The First Ladies: Helen (Nellie) Taft
Helen "Nellie" Taft is another one of those First Ladies who possesses little notoriety, but who had an accomplished life. Her biography shows her as a woman who had huge ambitions for her husband and who did her utmost to promote his career, while displaying a strong sense of independence.
Her name at birth was Helen Louise Herron, but she was called Nellie from childhood. She was born on June 2, 1861 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father was John Williamson Herron, a lawyer who served as district attorney and as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Miami University. Her mother was Harriet Collins Herron, who was both the daughter and the sister of U.S. Congressmen. Nellie was the fifth of ten children. She had seven sisters and two brothers. In contrast to her husband, she had a slight build.
Nellie was educated at the Miss Nourse School in Cincinnati, and took music lessons from George Schneider of the Cincinnati Music School. She attended the University of Cincinnati for a year where she was enrolled in two classes in the autumn term, studying German and chemistry. The following year she taught French at Madame Fredin's School, and later became a daily teacher in White-Sykes School for Boys in Cincinnati.
When Nellie was 25 years old, she married lawyer William Howard Taft on June 19, 1886, at her family home on Pike Street in Cincinnati. The couple had three children, two sons and one daughter: Robert Taft (1889-1953), Helen Taft [Manning] (1891-1987) and Charles Taft (1897-1983). Following their marriage she taught Kindergarten while she studied the process of early childhood learning. She worked without a salary, volunteering for her mother-in-law, a founder of the free kindergarten movement in Cincinnati. When she learned that she was pregnant in January 1889, she did not return to work.
Nellie Taft served as the President of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Association from 1893 to 1900. She helped to found the orchestra and was responsible for auditioning, contract negotiations with conductors and musicians, subscription sales, rental of the performance hall, fundraising, presiding at board and stockholder meetings, signing all contracts and stock certificates, community outreach, educational programming, and delivering the annual report. Of this experience, she said "I found, at last, a practical method for expressing and making use of my love and knowledge of music." She did all this while raising her three children while her husband was away from home much of the time, serving as circuit court judge.
The Tafts lived in Washington when her husband served as Solicitor-General. She tried to forward her husband's career through social connections, while she had political ambitions for him. After the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley offered Taft the position of Governor-General of the recently acquired Philippine Islands. Nellie Taft urged his acceptance and eagerly moved with her family to Manila. There she started a nutritional program for infants. She made a concerted effort to learn the language and culture of the various regions of the islands. She also eagerly urged Taft to accept the offer of President Theodore Roosevelt to become his Secretary of War. Relocating to Washington with her husband, Nellie Taft found her own life as a Cabinet wife dull and demeaning so she threw her energies entirely into helping secure Roosevelt's support for Taft as the Republican presidential candidate in 1908. In early 1908, Nellie Taft held two meetings with President Roosevelt, about her husband's future as Roosevelt's successor.
Nellie Taft was thoroughly involved in the political elements of her husband's 1908 campaign. In dozens of letters, she advised him on how to position himself so that he would be seen as supporting some of Roosevelt's popular policies yet also standing on his own, apart from Roosevelt. Her role was hidden from the public, conducted instead through private correspondence or in closed-door meetings. Throughout the Republican Convention in June of 1908, Nellie Taft and her husband kept in close contact with their representatives there.
Nellie Taft was the first First Lady to ride in the Inaugural Parade with her husband, following the swearing-in ceremony. Many newspapers at the time considered it a symbol of what they assumed to be her support of full suffrage for women. Against the advice of traditionalists, she had decided she would make the ride several days earlier when she learned that outgoing President Roosevelt was opting out of the tradition to accompany his successor back to the White House.
As First Lady, Nellie Taft replaced the all-white male ushers who greeted visitors at the White House with African-American ushers in uniform. Even though "usher" was a position on the domestic staff, it was considered highly prestigious. This was seen as supportive of African Americans and a New York Times editorial praised her for this. She lifted the ban which prevented divorced individuals from visiting the white house. She enlarged the social schedule of dinners to include a season of musical concerts, enabling her to invite even more different individuals. She also refused to hold events on Sundays, encouraging public figures to stay home and enjoy their families. At the large New Year's Day Reception and Easter Egg Roll, she provided refreshments, seats, rest areas, first aid and other services for the thousands of members of the general public who attended.
