Transcript - Firsts

Welcome to PORTRAITS a podcast from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Where art and biography history and identity collide. I’m Kim Sajet and in this episode, we peek behind the curtain at our upcoming exhibition on First Ladies.

Being a first lady is problematic. We tend to pour over their choice of China or the latest frock. There's so much more to the job than that. It’s not only about the silverware and the China. Jackie Kennedy, for example, took on the restoration of the white house in 1961, and she brought real scholarship to the task. Other first ladies have made bold contributions that we've either forgotten about or never paid much attention to in the first place. Well, no more. We'll be celebrating them all. In our upcoming exhibition, Every Eye is Upon Me. And today we're going to talk about some of their amazing achievements with none other than Cokie Roberts.

She has a full time job and she doesn't get paid, just like most women cook.

She is a journalist who wrote the book on early America's influential women, several books, in fact, and we're going to be asking her for her impressions of four portraits that will be hanging in the show.

Any one of us would love this portrait of her. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, no, exactly. I'm the woman who can't bear to look at our wedding photos.

But mostly, we'll be digging into some of the unsung accomplishments of the First Lady's going all the way back to the founding of the United States.

Cokie is a commentator for National Public Radio and ABC News. And the best-selling author of several books, including Ladies of Liberty, and Capital Dames, the Civil War and the Women of Washington from 1848 until 1868. She joined us here at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

 

Cokie Roberts, welcome to PORTYRAITS. It's so lovely to have you.

It's lovely to be here. Thank you.

I will say the first ladies are the most requested portraits outside of the Presidents when people come to the museum. And yeah, it is really interesting. Really, it's not till recently that people even knew who the first lady was they didn't have a vision of what they look like some people didn't even care. But one of the questions that I have is there is this perception that the reason that we care about first ladies today is that they have much more of a political voice, they do way more, they've got a cause, you know, they're sort of standing there next to their husband still at this moment. But back then they didn't have to they could be involved with running the White House and knitting and sewing. Is that true?

No, not even close to being true. First Ladies have been involved in politics, from Martha Washington on Martha Washington went to war, every winter of the American Revolution, eight long years of war, George Washington thought that she was absolutely essential to the troop morale. And troop morale was always extremely iffy, because the American troops there went through periods where they were unpaid, unhoused and unclothed. And she would come and would bring foodstuffs and cloth from Mount Vernon, and she would be cheered into camp. “Lady Washington is here!”. And she would then

 

sew with the soldiers cook for the soldiers, nurse the soldiers, put on entertainments with the other Officers Wives, and just keep morale going. And they adored her.

And let's talk a little bit about this portrait of Martha Washington. Yeah, I love that. So this is a portrait by Rembrandt Peale. It's called the Porthole Portrait. And of course she is older she has this really beautiful kind of hat on so lots of lace and frilly billows.

I actually think her hat does your great disservice.

Really?

Yes. All the pictures ever that we have any memory of she has on that had had mob capital scars. Yes. And it just makes her look dowdy. And she wasn't dowdy, she, she was funny. She said, things that were totally politically incorrect, you know, bad things about Thomas Jefferson. And one time she came in and saw that there was grease on her on her wall and said it must have been a democrat who did this

I mean, she was not this person. Think about it while she was first lady and having to create the role of First Lady, which was incredibly difficult. Because here we had just come through this revolution, to get rid of a king, and all of the courtliness of Europe, and so was a republican with a small our nation. And she had to create this role, where it was republican enough to be accepted by the revolutionaries, but elegant and formal enough so that Europe would take this pathetic little country huddled on the Atlantic seriously. She had a lot of work to do, and she felt confined by it. She wrote at one point to her niece; “They say, I'm the finest lady in the land. But I feel more like the Chief State prisoner.

Yes. But she did have help. Right? One of the more she had enslaved people working there. Oney Judge was one of them.

I know. And there was a bit of drama right when Oney ran away and how she didn't deal with that terribly well. No, because she couldn't get over it. Why would Oney run away? She didn't. She had absolutely no understanding of it.

Oney Judge was an enslaved woman who had worked for Martha Washington for a very long time. And Martha thought she was devoted to her as far as she was concerned. And she had a wonderful life, and only understood she was going to move back to Virginia. And she would be back in her in slave position. And so she took off. And Martha was very upset about it and tried to get George to go searching for her, which would have been very indiscreet, and Oney was never found by Martha.

And she actually came to the marriage to George's, a very wealthy widow, she had 84 enslaved people at the time belonging to her. They actually were not freed until he died is that no, they were not freed until she died.

And I must say, Mount Vernon has done a very good job, a fantastic job, letting us know the lives and the contributions of the enslaved people.

So Cokie, this next portrait that's in the gallery by William L. Well, it's of 1848. And it's up Dolly Madsen. And what do you see when you look at this ?

When I look at this, I see a Dolly Madison who is about to die frankly, she was 80 years old in this portrait. She died the next year. But she still has a knowing smile on her face, and a look of great intelligence in her eyes. She's wearing one of her signature turbans. She started wearing them in the early 1800s, when they were stylish, when she was this age, when she was an old lady.

