Free First Ladies by Margaret Truman

She also visited 109 model homes which the Civic Federation had built and talked with the residents, without letting them know that she was the First Lady. The next day she became a stockholder in the company that was building these homes, the Sanitary Housing Company—and soon agreed to become the honorary chairman of the woman’s department of the National Civic Federation.
    These gestures swiftly became public knowledge. Suddenly concerned congressmen were touring the alleys, and everyone in Washington society was discussing how to improve them. A committee of fifty prominent Washingtonians gathered to draft an “Alley Bill” that would clear the slums of the shacks and erect model homes in their place. Ellen Wilson invited the committee to the White House for tea. At another meeting, held in a private mansion, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, considered the greatest orator of the era, addressed the group. “The most eloquent speech here tonight,” Bryan said, pointing to Ellen, “is the one that has not been made at all, for actions speak louder than words…. As crowded as my days are, I feel that if the wife of the president can find time out of her busy days to be here and to work for this cause, I can too.”
    After the Alley Bill was introduced in Congress, Ellen went to work on the conditions in which women and blacks labored in government offices. She visited the Post Office Department and was appalled by the lack of light and air and the deplorable rest room facilities. She went to Postmaster General Albert Burleson, an ultraconservative Texan, who gave her the standard Washington runaround. At a White House luncheon, an angry Ellen Wilson brought up the problem in a very determined way with Colonel Edward House, one of her husband’stop aides. Soon the whole table was listening to the agitated House assure the First Lady he would do something about it.
    Ellen made similar inspections of the Government Printing Office, where conditions were equally deplorable. Soon in the black ghetto of Washington, D.C., praise was being showered on Ellen Wilson. She was described as a “noble woman” who had set an example that black Americans hoped other white women would follow.
    Ellen Wilson sent this message while maintaining a full-time pace as First Lady, with the usual White House round of entertaining politicians and visiting diplomats. She also functioned as her husband’s adviser and partner, going over his speeches with him, discussing his legislative program, doing research on problem countries, such as Mexico, with whom Wilson almost went to war in 1914.
    Suddenly, on the advice of her doctor, Ellen sharply curtailed her activities. She retreated to a summer cottage in New Hampshire, where she painted and communed with nature and exchanged longing letters with her equally lonely husband in the White House. When she returned to Washington, the doctor still urged her to rest. He did not have the heart to tell the President or the First Lady that she was suffering from Bright’s disease, a fatal kidney disorder for which we still have not found a cure.
    Ellen took only part of his advice. She summoned the energy to superintend the weddings of her daughters Jessie and Eleanor and presided at state dinners and receptions. But she noticed how easily she became exhausted. On March 1, 1914, she slipped and fell on the polished floor of her bedroom. She never recovered from this accident. In a letter to a relative, she described the fall as “sort of an all around crash.” Gradually, Ellen read the truth in her doctor’s mournful eyes. She was a dying woman.
    One spring day she visited the rose garden on her nurse’s arm. The gardener was working on a design that Ellen and he had created. “It will be so lovely, Charlie,” she said. “But I’ll never live to see it finished.”
    Throughout this slow, sad decline, the First Lady continued to take a strong interest in her slum clearance program.