Episode 2: Presidential Helpmate or Problem

Eleanor, Dolly, Mamie, Jackie. They were the nation's original influencers. Some were fearless, some were fragile, all left their mark on the nation's history. In this podcast, we'll reflect on the fascinating legacies of the women forever tied to the White House. I'm your host, Terry Finiman, the journalism historian who studies media portrayals of First Ladies, with production editing by Bella Cosgull. This is the First Ladies Podcast. Every First Lady leaves an impact on a presidential administration. Some more than others. Yet what's been called "soft power" leaves its own unique mark. In today's episode, we talk to Tammy Veehill, associate professor of media science at Boston University about US First Ladies, political assets and liabilities. Tammy, welcome to the show. Why did you become interested in studying First Ladies? I've been interested in First Ladies for some time. I became interested in them as a subject area when I was working on a project looking at speeches from national conventions, national nominating conventions. I was doing chapters on all the different types of speakers that there were. When I dug into the First Ladies as surrogates for their husbands during the conventions, they just became so fascinating to me. There was so much more to write than there was for just that one chapter. The more I kept digging into their, particularly their activities on the campaign trail, the more fascinating I became with them. First Ladies is just, it's one of those things that I stumbled across them and then just fell in love with the idea of digging deeper and deeper and deeper into understanding this really strange political group of women. So far women. The rule of First Lady isn't in the Constitution. It's unpaid and the women who serve in it are left to make their own way, trying to merge their own interests with how their predecessors have performed the role. What have been the main responsibilities of the First Lady across history? But you're right, First Lady is not constitutionally mandated role. And as such, what's really happened is become a societally constructed role, very social impact or love. Society has impacted the ways in which the perceived responsibilities of the women are. And as such, it's sort of become a reflection of the role of American womanhood. And so across time, the responsibilities of First Lady have really reflected what people have thought women should be doing, especially high profile women. So most of the roles include things like being a national hostess, being a figure of compassion, engaging in public social advocacy. There's also the sort of sideline things like be fashion, fashionable, what it means to be fashionable, creating role, modeling for motherhood, for being a good wife, those kinds of things. But mostly what I tend to focus on are things like the national hostess role, being a figure of compassion, being a public social advocate. And then especially for the idea of assets and liabilities, how those impact the presidency, but also the perceptions of the First Lady herself and her legacy. Yeah, so let's break down some of these roles that you mentioned into more depth. What does the national hostess role involve? And why does it even matter? Well, the national hostess role really evolved because the U.S. presidency isn't just the head of government, but also the ceremonial head of state. And so the First Lady has always been assisted in the fulfilling of that ceremonial head of state role. And so as a national hostess, what the First Lady does is brings a sense of both ceremony and commonality to the position of or to the presidency as a whole. And what I mean by that is the ceremony side. She does things like hosts, she hosts big dinners, she hosts especially the state dinners for international dignitaries. She tends to host smaller things like teas and lunchens for other kinds of important individuals and groups of people. But she also helps to coordinate things like Christmas celebrations and the Christmas decorations that gets a whole lot of attention, things like the Easter egg roll on the lawn of the White House, the holiday events like the trick or treaters coming. So she opens the House, the White House and the presidency to the public in a way that is important for the public to relate to the presidency and also to be able to fulfill some of those duties that in other countries the ceremonial heads of states do. So it's important because it's both political and personal wrapped up into one really complicated and yet seemingly simple duty. It's also one of the most enduring duties that the First Lady has. It started with Martha Washington way back when she was, when the national capital was housed in New York and she would host weekly events to open the cap, the president's home to different kinds of dignitaries and also sometimes to comment on as well. I'm glad you mentioned Martha because I want to talk about some of our early First Ladies, especially Louisa Adams, a First Lady who gets virtually no attention except perhaps in passing with Melania Trump since both were born abroad. What is her legacy as hostess? Louisa Adams is an interesting character because she, you're right, she doesn't get a lot of attention generally speaking. People talk about her as a well-traveled, one of the most well-traveled women of her time period and she was very fascinating and interesting person. But for Herolas as First Lady, one of the things that is interesting was she has an example of both the pros and the cons of what some people refer to as dinner party diplomacy. She would invite people when her husband was, before he became president, when he was in the Senate, when he was fulfilling other roles, she would invite folks into their home very strategically. So she would invite members of Congress, she would invite particular newspaper editors, she would strategically, she would have these very strategic dinner parties and receptions where she built a lot of political capital for herself and also for her husband. And so what happened with Louisa is that in 1824 when her husband was running for president, there was no official winner of the election. Nobody earned the majority, the necessary majority of the electoral college votes. And so the decision about who became president went to the House of Representatives and many of the people who were voting were people who had been socially connected to Louisa Adams and her husband. And she