Historical Lessons of Leadership with Catherine Allgor

[00:00:00] Lindsay Chervinsky: What can the early first ladies teach us about leadership and American politics? Welcome to Leadership and Legacy: Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. I'm Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, director of the library. In this podcast series, we talk with experts about leadership and history, how studying these stories helps us understand our current moment, and how we can apply lessons from leaders in the past to our own lives.

Today I am joined by Dr. Catherine Allgor, the President Emerita of the Massachusetts Historical Society, a scholar of women in the Early Republic, and the unchallenged expert on the first First Ladies. Her work explores how women carved out spheres of influence and power in the Early Republic, despite the restrictions placed on the "fairer sex."

She brilliantly demonstrates how women used whatever tools were available to them: fashion, relationships, socializing, and family, to build the careers of their sons, husbands, nephews, and brothers. She's best known for her books, Parlor Politics, which is required reading for just about every student of Early America, and A Perfect Union, the definitive biography of the always colorful and fantastical Dolley Madison.

Dr. Allgor has the unique ability to grasp Dolley's flare and charisma, because she brings her own to every conversation, including this one.

Well, thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you.

[00:01:32] Catherine Allgor: Well, I'm thrilled to be here and, and thank you so much for asking for my thoughts.

[00:01:36] Lindsay Chervinsky: Oh, well, I, I have to, any conversation about leadership, especially if we're talking about women's leadership, you are a natural go-to. So I wanna start in a little bit of a different place for this conversation. What are words that you typically associate with leadership?

[00:01:50] Catherine Allgor: It's a great question, but I find a lot of the sort of discussion around leadership to be not useful to me.

[00:01:56] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:01:56] Catherine Allgor: I am an intellectual. I also was raised very traditionally as a woman, and when we were just chatting sort of back and forth, you were talking to me about, you warned me, you said you were gonna ask me about a book about leadership, and thank you for not springing that on me, because honestly, I have to say that I have read the sort of classics in the field. They're often written by men. And I have to say I haven't learned a a lot about them. I've learned some, maybe some practical tips.

So I thought, okay, I can't talk about those books with Lindsay, but what, what book could I talk about? And I got to Aristotle. So Aristotle was very formative for me in college, and it was really the basis of my own morality.

I was raised very strictly religiously, so I had no morality. But Aristotle said in effect that every man, and he did mean men, but every person is an end to themselves and not a means to an end. And what that meant was that in— translating that in modern speak, that every person has their own destiny, their own story, that may intersect with yours, but they're never just a plot point in your story.

And I really took that to heart and realized so much of our lives just living our lives are transactional. Like, I really need you to bring my drink from the bar, wait person, you know?

[00:03:08] Lindsay Chervinsky: Sure.

[00:03:09] Catherine Allgor: And so what is one's obligation? The answer is to make the transaction in a way that that other person feels seen and heard as a full human being.

Even though their job is to bring you the drink and your job is to pay for it. Right?

[00:03:20] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yeah.

[00:03:21] Catherine Allgor: That's the simplest. Well, when you begin to be a leader, that's the first thing for me, that you go into any situation to, and you understand that these people, they have to work, they have to get the job done, they have to do the job well, but they're full human beings.

[00:03:34] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:35] Catherine Allgor: And so there isn't a lot of talk about empathy. There isn't a lot of talk about sort of morality and moral codes in leadership. But for me, that's really the kind of fundamental thing. So, all right. Words, I would say empathic, intelligent, humble, at times, so that's a little tricky. And always having the big picture, knowing where everybody's going so that people can feel like they know where they're going.

[00:03:58] Lindsay Chervinsky: It's so interesting 'cause you, I think, intuitively understood what I was getting at and I was intentionally not revealing the whole context of my first question, which is that a lot of the words that we typically associate with leadership: strength, vigor, power, those are masculine coded words.

[00:04:15] Catherine Allgor: Yes.

[00:04:16] Lindsay Chervinsky: And those are not the words you chose because, and I think for very good reason, because strength, vigor, power can be sometimes quite problematic. Sometimes they're useful in leadership.

[00:04:26] Catherine Allgor: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:27] Lindsay Chervinsky: But they can be quite problematic and they only allow for a certain type of leadership as opposed to a recognition, as you said, that empathy and intelligence and sort of strategic awareness can come in lots of different forms.

And so that is the viewpoint with which I wanted to enter this conversation.

[00:04:44] Catherine Allgor: Oh, I wish I could say I figured that out on you, but I didn't. Though, can I say something else? Just to make it all more complicated. Yeah, those, so you said strength, powerful strength, vigor. And power. And power. Right. And here's the thing, of course, those are all gendered.

[00:04:57] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:57] Catherine Allgor: Because you could be a person who's born a woman or identifies as a woman and be very strong, very clear—

[00:05:03] Lindsay Chervinsky: mm-hmm.

[00:05:03] Catherine Allgor: —about what you want. It still doesn't read the same way to the world.

[00:05:06] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yes.

[00:05:06] Catherine Allgor: Right. Your power could be the power of a sort of a deep understanding of human beings and how they work. That doesn't come across as power, you know?

