Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History

The Public and Private Lives of “First Dogs”: Warren G. Harding’s Laddie Boy and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fala

17 6 From the early twentieth century, the dogs of American presidents have enjoyed a special status. The iconic standing of the wives and families of the presidents as “first ladies” and “first families” has been extended to the “first dogs.” Ranking high in the pantheon of first dogs are President Warren G. Harding’s Laddie Boy, who was the first of the modern first dogs, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fala, arguably the most revered of the first dogs. This essay aims, first, to introduce Laddie Boy and Fala as legitimate biographical subjects and, secondly, to deepen the historical understanding of the first dog as a cultural construct. Methodological reflections are followed by a brief introduction to the lives of Laddie Boy and Fala. Some comparison and contrast highlight the dogs’ distinct life histories. The paper then sketches two case studies: Laddie Boy’s service as the “host” of the 1923 Easter egg roll at the White House and Fala’s emergence in 1944 as “an election year personality.” These studies begin to capture the complex, interconnected public and private lives of the first dogs. The paper thus demonstrates that rich historical sources on Laddie Boy and Fala—written by their close human companions and many other observers of the dogs—make serious biography possible. In talking about these first dogs, Americans ignored what Bernard Rollin has called the “common sense of science,”1 including scientists’ strictures against “attributions of psychological states to animals.” Members of the first families, their friends, the press, and the public saw Laddie Boy and The Public and Private Lives of “First Dogs” Warren G. Harding’s Laddie Boy and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fala h e l ena pycior The Public and Private Lives of “First Dogs” 17 7 Fala as expressing emotions, evidencing preferences, and having individual personalities.2 In developing portraits of the dogs, their human contemporaries relied heavily on anecdotes—“individual instances of behavior in context ”—which typically were reported in detail, often by multiple observers, and interpreted with noticeable restraint. Of interest to historians of humananimal relations, Laddie Boy and Fala were thus mediums for public, indeed national, sanctioning of the “ordinary common sense” approach to animal behavior over the “common sense of science.” Of particular interest to scholars exploring animal biography, careful readings of Laddie Boy’s and Fala’s emotional states are part and parcel of the records on the dogs left behind by their human contemporaries. Brief Argument for “Canine Biography” A contribution to the history of American presidents, White House history, and the history of human-animal relations, this essay is also an exercise in a particular form of biography, which I am calling “canine biography.” This is historical biography with a canine rather than human subject. Pushing the boundaries of biography to include nonhuman subjects is not a new idea. In 1933, Virginia Woolf published a book on Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. Although Flush: A Biography is not a historical biography, the book combines the facts of Flush’s life with fictionalized elements. The facts conform to what, in an essay of 1927, Woolf called the “granite” of biography, while the fiction is the “rainbow” that she felt was so effective in helping biographers to reconstruct personality.3The granite of Flush (including Flush’s attacks on Robert Browning in 1846, as documented by the Brownings) was the product of historical research, which took Woolf through at least ten volumes of published letters.4 In Polaris: The Story of an Eskimo Dog, published a decade before Flush, Ernest Harold Baynes came closer than Woolf to attempting historical biography of a dog. Baynes condemned earlier “oversentimental ” animal stories and promised his readers instead a life of a dog based on actual incidents, with “almost every one . . . recounted exactly as it occurred.” Baynes, who had lived with and closely observed Polaris (the offspring of two dogs who in 1909 made the trek to the North Pole with Admiral Robert E. Peary), admitted to “shading” only one or two of the incidents he recounted. The book’s dedication to Dr. Townsend W. Thorndike, moreover, suggested that Baynes had followed the latter’s suggestion that he write a biography , “the biography of our mutual friend, Polaris the Glorious.”5 Although Flush and Polaris offer glimmers of historical canine biography, h e l e n a p yc ior 17 8 this genre seems...