was eventually accused of being part of what they called a corrupt bargain to give John Quincy Adams the presidency in 1824. So she helped him to win the presidency to earn the White House. But right after that, when people started questioning why somebody who hadn't won a majority of either the popular or the electoral college votes was the president, the question she started to get a lot of backlash for her role in that and ended up she used all of her political a clout to get him in the office and had none to do anything afterwards. And so she basically had a very quiet, very reclusive first lady ship after having been a very open, fun, buoyant social person in her free first lady days. So it's kind of an interesting reflection of the double ed sort of the social aspects of dinner party diplomacy and the ways that women were getting involved in politics. I love that. I love exploring these little known stories about first ladies. I want to move next to discussing the role of first ladies as public social advocates. How did Martha Washington begin this? Well, Martha Washington was an interesting character because she was really basically the financial stability of the Washington couple. She, her finances allowed for George to be able to do the things that he did. And so what she did though, what she wanted to also be active. And so after the war, she used a lot of her her fiscal and also her popularity, her popular resources to help war widows, to help orphans and to help veterans of the revolutionary war. Because there were really weren't the kinds of social services necessary to help them. And so she saw a need and started advocating for assisted programs, but also started funding them herself. And so she really started by being extremely active and set a tone for other first ladies to be able to be free to talk about the issues that they were concerned about. Although, more recently, they've been the first ladies have been able to do that more effectively. But it really set a precedent for the first ladies to be these sort of combined figures of compassion and social advocates together, wrapping those two ideas into one. So which first ladies social platforms do you think had the biggest impact? Well, that's a tricky question because you have positive and you have negative impact. You can make the argument that for example, Rosalind Carter's efforts at mental health have been were extremely impactful. It was really hard for her to push that agenda at the time that she did, but she didn't back down from it. And so it started to conversation. that we're still having today, and it opened up avenues for exploration of the idea of mental health that people weren't open to in the '70s as much. But you can still see how we struggle with it, but we can have those conversations about mental health because of a lot of the work that Carter did as first lady in the afterwards. You can also make the argument that Clinton and her efforts at healthcare reform, particularly giving more access to healthcare to children, was super impactful. And so in positive ways, you can see a lot of that that kind of influence. But then you also have the sort of potential negative impact 'cause I've seen a lot of rear-comminging arguments about Reagan and the Just A Know campaign arguing that it had such a devastating impact on the discussion of the use of recreational drugs, the idea that Just A Know, Just A Know oversimplified the idea and made it difficult to talk about about the mental health behind drug use and also the healthcare behind drug use and the rationale behind. And so it really stifled a lot of the pragmatic approaches to drug use that might have helped advocate for a better understanding and much more impactful or more effective, I guess, way of managing recreational drug use. And so you can kind of make the argument that social platforms, these women can have positive and negative impacts with what they've done. And I think Reagan was definitely an example of a big negative impact, but you've got those great ones like Carter and Clinton with positive impact. - So continuing on this discussion of negative impact, there are plenty of presidents that are known for their scandals, Nixon and Watergate, Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Andrew Johnson and his impeachment. What are some of the biggest first lady scandals and what impact did that have on the presidency? - Well, it's kind of interesting 'cause we tend to, of course, be a little bit more focused on the more recent stuff because that's what we remember. And that's the impact that we feel the biggest or that we think are huge. So a lot of folks will talk about Melania Trump as being a highly controversial scandal-ridden first lady with things like her, the jacket that she wore to visit on her trip to visit the children who've been separated from their families at the border or her lack of understanding in terms of the, was she went to the G7 summit in Milan and wore a jacket that was $57,000 itself and it was more than, you know, most people, most of US citizens were making it at the time. And so you can, we tend to have a primacy for the first one. The earlier was, was there more contemporary, I guess I should say? But really, I would say that probably the most seriously scandal-ridden first lady was Mary Todd Lincoln. Mary Todd Lincoln was accused of misappropriating funds of selling influence of extortion. She had some serious, serious complaints lodged against her. Most of them were financially oriented because she tended to spend a lot of money and tended to meet a lot of money. But one of the things that I think is really fascinating is that in most cases, the scandals that first ladies end up having don't tend to have as strong of an impact on their husbands as perhaps the husbands have on their wives sometimes. For example, with Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln still managed to get reelected. He was doing many other things. And he actually gained a whole lot of sympathy from the public for having to deal with, who was referred to as Matt Mary Todd at the time. And so it actually kind of gained him, like I said, it gained him some sympathy as opposed to necessarily harming his, his, the perceptions of him. You could see kind of the same thing happened with the Clintons. Hillary Clinton was often accused of many different kinds of scandalous things during her time as first lady on the white water scandal. He had the white water scandal over people