[00:05:13] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yes, yes.

[00:05:14] Catherine Allgor: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:14] Lindsay Chervinsky: Absolutely. So with that very sort of complicated context that we have laid on the table, I want to talk about the early first ladies.

[00:05:23] Catherine Allgor: Ah!

[00:05:23] Lindsay Chervinsky: We often talk about the early presidents, rightly so, it's the George Washington Presidential Library, they crafted so many of the institutions that we are still living with today, and there's so much that we still have to learn from them, but almost all of them had partners, and those partners presented in different ways, and showed up in different ways, and thought of themselves in different ways, and so there's no one that knows more about that than you.

[00:05:44] Catherine Allgor: Oh—

[00:05:44] Lindsay Chervinsky: And so I am just thrilled to talk to you about first ladies. So let's maybe start with, as there are today, back then, there were lots of different types of first ladies.

[00:05:53] Catherine Allgor: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:53] Lindsay Chervinsky: Could you introduce us to some of them?

Allgor introduced me to a typology of first ladies based on some of the earliest first ladies: Martha Washington the helpmeet, Dolley Madison the social queen, and Abigail Adams the intellectual.

Particularly when combined with personal charisma, these roles enabled first ladies to wield soft power, comfort the nation, and shape how the presidency itself is perceived.

[00:06:21] Catherine Allgor: Yes. So the first, first lady, I would be severely remiss if I did not mention Martha Washington here in your own house. She would be the kind of, well, she was the Roman matron, but she would be definitely the husband centered helpmeet.

Her concern was for her husband, and not necessarily his political life, but rather just him as a person that she loved, right. And we see other first ladies who are like that. I always think of Mrs. Truman or Mrs. Eisenhower as being really husband focused. We're talking about those sort of care and feeding of the president.

[00:06:53] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:53] Catherine Allgor: And then we have the queen, I'll call her that, of the unofficial sphere, which is Dolley Madison, and we can talk about what the unofficial sphere means and the power of that.

And of course one of our mutual favorites is Abigail Adams. And Abigail Adams is to the extent a woman could be at that time, an intellectual equal to John Adams, a policy person, a person who was very sharp, and I mean that in all senses, around human nature. And she had a a nose for politics. And those are the kind of first ladies that we see with Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama.

And then I think a lot of first ladies try to combine a lot of these little bits and pieces to more or less effect. So poor Mary Todd Lincoln, who claimed a kinship with Dolley because Dolley's first husband was a Todd. Totally fictional, by the way, but—

[00:07:42] Lindsay Chervinsky: Oh, that's a good, that's a little fun parlor fact.

[00:07:45] Catherine Allgor: I, it is a little parlor fact.

[00:07:46] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yeah.

[00:07:46] Catherine Allgor: Gosh, I hope it's true. Well, I know the podcast audience out there will let me know. And anyway, it was a, Todd married into it. Ridiculous.

Anyway, but she decided to be Dolley Madison. Everybody decided to be Dolley Madison at some point, but she really did it up with the clothes and the parties. But the difference was she did it, Dolley Madison, the apotheosis of her time was of course during the war of 1812, but that was a war that was very far away from most people and didn't involve a lot of people, and Mary Todd Lincoln's trying to do this in the Civil War. You know the bloodshed is like right outside the door. So it did not go over well.

[00:08:17] Lindsay Chervinsky: No, it did not. It's a lot harder to have parties when you actually have wounded veterans basically in your backyard.

[00:08:23] Catherine Allgor: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So those are the kind of prototypes.

Can you think of another prototype? Am I missing one?

[00:08:28] Lindsay Chervinsky: No, I think that's exactly right. I think of the, as you said, the helpmate, the very political, I would add Eleanor Roosevelt to the very political.

[00:08:35] Catherine Allgor: Sure.

[00:08:36] Lindsay Chervinsky: And then there's the social queen. And I don't in any way mean social to diminish.

[00:08:40] Catherine Allgor: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:41] Lindsay Chervinsky: But a recognition of the power and the value of the social aspect.

[00:08:44] Catherine Allgor: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:44] Lindsay Chervinsky: And what could be achieved with that. I think you're right that no one has done that as well as Dolley did, but people certainly have tried and then, but I think, uh, you're right. Mostly these kind of fall within, if that's a triangle spectrum, they fall somewhere in that triangle where they're trying to pull different pieces from it.

[00:09:00] Catherine Allgor: Mm-hmm. And now I thought of another sort of power then too, that it, it starts with Martha Washington, much against her will, but it, it again, Dolley Madison. And this is the role of the charismatic figure.

[00:09:10] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:10] Catherine Allgor: Right. So this is a, another kind of power. And the political scientists, people who are no doubt listening to this podcast, avidly listening to it, will think of this as soft power, which we should probably talk about what that means. But the charismatic figure is this person who both reflects messages that are larger than him or her or their selves, and also becomes a lightning rod. Right?

So Martha Washington is aware of that when she dresses in white and affects the Roman matron. Dolley Madison is what genius at this, where she constructs a queen like presence that isn't like a real queen, but really queen, a Democratic queen, if you will.

