First Ladies of the United States: Rose Cleveland

For four years, the nation enjoyed the antics of President Benjamin Harrison's grandson, “Baby” McKee. Images of the child wearing a military hat or driving his goat cart across White House grounds had brightened an otherwise quiet and often melancholy administration. Now, on March 4, 1893, the boy, almost six and no longer a baby, “surrender[ed] the Lawn” to the new “Queen of the day,” little Ruth Cleveland (Lincoln, 1893). Ruth's father had taken back the presidency after a four-year absence, and Benjamin “Baby” McKee's grandfather was headed back to Indiana. For the Harrison–McKee family, vacating the White House represented political defeat amid personal sadness. First Lady Caroline Scott Harrison had died of tuberculosis the previous October, only weeks before the blow of Cleveland's victory, and her father, John Witherspoon Scott, who lived at the executive mansion, died a month later. Young Benjamin had watched as his mother, Mary Harrison McKee, tended to her father's grief while shouldering the duties of White House mistress during the family's last months in Washington..

Rose Cleveland was “a woman of unusual gifts, of large and varied information, of vigorous views and strong convictions.” Born in New York in 1846, she was the youngest of Richard and Ann Cleveland’s nine children and the sister of future President Grover Cleveland, who was nine years her senior. Miss Cleveland attended school at Houghton Seminary, taught in Pennsylvania and New York, and exhibited a particular passion for literature...