Nellie Taft decided to convert the presidential transportation mode from horse-drawn vehicles to automobiles. She told the Ladies Home Journal that she would serve alcoholic beverages, and was criticized by prohibitionists. The President was lobbied by the Women's Christian Temperance Union to change her mind. Nellie Taft refused to back down, and was again praised in an editorial.
One of the legacies of Nellie Taft's years as First Lady was the creation and development of what is now known as West Potomac Park. She imported Japanese cherry blossom trees, which bloomed white and pink flowers every spring. She worked with professionals in the design of the new park. At her order, the Agriculture Department began locating all available cherry blossom trees they could quickly find, sending them to Washington and transplanting them in a single row as Nellie Taft directed. Hearing of the plan while in Washington, a Japanese scientist met with her and developed a plan to have the city of Tokyo donate some two thousand of its cherry blossom trees. Although the initial shipment was found to be diseased, and had to be destroyed in December of 1909, the mayor promised a new shipment - this time of some three thousand trees. They arrived in 1910 in clean condition. Nellie Taft, along with the Japanese Ambassador's wife would plant the first two of this shipment on 27 March 1912. They survive to this day.
The first of the public concerts that Nellie Taft began was held on Saturday, 17 April 1909. It included international music as well as American. The concerts are still held in the warm weather in Washington, D.C., at the Jefferson Memorial, near where they were originally played. Nellie Taft was successful in getting a $25,000 Congressional appropriation for further improvements in the park. She lead a national effort to raise a memorial on the Potomac River to heroes who perished on the Titanic in 1912.
Nellie Taft gave one of her only known speeches on December 15, 1908 at a convention of the National Civic Foundation in New York. She vowed that she would do all in her power to initiate reform in the federal workplace, providing safe, clean, well-lit conditions. She was unanimously elected NCF's women division honorary national chair. Shortly after, she made inspection tours of cotton mills in North Carolina, where children worked under dangerous conditions. She made an inspection tour of federal workplace conditions, and successfully solicited pledges from the new Cabinet members to cooperate in the "movement for the betterment" of working conditions for the mostly women employees in each executive department. Her effort would result in the first official federal act initiated by a First Lady to affect a large portion of the Washington working-class. Executive order number 1498 provided for Bureau of Public Health inspection of all executive branch government buildings and offices, and to standardize and maintain sanitary and safe conditions.
Nellie Taft's public appearances were limited after she suffered a stroke on 17 May 1909. The stroke was not devastating, but Nellie Taft did suffer from aphasia, and had to relearn how to speak. A residual speech impediment made her very self-conscious in public. When she was unable to serve as a public hostess, her daughter Helen Taft, and her sisters Jennie Anderson, Eleanor More, and Maria Herron acted in her place.
Unknown to the public, Nellie Taft smoked cigarettes, played poker and gambled. She was a heavy drinker, with a self-proclaimed taste for quality beer and champagne.
In her early months as First Lady, Nellie Taft declared herself a "qualified" suffragist, suggesting that the right to vote should be awarded only to women - and also to men - who could prove a degree of knowledge on the issues and candidates about which and for whom they were voting.
After her stroke and long convalescence, the President was hesitant about confiding political problems to her, fearing the effect on her nervous system. This coincided with a marked reduction in his political judgement. Public relations were a particular strength of Nellie Taft, and her husband's presidency was damaged by her absent advice. In spite of her impediment, she predicted that former President Theodore Roosevelt would challenge her husband for the Republican presidential nomination in 1912, and later that he would run as a third party candidate.
In July 1912, Nellie Taft again broke precedent when she attended the National Democratic Convention in Baltimore, becoming not only the first incumbent First Lady to attend a convention, but the only one to ever attend that of the opposition party. Greatly depressed at the loss of her husband's election, Nellie Taft moved with him to New Haven, Connecticut where he began teaching law at Yale University. She soon began work on her own memoirs, published in 1914, the first memoirs published by a First Lady. She eventually came to support full suffrage for women. She closely followed the career of her daughter Helen, who went on to earn a Ph.D., rising through the ranks of academia to become the president of Bryn Mawr University. During World War I, Nellie kept up with news of U.S. troop involvements through letters from her son Charles, who had volunteered as a private, and her sister Maria Herron, who volunteered as a Red Cross nurse at the front. Nellie Taft was an avid supporter, with her husband, of the League of Nations despite the fact that it was largely opposed by Republican leadership in the U.S. Senate.