She was poverty stricken. And so she kept wearing all of her old clothes as a way of just sort of making a statement. She thought she was fooling people that way, but in fact, she didn't have any money to buy new clothes. So the turban was something of a hallmark of Dolly Madison. She's wearing a black dress with a red shawl. So the red shawl gives you some sense of style. In her day, she was an extremely stylish woman. She wore the dresses of the Napoleonic era with them. The big the low necklines, and the bosom pushed up. And then these Empire style.

And then you see around her neck and sort of netting. She would wear that to slightly cover her bosom to be slightly more modest. It's kind of too bad that the Portrait Gallery has all of these old ladies they're all old.

Yeah.

Where she was very stylish. Is it true that, you know as Martha Washington was considered the mother of the nation that Dolly Madison was considered Queen Dolly, she was called “Queen Dolly.” And was very much the absolute power of the city of Washington. Dolly Madison basically was First Lady of the United States of America for 50 years. She had her own seat in the house of representatives.

And I can actually make the case that she kept the country together at a time when it was could have easily fallen apart. The kind of partisanship that we see today was rampant in the early 19th century, combined with vicious regionalism, and the country was way too young and way too fragile to be able to see sustain it without some help. And the help came from Dolly Madison. And she made people come together in the fledgling town of Washington and come to her events and sit down together, have some cider, have some wine, and behave. And she kept them from really falling apart.

And is that because her husband, James Madison, who was the fourth President of the United States didn't have the sort of social grace?

No, before that when Thomas Jefferson was president, he didn't have a wife. She had been dead for a long time. But, people talk about Dolly Madison as Thomas Jefferson's hostess. And from time to time, she did hostess events. But mainly she had a whole separate power base at her house on F Street. And she was the person who made people come together, as I said, but also that then went on for decades.

And so Daniel Webster is said to have, at one point said, “There is no permanent power in Washington, other than Dolly Madison.” So she was, she was recognized in her time. And I think that's something very interesting. When I went back to learn about these women, I was surprised to see how people at the time gave them credit for political power.

Interesting, because we just don't hear about it anymore. they're seen as in this case, the old lady's old white ladies in the museum, right?

Exactly. Well, you know, she's much loved by art historians. And you know why? Because the British were coming part of the War of 1812. But this happens Two years later, in 1814. And she's left in the White House, everyone's telling her leave, leave, leave the British are coming. And there's a Mr. Carroll poor man who's been given the job of getting Dolly out of the White House is getting dangerous. And she writes, “Mr. Carroll is in a very bad humor with me because I insist on waiting until the large picture of General Washington is secured and requires to be unscrewed from the wall. The process is found to be too tedious for these perilous moments. And I've ordered the frame to be broken and the canvas taken out, it is done. And the precious portrait placed in the hands of two gentlemen of New York for safekeeping.”

And it is, in fact, a version of the Lansdowne portrait that is still in the East Room of the White House. So think about recent history. Think about bringing down Saddam Hussein's statue. Think about Lenin's statue in any war situation, going after the leader the symbolism of the nation is something that is very difficult to have happen to a nation. And she understood that. And so what happened is the British then did come they burn their way from the Capitol to the White House, came into the white house she had prepared or, and her and slave servants had prepared dinner for president Madison and his cabinet. The British sat down, ate her dinner, drank her wine and stole her portrait. And so they probably did unspeakable things to her portrait. But they did not have George Washington to be able to attack and we have no idea what that portrait looked like that's lost. That's too bad.

When we come back, we skip forward and look at the portraits of two first ladies from our more recent history, one known for serving humble meals on White House China, and the other known for bringing some Hollywood pizzazz to the table. Don't go away.

Welcome back. I'm speaking with journalist and author Cokie Roberts about first ladies. So we couldn't not talk about Eleanor Roosevelt. Here she is addressing listeners after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

“You cannot escape anxiety... And yet I hope that the certainty of what we have to meet will make you rise above these things. We must go about our daily business.” Roosevelt had a towering political presence as First Lady during the Depression and World War Two and was instrumental in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She was an approachable woman ahead of her time. She even instituted all female press conferences. Let's get back to our conversation.

So Cokie let's talk about this next photo.

Eleanor Roosevelt is First Lady and this portrait that was done in 1946. What do you see, when you look at this?

I see a woman looking at me so directly and so intelligently. I love this portrait. And it's entitled first lady of the world. And I love that that was a title given to her, by the way, by Harry Truman. And I think that you really have that sense of her, you have that sense of her, her determined-ness. And at this point, she's at the United Nations. She was, of course, the author of the human rights convention.

She was an incredible human being. And she was from childhood. She was involved in every imaginable do good organization. From the time she was a little girl, she was going to change the world. And she did, she did, once they reached the White House, of course, President Roosevelt had polio and could really not move around. And so she became his eyes and ears. And she went around the world in the country, learning everything she could learn and coming back and telling them and they often disagreed, and she often pushed him to places he didn't want to be. But she was never going to stop. And I think you get some sense of that in this portrait.