[00:09:44] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:44] Catherine Allgor: I call her the Republican queen actually. But the, what Americans would imagine a queen to, to be. And these are again, imparting, in the case of the early first ladies, the real important message was everything's fine. The right people are ruling you. You can tell because of the, the way you are received in the White House or Martha Washington, the way she greets you and what they all look like.

Later first ladies have more complicated and, and this is one of those things, you have to choose it, right? You have to choose to be a charismatic figure, but Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, projected modernity and youthfulness, and a kind of elite Americanism I call J. Crew'd- ness, or Ralph Lauren probably.

[00:10:22] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:10:23] Catherine Allgor: You know, it's like this easy American style, but it's very high end, you know?

[00:10:27] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yeah, no, I think Ralph Lauren is perfect, 'cause I remember when Michelle Obama wore J. Crew gloves to the 2009 inauguration.

[00:10:34] Catherine Allgor: Yes.

[00:10:34] Lindsay Chervinsky: It broke the Internet because a people were trying to get the link to the gloves and they sold out almost instantaneously.

But it was very much a demonstration of what we would think of as like, accessible American fashion.

[00:10:47] Catherine Allgor: Yes.

[00:10:47] Lindsay Chervinsky: It wasn't high-end American fashion. It was nice, but it was accessible.

[00:10:51] Catherine Allgor: And that was the whole Obama vibe really, which is that you can be a regular American, working class, modest, you work hard, you succeed and you graduate from the fancy school, you become a lawyer, whatever, but you are still a regular American. And I think that's what the Obamas, it's like, this is what a regular American looks like, sounds like, what they choose to do with their children when they succeed. Yeah.

[00:11:11] Lindsay Chervinsky: Well, yeah, absolutely. And one of the ways that I think that always comes through with first ladies and, and I think modern first ladies in particular, is where do they send their children to school?

[00:11:19] Catherine Allgor: Yeah.

[00:11:19] Lindsay Chervinsky: That is always one of those questions that becomes weighted with so much additional significance.

[00:11:23] Catherine Allgor: I know, I know. And the truth, there's so many practical considerations, security now.

[00:11:28] Lindsay Chervinsky: Oh, of course.

[00:11:29] Catherine Allgor: We can't judge, but—

[00:11:30] Lindsay Chervinsky: Well see, you've gotten at a couple of different things that I wanna kind of drill down on. And one is messaging, one is the concept of a charismatic figure, we've touched very briefly on the unofficial sphere, but for the early first ladies, what are some of the different ways, and we can expand on the ideas we've already discussed, that they exhibited forms of leadership, and did people at the time recognize them as leadership?

Allgor emphasized that first ladies, much like their husbands, wanted to acquire and wield power. But what this looked like was profoundly shaped by the gendered world they lived in.

Rather than the official sphere that their husbands operated in, they ruled over what Allgor calls the "unofficial sphere." And politics, she argues, needs both to function.

[00:12:18] Catherine Allgor: So that's tricky. That's tricky. But I'll say this, and this goes a little bit back to how we started with Aristotle. Looking at the first ladies, and I'm gonna include their cohorts, these other political women that I study and you know well. Just a reminder, women are very similar to people. Just people. And human beings love power.

[00:12:38] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm.

[00:12:38] Catherine Allgor: And our true desire is to control the world. And if you have a 2-year-old in your life, you know that they wanna control the world. And we like to control our destinies.

And one of the interesting things is, you can look at human beings in any kind of extremis, right? Even in a concentration camp or as an enslaved person, and where they can exercise agency and whatever passes for power that they can get ahold of, they will use it.

And that's true of these women. So these women, I'm gonna use first names, but you know, Martha and Abigail and Dolley, and Elizabeth Monroe and Louisa Catherine Adams, their culture did not offer them a lot of avenues to control their destiny or to control their world or their— themselves, but they found ways to do it. And they took what was offered to them and they really ran with it.

So let me talk— back to my favorite audience, apparently is the political scientists, because the charismatic figure is actually from a political scientist named Seymour Martin Lipset, who talked about George Washington as the charismatic figure.

[00:13:36] Lindsay Chervinsky: Ah.

[00:13:36] Catherine Allgor: And when I read that, I was like, yeah, he was the charismatic figure, this larger than life person with the incredibly intense focus on him and his body and the way he took his glasses off and all that. That got transferred to Dolley.

[00:13:48] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:48] Catherine Allgor: So when I did my work around Washington women, which included a couple first ladies, I began to understand the power of the social sphere.

But I was so afraid of exactly what you said, which is that you just say social and people's like, minds drop out.

[00:14:00] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:00] Catherine Allgor: They just can't—

[00:14:00] Lindsay Chervinsky: mm-hmm.

[00:14:01] Catherine Allgor: —do it. They just can't. And so I proffered a theory, which is that for politics to work, you need two spheres of action. One is the official sphere, and that's the sphere of legislation and debates and laws and paperwork and the product, if you will, of politics.