Through her many trips to New York City, Nellie Taft also developed a great love of theater, often going several times a week and becoming something of an expert critic on numerous productions, as illustrated in her reviews in letters to her family.
In 1921, when William Howard Taft was nominated and confirmed as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by the Harding Administration, Nellie Taft was happy to return to Washington, D.C. Despite the fact that her husband was the highest-ranking judicial figure in the nation, Nellie Taft rejected the Prohibition laws, often arguing with him over it. She had a taste for some of the more scandalous "sex plays" of the 1920's and risked being part of an audience raid. Nellie Taft came to enjoy going to the movies, and was a fan of the Charlie Chan series.
She annually made an overseas trip, but when her husband's heart condition weakened, she remained at his side until his 1931 death. As a widow, Nellie Taft resumed her global travels - exploring Egypt on a donkey, taking buses in London, drinking beer in Mexico, sailing to the South Sea Islands, and Naples, Italy. Back at home, she lived in Charleston, South Carolina in the late winter and early spring, returning to Washington, spending her summers and early autumn at the family home in Quebec, and then back to Washington. She rarely returned to her home of Cincinnati.
Although she remained a loyal Republican, particularly supportive of Herbert and Lou Hoover, she was anxious to meet Eleanor Roosevelt. After her son Charlie took a job with the Roosevelt Administration, Nellie Taft was told a reporter in Mexico that she supported FDR in his bid for a second term, in 1936. Her other son, Robert Taft, then a Republican U.S. Senator, quickly issued a statement denying that she had done so. When her son ran for the Republican nomination in 1940, Nellie Taft attended the Philadelphia convention and loyally supported him. However, she also signed a public letter with other women, including FDR's mother, Sara Roosevelt, calling on Republican Senators - including her son - to permit Roosevelt's war-preparedness legislation to come to the Senate floor for a vote.
Nellie Taft died in Washington, D.C. on May 22, 1943 at the age of 81. She is buried alongside her husband in Arlington National Cemetery.
Her name at birth was Helen Louise Herron, but she was called Nellie from childhood. She was born on June 2, 1861 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father was John Williamson Herron, a lawyer who served as district attorney and as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Miami University. Her mother was Harriet Collins Herron, who was both the daughter and the sister of U.S. Congressmen. Nellie was the fifth of ten children. She had seven sisters and two brothers. In contrast to her husband, she had a slight build.
Nellie was educated at the Miss Nourse School in Cincinnati, and took music lessons from George Schneider of the Cincinnati Music School. She attended the University of Cincinnati for a year where she was enrolled in two classes in the autumn term, studying German and chemistry. The following year she taught French at Madame Fredin's School, and later became a daily teacher in White-Sykes School for Boys in Cincinnati.
When Nellie was 25 years old, she married lawyer William Howard Taft on June 19, 1886, at her family home on Pike Street in Cincinnati. The couple had three children, two sons and one daughter: Robert Taft (1889-1953), Helen Taft [Manning] (1891-1987) and Charles Taft (1897-1983). Following their marriage she taught Kindergarten while she studied the process of early childhood learning. She worked without a salary, volunteering for her mother-in-law, a founder of the free kindergarten movement in Cincinnati. When she learned that she was pregnant in January 1889, she did not return to work.
Nellie Taft served as the President of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Association from 1893 to 1900. She helped to found the orchestra and was responsible for auditioning, contract negotiations with conductors and musicians, subscription sales, rental of the performance hall, fundraising, presiding at board and stockholder meetings, signing all contracts and stock certificates, community outreach, educational programming, and delivering the annual report. Of this experience, she said "I found, at last, a practical method for expressing and making use of my love and knowledge of music." She did all this while raising her three children while her husband was away from home much of the time, serving as circuit court judge.
