Clark University - Clark News winter 2005
Between fathers and daughters (spring 2005)
Letters offer insights into the relationships between U.S. presidents and their daughters
By Judith Jaeger
In an age of e-mail and instant messaging, of a new language of inventive abbreviations meant to fit on cell-phone displays, the letter is going the way of the typewriter.
But there was a time when letters were an important line of communication, playing a critical role in maintaining family ties. The new book "First Daughters: Letters Between U.S. Presidents and Their Daughters," edited by Gerard Gawalt Ph.D. '69 and his daughter Ann Gawalt, shows the value of written letters to these families while shedding light on the relationships between presidential fathers and daughters. The book includes correspondence between 21 U.S. presidents and their daughters on subjects ranging from education and marriage to politics and diplomacy.
The book came about when Gerard Gawalt curated the exhibit "Thomas Jefferson: Genius of Liberty" at the Library of Congress, where he is a specialist in early American history in the library's manuscript division. Ann Gawalt noticed the letters between Jefferson and his daughter in the exhibit and suggested compiling an anthology. While there are books of primary-source material about U.S. presidents and their sons, Gerard Gawalt notes that no other book has been done about presidents and their daughters.
"Ann is more than a bit of a feminist," he says, "and I have three daughters, and my wife is one of three daughters. So, the focus on daughters seemed natural to me."
It took nearly four years of research to turn the idea into a finished book. There were sometimes hundreds of letters from which to choose, Gawalt explains, and it was often a challenge to find any letters at all between the fathers and daughters.
"One thing we found was how few of the daughters' letters have survived or are available to the public," he says. Of the letters that were available, the Gawalts selected those that revealed something about the relationship between fathers and daughters.
On love and marriage
In the section about marriage, for example, Gawalt points to a letter in which William Howard Taft tries to persuade his daughter Helen Taft to delay marriage for another year and finish her degree. He recalls writing a similar letter to Ann when she announced her engagement just as she was preparing to go to law school. Like Taft, Gawalt tried to convince his daughter to get her law degree first. Gawalt says his daughter has since told him that this only inspired her to prove him wrong by embarking on marriage while successfully earning a law degree. Gawalt notes that Helen Taft took up the same challenge. She got married, earned a Ph.D. and became a professor and acting president at Bryn Mawr College.
One of Gawalt's favorite letters is from George Washington to his adopted daughter Elizabeth Park Custis about marriage. Washington tells his daughter, in part, that love is "a mighty pretty thing" but also "cloying."
"It's a very passionate, straight-forward letter about passion and the practical aspects of marriage—that it takes more than love to live on," he says. "It's a very emotional and warm letter, which makes it stand out from his other letters."
On politics and diplomacy
Another classic letter, Gawalt says, is from Theodore Roosevelt to his daughter Alice, about how she and her new husband should be comporting themselves during their honeymoon in Europe. Specifically, he tells them to visit both Hungary and Austria, so that neither country feels ignored, and instructs them to "listen smilingly to anything that anyone, from an Austrian archduke to a Hungarian count, says about the politics of the dual empire" and to "make no comment thereon yourselves." The letter impresses upon the newlyweds that they are representatives of the United States, Gawalt says, which strikes an important chord in the book.
"The daughters were much more important factors in the personal and political life of the presidents than people have thought," he says. "The letters are also, in many cases, a substitute for presences. You don't get to be president by staying at home."
Next: U.S. presidents and their wives
At Clark, Gawalt studied the history of the legal system in Massachusetts with the guidance of his adviser, Professor Emeritus George Billias. The book that developed from his dissertation, "The Promise of Power," became a seminal volume in the legal profession because of its statistical analysis. His book "The New High Priests" is a study of the U.S. legal profession at the end of the 19th century. He has since published and contributed to many other books, including "The Declaration of Independence and the Evolution of the Text," "Thomas Jefferson: Genius of Liberty" and "Justifying Jefferson: The Political Writings of John James Beckley."
Gawalt is currently working on an anthology of letters between U.S. presidents and their wives as a companion volume to "First Daughters" and also on a creative biography of Merriweather Lewis.
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