[00:14:18] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:18] Catherine Allgor: But you need an unofficial sphere. You need a place of process where people can negotiate. They can get to know each other as human beings. They can offer proposals or thoughts they cannot offer in the official glare, the spotlight of the official sphere. And I named that the unofficial sphere because I needed to break people's, just, minds about what—

[00:14:39] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:39] Catherine Allgor: —social meant. And then of course, these spheres and the period we're talking about, as they are now, are gendered. So the official sphere is gendered male, and it happens in male places, and the unofficial sphere is gendered female, and it happens in female places.

And to get to the hard question though, about whether people know, and of course how they are understanding it, let's put it this way. When someone needed a job in Washington, they knew who to go to.

So Washington Irving, who's a very famous writer from the early 19th century, he needs a job. And he knows what to do. And he writes very frankly about this. He needs to go to Washington and get invited, or go, really, to Mrs. Madison's squeeze, her reception, get to know Mrs. Madison and the ladies around her, get in good with them. And that was the way for advancement.

And this was widely known in Washington. You needed to have a friend at court, and that friend was a lady. Now, what were these men telling themselves? We don't know maybe what was in their heart of hearts, but the proof is in the pudding. Now, what's interesting about the women, and I discovered this, I like to say I discovered as much as Columbus discovered America, but this was happening. It was hard to see in the sources.

[00:15:42] Lindsay Chervinsky: Hmm.

[00:15:43] Catherine Allgor: Because from the women's point of view, it was always a discussion that sounded very personal and very womanly. So it'd be like, dear Russell, something, came to visit me. Mrs. Russell came to visit me, and we talked about her beautiful house and her lovely son, and how sad it was that her husband had died and we were worried about her son.

And so to help her— and it would be all this talk about family relations, and love, and marriages. Boy, Martha Jefferson Randolph, she really did go quite a bit to Margaret Bayard Smith and look for stuff from her. And it was always couched in this idea that the sons and daughters were stuck on that mountaintop in Monticello. They needed to come to Washington so they could meet people and get married.

So there's this language. So at least what the women were telling, at least other people, it wasn't that they were playing politics at all, that they were not in fact patronage dealers.

[00:16:31] Lindsay Chervinsky: Don't you think to a certain extent though, that was a, a shield, don't you think that—

[00:16:35] Catherine Allgor: Oh, totally a shield.

[00:16:35] Lindsay Chervinsky: Because I suspect, and you know much better than I do. But I suspect that Dolley was wicked proud of her ability to run the city.

[00:16:43] Catherine Allgor: And she would deny it to her last breath.

But yes, I, I think so. Like Margaret Bayard Smith, who is really a great source of early Washington, she would say things like, this guy now is succeeding—

[00:16:53] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:53] Catherine Allgor: —and little does the world know who got him that job.

[00:16:55] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yeah.

[00:16:55] Catherine Allgor: Yeah. There's a little bit like a hint.

[00:16:58] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yes.

[00:16:58] Catherine Allgor: So they, yeah. I think they little pride in their work kind of peaks out a little bit, so. Yeah.

[00:17:01] Lindsay Chervinsky: Well, one of my favorite examples that I think you and I have talked about, that I've written about, was how people talked about Abigail, and it's so revealing of her unique position, as you said, a political mind, because when people thought she was on their side, they were thrilled that she was involved politically.

[00:17:17] Catherine Allgor: Yes.

[00:17:17] Lindsay Chervinsky: That she could change her husband's mind, that she could do any of that, and when they felt she wasn't on their side, then she was too political. She was a French lady.

[00:17:26] Catherine Allgor: Yes.

[00:17:26] Lindsay Chervinsky: She was too much like the French courtesans or the French women at court. And they wrote this in their letters. They're quite explicit about it.

And at one point, one of my favorite exchanges is between John and Abigail, and they both basically heard the same rumor in Boston and in Philadelphia, that if she had been, if the "old lady" had been present, then he would not have sent a diplomatic negotiation. And they're both writing to each other saying, isn't this hilarious that— because she's saying, I agree with you. This is a great choice. And he's recognizing that they talked through things together. There was no control there. And I love that moment because it is so revealing about how involved they could be.

[00:18:05] Catherine Allgor: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Oh, you must have loved that.

[00:18:07] Lindsay Chervinsky: I mean, if all sources could be that glorious, our job—

[00:18:10] Catherine Allgor: —those days—

[00:18:11] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yes.

[00:18:12] Catherine Allgor: —that's the day where you leave the archive going, you know what, this is a great job and it is a great job no matter what's happening in the archive.

I agree with you. And in fact, one of the things when I started with Dolley Madison work, one of the things I sort of knew, like everybody knew, was that Dolley Madison was incredibly popular. She was beloved.

There are lovely nicknames for her, and people just adored dear Dolley, that's what Louisa Catherine called her, dear Dolley. But of course the best was kind of what you're saying. She had enemies. Who hated it. So that was the best part. When you're trying to prove someone's power, sometimes the words of enemies are the best because they're revealing that she's definitely somebody to be reckoned with, somebody who's possibly dangerous, that they don't trust them, or in fact, hate her.

