Julia Tyler
Although she would prove to be the second youngest presidential wife to serve as First Lady, and the one with the shortest tenure, lasting only eight months, Julia Tyler viewed her status as the spouse of the president to be larger than that of hostess of social events within the mansion, which had been the traditional identity of that role. Part of her willingness to assume a public role might likely have resulted from the influence of former First Lady Dolley Madison who, by this time, was living across Lafayette Square from the White House and was welcomed as part of theTyler family circle. So close did the former First Lady become to the new one that the two of them travelled to New York together in September of 1844.
Julia Tyler is the first known First Lady to have overtly sought newspaper coverage that reported not only of her social events but articles also intended to personally raise and maintain her as a public figure praise. In many respects, she was the first First Lady to seek and earn the status of the modern equivalent of “celebrity,” a woman whose name, face and legend was widely known in her time.
Since President Tyler had no intention of seeking a full term in the 1844 presidential election at the time he married Julia Gardiner, she had knowledge that her time as First Lady would be brief. Thus she accelerated a regular pace of entertaining, afforded the chance to serve as official hostess for only the four months of the last social season of the Tyler Administration, from December 1844 to March 1845. Some among Washington’s social elite also disdained her regal form of receiving guests by seating herself among a dozen young women dressed alike in white and dubbed her “vestal virgins.” From the religious press, she earned disapproval for the abundant supply of champagne she had served to guests and the physical closeness of the new waltz dancing she sponsored and participated in.
The young First Lady also changed public presidential ceremony. She directed that the President be removed from more direct access to the public when he received them. There was a practical reason for Julia Tyler’s changing the format in which a presidential couple received their guests, related directly to the safety and security of the President himself. Previously, the President would simply stand in the middle of the Blue Room to welcome guests and often found himself besieged or even engulfed by guests. During open-house public receptions, this presented both a tiring, somewhat undignified but also dangerous scenario. Julia Tyler’s new configuration had the President standing against the wall, in the deeper side of the oval room. It kept people from coming up behind him and also allowed for the single line of guests to stream in and out efficiently. Along these lines, Julia Tyler has been anecdotally credited with directing the Marine Band to always play a specific march whenever she and the President entered a public event, later to be famously known as “Hail to the Chief.”
