacitated. So first of all, set us up to that moment. How does he get to the point where he is incapacitated? And then what happens when he is? His health was never robust. He always had something going on. And when he insisted on going to Paris himself to be part of the treaty negotiations at the end of World War I, which was unprecedented, right? No president had left the country for anywhere near that amount of time. And no first lady had left the country at all as first lady. And the two of them were in Paris for the better part of six months. The idea that the United States president and first lady would be gone from the country for six months.

That is absurd. It was absurd then, and it's absurd now. Nobody would do that. Gone without modern telecommunications. Yes, for six months. No, it's bananas. But Wilson would not brook any opposition to that. It was his whole reason for the US being League of Nations, this whole notion of global cooperation and enforcement of global peace. That was what he wanted. And that was what he thought we had earned by US involvement in the war. And he wanted to do it himself. And it was controversial at the time, not just because they were going to be gone so long, but because people thought he was getting his hands dirty with the nitty gritty of treaty negotiations, which is ugly, whereas he could have sort of held his moral high ground from

the White House and sent his people. Exactly. But he wouldn't hear of it. It was never even really considered. And where he went, she went. So off they went. So they come back from Paris in the summer of 1919. He's a mess.

He's exhausted. He looks terrible. And he's facing now a huge fight in the summer of 1919. He's a mess. He's exhausted. He looks terrible. And he's facing now a huge fight in the Senate because they don't want to ratify the treaty as written. They want to make compromises. He doesn't want to make compromises. Henry Cabot Lodge is leading the opposition. They are fighting all summer. No ground is made. Clearly, this is just a total impasse. No ground is made. Clearly, this is just a total impasse. He won't even give on little things. And I think this is Wilson's tragic flaw. He is an absolutionist. It comes from sincerity. He truly in his heart believed that this was the right path. But that moral certainty doesn't make for very good legislation. And so he decides the only thing he can do is take it to the people.

He's going to embark on this national train tour and tell everybody about how wonderful the League of Nations is, and they're all going to believe him, and they're going to pressure their elected officials to support the treaty. And that's the way it's going to happen. Everyone knows this is a terrible idea. You don't put an already sick and exhausted man in a thousand degree train car and go thousands of miles and shake millions of hands and give four or five speeches a day in the middle of the summer. It's just- No, that's a bad idea. Bad idea. But every time someone says, and they did say, this will literally kill you,

he kind of loved that. He'd say, what better way to go than in the service of this wonderful cause? He enjoyed that martyr role. So nothing they said dissuaded him. And everyone tried. And finally, there's nothing to do but go on this completely ill-fated, completely bonkers train trip. And Edith goes, Kerry Grayson goes and Joe Tumulty, who was his secretary, but basically served as his chief of staff. They all go to try to kind of protect him from himself. But it's just as terrible as they feared it would be. It's even worse because they thought he'd actually get some rest going from stop to stop. But inevitably, some local politician gets on the train and says, I'm going gonna ride with you to the next stop because I want to

Tell you about my pet project. He's getting no rest. He's shaking a million hands He's giving all these speeches the press is covering every word. He's not sleeping He's getting headaches that are so blinding literally blinding that he's literally blind at some points and All of the tricks that he had learned to manage his health Because he had always been able to get a good night's sleep and kind of the tricks that he had learned to manage his health, because he had always been able to get a good night's sleep and kind of revive himself. It's all out the window. And so it snowballs, right? It gets worse and worse and worse. And finally, on the way back outside Pueblo, Colorado, he collapses in the train car. And Edith and Joe Tomlety and Carrie Grayson kind

of band together and say, you can't go on. You absolutely need to cancel this train trip. Took some convincing. He was not ready to quit. But he finally admitted that he couldn't go on. They cancel the trip. Train goes speeding back to Washington. He's sort of up and around enough. When he gets off the train, he waves to the crowds at Union Station, goes to the White House to recover. And they're putting out these very vague press releases that say he's suffering from nervous exhaustion, which is like not a thing. Union Station, goes to the White House to recover. And they're putting out these very vague press releases that say he's suffering from nervous exhaustion, which is like not a thing. But he'll be up and around soon. He looks great. It's all fine. And then October 2nd, he collapses completely

in the White House. It's very clear he's had a massive stroke. His entire left side is paralyzed. very clear. He's had a massive stroke. His entire left side is paralyzed. He is at death's door. I mean, for a good week, it is touch and go about whether or not the man would survive. He's in and out of consciousness. When he is conscious, it's not clear how lucid he is. When he is talking at all, his speech is heavily slurred. He finds it hard to understand what people are telling him. He's a very, very sick man. What does Edith do? Edith decides she's just going to lie to everybody. She's not going to tell anybody how sick he is. And she is going to keep this up and be his gatekeeper until he's better, or until he dies, I guess, whichever comes first. But at no point does she consider bringing in the vice president, telling the American public the