[00:18:50] Lindsay Chervinsky: Absolutely.

[00:18:51] Catherine Allgor: That's the best.

[00:18:51] Lindsay Chervinsky: Absolutely. Sometimes criticism is the most revealing.

[00:18:54] Catherine Allgor: I know.

[00:18:57] Heather Soubra: Experience leadership like never before at the George Washington Leadership Institute. Inspired by the timeless lessons of George Washington, our programs focus on critical skills, like effective communication, emotional intelligence, adaptability, strategic vision, and character driven leadership.

Immerse your team in a journey through history while equipping them with strategies to navigate today's complex challenges. Join us at the beautiful George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon for a half day or full day sessions, or customize a program to fit your needs. Visit GW leadership institute.org to learn more.

[00:19:44] Lindsay Chervinsky: So all leaders have successes and failures.

[00:19:47] Catherine Allgor: Yes.

[00:19:47] Lindsay Chervinsky: And they learn from them, both of them. Sometimes I think failures teach us more than successes. What were some of the successes and failures of the early first ladies?

[00:19:55] Catherine Allgor: Yes. So really deeply, the failure for Dolley Madison— so what Dolley Madison does for us Americans now, is she offers us a kind of politicking model, right? If you just look back at early America, you go to see Hamilton way too many times, politics was very masculine. It was very violent, and that is true about the politics starting right from the beginning, all through the 19th century, we have people beating each other and with canes and on the floors of Congress.

[00:20:22] Lindsay Chervinsky: Can we just pause there and let that sink in for people in the event that they have not heard this history, we think Congress is bad today, and I would not disagree with that sentiment, but we have yet to have any cane beating to my knowledge in the last 10 years. So there's at least a lower bar to which we could sink, I suppose.

[00:20:39] Catherine Allgor: I suppose. Cane beating to almost to the point of death too.

[00:20:42] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yes.

[00:20:42] Catherine Allgor: We're not just like whack, you know?

[00:20:44] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yes. We don't have. We have not had intra-party death fighting on the floors of Congress in a while. So that's a small blessing that we can be grateful for.

[00:20:52] Catherine Allgor: Let, let alone the streets. I mean, they were actually— I don't know if they were restraining themselves at all.

But anyway, if you're interested in this, Joanne Freeman's work is the best on this. I have to recommend—

[00:21:00] Lindsay Chervinsky: And that's called The Field of Blood.

[00:21:02] Catherine Allgor: I think it's Affairs of Honor.

[00:21:03] Lindsay Chervinsky: There's two—first one was Affairs of Honor, about the duals.

[00:21:05] Catherine Allgor: Yes.

[00:21:05] Lindsay Chervinsky: Field of Blood is about all of the fighting in Congress—

[00:21:08] Catherine Allgor: in Congress.

[00:21:08] Lindsay Chervinsky: —in particular.

[00:21:09] Catherine Allgor: Yes. You. There you go.

[00:21:09] Lindsay Chervinsky: Both of which are available on Mount Vernon's website.

[00:21:14] Catherine Allgor: I hope Joanne Freeman is appreciating this.

It's just astonishing. And, and of course we get carried away with that. It's very dramatic. But there is another model that Americans can look to. And I say it this way because Americans really look back to this time period for actual wisdom, right?

I mean this is what, this is all predicated on that. I like to say we take our early history very seriously 'cause we have so little history. So.

So if that's true, then there was a model that was being broached. I mean, she really tried to stop the war of 1812 through diplomacy. It did not work. She tried to model a politics that they didn't even have a word for. We would call bipartisan, where people had to come together in a room and behave themselves, we should build bridges instead of bunkers. She got people to see each other as human beings. She did not prevail. But that wasn't her fault.

[00:21:57] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm.

[00:21:57] Catherine Allgor: Or some kind of real failure. It just, the culture was not ready to support it. So that to me is sort of the deepest failure.

I think Martha Washington was a complete success because she made her husband happy and healthy, and she got him through and then took care of him until he died.

Abigail is a little harder, right?

[00:22:15] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:15] Catherine Allgor: She's a little harder because she had the capacity to be helpful. She had the capacity to be not helpful, I think about The Alien and Sedition Acts.

[00:22:22] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:23] Catherine Allgor: And there was so much time during his presidency, and you alluded to this too, well, if the old lady was there, where he was just begging her to join him.

[00:22:30] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:31] Catherine Allgor: And I can't decide if that would've been a bad or a good thing. What do you think?

[00:22:34] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I think it probably would have been a good thing. I'm not sure how much it would have changed the outcome. It certainly would've made his experience more pleasant.

[00:22:44] Catherine Allgor: Yes.

[00:22:44] Lindsay Chervinsky: And I think if she was in, in particular, when we're thinking about 1799, when he stayed at home with her because she was in really poor health, if she had been able to travel with him—

[00:22:56] Catherine Allgor: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:56] Lindsay Chervinsky: He would've been in the city more.

[00:22:57] Catherine Allgor: Yes.

[00:22:57] Lindsay Chervinsky: And I think that would've been useful.

