Edwin Gaines January 13, 1999 Mame Warren, interviewer Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is January 13, 1999. I'm in Rockbridge Baths with Edwin Gaines, and I'm just thrilled to be here, finally. You are the son of the very famous Francis Pendleton Gaines. How old were you when he became president of Washington and Lee? Gaines: I believe I was about fifteen months old. Warren: So what's your earliest memory? Gaines: Earliest memory is arriving at the Lee House in our car, rushing out to the back yard, and having my mother yell at me because there were two muddy wells in the back yard, uncovered, as I recall. Warren: In the back yard of Lee House? Gaines: That's right. I suppose we talked so much about going that the arrival, it's first thing I remember, period, I think. Warren: So what was it like to grow up in Lee House? Gaines: It couldn't have been more wonderful. There were so many rooms. Traveller's stall was my clubhouse. We had tunnels underneath the house. For instance, the porch is raised. I even kept a groundhog underneath there for about a week. I would go in and feed him, and I finally brought him out, and he never hurt me. The Lee House, it was very comfortable, very large, and it was just right for boys, too. There would be ping-pong tables, even a pool table, electric trains, and the attic and the basement were open to whatever we wanted to do. I might say there was a spirit that I sincerely felt that General Lee was there, and I felt that he also had a sense of humor, because to put up with us in his own home, you know. No telling. The library, in which we entertained most of the time, Mrs. duPont gave us a slot machine-not a slot machine, a pinball machine, because she heard we wanted one. They were new at the time, and so for about a year we 1 kept the pinball machine in the library. But, unfortunately, somebody kept filching the nickels, and so it finally died. But the Christmases and all that were wonderful. We frequently had unusual things happen. We didn't lock the door or at best, we said, "Last one in, lock the door." Of course, you never knew whether you were the last one or not, so we never locked it. On occasions we'd find tourists wandering through. I remember specifically this group. My father was trying to tell them that this wasn't a museum and it wasn't open, and they persisted, and just said, "Just tell us what in the house belonged to General Lee that's still there." My father said, "The radio." And they thanked him and seemed to go on their way. [Laughter] Warren: [Laughter] That's great. That's great. Tell me about your sense of the spirit of Lee being there. How did you feel that? Gaines: Well, I suppose one of the things, I kept a daily contact when I was young. First I took my bear, which was a bear on four wheels, and he used to travel down to the Lee Chapel. Then when I was older and had a tricycle, I used to go to the Lee Chapel. I'd go in and talk to Traveller, if nothing else, and then return to the front steps of the chapel and return the VMI cadet salutes when they came. They used to salute every time they walked by the chapel, saluted General Lee. I assume about twenty years ago they stopped that. But I would stand on the steps and return their salute, and they would either laugh or something like, that. But anyway, I was in contact with, if not Lee and his belongings, even Traveller or something, as I say. I think the test was if I did something questionable, I'd either say, "Is it all right, General Lee? Just please overlook this," or something like that. He certainly didn't replace the deity or anything, but I felt he was there most of the time. Warren: Well, he's certainly a presence. I'm certainly aware of him being around. I guess you were too young to really remember your father's inauguration. Gaines: I was. I've since read it, and I think it's just magnificent. You've probably seen it. Warren: Yes, of course. But now, an event that happened when you were still pretty young and we started to talk about, is when they unveiled the McCormick statue. Gaines: The McCormick statue, yes. Warren: Tell me all about what you remember of that day. Gaines: Well, I remember that Mrs. McCormick from Chicago and another lady- well, anyway, she usually sent presents to the children, that is, to my mother and father's children. But the McCormick had been very nice to Washington and Lee, 2 and, of course, the reaper was invented there, and the reaper set the pattern for the Northern agriculture, as you know, so that they had foods and could ship foods to starving places, and it offset the dependency on cotton that the cotton gin had established in the South. But anyway, the McCormicks were important people, they were coming, and the governor and one of the senators from Chicago came. I remember we had our entire congressional delegation, senators and so forth, and there was the McCormick family. The highlight, of course, was the dedication of the statue that everyone-or most people mistake for General Lee that haven't been on campus. And they were all assembled, and my father was, I'm sure, attempting to give his best, and when he nodded at me, I was to pull the ribbon and the shrouds would come off the statue. And so he was going along and wound