While Nellie remembered the three-story gray brick house where she grew up as “not particularly distinguished,” she took pride that her home shared the same street as the Sinton mansion where Will’s brother Charley and Annie Taft lived. Nellie marveled at the elegant facade of the white colonial dwelling; its Doric portico and bay windows, set amid “green lawns and finely kept shrubbery,” reminded her of the White House.
At “The Nursery,” as the exclusive Miss Nourse’s school was known, Nellie excelled. A voracious reader, she carried a book everywhere she went. She read in the afternoons after completing her household chores, read at night in the quiet of her room and on rocky beaches during summer vacations. “A book,” Nellie confided in her diary, “has more fascination for me than anything else.” She possessed a sensibility for the beauty of language. Reading aloud with her girlfriends, she was attracted to the sound of words and the rhythms of passages. The curriculum at The Nursery included literature, history, science, music, French, German, Latin, and Greek, a comprehensive course of study to prepare students for entry into the best colleges. Nellie yearned to continue her education when she graduated, hoping especially to study music, which she considered “the inspiration of all my dreams and ambitions.” While her brothers departed for Harvard and Yale, however, Nellie was informed that her father could not afford to send her to college. Instead, she was expected to “come out” into society and find herself a good husband.
Nellie was sixteen in 1877 when she accompanied her parents on a week-long visit to the White House at the invitation of Rutherford and Lucy Hayes. The president and first lady planned to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary among the friends who had stood with them at their marriage in 1852. The invitation included the prospect of a christening ceremony for the Herrons’ seven-week-old baby in the Blue Room. The child had been named Lucy in honor of Harriet’s closest friend. Harriet was reluctant at first to accept, protesting that “her baby has no fine clothes fit for such a place . . . & that she herself has only the same dresses that she had last March, hasn’t bought a stitch since & hasn’t time now to do it, even if she had any money to pay for them.” But John insisted, and Nellie was thrilled to be included.
“I feel very much complimented that you should have remembered me in the preparations for the holiday festivities,” Nellie wrote her “Aunt Lucy.” “I have been in some doubts as to whether it would do for me to emerge from the chrysalis of school girl existence even for a short time into the butterfly life of young ladyhood, but the temptation has proved too strong for me, and it will give me great pleasure to accept your invitation.”
Because Nellie had yet to make her official debut, she was not included at the anniversary dinner in the East Room attended by cabinet officers, generals, and justices of the Supreme Court. She could hear the music of the Marine Band from her room and spy the elegant gowns amid the splendor of the Blue, Red, and Green parlors, “profusely decorated with choice flowers from the conservatory.” Hayes stated in his diary that Nellie brought “the house alive with laughter, fun, and music.”
She was so elated by the visit that she rapturously confided to “Uncle Rutherford” that she intended “to marry a man who will be president.” With a smile, Hayes replied: “I hope you may, and be sure you marry an Ohio man.” Thirty years later, even as her husband sat in Roosevelt’s cabinet, the allure of that first stay at the White House had not dimmed. In interviews with journalists, she recalled every detail. “Nothing in my life,” she confessed, “reaches the climax of human bliss, which I felt as a girl of sixteen, when I was entertained at the White House.” The vision of that expansive world spurred her sense of purpose. “She was intoxicated by what she saw and heard there,” observed one reporter, “the bigness and breadth of the life.”
For as long as she could remember—Nellie revealed in her diary—she had dreaded the prospect of leaving school, turning eighteen, and “coming out” into society. In the fall before her first season, she and her best friend, Alice (Allie) Keys, shrank from the prospect of becoming young women according to the traditional rituals, obliged to “receive attentions and offers and to wait around calmly to see if any future life will adjust itself.” When the season drew to a close the following spring, though, she noted with surprise that she had “exceedingly” enjoyed herself in the “perfect whirr of gaiety” of the young Cincinnati set. She and her girlfriends Allie, Agnes, Laura, and Mary “stuck valiantly to each other” as they joined their male friends at Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, theatre parties, poker games, and German dances at Clifton Hall.