truth. She doesn't even tell him the truth about how sick he is. She creates this total lockdown echo chamber where she and Kerry Grayson and Joe Tumulty know the truth, but together they are managing the message to the press, to the public, to the cabinet, to the Congress, and to the patient himself. And her justification for this, which is an amazing piece of rationalization, because of course she details it in her memoir, she says that the doctors told her that if he did everything he was elected to do, she says that the doctors told her that if he did everything he was elected to do, if he actually acted as president, he'd die. If he resigned, he'd die, because passing the League of Nations was all he was living for. So he couldn't be president,

but he couldn't not be president. If he died, then world peace would never be achieved. That's how high the stakes were. But at the same time, it's not that big a deal. You're not doing anything that out of the ordinary. You've always helped him with his work. He trusts you. He believes you. You know everything. You're an insider. Just make it work for as long as you need to make it work. So the stakes are incredibly high. He can't possibly die or world peace will never happen. But at the same time, it's fine. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I see no issues here. Now, to be fair, the 25th Amendment didn't exist. So there wasn't a very clear succession plan for what happened when the president was incapacitated. Everything she was doing was completely

unconstitutional. And she kept it up. It is astounding to me the scope and scale of that cover-up because she controlled who saw him. She communicated directly with cabinet members and members of Congress. And she made everyone come to her, not him, for like six months. I mean, it's astounding. This is one of the questions that I've always wrestled with, is why did people accept it? Why did everybody, like everyone who worked in his administration, why did they all say, oh, okay, Edith is the person we speak to now, that's fine. That's no problem. It's astonishing. In retrospect, it's astonishing. It is. Questions were asked, they were just shut down. It's that, again, it seems inconceivable today. The president's gone for six months.

You haven't seen him in public in six months. Can you imagine? Yeah. Before that, he was in Europe. Then he's on a train trip for God knows how long. And now he's disappeared. He's fine. And I can only talk to Edith.

What is happening? But trust me when I tell you it's all okay. It's no big deal. This is normal. This is how it's supposed to work. It is really fascinating. And I know that's one of the things that I really think people will love about your book is that you go into so many of these details because it is so unprecedented and it seems ridiculous now, but it actually was ridiculous then too. It's not just us. No, no, it was ridiculous. You know, eventually Woodrow Wilson, he does make some progress. And he actually decided, you know, like he thought he was just going to keep running

for office. I'm going to run for reelection again. I have to say that part staggered me. This man who in 1919 almost dies by the spring of 1920 has recovered enough to like sit up in a wheelchair, but is not healthy. He thinks he's running again in 1920. And that, isn't that one of the questions that historians have puzzled over of like, did he know really like what he was saying, doing? Did he understand the gravity of his disability when he was like, I'm running again? the gravity of his disability when he was like, I'm running again? It's clear he did not. I mean, so while Edith was acting as executive, I don't think she did anything he wouldn't have done. She knew what his impulses and priorities were. She didn't, you know, go champion some legislation that he wouldn't have approved of. So she didn't like change the course of political history. She just did

what she knew he would have done. But this is where I think her actions really did have an impact. She kept him so isolated and told him how wonderful and strong and healthy he was and how much the people loved him every day, kept all negative press from him, kept all critical voices from his ears. So he didn't know how sick he was. He didn't know how tired of the war the American public were. He thought he was beloved. And the last time he had been out in public, he was on that train tour where huge crowds

were coming to hear him speak. And in the meantime, the nation had turned tour where huge crowds were coming to hear him speak. And in the meantime, the nation had turned away from him and moved on to other things. And Warren Harding's message of return to normalcy in the 20 campaign was overwhelmingly popular. But Wilson didn't hear it, and he didn't see it, and he thought the people were still with him. And so not only did he have complete delusions about his own ability to withstand another campaign, he kept not withdrawing from the race, which meant that

no strong alternate candidate came forward because he hadn't cleared the field. And so the Democrats end up nominating James Cox in 1920. Who? Right? Now, maybe Harding would have wanted a landslide anyway. Maybe that was just the times. But the Democrats basically forfeited the 1920 election because Wilson wouldn't back off. And Wilson wouldn't back off because he had no idea what was going on, because all he knew was what Edith was telling him. I have long thought Warren Harding's campaign slogan of a return to normalcy. It is the most bizarre platform, like return to normalcy. First of all, Warren Harding is not normal. That's a completely separate topic. The fact that you think you're the normal one here, no. But it does speak when you understand it in the context of what exactly was going on with Wilson, that everyone knew this is not normal. And that Warren Harding was the man who's like having his romantic tryst in the closets of the White House. He's drinking during prohibition and having his parties and like fathering children and blah, blah, blah.