where he was saying things like, oh, she was having people murdered and stuff like that. It was pretty outrageous a lot of the claims. But there were a lot of scandals that came around there around that particular issue. And yet Bill Clinton didn't really seem to take it on the chin very much for her scandal. If he did for his own, but even at that, even his, you know, the Monica Winsky scandal didn't really harm him as much as people might have expected that it would. So the first ladies tends to harm themselves when they're in scandal more than necessarily their husbands. In addition, like even with Melania, it's from the folks argue about her scandal ridden, the scandal ridden nature of a lot of her first lady actions. She didn't do anything, at least that we've seen so far. So you didn't do anything that was illegal. So you didn't do anything that really kind of harmed the presidency and her husband's scandals kind of still overrode, depending that she ever did. So it was sort of, you know, she didn't have a negative, necessarily negative impact on him. So I'm kind of hard pressed to find a first lady that really hurt her husband's presidency through any of the scandals that she was either accused of or actually engaged in. Rand another presidential election year in 2024. How have first ladies impacted the campaign trail? Well, I think it's been an interesting year so far. We have two first ladies, or a former first lady and a first lady involved. And so with Jill Biden, I think Jill Biden has been exactly what people have expected her to be. She's been a surrogate on the campaign trail. She hasn't been as active as I would have expected by now. But I think she's probably going to save up a lot of her activity until closer to the general election. I wouldn't expect to see things ramping up for her in somewhere around May, June, July. I think that-- and then really being very active in fall. The bigger, I think, thing that we've seen is the impact of what people have referred to as the missing Melania. We often have issues with-- when we think first ladies should be doing something or spouses generally of candidates should be doing something and they aren't, they get a lot of attention for not being present. And some might even argue they get more attention for not being present than they do when they are present. And we certainly see that with Melania Trump right now with the death of her mother and the illness that led up to her death. She's been off the campaign trail out of the public eye. She wasn't even part of the family Christmas celebrations that the public-- the publicity around those. And that has gained more attention than really most other aspects of any activity that she's gotten involved in. But she, she and Melania has been really quiet. And I think that's raised a lot of questions. So it's been a slightly negative impact on her husband. But Jill Biden has been mostly positive in terms of her surrogacy. But there have been some stories that have popped up with her that have been a little bit questionable in terms of the asset versus liability question. Because especially recently, we saw a story about how she had to escort her husband off the stage or how she had to remind him about what his favorite food was and things like that. And so in some instances, her engagement has actually become grounds for concern or questions of now the fitness of her husband for her office. They have been huge concerns or huge questions. But they are things that have popped up. So even though she's being helpful, in some ways, it's also being slightly harmful. So this next question goes back to what we were talking about a little bit ago. And that some first ladies have tried to mingle their interests with policy change. We talked about Hillary Clinton, for example, trying to work on health care. Do these attempts by first ladies tend to fall more under creating liability issues than helping the presidency? We could also talk about Michelle Obama and her efforts to change school lunches having a policy impact. Are these more of a liability or what do you think? Well, I think they do often create distractions from the work of the president because they become conversations about appropriateness of behaviors by the first lady in whether or not she's overstepping her bounds. We saw some of that with Rosalind Carter and Mental Health. We definitely saw it with Clinton. And even Michelle Obama, one of the things that has always surprised me is when my students complain, because they're now at the age they were the ones that were having their school lunches changed. And my students complain about Michelle Obama and as sticking her nose word in the log. And so that's often a conversation that pops up when women starts to try to engage. When the first lady starts to really try to engage in policy activities. When they're just doing advocacy, they don't tend to have that same problem. So it does create a distraction. It creates a different conversational bread for the White House to try to address. And also the East Wing as well. The office and first lady needs to address that as well. But the other thing that it does that I think is kind of interesting is it continues to increase our conversations around the role of women and whether or not women. And particularly first ladies have retained their rights as citizens because oftentimes first ladies are expected to simply go along, get along with their husbands. And when they start to engage in ways that people think are inappropriate, it's not inappropriate for a citizen, it's inappropriate for a first lady. And I think that distinction and that conversation is an important one. And so while it does create a distraction from other governmental work, it also opens up conversation about what shouldn't shouldn't be expected from women when they have access to power in different ways. kinds of ways. Every now and then you'll see rankings of the presidents, which I sometimes question the accuracy of. But you briefly discuss evaluating first ladies at the end of your chapter. There hasn't been a first lady ranking in quite a while now. How do you think first ladies should be evaluated? Well, yeah, that's a great question because we want to rank everybody and we want to compare everyone. It always seems to be a drive that we have. And so what we have historically done is we talk about first ladies, we try to compare and contrast them as though they are all exactly equals or as though there is a some kind