First Ladies' Firsts
The role of the First Lady has changed over time due to shifting social values as well as the individual personalities of the first ladies. Try to identify the correct first lady in each question based on the following descriptions.
1. What president's wife first spoke on national radio, broke precedent by inviting noticeably pregnant women to stand with...
Lou Hoover.
2. Several First Ladies were widely known as counselors to their husbands, but which one engineered her husband's run for ...
Helen Taft.
3. What First Lady was the first (and only) woman to have married a President in a White House ceremony?
Frances Cleveland.
4. What president's wife was the first to descend into a mine?
Julia Grant.
5. What president's wife was the first to invite spirit mediums to the White House to conduct séances?
Mary Lincoln.
6. Who was the first woman to see her husband being sworn in as President? A famous writer described her as "a fine, portly...
Dolley Madison.
7. Who was the first woman widowed as First Lady to be present for the inauguration of her husband's successor?
Jacqueline Kennedy.
[Question 1] The first photograph of either a president or a first lady broadcasting from the White House is of Mrs. Hoover. She began national broadcasts in 1929, even setting up a practice room in the White House where she could "improve [her] talkie technique." Many of her broadcasts were made from President Hoover's country retreat, Camp Rapidan, where she often devoted her programs to speaking to young people, urging girls to contemplate independent careers and boys to help with the housework. Mrs. Hoover had a degree in geology from Stanford University, as did her husband. She had accompanied him to China for two years, where he hadsupervised the country's mining projects. She later used the Mandarin Chinese she learned then to communicate with her husband privately when they were in the presence of others.
[Question 2] Her father and her maternal grandfather had both served in Congress. When she was 17, she had gone to Washington with her parents to visit their family friends, President Rutherford Hayes and his wife Lucy, and she had spent a week as a guest at the White House. She was politically ambitious, but saw little opportunity for women to advance their own political careers. She married William Taft, a lawyer, who would probably have been content to practice law, or to become a judge, but she strongly encouraged him to accept political appointments, and finally, to run for political office. On her husband's inauguration day, the outgoing President, Theodore Roosevelt, left Washington immediately after the swearing-in ceremony, and she skillfully maneuvered herself into the car, next to her husband, that drove them both back to the White House. William Taft coped with stress and unhappiness by eating. During his presidency, his weight ballooned to 340 pounds, making it necessary for theTafts to replace the White House bathtub with a super-sized one.
[Question 3] Bachelor President Grover Cleveland married 21-year-old Frances Folsom on June 2, 1886, in a White House ceremony at which John Philip Sousa played the wedding march. After the ceremony, the newlyweds escaped to a honeymoon cottage in nearby Deer Park, Maryland, where reporters camped out in the bushes. Frances Folsom was the daughter of Cleveland's former law partner. Cleveland had known her since she had been born, and had bought her first baby carriage. He was 27 years older than her.
President John Tyler's first wife, Letitia, was the first woman to die during her husband's presidency, in 1842. He remarried while he was President, to Julia Gardiner, at her church in New York City, on June 26, 1844. President Wilson's first wife, Ellen, died in the White House on August 6, 1914, and he remarried, to Edith Bolling Galt, while he was President, on December 8, 1915, in a ceremony at Edith's Washington, D.C. home.
[Question 4] Julia Grant, although it happened after her husband was no longer president. Mrs. Grant went down the Big Bonanza silver mine in Virginia City, Nevada with her husband after hearing that he had wagered that she would be afraid to go. The Grants, along with their son, Ulysses, Jr., visited the mine on October 28, 1879, more than two years after Grant had left office. The mine's fabulous production of silver during the Civil War had done much to undergird the Government's financial credit internationally. Lucy Hayes later descended into the same mine with her husband, President Rutherford Hayes. On May 21, 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt made the national news by visiting the Willow Grove coal mine in Bellaire, Ohio, to observe the working conditions of the miners.
[Question 5] After the Lincolns' son Willie died in February 1862, she grew despondent. A few of her acquaintances suggested that she and her husband could still receive consolation from him in the afterlife through the intermediary of a spirit medium. Mrs. Lincoln invited several—the exact number is disputed—to the White House for private consultations. Both Lincolns attended a few séances elsewhere in Washington, although it is a matter of conjecture whether the President regarded these as anything more than a kind of entertainment.
[Question 6] The famous writer was Washington Irving. James Madison was generally shy and reticent among crowds and at parties, but Dolley was a social gadfly and an accomplished hostess. She was also a couple of inches taller than her husband.
[Question 7] Lyndon Johnson, with his wife Lady Bird on one side and Jackie on the other, was sworn in aboard Air Force One less than two hours after JFK's assassination. The ceremony was delayed to wait for Jackie to arrive. The most famous photograph of the event has Jackie in the foreground, standing in a pink suit still stained with her husband's blood, with LBJ in the center with his hand upraised taking the oath, and with Lady Bird in the background.
- Betty Boyd Caroli, First Ladies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
The statue stands in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, AL. The park, which predates the civil rights movement, was used by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as a staging point for nonviolent protests in 1963. Protesters, many of them local schoolchildren, massed here to organize for sit-ins, boycotts, and marches; in the streets around the park, law enforcement officers drenched protestors with fire hoses and menaced them with dogs. Photographs of these events created some of the most enduring images of the movement. 
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Park in Seattle, WA, honors the memory of King with an abstract sculpture inspired by his final speech, "I've Been to the Mountaintop." No specific event in the civil rights movement or in King's life took place at this location; like memorials, events, and other observances nationwide, the Memorial Park sculpture, by Seattle artist Robert Kelly, reminds the surrounding community not of specific historical events but of the assumed spirit of King's life and of the civil rights movement.
Sculptor Patrick Morelli's BEHOLD stands in the Peace Plaza in Atlanta, GA. Around the plaza range sites important in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., including his birth home and Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King preached as co-pastor with his father. Newer sites also surround the statue and plaza: The King Center, the location of King's tomb, founded by King's widow, Coretta Scott King, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visitor Center, maintained by the National Park Service.
The Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial does not yet exist, but the memorial's design has been completed and ground broken, ceremonially, on the proposed site. When finished, the envisioned four-acre memorial will be positioned along the edge of the Tidal Basin, along a sightline stretching from the Lincoln Memorial to the Jefferson Memorial. Difficulties and controversy have dogged the memorial's progress, including backlash when Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin was chosen to carve the nearly-three-story-tall statue of King that will anchor the memorial.
The National Park Service's travel itinerary 