[00:22:59] Catherine Allgor: Yeah, that's true. That's very true. Yeah.

[00:23:01] Lindsay Chervinsky: Our conversation so far had touched on fashion and first ladies several times, so I wanted to address it head on: is fashion politics? Allgor's answer was that of course fashion is political, but that it also had a crucial role to play in how the early American state was understood, both domestically and internationally. And the first ladies knew it.

So let's pivot and talk about fashion.

[00:23:25] Catherine Allgor: Hmm hmm!

[00:23:26] Lindsay Chervinsky: Fashion is often dismissed as a soft and fuzzy topic, or one that is unimportant or frivolous. And I would argue that all fashion is politics. And in fact, we in February brought out George Washington's inaugural coat for a special viewing just around the, no, that was January, around the inauguration because he was the first president to wear American made. It was an American home spun, very nice home spun, and he accessorized with diamond shoe buckles, but nonetheless, first President to wear American made.

So let's talk about first ladies fashion. How did they view it? You mentioned Martha Washington at the beginning. How did they wield to that power? Did they recognize the potential sharpness of political fashion?

[00:24:07] Catherine Allgor: Yes, absolutely. It's hard to imagine that, the fact that Martha Washington started appearing in drapery that evoked classical themes was an accident. This is obviously what she was doing

[00:24:17] Lindsay Chervinsky: And white is not the most convenient color, when you don't have running water.

[00:24:21] Catherine Allgor: That's exactly right. To suffer for fashion.

And of course, these women aren't making this up. And this culture's not making this up because these are people who have English and European knowledge and background, and much as kings and queens, and lords and ladies and the members of Versailles, the Court of Versailles, were using fashion to make political statements to signal allegiances. They were just adapting this behavior.

So this isn't behavior that Americans invented, it's as old as Western civilization. Right? So they're making their own adaptations.

There's no real indication to me, though I'd be interested if you had something else to say about it, that Abigail Adams did anything than just follow fashion at the time, she wasn't terribly interested in clothes anyway. She certainly made no innovations.

[00:25:04] Lindsay Chervinsky: No, she was extremely frugal. I think in most things, she tried her best to follow Martha's example, recognizing that if she diverged from it, she would be criticized.

In the one area where they diverged slightly it was not because of her, it was because of John. When he was elected, they bought a new carriage. And she had a coat of arms put on it and he said, take it off immediately. He said, paint over it. He recognized the same aristocratic tendencies that Washington would be celebrated for, he would be criticized for.

[00:25:32] Catherine Allgor: Right. Okay, so now you brought that up. We can dovetail this with fashion. It's a very interesting dynamic, right? So it's American Revolution and we're fighting against everything monarchical, and the world turned upside down, and the world built anew, and then the Americans win the American Revolution, and hurrah! We're gonna start from scratch.

The problem was all of these former colonists were English or European. They had— the only vocabulary of power, which I think I also borrowed from Joanne Freeman, the only vocabulary of power they had lay in aristocracy. In the ways of kings and queens, material display, patronage, beautiful houses, all of that royal stuff that they abandoned, they realized they needed more or less.

And the founders after the revolution tried to bring some of it back, and we have this very famous moment where they're trying to call George Washington— what did they try to call him? Your Excellency?

[00:26:26] Lindsay Chervinsky: Well, your Excellency was the title for all governors and generals. John Adams suggested a title that I think was something like, Your Elected Magistrate and Protector of our Liberties.

[00:26:37] Catherine Allgor: Yeah, that's ridiculous. But here's this— here's John Adams, he was the first one leading the charge—

[00:26:42] Lindsay Chervinsky: And he's just come from Versailles, and the Court of St. James and he is a little concerned about what he's seen and whether anyone's gonna respect it.

[00:26:49] Catherine Allgor: Right, exactly. And, and he's absolutely right. And how they solve this— oh, and the other one, my other favorite George Washington, is this letter, I guess, where he was talking about how many pairs of matched horses to pull his carriage through the streets. It had to be enough to convey the proper authority. I think it was three pairs.

[00:27:06] Lindsay Chervinsky: I think that's

[00:27:06] Catherine Allgor: right.

Six horses.

[00:27:07] Lindsay Chervinsky: I think, I think was six horses because John Adams had four.

[00:27:09] Catherine Allgor: There you go. Smart man. Smart man. George Washington ratcheted down a little. Perfect. So, these are very interesting moments for me and what the, the founding generation and the generation after, what they do with this longing for aristocracy is they give it to the women.

[00:27:23] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm.

[00:27:24] Catherine Allgor: So you have Mr. President, George Washington is Mr. President, but his wife is Lady Washington. And Mr. Madison is Mr. Madison, and she's Queen Dolley.

[00:27:33] Lindsay Chervinsky: Oh.

[00:27:33] Catherine Allgor: And so the men are to answer the worry about republicanism, the worry about Napoleon figures, and nobody reassured anybody better than James Madison, 'cause he was not a charismatic figure. Very small, very quiet. Anyway, so he was not gonna be leading an army, you know what I'm saying?