The Tafts lived in Washington when her husband served as Solicitor-General. She tried to forward her husband's career through social connections, while she had political ambitions for him. After the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley offered Taft the position of Governor-General of the recently acquired Philippine Islands. Nellie Taft urged his acceptance and eagerly moved with her family to Manila. There she started a nutritional program for infants. She made a concerted effort to learn the language and culture of the various regions of the islands. She also eagerly urged Taft to accept the offer of President Theodore Roosevelt to become his Secretary of War. Relocating to Washington with her husband, Nellie Taft found her own life as a Cabinet wife dull and demeaning so she threw her energies entirely into helping secure Roosevelt's support for Taft as the Republican presidential candidate in 1908. In early 1908, Nellie Taft held two meetings with President Roosevelt, about her husband's future as Roosevelt's successor.
Nellie Taft was thoroughly involved in the political elements of her husband's 1908 campaign. In dozens of letters, she advised him on how to position himself so that he would be seen as supporting some of Roosevelt's popular policies yet also standing on his own, apart from Roosevelt. Her role was hidden from the public, conducted instead through private correspondence or in closed-door meetings. Throughout the Republican Convention in June of 1908, Nellie Taft and her husband kept in close contact with their representatives there.
Nellie Taft was the first First Lady to ride in the Inaugural Parade with her husband, following the swearing-in ceremony. Many newspapers at the time considered it a symbol of what they assumed to be her support of full suffrage for women. Against the advice of traditionalists, she had decided she would make the ride several days earlier when she learned that outgoing President Roosevelt was opting out of the tradition to accompany his successor back to the White House.
As First Lady, Nellie Taft replaced the all-white male ushers who greeted visitors at the White House with African-American ushers in uniform. Even though "usher" was a position on the domestic staff, it was considered highly prestigious. This was seen as supportive of African Americans and a New York Times editorial praised her for this. She lifted the ban which prevented divorced individuals from visiting the white house. She enlarged the social schedule of dinners to include a season of musical concerts, enabling her to invite even more different individuals. She also refused to hold events on Sundays, encouraging public figures to stay home and enjoy their families. At the large New Year's Day Reception and Easter Egg Roll, she provided refreshments, seats, rest areas, first aid and other services for the thousands of members of the general public who attended.
Nellie Taft decided to convert the presidential transportation mode from horse-drawn vehicles to automobiles. She told the Ladies Home Journal that she would serve alcoholic beverages, and was criticized by prohibitionists. The President was lobbied by the Women's Christian Temperance Union to change her mind. Nellie Taft refused to back down, and was again praised in an editorial.
One of the legacies of Nellie Taft's years as First Lady was the creation and development of what is now known as West Potomac Park. She imported Japanese cherry blossom trees, which bloomed white and pink flowers every spring. She worked with professionals in the design of the new park. At her order, the Agriculture Department began locating all available cherry blossom trees they could quickly find, sending them to Washington and transplanting them in a single row as Nellie Taft directed. Hearing of the plan while in Washington, a Japanese scientist met with her and developed a plan to have the city of Tokyo donate some two thousand of its cherry blossom trees. Although the initial shipment was found to be diseased, and had to be destroyed in December of 1909, the mayor promised a new shipment - this time of some three thousand trees. They arrived in 1910 in clean condition. Nellie Taft, along with the Japanese Ambassador's wife would plant the first two of this shipment on 27 March 1912. They survive to this day.
The first of the public concerts that Nellie Taft began was held on Saturday, 17 April 1909. It included international music as well as American. The concerts are still held in the warm weather in Washington, D.C., at the Jefferson Memorial, near where they were originally played. Nellie Taft was successful in getting a $25,000 Congressional appropriation for further improvements in the park. She lead a national effort to raise a memorial on the Potomac River to heroes who perished on the Titanic in 1912.
Nellie Taft gave one of her only known speeches on December 15, 1908 at a convention of the National Civic Foundation in New York. She vowed that she would do all in her power to initiate reform in the federal workplace, providing safe, clean, well-lit conditions. She was unanimously elected NCF's women division honorary national chair. Shortly after, she made inspection tours of cotton mills in North Carolina, where children worked under dangerous conditions. She made an inspection tour of federal workplace conditions, and successfully solicited pledges from the new Cabinet members to cooperate in the "movement for the betterment" of working conditions for the mostly women employees in each executive department. Her effort would result in the first official federal act initiated by a First Lady to affect a large portion of the Washington working-class. Executive order number 1498 provided for Bureau of Public Health inspection of all executive branch government buildings and offices, and to standardize and maintain sanitary and safe conditions.
