Edith Roosevelt, First Lady

A Staff of Her Own

Within weeks of moving in, Edith hired Isabella "Belle" Hagner, a Washington woman who had made a living writing invitations for society hostesses and working as a War Department clerk. Hagner became the first White House social secretary. She answered the mail, screened requests, kept the guest lists and planned receptions, dinners and musicales.

She was paid as a government clerk. For the first term she was formally on loan from the War Department. In March 1906 Representative Thomas Hardwick of Georgia tried to bar federal money from paying a social secretary to the President's wife. Colleagues rose to defend the arrangement, and the amendment failed. As the Evening Star reported, Hardwick "seemed to be the only one voting in favor of his proposition."

Edith also brought order to official society. Every Tuesday morning in the season she gathered the wives of the Cabinet in the White House library, often over knitting or embroidery. The custom lasted until 1909, when Helen Taft did away with it.

The household got the same attention. As longtime usher Ike Hoover remembered, "While an abundance of help was always at hand, still she looked after every detail of the household herself."

Music in the East Room

Under the Roosevelts, musicales became a regular, scheduled part of White House life. Edith took a close hand in the programs. Pianist Ignacy Paderewski played for the Roosevelts. So did a young Spanish cellist named Pablo Casals, on January 15, 1904; he returned to play for the Kennedys in 1961. The contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink and the pianist Ferruccio Busoni came too. In 1903 the White House received a gilded Steinway grand for the East Room.

The piano was a gift from Steinway & Sons. It stayed in the East Room until a new one replaced it in 1938, and the old piano went to the Smithsonian. Its painted lid is the work of the artist Thomas Wilmer Dewing.

The performers were not paid. As Lewis Gould notes, they might receive a presidential souvenir, such as a signed photograph, instead. By Gould's count, Edith hosted more than thirty musicales. The last was on Friday, February 19, 1909, less than two weeks before the family left the White House.

Historian Lewis Gould credits Edith with giving the Roosevelt White House the feel of a salon, where music and books mattered as much as politics.

History on the Walls and on the Table

Edith thought the White House should tell its own story. During the 1902 renovation she arranged for portraits of the First Ladies, herself included, to hang along the new Ground Floor corridor where guests arrived.

She also took on the presidential china. Caroline Harrison had already begun saving historic presidential china, and an inventory was taken in 1901. Edith backed the search for missing pieces from collectors and presidential families, preferred gifts and loans over purchases, and had two cabinets built to display the collection for visitors.

The oak cabinets went into the ground-floor corridor about 1904. Abby Gunn Baker, a Washington journalist who had been studying the china since the summer of 1901, chose the first pieces to go inside. Edith also had the collection declared government property, and in her last winter in the house she refused to let chipped state china be sold at auction.

The Quiet Adviser

Edith kept her political opinions out of public view. Privately, she was T.R.'s closest counselor. Most mornings the two had time alone together; the Theodore Roosevelt Center describes about an hour a day spent talking over affairs of state.

She also ran a back channel. Cecil Spring Rice, the British diplomat who had been best man at their 1886 wedding, wrote her long political letters, knowing the President would hear every word. The American ambassador in London, Whitelaw Reid, did the same. When Britain needed a new ambassador to Washington in 1906, Edith pushed hard for Spring Rice. London sent James Bryce instead, and she told Spring Rice how hard she had tried.

How Historians See Her

For decades Edith was remembered as the woman in the background. Lewis Gould's 2013 biography, subtitled Creating the Modern First Lady, argues that she did far more than that image allows. Working with a social secretary and pursuing a broad cultural agenda, Gould writes, she helped "lay the foundation for the modern development of the institution." Gould also documents racial prejudice in her private letters.

Her successors inherited what she built: a social secretary, a portrait gallery, a china display and a White House that worked as both a home and a stage.