If Donald Trump becomes president, his wife, Melania, who was born in what’s now Slovenia, will become the second foreign-born first lady in the history of the United States. Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, whose husband was elected president in 1824, was the first. Although Melania’s origins have made her the object of some interest during the 2016 campaign, no one has used them to argue against Trump’s claim to the White House, or even his well-known views on immigration. But that was not the case with Louisa—whose birthplace was used as a weapon against both her and her husband. To John Quincy’s political opponents, Louisa’s origins implied that she and her husband were undemocratic, tainted by the Old World, antithetical to the new republic. [...]
Thomas Jefferson, for instance, had been shocked when he saw how women “mix promiscuously in gatherings of men” in Paris. He would form friendships with some of them but remained suspicious of women in power. “I have ever believed that had there been no queen there would have been no [French] Revolution,” he wrote in his autobiography. Female courtiers were suspected of being capable of ruining a country, both morally and financially. They were seen at once as too weak and too dangerously powerful, capable of “omnipotent influence,” in the words of one American founder. Marie Antoinette was not the only one. When the French-Swiss writer Madame de Stael’s book Delphine reached American shores at the start of the 19th century, everyone read it, and buzzed about its scandalous defense of divorce.
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