Ellen and Edith: Woodrow Wilson's First Ladies

Bibliographic Essay

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY 331 } { A wealth of Wilson material is available—letters, books, and journal articles. Online access to newspaper archives through ProQuest and America’s Historical Newspapers has made it possible to see how Ellen Wilson and Edith Wilson were perceived all over the country, not just in the traditional centers of power. books For Ellen Wilson, Frances Wright Saunders, Ellen Axson Wilson: First Lady between Two Worlds (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), provides an excellent comprehensive treatment. It is to date the only long scholarly biography devoted to Woodrow Wilson’s first wife, and I make reference to it often. Saunders also published “Love and Guilt: Woodrow Wilson and Mary Hulbert,” American Heritage 30 (Apr./May 1979): 68–77. In addition, Saunders collaborated with Frank J. Aucella and Patricia A. Piorkowski on Ellen Axson Wilson: First Lady and Artist, exhibition catalog (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson House, 1993), which gives a useful description of her career as a painter. W. Barksdale Maynard, Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), describes the Wilson years at Princeton . Lewis L. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), is illuminating about the politics and personalities of that campaign. Gould’s Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973) is also useful on that election. Ellen Wilson wrote no memoir, but three family members wrote memoirs giving good accounts of her life: her brother, Stockton Axson, “Brother Woodrow ”: A Memoir of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); her daughter Eleanor Wilson McAdoo, The Woodrow Wilsons (New York: Macmillan, 1937); and her sister Margaret Axson Elliott, My Aunt Louisa and Woodrow Wilson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). The most recent biography of Edith Wilson, Phyllis Lee Levin’s Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House (New York: Scribner, 2001), is remarkable for its extensive research. It was the first biography of Edith to make use of the information published in the 1990s about the extent of Wilson’s disability. Although Levin is often critical of Edith’s motives, her book is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to understand this very controversial period of American history. Other biographies of Edith include Alden Hatch, Edith Bolling Wilson: First Lady Extraordinary (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1961), written during Edith’s lifetime and with her cooperation. Gene Smith’s When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson (New York: William Morrow, 1964) was published three years after Edith’s death. It was the first biography to examine critically the situation in the White House after Wilson’s stroke, in the hope that it would lead to a guarantee against any future “lapse in executive authority.”Ishbel Ross, a newspaperwoman who was a near contemporary of Edith’s, wrote a sympathetic but unsourced account, Power with Grace: The Life Story of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson (New York: Putnam’s, 1975). Edwin Tribble, ed., A President in Love: The Courtship Letters of Woodrow Wilson and Edith Bolling Galt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), and Tom Shachtman, Edith and Woodrow: A Presidential Romance (New York: Putnam, 1981), make use of the 1915 correspondence between Edith and Woodrow, but in general it is better to go to the original sources for these documents. Edith Bolling Wilson’s My Memoir (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1939) portrays her life with Woodrow as she wanted it to be remembered; it is, however, quite unreliable. Lewis L. Gould, editor of American First Ladies: Their Lives and Their Legacy, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), is himself the author of “Edith Bolling (Galt) Wilson,” an excellent short biography that is especially good on the impact Edith’s actions had on the first ladies who came after her. In the same volume , Shelley Sallee’s “Ellen (Louise) Axson Wilson” highlights Ellen’s sophistication and speculates on what more she might have accomplished had she lived. Other useful surveys of first ladies include Carl Sferrazza Anthony, First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents’ Wives and Their Power 1789–1961 (New York: HarperCollins , 2003), and Betty Boyd Caroli, First Ladies, large print edition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Book and Music Clubs, 1993). Arthur S. Link wrote “Ellen Louise Axson Wilson” for Notable American Women 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary, vol. 3, P–Z, ed. Edward T. James, Janet...