As summer came, her mood shifted. The cumulative months without intellectual or purposeful activity had grown enervating. “I am blue as indigo,” she wrote on July 13, 1880, from a hammock at Yellow Springs, Ohio, a popular summer resort where she was vacationing with her family. “We are all rusticating up here, doing absolutely nothing, and I am reduced to a queer state of mind. . . . I am sick and tired of my life. I would rather be anyone else, even some one who has not some advantages I have and I am only nineteen. I feel often as if I were fifty.” She yearned to “be busy and accomplish something.” Even her attempts to pursue musical instruction were stymied. While she practiced diligently on her own to become a more accomplished pianist, she required guidance and lessons to achieve genuine virtuosity—lessons that cost more than her father would pay to accommodate what he considered simply a pastime.
“I would much rather give up some of the dresses I am getting,” she wrote, “but Mama thinks I must have them.” Harriet was determined that her daughters should “enjoy all the comforts and privileges of the wealthy class,” even if John had to work long hours and weekends to stay out of debt. Nellie’s biographer Carl Anthony conjectures that “a repressed nervousness” was instilled in the young woman by the chronic strain of the family’s drive to maintain their place in a circle of greater wealth and privilege.
“I am beginning to want some steady occupation,” she confided in her diary. “I read a good deal to be sure . . . but I should have some occupation that would require active work moving around—and I don’t know where to find it. I believe my greatest desire now is to write a book. . . . I do so want to be independent.”
Nellie’s stifled energy and curiosity were quickened by the arrival of “that adorable Will Taft” at Yellow Springs. “Unfortunately I did not recover from my surprise and delight soon enough,” she wrote Allie, “to make that impression which I would have wished.” Will’s solicitous, chivalric nature made a great effect upon Nellie. She was touched when he offered to cut up the meat for her six-year-old sister at a picnic on the Fourth of July, and charmed when he helped the women over brooks as they tramped through the woods the following day. “We had a lovely walk,” she reported, and at an evening dance, Will “was enchanting as ever. You see what a splendid chance I had at Will, but alas!” she noted regretfully, “he strikes me with awe.”
Later that summer, Nellie accompanied her father to Rhode Island’s Narragansett Pier, where she was joined by several friends. Though her days were filled with tennis, croquet, and sailing, she could not rouse herself from her “stupid state.” The thrill of forbidden activities provided some respite from her torpor. She hid in the rocks at dusk to smoke cigarettes with her girlfriend Sallie, gambled at cards, and drank milk punches laced with whiskey late at night.
As fall approached, convinced that her rebellious unconventional nature would forever preclude a great success in society, Nellie pledged to devote five or six hours a day to the piano. She begged her mother to intercede with her father and facilitate the music lessons she craved. She realized, however, that no decision could be made until her parents returned from a two-month trip with the president and first lady to California, a historic voyage that marked the first visit by a president to the west coast. Nellie was left behind with her four younger siblings to take charge of the household, to dust and tidy, sew and darn, set the table for dinner, and wash the
dishes. “I have not read one good book, novel excepted, but Schiller’s Life by Carlyle,” she complained.
Nellie gained some leisure time when her parents returned, but the music lessons never materialized. Desperate for a measure of genuine intellectual engagement, she enrolled in less expensive chemistry and German classes at the University of Cincinnati. Her spirits lifted. She relished her studies and joined a walking club that included Annie Taft, several of her girlfriends, John Mack, and Howard Hollister, Will’s best friend. “He is very sympathetic,” Nellie wrote of Hollister. Seated next to him at a supper following one of their hikes, she was “all afire” when he launched into a sentimental debate on the glory of dying for one you loved. Being “exceedingly romantic” herself, Nellie leapt into the conversation. Then, suddenly overcome by self-consciousness, she worried that he was simply drawing her out to “make fun” of her. “Make fun of you,” he exclaimed. “Why Miss Herron there is no one whose good opinion I value as much as yours.”