This is a fairly painterly portrait in that you can really see the brushstrokes, and indeed Eleanor is looking directly out at you. I often call this the power pose. She's got her hair up, which is now silver into this lovely sort of curled ban. And a beautiful white shirt with a pendant, I do think is a very kindly portrait, but she is certainly scrutinizing you. And you, you need to look back. The other thing I think about it, is that I think she's prettier in this portrait than most of the pictures you see of her. Her eyes are so blue.

Yeah, and the way they come across, and they, they really give you a sense of her inner beauty. You know, what's sort of fascinating is that you talk about her as someone who had a lot of determination, she had a lot of courage. In fact, one of the quotes we have of her is saying “courage is more exhilarating than fear. And in the long run, it's easier.”

But she was actually kind of shy. She didn't like getting a portrait done, which was part of the problem that we had is there aren't a lot around. But one thing is about other people and one thing is about yourself. And she could speak for other people to be publicly advocating for someone else is much easier than saying, okay, paint me.

Right. So let's jump ahead to this next portrait, which I think is pretty dazzling Coki I hope you agree. This is a portrait done of Nancy Reagan. And it is done in between 1984 and 1985 by Aaron Shickler. This is her Time magazine cover for the second Reagan inauguration. And as you see the the cutline this white house and, Nancy Reagan's growing role. And that probably sent shivers down a lot of American spines. Why?

Because people are scared first ladies. They think that they have too much power. They don't want them to have power. And there was a perception that Nancy got a little too involved. Sometimes she was very involved.

That's true.

Oh, absolutely. She fired the Chief of Staff she hired and fired cabinet. She was terribly involved in running that white house. And the reason people get nervous about that is because they didn't elect her. You know, they elected him and not her. And we, by the way, have absolutely no evidence that any first lady has affected anybody's vote. So not only did they not elect her, but they didn't even really think about her as they were casting their ballots.

And there she is no matter of who she is. With the last word at night and the first word in the morning, and incredible influence. And she not only was not elected, she can't be fired. Yeah, one of her quotes they did I ever give Ronnie advice? “You bet I did.” And then she goes on to say “For eight years, I was sleeping with the President. And if that doesn't give you special access, I don't know what does.” There you go.

Well, now I have to say for a woman who was actually 64 in this picture. She's looking fantastic. She was a very beautiful woman. Can you describe it?

Yes. This is Nancy Reagan, in her 60s but looking considerably younger. With her hair done as it always was. She's wearing a red shirt dress, with her hands kind of not quite in the pockets but looking like they might almost be. And she is again looking directly at you with a somewhat benign look but you don't want to mess with her.

 

No. And the fact that she's in a shirt dress I find just absolutely fascinating cuz that's very modern right?

Very controlled. Not that it's that simple.

And that it's very plain, but it's the Reagan red, I discovered that this is a thing.

Oh, the Reagan read was a thing. She told people that they couldn't wear red to the inauguration so that she would be the only one in red. But she is wearing this red dress for this cover to try to look like a plain Jane for Americans. So she's not scaring them. Nancy Reagan was seen as a little bit too hoity toity for a lot of people. She hung out with Hollywood royalty. She did buy expensive things. she borrowed expensive things, which some people found unsettling. I think that's kind of smart, though it was considered somehow common.

Ha. And so it's funny, she was both common and to regal at the same time.

But that's what happens to first ladies. You know, Martha Washington, loved satins and silks. But when she went to New York to assume the job of first lady, she wore homespun.

Yeah. So if we just circle back again, there's been a whole lot of misconceptions about the First Lady. One of them is that really it's been the contemporary first lady's or at least the 20th century first ladies that have become more involved in politics. Nancy Reagan certainly comes to the fore. But in fact, the early First Ladies, the first mothers were just as involved.

Absolutely. You can go down them one after another and find that there was something where they were instrumental, Sarah Polk, the wife of James Polk was the cabinet secretary. And of course Edith Wilson ran the government after Woodrow Wilson had his stroke. So you just keep looking at them. And the more you learn about each one of them, the more you understand how incredibly influential they were.

And that adage that behind every great man is a truly exceptional woman.

Not all these men are great.

That is fabulous.

Thanks for listening, everybody, and a huge thanks to Cokie Roberts for coming on the show. As always, you can find the portraits we discussed on our website in npg si.edu slash podcast. Our exhibition on first lady's called Every Eye is Upon Me, will be opening next fall in an election year and runs through to spring of 2021. Our podcast team includes Ruth Morris Jason Orfanon, and Deborah Sisum. And Rebecca Kasemeyer. Theme music is by Jo Chi and Tarik Fouda is our engineer. Laura Bush gets the final word: “Are we too obsessed with your hair? Your makeup, your clothes? Yes. Okay, for sure. But I don't think we can get around it. Maybe when we finally have a first gentlemen.”

Until next time, I'm Kim Sajet