He's the return to normal. Uh-huh. He was the return to normal after the Wilson era. And obviously there had been a global war. That is not normal, right? Yes, that's right. People were exhausted by the sacrifice required of war. But also they were exhausted by this moralistic president who was constantly preaching to them about the righteous thing to do. That's kind of exhausting. A know, a president who's

going to have a drink and an affair might actually kind of feel like a little bit of a break after Professor Wilson. So I- It truly, obviously. Warren Harding was viewed much more like, well, he's more like one of us. Right. He's this charming, affable guy, maybe not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I'm with it. We've had this intellectual, moralistic leader for eight years. I haven't seen him in a year and a half because he's been in Europe and on a train and also doesn't come out in public anymore.

I'll take Warren Harding, please, for 200. And they did in a landslide. Yes. And then, of course, after he died, they discovered exactly how corrupt he was. And perhaps they regretted their choice. But nevertheless, they weren't actually, to your point, they were not actually given a legitimate choice because Wilson doesn't leave. And they're just kind of, as you mentioned, just float this candidate who has absolutely no hope of winning against a pretty formidable opponent. Okay, so we all know that Woodrow Wilson doesn't live to be 150. So they retired here in Washington, which they were the

first couple to do so. The Obamas have since done it. But after they left the White House, so the Obamas have since done it. But after they left the White House, they bought a house here in Washington, and he only lived three more years. She lived till 1961. It's crazy to think that she literally was alive during the JFK administration. Totally. She traveled a ton. She was always in Europe. And she was this beloved auntie to several of her siblings, kids and grandkids, and should take them off on wonderful trips. And she kind of positioned herself as the first lady here in town. So every new first lady, regardless of party, should invite them to tea. And it wasn't a like, come pay homage to the grand grand dame thing. It was like, hey, I know being first lady is a ridiculous, weird job, and I'm here to help however I can. And so she did that. And then what she mainly spent her time doing was curating his image. She showed up at everything. Every statue, artwork, train station unveiling, every medal, everything, she was there.

train station unveiling, every medal, everything, she was there. And we've recently revised our opinion about Woodrow Wilson and recognized that he did things like resegregated the civil service and dragged his feet on suffrage and things that were not admirable. But until that revisiting, he was held up as one of the best presidents we've ever had because of his vision of global peace and because of his moral certainty. And a huge amount of that myth-making was Edith's doing. She created that vision of Wilson that we all held for the bulk of the 20th century. She reminds me in many ways of Dolly Madison. Dolly Madison was the first lady that ever, she lived in Washington, DC after James died. And she Madison was the first lady that ever, like, you know, she lived in Washington, D.C. after James died. And she was always the like, oh, I'll be your friend. I'll show you

the ropes. I'll go to all the things. I'll wear the beautiful clothes. Everyone will know me. Yeah. And, you know, Dolly Madison was also the person who recognized the value of social diplomacy because James was terrible at it. And so she would hold these parties and she would smooth ruffled feathers and she'd make people feel important. And Edith did all of that. Wilson was terrible at the public ceremonial side of being the president. And she hadn't signed up for it, right? Like she became first lady overnight, which is hard. She had no on-ramp whatsoever, but she was great at it. She shook all know, shook all the right hands and made everyone feel better. And she was at ease in any situation. And she was never sort of self conscious about I

don't know the protocol here. She just kind of barreled her way on in and crack some jokes and charmed everybody. Yeah, that whole like, come to tea at my house. I know it's tough to be the first lady. Sounds like a total daily medicine move to me. Yes, yes. Oh, my goodness. Well, we could keep talking about Edith. And there is so much more to say, which is why I think reading Untold Power will be fascinating for people. There's so much more than we have time for in this conversation. But this gives you just a little taste of how much there is to this story. What a fascinating story. Thank you so much for being here today. Oh, Sharon, thank you so much for having me. It's been a treat. You can find author Rebecca Boggs Roberts' book, Untold Power,

wherever you buy books. There is so much more to the Edith Wilson story, and I would highly encourage you to pick up this title if this topic interests you. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for listening to Hearer's Work. It's interesting. This show is written and researched by Heather Jackson, Sharon McMahon,

Valerie Hoback, and Amy Watkin. Edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder. And it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. We'll see you again soon.