I feel like I’ve heard this a lot of times but I’ve never heard any real argument behind it. I’ve only heard assumptions because Woodrow Wilson couldn’t perform the duties by himself after his stroke.
I feel like I’ve heard this a lot of times but I’ve never heard any real argument behind it. I’ve only heard assumptions because Woodrow Wilson couldn’t perform the duties by himself after his stroke.
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It has always been, and to some degree remains, extremely difficult to sort out just who was wielding power after Woodrow Wilson suffered his stroke in October of 1919. The two people who had the most access to Wilson were Edith and his physician, Dr. Cary Grayson, and these two along with the President’s private secretary Joseph Tumulty engaged in a determined conspiracy to hide the president’s true condition from the public and also from various members of congress and the cabinet. This produced some highly misleading statements by them, and then of course politics came into play and a lot of political hyperbole in the other direction muddied the waters still further.
In Edith Wilson’s own telling decades later, she acted as a filter for the president: “I studied every paper sent from the different Secretaries or Senators and tried to digest and present in tabloid form the things that, despite my vigilance, had to go to the President. I, myself, never made a single decision regarding the disposition of public affairs. The only decision that was mine was what was important and what was not, and the very important decision of when to present matters to my husband.” But obviously, as many historians have pointed out since, even as she described it her role would have commanded enormous power.
Nevertheless, Wilson took several official actions within a very short time. He vetoed a bill in late October (it was the Volstead Act and his veto was overridden) and corresponded, and in a few weeks even met with, members of Congress and of the Congress and also with the King and Queen of England. Edith and Dr. Grayson both claimed that Wilson was distressed and angry that the cabinet was meeting without the President’s invitation, but there’s no other evidence that he even knew it had done so until much later, and one biographer regards it as “inconceivable” that they actually even told Wilson about the meetings. He also initiated communications (through Edith) with Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, on a matter of policy.
The public line, with which most members of the cabinet and the friendly press stayed mostly consistent, was that Wilson’s body was broken but his mind was sharp and clear. There has been intense debate among medical historians about whether or not this was true or even possible, but certainly many (notably the very bitter and discontented Secretary of State Lansing) doubted at the time and people have gone on doubting it ever since. As above, if she was making the final decision what correspondence was reaching the president, Edith Wilson’s “stewardship” (her word) was far-reaching and enormously powerful. However, other executive functions were taken on by the Cabinet, by other executive officials, and by Edith and Dr. Grayson and Tumulty and others in the president’s inner circle. Edith Wilson did not step into her husband’s shoes in any kind of complete or comprehensive way, and indeed could not have done so given her qualifications. That she wielded enormous influence for at least a few months, and was probably the prime mover in Lansing’s resignation in February 1920, seems clear enough.
To go into any more detail relies on inference, and is heavily tied in with speculation about just how good the president’s condition could have been after a stroke. Excellent medical historians have done tons of great work on this, parsing eyewitness accounts of the president’s conduct for months after his stroke down to the tiniest detail. The normally very hostile (and enormously corrupt) Senator Albert Fall, who visited Wilson in October, left saying that “If there is something wrong with his mind, I would like to get the same ailment.” Ike Hoover, the longtime Chief White House Usher, said on the contrary that “there was never a moment during all that time when he was more than a shadow of his former self.” Everyone in the whole situation had excellent motives to lie or exaggerate in one direction or the other, and teasing out the real truth is probably impossible, not that people will stop trying. But to your specific question, Edith was never the “first female president” on her own, but she played a critical role in helping the president through his period as an invalid, and in doing so, certainly stepped beyond the ordinary constraints of being First Lady. Just what she was in those months is hard to pin down – personally, I would go with something like “vizier.”