Nellie Taft's public appearances were limited after she suffered a stroke on 17 May 1909. The stroke was not devastating, but Nellie Taft did suffer from aphasia, and had to relearn how to speak. A residual speech impediment made her very self-conscious in public. When she was unable to serve as a public hostess, her daughter Helen Taft, and her sisters Jennie Anderson, Eleanor More, and Maria Herron acted in her place.
Unknown to the public, Nellie Taft smoked cigarettes, played poker and gambled. She was a heavy drinker, with a self-proclaimed taste for quality beer and champagne.
In her early months as First Lady, Nellie Taft declared herself a "qualified" suffragist, suggesting that the right to vote should be awarded only to women - and also to men - who could prove a degree of knowledge on the issues and candidates about which and for whom they were voting.
After her stroke and long convalescence, the President was hesitant about confiding political problems to her, fearing the effect on her nervous system. This coincided with a marked reduction in his political judgement. Public relations were a particular strength of Nellie Taft, and her husband's presidency was damaged by her absent advice. In spite of her impediment, she predicted that former President Theodore Roosevelt would challenge her husband for the Republican presidential nomination in 1912, and later that he would run as a third party candidate.
In July 1912, Nellie Taft again broke precedent when she attended the National Democratic Convention in Baltimore, becoming not only the first incumbent First Lady to attend a convention, but the only one to ever attend that of the opposition party. Greatly depressed at the loss of her husband's election, Nellie Taft moved with him to New Haven, Connecticut where he began teaching law at Yale University. She soon began work on her own memoirs, published in 1914, the first memoirs published by a First Lady. She eventually came to support full suffrage for women. She closely followed the career of her daughter Helen, who went on to earn a Ph.D., rising through the ranks of academia to become the president of Bryn Mawr University. During World War I, Nellie kept up with news of U.S. troop involvements through letters from her son Charles, who had volunteered as a private, and her sister Maria Herron, who volunteered as a Red Cross nurse at the front. Nellie Taft was an avid supporter, with her husband, of the League of Nations despite the fact that it was largely opposed by Republican leadership in the U.S. Senate.
Through her many trips to New York City, Nellie Taft also developed a great love of theater, often going several times a week and becoming something of an expert critic on numerous productions, as illustrated in her reviews in letters to her family.
In 1921, when William Howard Taft was nominated and confirmed as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by the Harding Administration, Nellie Taft was happy to return to Washington, D.C. Despite the fact that her husband was the highest-ranking judicial figure in the nation, Nellie Taft rejected the Prohibition laws, often arguing with him over it. She had a taste for some of the more scandalous "sex plays" of the 1920's and risked being part of an audience raid. Nellie Taft came to enjoy going to the movies, and was a fan of the Charlie Chan series.
She annually made an overseas trip, but when her husband's heart condition weakened, she remained at his side until his 1931 death. As a widow, Nellie Taft resumed her global travels - exploring Egypt on a donkey, taking buses in London, drinking beer in Mexico, sailing to the South Sea Islands, and Naples, Italy. Back at home, she lived in Charleston, South Carolina in the late winter and early spring, returning to Washington, spending her summers and early autumn at the family home in Quebec, and then back to Washington. She rarely returned to her home of Cincinnati.
Although she remained a loyal Republican, particularly supportive of Herbert and Lou Hoover, she was anxious to meet Eleanor Roosevelt. After her son Charlie took a job with the Roosevelt Administration, Nellie Taft was told a reporter in Mexico that she supported FDR in his bid for a second term, in 1936. Her other son, Robert Taft, then a Republican U.S. Senator, quickly issued a statement denying that she had done so. When her son ran for the Republican nomination in 1940, Nellie Taft attended the Philadelphia convention and loyally supported him. However, she also signed a public letter with other women, including FDR's mother, Sara Roosevelt, calling on Republican Senators - including her son - to permit Roosevelt's war-preparedness legislation to come to the Senate floor for a vote.
Nellie Taft died in Washington, D.C. on May 22, 1943 at the age of 81. She is buried alongside her husband in Arlington National Cemetery.