But they still crave that imprimatur—

[00:27:52] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:52] Catherine Allgor: —of aristocracy. And that's what Dolley figured out. And that's why she went from being just a well-dressed woman to being a fantastically dressed woman. And I use the word fantastically in two ways, sort of like you look fantastic, but also it was very fantastical.

[00:28:07] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:07] Catherine Allgor: Right. So real court dress is very clumsy, it's very restrictive. It's very elaborate. And what she put together, when she became the first lady was not, as I said before, not what a real queen would wear, but what you in the hinterlands of Pennsylvania might imagine a queen to wear. And when you show up in Pennsylvania, 'cause you've just been elected a representative, she's answering all of that for you as a queen.

And she got criticized for it, but she was using fashion to kind of ride that line.

[00:28:33] Lindsay Chervinsky: What's so interesting to me, because fashion is therefore almost emblematic of this broader question of what does it mean to be an American? Because so many Americans had identified themselves as not British. So the country was not Britain, was not a monarchy, but that's actually not an identity.

You need to actually form something else. And so the fashion is just one piece of trying to shape that culture, that identity from scratch with, you know, one model that many of them were quite comfortable with, but they didn't want to replicate exactly. And that is, I think, really the main question of the Early Republic.

[00:29:09] Catherine Allgor: Yeah. And another book that will change your life. Not you perhaps, but someone is the Refinement of America, which is Richard Bushman. And I read that, and I would assign it to my graduate students going, "this will explain everything you need to know about your own world." Because it's how we came to think about things.

[00:29:25] Lindsay Chervinsky: Yeah.

[00:29:25] Catherine Allgor: And so the idea in starting in the 1820s, thirties, forties, was let us take what is good of Europe without the pernicious part. And the key word was etiquette. Right. Etiquette was seen as this perfect, just, like a formulaic, hollow, possibly hypocritical, corrupt, just outward show. But if refinement sprung from your inner something or other, your inner, your spiritual essence, and it— that reflected in the way that you picked up a teacup or what you did with your hair, or the clothes you wore, then that was an expression of some kind of inner worthiness.

And this happens at a time when, as we go through the 19th century, race science and sex science get very concretized in sort of very disturbing ways.

[00:30:09] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:10] Catherine Allgor: But it's this reliance on the fiction of blood, right. And there are some people

[00:30:14] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:14] Catherine Allgor: And it would be perhaps a story of a prince who comes to an American town and all the young ladies at the— and they're all dressed up with their feathers and, and they're trying to, inveigle the prince, but he sees a girl, a simple country girl at a well.

And, and her clothes are poor, but they're clean and they, they have a little something to them because she's got the natural refinement.

[00:30:34] Lindsay Chervinsky: Sure.

[00:30:34] Catherine Allgor: So that was the, the gloss of let's take the good stuff from the old world, but let's root it in something purer, I think.

[00:30:40] Lindsay Chervinsky: One of our goals with this podcast is to, of course, share the history, teach the history, talk about different forms of leadership, but then also connect it to today.

So in some ways we live in a very different world and in some ways we do not.

[00:30:51] Catherine Allgor: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:51] Lindsay Chervinsky: What can people, can listeners take from the first ladies and apply to their own lives?

Allgor's answer was surprising. While not denying the influence that the early first ladies had, she acknowledged that power is only meaningful if it can be used to affect change. And the early first ladies, like other women of their time, lived in a world that did not let them do that in a meaningful way.

But she also brought back the importance of the unofficial sphere, and how its absence today has negatively impacted American politics. Her answer also emphasized the importance of viewing the people you work with as full human beings, both in politics and in leadership more generally.

[00:31:33] Catherine Allgor: So this where it's awkward being a first ladies expert, and so persuasive, I think you'll agree, I'm making it all sound great.

[00:31:39] Lindsay Chervinsky: Fantastic.

[00:31:40] Catherine Allgor: Thank you so much. Well, I used to do a lot of work for some of my favorite groups of people, the Daughters American Revolution, the Colonial Dames, and let's face. They were— I was preaching to the choir. They knew lots about these women and they were already fans and they love it, and they felt very personally gratified.

[00:31:56] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:57] Catherine Allgor: By these depictions of them as historically significant, as leaders, as powerful women. But often I would get a question, which made me thought, what message am I sending? Because the answer is, you want to have power and destiny over your life.

I admire these women for taking what their culture offered them and doing their best with it. But in the end, it wasn't really power in that way.

[00:32:17] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:17] Catherine Allgor: It's not power unless you can actually affect change. Profound change, and I've been thinking a lot about this lately, but it has everything to do with how they understood themselves to be humans in this world.

And one of the ways you do that is law. And of course, as you know, I've been talking about coverture for many years.

[00:32:34] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:34] Catherine Allgor: And what does it do to shape your understanding of who you are, when you are basically chattel. And enslaved people had the same dilemma, but somehow enslaved people, black men and women, enslaved and free, fought against that rhetoric.

[00:32:48] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:48] Catherine Allgor: No, no doubt they internalized some of the dehumanizing rhetoric that was around them, but they also fought against it.