After a brief flirtation, Nellie and Howard settled down to become good friends. “I am perfectly delighted in the hope that a very ordinary love affair may perhaps have become what I always longed for,” she wrote in her diary, “a warm friendship between two quite congenial people—which is very rare, and so much more to be desired than the other. . . . Such a friendship is infinitely higher than what is usually called love, for in it there is a realization of each other’s defects, and a proper appreciation of their good points, without that fatal idealization which is so blind. . . . From my point of view a love which is worthy of the name should always have a beginning in the other, and should this friendship turn into something higher it is a blessed happiness.”
Nellie counseled Howard through a tumultuous relationship with her friend Agnes Davis while he, in turn, supported Nellie’s struggle to find purpose in her life. In her diary, she recorded diverting evenings in the German section of town where they “drank beer and ate Wiener Wurst.” Mixing with laborers and merchants in raucous beer halls might be unsuitable behavior for a society girl, but Nellie loved the atmosphere. Indeed, the fact that such surroundings “greatly horrified” her proper friends intensified her pleasure. “There being something Bohemian about it which delighted me,” she wrote, “I really felt quite like a comrade & man.”
In the spring of 1883, contrary to her mother’s wishes, Nellie accepted an offer to teach in a private school for boys. “Do you realize you will have to give up society, as you now enjoy it,” Harriet reminded her. “Certainly late hours and dancing parties do not promote the patience and physical endurance required by a teacher. And then is it quite the thing for a young girl in your position to teach in a boys school—and where there are no other ladies? . . . I shrink from thinking of you as making your own way in the world in any inconsequential manner.” Nellie was shaken by the opposition that her mother expressed in “two dreadful letters.” Though several friends admired her decision, the majority questioned her “queer taste.” Disconcerted by her inability to “get along as other girls do,” she was determined to move forward, envisioning a future as headmistress of a school. “Of course a woman is happier who marries, if she marries exactly right, but how many do,” she reasoned. “Otherwise I do think that she is much happier single, and doing some congenial work.”
Harriet Herron’s conviction that her daughter’s decision would inhibit her social life proved unfounded. In fact, Nellie’s occupation bolstered her confidence and buoyed her mood, making her a far more engaging companion. Her insecurity in Will Taft’s presence evaporated as he joined her regular circle of friends. On numerous occasions, she accompanied Will and Howard Hollister to concerts and German dances at Clifton Hall, returning the hospitality with whist parties at her house. “The meeting at Miss Herron’s was a great success,” Will told his sister Fanny, describing an evening of cards, supper, charades, and games. “We made the Herron mansion ring with the merry peals of the young ladies and the harsher but joyous tone of the men until the hands of the clock were pushing us home by pointing towards two o’clock.”
Sustained by this new sense of direction, Nellie no longer found the long summer days depressing. In July 1883, she joined Allie and a group of their friends at “Sea Verge,” the Keys’ summer mansion at Little Boar’s Head in North Hampton, New Hampshire. Alongside the customary swimming and sailing, tennis and card games, she and Allie determined to embark on an ambitious reading program. They resolved daily to read aloud fifty pages of Henry Buckle’s three-volume History of Civilization in England; they shared “long and very tough” readings of John Stuart Mill, and immersed themselves in German and Italian. To “repair” their “exhausted intellects,” they took long walks through the countryside, picked berries, read a little poetry, and watched the tide break around the rocks. In the evenings they plunged into the bracing water of the North Atlantic to stimulate their appetites before dinner.
Returning to her teaching job in the fall, Nellie struggled with her mother’s increasingly strident opposition. “Mamma thinks I am wrong,” she told her diary. “I hope that I am not . . . I should be a miserable apathetic woman without an interest in life unless I bettered myself now while I am young and courageous and engaged in some real work. The usual pottering which an unmarried woman calls work would never satisfy me.” Still, she could not easily disregard her mother’s admonition that a society girl entered the workforce at her peril. “Why should I take life so hard? Other people seem to get through all right without inconvenient ideas,” she lamented. “All week I have been in that state when my eyes fill with tears at the least provocation,” she admitted, “and I take refuge in silence.”