up-and may I add finally that Cyrus McCormick was one of the dearest souls that ever graced the face of this universe. He nodded to me, I pulled it down, and right in the crook of Cyrus McCormick's arm was a great big empty whiskey bottle, to the horror of everyone. And Dean Gilliam could not quite reach that point. He was trying to reach up and get it out. It was so high. But that did little-I think my father recovered very graciously with, "Maybe we'd better use some of this corn for something else besides just [unclear]." But that was one of my highlights as a kid. I think tha~ was when I was about six. Warren: I've seen an album from that day, and there was a pageant that took place out at the farm, the McCormick farm. Gaines: Yes. Warren: Did you go out to that? Gaines: I didn't. My brother did. And they also had the-you remember they had the stamp, the McCormick stamp commemorating-that was-I don't remember what it was. But had you heard about that? Warren: No, I don't know about that. Gaines: Yes. They opened the sales right here in Lexington. That was in the thirties sometime. Warren: No, I didn't know about that. Gaines: I'm pretty certain it was a Cyrus McCormick memorial stamp. Warren: Interesting. I'm going to pause for just a moment. [Recording Interrupted] Gaines: Well, I guess Mrs. [Edith Bolling Galt] Wilson, and then, of course, we have pictures all over of Mrs. duPont and Mrs. Evans. I remember when Mrs. Roosevelt 3 came down. And then there was Ma [Frances] Perkins, the first lady in the cabinet, Secretary of Labor. She came down. One of the perplexing things was we had upstairs my room and my father's room on one side. On the other side was the Green Room and the Rose Room for guests. The Green Room was right across the hall from my father's room, which was-there's a big hall, by the way, which was on the front of the house. My mother had a little bitty room that she made right at the end of the hall. It was the smallest room upstairs, but we used to get eight people in there sitting on the floor and everything. But my mother would go down, when we were having dinner, about fifteen or twenty minutes in advance to make sure everything was all right. Inevitably there would be a call from either the Green Room or the-"Help! Help! I need some help." My father would go over there, and it would be one of these ladies that needed someone to zip up their dress. Well, it became-all right, Mrs. duPont knew the deal and Mrs. Wilson knew the deal, but then some of the others-and I'm almost certain that the Secretary of Labor, Ma Perkins, and Mrs. Evans, I know, they also experienced the thing. My father got so he would just listen, you know. As a matter of fact, they had buzzers in their rooms, but they wouldn't use them, that went down to the butler's pantry. When General Lee was there, he had chimes, and they would pull these things in the bedrooms, and the bells would ring in the kitchen, and they memorized that. I remember we replaced it because nobody could memorize the tones and put in one, two, three, four, five, six buzzers. Anyway, my father did this so often that he declared at one point that he was thinking about writing a book entitled Women I Have Zipped Up. [Laughter] And I told him that wouldn't go over. It would have to be, this day and time, Women I Have Zipped Down. He was quite a human person. We thought he was dying of strep throat one time. He was confined to his room. Nobody was allowed in except for his food and doctor. He wasn't supposed to get out of bed. I remember going to the door to see him, and he slipped to the window. I didn't know what he was going to do. And he opened the window, and here was his favorite tomcat, and he let him in, pulled the window and went back and jumped in bed like he'd never been out of it. But, you know, the roof to the Lee house, the cats used to get up and come in. When we had been at Penn Robin, we would not have a key to the Lee house in the summertime. We would go up this big wisteria vine right by what is now the parking space at the Lee house, get on the roof, and we had one window that we 4 kept the screen unlocked. So you'd see the Gaines boys crawling up on the top of the Lee house. Warren: You mentioned Penn Robin. Explain what that is. Gaines: Three or four years after my father came here, he decided it might be nice to have a place, a summer home, and so we spent a couple of years looking. We almost bought one place right here where the interstate is now at Kerr's Creek, a big hill and [unclear]. But he finally found this one place with 320 acres or something, and he restored that. Some of the board members helped him restore it. It was a really sort of mansion. You've seen pictures of it. Warren: Did it belong to him or did- Gaines: No, this was my father bought this. Warren: It was personal. Gaines: And then restored it, and it became something of a showplace in the county. There are not too many big homes then. We had a tennis court. We had two log cabins. One of them was, they think, in the 1750s. The house burned down and was rebuilt in 1802. And you know, the boys, we had one wing, three bedrooms and a small maid's room, and on the other wing was my mother and father's. My mother built just beautiful gardens. They