[00:32:53] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:54] Catherine Allgor: Whereas women, white women, didn't do that so much. So I would say take as much power as you can, use it wisely. That would be a lesson of the first ladies.

And I would say the power of the unofficial sphere, because I think some of the problems that we have in Washington are the absence of this social sphere, this place where people can come together, they can work on charity projects, their families can interact, they can have dinner. That doesn't happen in Washington, and that started in the 1990s with a deregulation of airlines, strangely enough.

And because there is no place for the largely, but not completely, male legislators to get to know each other as human beings, it's so easy to cast the other as an embodiment of evil, on both sides. So the power of the unofficial sphere, I would say is a big lesson.

[00:33:39] Lindsay Chervinsky: It's an excellent point. So in addition to writing about really important figures, you have also held leadership positions in a number of essential historic sites that preserve historic artifacts and memory and encourage future generations of leaders.

What was either the best advice that you were given in those positions of leadership, or based on your experience, what would be the advice that you would give?

[00:34:02] Catherine Allgor: So I have to say the best advice I got from was my former boss, Steve Koblik from the Huntington Library, who is a former academic, and he spotted me right from my interview and he said, you wanna be a president someday? I said, I do Steve Koblik. And he said, come be my director of education for three to five years and I'll make you a president.

One thing he said is, he said, you're gonna be great as president, because you are a professor, you're a teacher, and in many ways the job of the president is to teach to whatever the audiences are, whether it's your staff of longstanding, new people who come to join you, leading boards, audiences, donor communities, grant foundations, whatever the audience is, your job is to teach them about what you do and why it's important. And so it was very comforting to me to think that my work as a president when I got my job at the Massachusetts Historical Society was an extension of my work as a teacher. And I found that to be very useful.

And as far as the MHS, Massachusetts Historical Society, I had a theory. And I was so delighted to watch the theory play out with the wonderful group of human beings with whom I worked at the Massachusetts Historical Society. And the theory was this, if you have a good mission and everybody knows what it is, and you treat people decently as human beings, and they, so they're being treated decently, humanely, and that we're talking about, we're talking about some basic stuff here.

[00:35:19] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:19] Catherine Allgor: Healthcare, money, all of that good stuff. And they know they're doing something that makes the world a better place. In our case, a kinder, smarter place, they will work their hearts out for you.

[00:35:29] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:30] Catherine Allgor: And I came into the Massachusetts Historical Society in 2017 to a great group of people, but we really pulled together, we refined our mission, and we not only got through the pandemic, which was horrible, there's no silver linings, but we actually, as a team, pulled together and we were remote most of the time 'cause we were right in downtown Boston.

[00:35:49] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:49] Catherine Allgor: So that was always my theory, that people want to work, they wanna work their hearts out.

[00:35:53] Lindsay Chervinsky: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:54] Catherine Allgor: And they were incredibly wonderful that way, and I saw them blossom.

[00:35:57] Lindsay Chervinsky: That's wonderful. So now our final and traditional last question. When you think, and you've kind of already hinted at this, but I'm gonna allow you to expand. When you think of George Washington and leadership, what do you think of?

[00:36:07] Catherine Allgor: Oh, I didn't know this was the traditional last— I, how did I not know this? I, I'm listening. I'm a listener. I'm a listener.

I think it is as the charismatic figure. It really is. I mean, he's not, he's not the greatest writer. I'm just gonna say that right now. Don't kick me out. Don't kick me out of the grounds.

[00:36:22] Lindsay Chervinsky: We will not.

[00:36:23] Catherine Allgor: And there we go. Military success. For me, that's not really a measure. I'm actually one of those people who thinks probably there shouldn't have been American Revolution. There we go. Sorry. No, now she really will kick me out. All right. Talking to the producer now.

She's gonna kick me out, but. He knew what people wanted from him and that they needed the reassurance and that was resting literally and metaphorically on his shoulders, and he knew how to pass those messages on that he was in charge. Everything was gonna be fine. You don't have to worry, we're going forward in this new experiment.

So I would say as a charismatic figure.

[00:36:53] Lindsay Chervinsky: Wonderful. Well, that is a great place to end. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. This has been just such a delight.

[00:36:58] Catherine Allgor: It was a pleasure. Thank you so much.

[00:37:03] Lindsay Chervinsky: Thank you for joining us this week on Leadership and Legacy, and thank you so much to our guest, Catherine Allgor. You can pick up her excellent work wherever you buy books. I'm your host, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky.

Leadership and Legacy: Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, and Primary Source Media.

In the spirit of George Washington's leadership, we feature the perspectives of leaders from across industries and fields. As such, the thoughts expressed in this podcast are solely the views of our guests, and do not reflect the opinions of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association.

To learn more about Washington's leadership example, or to find out how you can bring your team to the George Washington Presidential Library, visit GW leadership institute.org. Or to find more great podcasts for Mount Vernon, visit George Washington podcast.com. You can also explore the work of Primary Source media at primarysourcemedia.com. Join us in two weeks for our next great conversation.