Despite these private misgivings, Nellie was self-possessed and animated among her friends, emerging as the leader of their social circle. The Saturday night salons she hosted, anticipated by her coterie the week long, offered an enlivening combination of entertainment and intellectual pursuits. The regulars included Allie Keys, Will Taft and his brother Horace, Howard Hollister, Agnes Davis, and Maria Herron, Nellie’s younger sister. The group selected a different topic each week and the members of the salon were expected to prepare for discussion with all the reading and research they could muster. For the session on the French Revolution, Will read Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, a History; when the topic was Russia, he read Donald MacKenzie’s Russia. When Rousseau, Cavour, Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold, and Isaac Newton were selected as subjects, he scoured the public library for their works. The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum suddenly found himself inspired.
“Nellie Herron has made a great success of her salon,” Will reported to his sister. “I feel as if I had really profited greatly by the reading which I have done for it. The pleasure of it has grown as we go on. I value the friendships which have grown out of it very highly. Nobody is absent when he can help it.” Indeed, forced to travel out of town one Saturday, Will sent Nellie roses to express his regret at missing “that sweet school of Peripatetic philosophy in which I am an humble but enthusiastic disciple.”
Writing of one salon session, focused on Edmund Burke, Will wryly remarked to his mother that the discussion became “very heated especially between the men, who knowing less about the subject than the ladies, are naturally more certain of their position.” Burke was not the only topic to stir dissension among these passionate young people; in the aftermath of a debate on slavery, the volatile mixture of historical inquiry and individual points of view left Will much chagrined. “I am not satisfied at all with my bearing in the slavery discussion,” he wrote to Nellie. “I deeply regret that my manner was such as to leave the impression on your mind that I held your suggestions or arguments lightly or regarded them with contempt. . . . So far as holding your opinions lightly, I know no one who attaches more weight to them or who more admires your powers of reasoning than the now humbled subscriber.”
The attachments forged in the salon deepened as the friends
consoled each other in difficulties and together celebrated triumphs. The group spent weekends together at the Keys’ mansion in Walnut Hills and escorted each other to the regular Thursday German dances. The girls organized card parties and picnics for which the men provided both the punch and the repast. They put on amateur theatricals for charity. Nellie long remembered the burlesque production of Sleeping Beauty in which Will played the beautiful princess, while Horace, who had fallen in love with Nellie’s sister, Maria, performed as Puck.
With increasing frequency, Nellie’s name appeared in Will’s letters to his family in Vienna. He lauded her as “the only notable exception” among superficial society girls who viewed “a suitable marriage as a proper ending of their social career.” He proudly relayed the news that she had been offered a teaching position at Miss Nourse’s school, declaring that she deserved “the greatest credit” for persevering despite censure from friends and family alike. “It is easy enough to talk about woman’s widening her sphere and being something more than an ornament or a housekeeper but it is not so easy in the present state of society for her to act on that theory.”
In the summer of 1884, Will was invited to spend a long weekend with Nellie and Allie at Sea Verge, the summer mansion at Little Boar’s Head. During those sunlit days, filled with picnics, swims, and ventures into Boston, Will first began to recognize the central place Nellie had come to hold in his life. “After awhile I found myself deferring to her opinion in everything I did or said,” he later told Allie. “Finally what she thought became of much more importance to me than what I thought myself.”
Largely to gain Nellie’s approbation, Will began to carry a book as a matter of course. “Trollope is a great favorite of mine because of the realistic every day tone which one finds in every line he writes,” he told her. “His heroes have failings human character is heir to, and we like them none the less on that account.” He became increasingly solicitous of Nellie’s happiness. When the German opera festival was in town, he accompanied her to hear Tannhäuser, admitting to his mother that while “my own appreciation of Wagner is not intense . . . [I] shall derive most if not all of my pleasure from her enjoyment of the music.”