were terraced. They went up to what we called the Taj Mahal, which was a big housy. We should have a picture of that. And then the big barbecue pit up there. We could see sixty miles of mountain. They had some awful nice dinners and things up there. The dining room, I think, was something like fifty feet long. It was a whole side along the house. Warren: Whoa. That's huge. Gaines: The living room was what we called the "morning room," and then my father's room was the whole length of one side. All the rooms were huge. But that's where we loved and we considered home, and we lived there in the summer and lived in the Lee house in the nine months of school. Then when they retired, they lived there for a couple of years and then moved into town and sold Penn Robin. Warren: I see. So it was sold within his lifetime. Gaines: Yes, it was. Warren: You also were around for another huge event, and you were awfully young, but do you remember the fire when the law school burned? Gaines: Oh, yes, absolutely. My uncle was living with us at the time, and he went through the law school, my mother's youngest brother. So I got a little bit on it. I think-was that fire in '35 or '37? Warren: 1934. 5 Gaines: '34. But I remember everyone concerned about the lumber company over there, and it was burning. Then, lo and behold, the law school was on fire, that ugly building, and everybody went from there. Now, I could see from the Pink Room- the Rose Room, I guess it was called-upstairs. I had a perfect view of the law school. And then I remember Cabot, who was president of the law school for a year, my uncle, I remember him saying something to the effect that, "You notice nothing of importance burned." The story I had at the time was that the law students disliked the building so much and thought it was such an [unclear] that the fire had been started by some students to draw the fire department's attention over there, and meanwhile over at the law school they'd carried out all of the documents of importance, and all of a sudden it erupted, the school. I couldn't swear to this, but that's the story that went around at the time. Warren: There are a lot of stories around that fire. Gaines: Had you heard that at all or not? Warren: I didn't hear that anything was saved except a few of the law books. I think it was a pretty disastrous fire, but apparently it was pretty dramatic, too. Gaines: It was. Warren: So you remember the original Tucker Hall and how ugly it was. Gaines: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. But I don't think theY, ever really established or put the blame on anybody for that fire. Warren: No. No, they never figured either one of the fires. They determined that both of them were arson, but they never figured out who did it. Gaines: It was a tremendous blaze. Well, I guess the library would have been. Warren: Now, when we talked last summer, you were telling me some wonderful stories about various people who were visitors at Lee House. You mentioned Mrs. Wilson. Was that Mrs. Woodrow Wilson that you have been talking about? Gaines: Oh, yes. She was at- Warren: Tell me about her connection to your family. Gaines: Well, Mrs. Wilson had been a friend of Mrs. duPont's. Now, I think they all came from Virginia. Mrs. duPont had been a schoolteacher there in Wytheville, I believe it was, and I believe Mrs. Wilson also had-this is the second Mrs. Wilson I'm talking about, Edith B__. Anyway, Miss Edith and my mother and father hit it off pretty well through Mrs. duPont, and she used to come down. She came down to my wedding. A lovely person. This is one story I want you to remember, if you will. When President [John F.] Kennedy was elected President, then Mrs. Wilson, as was customary for the 6 wives to give a dinner for the incoming President's wife, this was a tradition, and Mrs. Wilson, I assume when she went there she'd been given a dinner by the ex- Presidents' wives. So she gave this dinner for Jackie, and she invited my mother. She even sent, which I foolishly gave away, diagrams of where each person was going to sit. There would be Mrs. Wilson, there would be Jackie, then she put my mother right next to her. The cabinet wives were also invited. So they're all there, but she knew my mother wanted to talk to Jackie and put her there. Came back after this was over, and I asked my mother, "What did Jackie have to say?" She said, "Oh, she just said, 'Do you think eight years in the White House is going to spoil John-John?"' Well, At that point nobody knew. I think one morning I walked down into the library, and here was Alexander Korinsky [phonetic], I believe it was. Warren: I don't know that name. Korinsky? Gaines: Korinsky. Right before the Communists came in, he had a position in the government of Russia. Then he had to leave, and he went to New York and lived and toured the country lecturing, but he was head of the Russian government for a little while. But, I mean, that was typical of who might be there. I have a list of most of the people that came there, and they signed the g~est book and so forth, if you'd like to see it. Warren: Oh, let's get that out. We're going to pause just a moment. [Tape recorder turned off.] Go ahead, please. Gaines: During the Bicentennial, I remember Jimmy [F.] Byrnes, who was one of my father's closest friends-they'd grown up together in South Carolina-came down to make the address. [Harry S] Truman had promised my father he would, and then he couldn't. At least he said he couldn't at the end, so he sent his Secretary of State, James Byrnes. During one morning just before lunch, we heard a great commotion during the Bicentennial up in the Green Room, but couldn't find anybody. Finally we heard the voices go again, and even some threatening voices, and went in the bathroom of the Green Room, and here were Jimmy Byrnes and Sam Rayburn about to come to fisticuffs. Byrnes was breaking-he used the occasion to break with Truman and denounce the welfare state. But that was a little bit of a Bicentennial that-I think that the biographer of Sam Rayburn mentions it in his- Warren: So this is in 1949. 7 Gaines: That's right. I was in there helping separate them, and Byrnes was a great friend of mine, too. I didn't know Rayburn very well. Or you can take the case of Henry Luce. We were all in my mother's room. The upstairs telephone was there. Luce had put in a call to his magazine. You know who Henry Luce was. Warren: Yes. Gaines: You know his wife, anyway, I'm sure. But he got hold of Whitaker Chambers, who had just announced he had been a Communist but who had named also that-and Henry Luce, we started to leave the room, and he said, "No, I want you to hear this." And he said, "Are you telling me you've never been a member of the Communist party, and you have, and I'm firing you." Well, you remember Whitaker Chambers was an Alger Hiss-he put the thing on Alger Hiss, which is right interesting. My father was appointed to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. My father had been more or less a protege of Nicholas Murray Butler while my father was studying at Columbia. Nicholas Murray Butler was president. He had won the Nobel Prize. And for some reason or another he liked my father. I remember my father telling me how he, himself-how Nicholas Butler gave him his German test for his Ph.D. Anyway, they went on, and when Butler retired, he wanted my father to succeed him as the president of Columbia. Father had offers at Tulane, Rice. I think there were fourteen or fifteen universities. But the Columbia one, they sent down-one of the Dodgers, I remember, stayed in the weekend. They told my father, "We can't tell you that we'll name you president. But we'll tell you this, if you will accept it, we will offer it to you." So you may have seen-all these things came out in the paper last fall, just things of fifty years ago. That's [unclear]. But my father wasn't interested in that. Warren: Why do you think he was so devoted to Washington and Lee? Gaines: Oh, he was the keeper of the tomb. To him, Lee was what Arthur was to his keeper of the tomb, I think. Warren: Tell me more what you mean by that. Gaines: Well, he saw a great deal of inspiration in the life of Robert E. Lee. If you study most of the heros in America, Abraham Lincoln, at the height of his power, he was assassinated, and he never had to live with Reconstruction or something like that. I frankly believe it would have been a hell of a lot better if he had lived, I mean, obviously. So he became a hero. Same thing with Kennedy. He really hadn't-he had a few months, but he hadn't blossomed, and he was killed right at 8 the height, and so people can imagine what they have to. And this was true with others. But General Lee, I think, is the most inspiring person, or one of the most inspiring persons, because he had to live with defeat, and the manner in which he did it helped us to heal up our wounds and get together, we'd lost. It was a very difficult thing, and yet people loved him as much after that as they did before or during the war. He had to live with, really, defeat. If you wanted to, you could say, "Look, here are 600,000 people dead because of you," of something. When he was fighting to repel the invasion. But we all have our problems. But even if General Lee went to Greenbrier or something like that, he was the first to get up and go and ask the wives of the Northern ex-generals to dance with him and that sort of thing. Mrs. Lee had a cottage right-you've probably seen that cottage down in Rockridge Baths there that they call the Lee Cottage, where she came out and stayed when she took the baths. And he was a devoted husband, and the house was built with the porch around it for Mrs. Lee, so her wheelchair could go around there. He spent plenty of time [unclear]. There's no comparison to the way it is now with some of our leaders. Warren: So all of this was very inspirational to your father, and it's what held him in Lexington? Gaines: I think so. Warren: Did he talk about it? Gaines: Yes. It almost went without saying. I mean, when they first came here, they'd get up at six o'clock in the morning and started walking the streets of Lexington. That's the way they met everybody. Once or twice when he received offers, I think my mother thought about going. She liked the idea of going to Tulane and living in New Orleans, but my father just kind of-he talked her out of it. I don't think my father would have been happy in New York. I don't think he'd have been happy. He was a small-town boy. He was appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy Board by the President and at one time served as chairman of the Patent Committee. He couldn't screw a light bulb in very well, you know. [Laughter] He was what was so tremendously inspiring and philosophical, humble in the best sense of the word, treated everyone the same way with great deference, and yet, you know, there were some things, he was just like a kid. I'm the same way. He couldn't read instructions, how to put something together. [Laughter] 9 He was a member of a number of clubs. One of his favorites was the Alfalfa Club, which you've probably never heard of, but it's in Washington, and I think it's even more prestigious than the Gridiron Club. They have, I think, what they call the two outstanding people in each of fifty fields or something like that. My father was a member of the Alfalfa Club. I remember Ben McKelway was editor of the old Washington Star, and he had two sons that went to Washington and Lee. One of them was my classmate, and one was my brother's. He nominated my father for president at the Alfalfa Club, which they did every four years. So my father went up there, and he nominated him, then my father made the speech. Now, this was a speech that was to be humorous to the Alfalfa Club, and he really wowed them. His slogan was "Gird up your loins, we're going to win." They had to take Felix Frankfurter out physically. He got hysterical. The next day, the papers, which I would love to get-this is 1948, I believe it was-the Washington Star had the headline "Gaines Nominated for Presidency." You know, it was all part of the thing. So they've had two presidential candidates in this town. I've often wondered if I could write-I'm sure I could-and get a copy of that paper. My mother had one. But Ben McKelway, being editor, he could do what he wanted to. Warren: Oh, I'll bet we could track that down. You were starting to tell me about the famous visitors, and you had this list. I thought maybe if we opened up that list, that might spark your memory of some other great stories. There we go. Gaines: Lejeune and quite a few of them are-Harold McCormick and Jessie Ball duPont, she was my godmother. She was my godmother and Cy Young was my godfather. He couldn't be at that time more Washington and Lee than anybody in the world. Warren: Tell me exactly, what's the connection with Jessie Ball duPont? How did that start? Tell me about their friendship. Gaines: If you'll see the picture, they simply adored each other. Warren: Tell me what you remember. Gaines: I remember they'd been schoolteachers together. They hadn't been schoolteachers together. I mean, she had been a schoolteacher and he had been a schoolteacher. I guess it was through mutual friends. I don't remember whether it was Patrick Hurley [phonetic], who was ambassador to China, but they met, and Mr. duPont loved my father, and they got-I think they were in some government things together. Maybe it was that Committee for the Endowment for International Peace. I don't know. 10 But then, I think, after Mr. duPont died my father became the man she relied on most of all. She had a brother, Ed Ball, who was a ruthless individual, made a lot of money, and when she died, he took over the-she put my father on the St. Joe Paper Company board, which handled all these-Mr. duPont, if I can back up, was the biggest stockholder of duPont Company, but he had three nephews that could outvote him when they put theirs together, so he went to Florida and made another fortune there, and this was when Mr. Ball took over from Mrs. duPont. She put my father on the board because he was the only one that could control Mr. Ball, Ed Ball. I don't know whether you remember it, but right before he died, he was putting armed guards on all the trains that went through Florida because the unions were blowing them up. It was one of those things that happened. So, the more they met each other, the more they loved each other. They spent most of their vacations together. For instance, the last time I was in Epping Forest, which is Mrs. duPont's place in Jacksonville, I was the host and she was the hostess, and that's the way she would have it, you know, and we'd all dress up. You'd drive into her estate and be met. People would take you out, usher you to her salon, and she'd be there, come in, and we'd have a drink or two, and then she'd say, "Okay, now, everybody get dressed for dinner," which was always formal, "and be back down here now." And you'd go back, and your suitcase would have been opened, all the clothes pressed and hanging up in there. It was quite funny. My first wife had a large foot, so she put her shoes with my outfit and my shoes with hers. [Laughter] But that's the way it went. But before that, my mother and father, they'd travel on the Minnie Moocher [phonetic], which was one of her yachts, and I think they eventually gave both yachts to the war. They crossed the ocean in it one time. Mrs. duPont became more and more dependent on my father on things, and, of course, there were a lot of things that-for instance, my father, because he knew her and because he was interested in her children's hospital, the first in the United States, in Wilmington, Rockridge County became one of f