704 the NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the Notorious

704 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle is a pleasure to read. Its compact size, clear and graceful prose, and layered insights into the enduring nature of American attitudes toward gender and the family would make it easily adaptable for classroom use. Chamberlain rightly con- tends that the portrayal of Tuttle as a rebellious, promiscuous woman has had such incredible staying power because it conforms to cul- turally entrenched ideas about female deviance that have long been “deployed to legitimate male dominance” and that still give “weight to adultery allegations in contested divorce cases” and raise questions “about the veracity of a woman’s word in rape trials” (pp. 188–89). Her carefully researched and imaginative deconstruction of the “no- toriety” surrounding Elizabeth Tuttle vividly illustrates how focusing attention on those who may have “inhabit[ed the] periphery” (p. 1)of early American society can illuminate truths that still resonate today. Michelle Marchetti Coughlin is an independent scholar and the author of One Colonial Woman’s World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit (2012). Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Creating the Modern First Lady.ByLewis L. Gould. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. Pp. viii, 176.$34.95 cloth; $14.99 e-book.) Edith Kermit Roosevelt could easily be labeled “the other Roo- sevelt first lady,” for in the canon of White House scholarship much has been written about Eleanor Roosevelt, Edith’s niece by marriage, but little on Edith herself. The lone biography, Sylvia Jukes Mor- ris’s Edith Kermit Roosevelt (1980), portrays Theodore Roosevelt’s second wife as an adept hostess, confident wife and mother, and strong personality. In this new biography, Lewis Gould affirms Edith’s reputation as “aristocratic, scholarly, cultured, tasteful, and discreet” (p. 1). Yet he also finds her to be a “complex and interesting figure,” possessing faults as well as virtues, and a pioneer in elevating the position of first lady to public importance (p. 2). Ultimately, he believes that she was the “model of a modern first lady” (p. 1). Edith Roosevelt exuded fortitude, energy, and savvy as she ran the family estate and supported the political aspirations of her husband. “Being married to Theodore Roosevelt came with large responsibil- ities,” Gould asserts, and Edith “carried out these duties with ef- ficiency and affection” despite the recurrence of “minor ailments,” Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00331 by guest on 27 September 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 705 “emotional stress” (p. 80), and periods of separation from her husband. But she was no passive sufferer. Edith exerted mastery over the boisterous Roosevelt brood: her stepdaughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth—no unbiased observer, to be sure—remembered her as “a very hard woman” (p. 12). Yet in Washington and among the wider public she acted as wife and mother in a manner “that struck contem- poraries as just right” (p. 131). Edith also found politics interesting and had an intuitive, rather than intellectual, grasp of Theodore’s life work. For example, she wisely discouraged her husband from making a longshot run for mayor of New York in 1894. As first lady, she maintained that Russian Grand Duke Boris—a “notorious playboy” (p. 43)—did not deserve a White House welcome, and she predicted that Theodore’s handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, would make a poor president. As Gould concedes, charting Edith’s influence over her husband’s political decisions remains a tricky endeavor. What is certain is that she developed the position of White House social secretary when she hired Isabelle “Belle” Hagner to help her plan engagements and answer correspondence. Edith also lent her name to charitable enterprises, such as a benefit performance of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel by the Metropolitan Opera Company, and she brought to the White House such world-class musicians as the pi- anists Ignace Paderewski and Ferruccio Busoni and the cellist Pablo Casals, entertainment that foreshadowed modern broadcasts of “In Performance at the White House.” However, her aesthetic enterprises reflected, rather than elevated, the nation’s tastes. While Edith was first lady, a duet known as “The Misses Turner” performed “Negro Songs” at the White House, and a vocalist named Mary L. Leech sang a ditty entitled “Jus a Little Nigger” (p. 59). These appearances essentially gave official sanction to “crude melodic stereotypes depicting an oppressed racial minor- ity” (p. 60). This was no accident, for Edith, according to Gould, “embraced with enthusiasm the racial values of her time” (p. 94), a claim supported by her correspondence, which she littered with ref- erences to African Americans as “darkeys,” “chocolate drops” (p. 93) and “little nigs” (p. 95). Gould’s thorough documentation of Edith Roosevelt’s racism is the most notable contribution of this slender biography. Otherwise, his argument that Edith established the modern first ladyship feels forced. Though Edith’s patronage of the arts did demonstrate “what first ladies could do to set a cultural tone for the national capital Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00331 by guest on 27 September 2021 706 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY and the country at large” (p. 67), most of her ventures, such as her role in assembling the White House china collection and her involve- ment in charitable needlework, seem modest when compared with those of her immediate successors. For example, Ellen Axson Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt both exceeded Edith Roosevelt in concern for the poor. Edith Bolling Galt Wilson exercised more obvious political influence, especially at the close of her husband’s ill-starred presi- dency. Florence Kling Harding proved more outspoken on a range of issues, while Lou Henry Hoover identified herself with the Girl Scouts of America, an organization that arguably touched a greater number of Americans than the charitable and cultural endeavors of Edith Roosevelt. Even her purchase of Pine Knot, a tract of Virginia wilderness used by the Roosevelts as a “presidential getaway,” seems less “special” (p. 85) than the author implies, for the land was only one forerunner to today’s Camp David. The Lincolns had sought summer refuge in the Old Soldiers’ Home in northern Washington, D.C., and the Hoovers retreated to the rustic Rapidan Camp in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Societal conventions and personal circumstances, such as having to manage a large family and an exuberant husband, perhaps prevented Edith Roosevelt from emerging more fully as the socially concerned or politically active first lady to which Americans in the twenty-first century have grown accustomed. Overall, she remained a woman of her time who made slight alterations to the role of the first lady as she focused on family matters and championed a few projects in the cultural realm. Edith respected, and reflected, public opinion and popular prejudices, especially concerning race, which Gould expertly expounds and rightly condemns. For that reason alone, Edith Kermit Roosevelt merits a wide audience. Dean J. Kotlowski is Professor of History at Salisbury University in Maryland and the author of Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy (2001). His next book, Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR, is forthcoming in 2014. Alice Morse Earle and the Domestic History of Early America.By Susan Reynolds Williams. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013. Pp. xviii, 316.$80.00 cloth; $28.95 paper.) For scholars of New England, material culture, and the intellectual and methodological development of historical interpretation, Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00331 by guest on 27 September 2021.

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