Lady Godiva Rides into the Second Worlds Fair

Sally Rand wanted to be part of Chicago's Second Worlds Fair. The young dancer who had an act at the Paramount on State Street where she danced naked behind giant ostrich feathers but she knew this was her last chance. So she did what any self respecting woman would do she hired a boat and got hold of a horse and covered herself with body paint with nothing on but a cape and headed for the opening ceremonies. It was a warm night for May and Sally Rand put the horse on the boat and had her boss from the Paramount drive her along the Lake front.

She could hear the crowd and see the lights. Her career in Hollywood had fizzled when the talkies came and her lisp resonated like a bad cymbal. Cecil B Demill didn't have to tell her it was over and that's when she headed for Chicago with nothing but a bus ticket. She ended up sleeping in alleys until she hooked the job at the Paramount. But working on State Street didn't compare to the glittering lights of Hollywood and Sally Rand wanted to climb back and she saw the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1933 as a way to do it.

So now she is on that horse heading toward the waters edge. The horse is restless as the boat bumps up against the cement retaining wall and then Sally digs her heels into the warm sides of the creature who just wants to run. It  is a dead gallop through the fair turning one way and then the other. The naked woman on the horse heads for the bright lights instinctively. It will be her last chance to be a star.

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How A Soaked Book Led To Madam President

I was in the bathtub reading Scott Bergs book WILSON when  I dropped it in the water. It wasn’t a spasm but a reaction to the line I read that basically said Edith Wilson was almost the president in 1919. After I hauled the book out of  the water with blue ink washing down from the cover I read on and then on and on until I reached The Papers of Woodrow Wilson in the Elmhurst Library. There buried in the tombs was a story of a woman who had only been married to the president of the United States for four years and had only two years of schooling and was required in the forty sixth year of her life to take control of the United States government and step in as president.

It is through the correspondence of the day that this story is told. 

There was no email or fax of course so people mailed each other and sent telegrams or letters. In these letters the power flowed from Woodrow Wilson to Edith Wilson as she redirected the presidential river to allow her husband to heal from a massive stroke that made him into a semi invalid who could only be wheeled out to the South portico or shown movies in the Red Room or when he was well enough taken for drives. In these dusty books I discovered that Wilson disappeared for five months and the White House ceased to function and became more like a haunted Victorian hospice than a functioning White House.

And at the center was Edith Wilson signing legislation, making appointments, orchestrating the cover-up, working on official proclamations while trying to fight the battel of the League of Nations. By the time I closed the volumes of letters and official correspondence I had my book and I had my heroine. Her name was Edith Wilson and she was the first woman president. The title flowed out from that idea, Madam President The Secret Presidency of  Edith Wilson.  And as I dug deeper I was surprised to find a love story.

Edith Wilson was a progressive woman who had buried one husband, a child , had been homeschooled by her grandmother and  had been left a failing jewelry company. By the time she met a grieving Woodrow Wilson she was a woman of means with the first drivers license in the District of  Columbia,  an electric car,and a penchant for travel and the good life. The last thing she had on her mind was marriage but Woodrow Wilson woke from his grief and pursued her like a Victorian suitor half his age. Wilson for all his academic frigidity was in reality a sensual man and the love letters would make a woman in 1919 blush. The romantic won over Edith and then he did a very curious thing. He made his new wife his partner in the White House.

 By the time they married Edith had been deciphering top secret codes and had become the President’s closest advisor and effectively began isolating him from the men around him. Edith was fierce, loyal, protective, aggressive,  and smart. The couple navigated through World War I as Wilsons health deteriorated. The final blow coming outside of Pueblo Colorado on a whistle-stop tour to promote the League of Nations. When they returned to Washington the blood clot in his brain squeezed off circulation and Wilson collapsed, paralyzed on his left side. The Edith Wilson presidency began.

 And now almost a hundred years later we entertain the possibility of our first elected woman president. The Edith Wilson Presidency has nibbled at the pages of history for a long time and maybe now with Hillary in the final stretch it is time to shine the light on the dusty pages that reside in the books never checked out. But in those pages is the story of Edith Wilson and her secret presidency. Hillary should take note of the woman who ruled before women even had the vote. She too, had it all against her. 

Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson

Book Trailer Madam President

What the Torpedo in Eric Larson's Dead Wake Really Brought

Reading Eric Larson's Dead Wake is like reading about a wake. You are reading really about dead people. The sinking of the Lusitania took eleven hundred souls to the bottom of the Atlantic and that is really the nub of it. Now how that event took place and the aftermath of course is really what Dead Wake is all about. A dead wake by the way is what is left when a ship passes or a torpedo. So what I am looking for is a thesis to emerge. It is the historian in me.

Larson gives us the U Boat with Schweiger in command. This is really the fascinating part of the book. It must be something about submarines or about Germans in submarines. See Das Boot. But when they go to the bottom of the sea to have Christmas it is really hard to imagine. A UBoat literally sitting on the bottom of a bay where no one can detect it so they can hang a wreath and sing Christmas Carols. Fascinating.

And then we have all those passengers on the doomed Lusitania. These are the ones that survived mostly. And they are interesting and here is why. They are early century Victorians who may have seen themselves as modern but they know nothing about what is going on in the Western Front. They have no idea that the world has changed and so has warfare. They have no idea what the twentieth century has in store for them.

It takes the clear white translucent trail of a compressed air torpedo to be the harbinger of this new world. It crosses the Irish Channel like a meteor from another world and the passengers watch it in awe and fascination as something from a  New World. These people most of them had never seen a plane and to many the automobile was a marvel. So here is this strange missile bringing death from the sea and they watch in disbelief as it slams into the ship.

And so the thesis I draw and not Larson is that the silky trailing torpedo is really a messenger that Total War has arrived. And even as these people drown in the 55 degree water they don't really understand what has happened. They are in shock but they have no point or reference for the true barbarity the twentieth century will unleash. It is in their expressions in the numbered pictures Cunard took of a every victim.

Men, women, children, and infants.

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