of set standard for the position that we can use to evaluate them. And those things don't exist. What the first ladies do is they serve in a capacity that is unclear, that is only based on the expectations created by their predecessors and by society at large. And so it's really hard to actually effectively compare them without looking at them individually. So if I were to say how should we evaluate them, I would say start at the individual level, think about who they are, what they bring to the table to begin with and thinking about the socio-historic context that they're serving it. Because you have different kinds of constraints that are placed on them and different first ladies come with different experiences that either help or maybe hinder their effectiveness in terms of getting their message out in terms of understanding what the role should be or how they should best enact it. And so it's really, I think, a challenge to be able to really just say these are the set standards and here's the best first lady ever. Because if you try to say best to worst, you then have to really clearly define what that means. And I don't know that that's really possible. So when I think about evaluating first ladies, I tend to say do it individually and then create points of comparison that are actually clear and fair. And I think we try to do that most of the time, the scholars, but there's often the sort of push to rank order or push to overlook certain kinds of elements of a first lady ship. And so they're all idiosyncratic and it's hard to really make them out to be the same. So I think that's a challenge to be able to do that. The best we've been able to do so far is terms of polling and rankings has been the favorability poll, which is basically how much do you like them. And I think that's a challenge because liking doesn't mean necessarily more or less effective. And you have people who are doing different kinds of things or facing different kinds of challenges. For example, if you compare and contrast same shallow mama and Melania Trump or Melania Trump and Jill Biden, if you're trying to compare and contrast the two of them, you've got Jill Biden who had a lifetime of lifetime, but many decades of experience has a political spouse before becoming first lady. Melania Trump had zero experience as a political spouse before becoming first lady. So understanding the expectations, understanding the audience, understanding how you're being assessed and what the expectations of the role are, those two women would come in with very different toolboxes and very different teams around them. So to compare and contrast them directly without taking that into consideration, gives you really a false comparison between them. And that's just an example of two. I know that was probably a little bit longer than the briefly evaluating. No, that was great. It is a very complicated issue. What do you think are additional avenues or perhaps specific first ladies that still need exploring in relation to first ladies as political assets and liabilities? Well, I think some of the stuff I was talking about before thinking specifically about the context in which a first lady serves, I think is incredibly important. The first ladies themselves and their personalities are important as well. I mean, you get somebody like Eleanor Roosevelt who by all accounts had at one point been pretty shy and then when she was first lady, you couldn't tell it by the things that she's done. So trying to understand the evolution of the women in the role as well as the role itself, I think that and how the how the role impacts the women and how the women impact the role like that back and forth relationship is something that I think we all try to think about but don't always explore as deeply as we can. So I think that's an avenue of exploration that especially in terms of the assets and liabilities component because are they improving or are they not? The other thing I think is to whether or not they're the influence as a political asset for themselves. Are they being an asset or liability? We'd like to think about it in terms of the presidency because the presidency is why they're in that role. But at the same time, a lot of the first ladies outlive the role by a significant amount of time. So their legacy as a first lady then carries over. And so I think thinking about themselves and what they do for their own political legacy is important too. Why do you think sitting first ladies matters? I think for studying first ladies matters for a number of reasons. I mean, it reflects the roles, the evolving roles of women in society, the first lady ship does and so exploring it is super important from that perspective. It also tells us something about American politics in interesting ways, especially about the people who are not in elected or appointed roles, but are sort of, and I don't want to say political celebrities because the first lady ship is more than that, even though it's been called that. The folks who have influence, how they have influence, looking at first ladies, this is a really great encapsulation of that kind of un-stated, unclear position that does exist in multiple places in our system, that it gives us a better understanding of how things like soft power in politics works. But I think it's also important and probably maybe one of the reasons why I think it matters a lot is that first ladies are a valuable part of the American mythos. And so they're fascinating historical figures and they deserve attention in their own right. They're obviously paired with their husbands and often are discussed in the shadow of their husbands, but they do things that their husbands can't. They do things the president can't actually do and they help and they hurt in ways that are important to understand. And so I think understanding who they are, what they've done, is important because the influence that they have should be interrogated, both to try to understand our past, but also to try to inform our future in terms of the first lady ship, in terms of how we think about people, power, gender roles. First ladies encompass a whole lot of different kinds of components to the American society and American politics in ways that really deserve a lot of attention. Alright, well thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. We hope you enjoyed the show. Tune in next time to uncover more untold histories of the nation's first ladies. I'm Terry Fineman and this is the First Ladies Podcast.