Harris herself called attention to this in her acceptance speech. “When [my mother] came here from India at the age of 19, maybe she didn’t quite imagine this moment,” said Harris, clad in suffragist white that historic night in Wilmington, Delaware. “So, I’m thinking about her and about the generations of women—Black women, Asian, white, Latina, and Native American women, throughout our nation’s history, who have paved the way for this moment tonight.”

The momentum that brings Harris to the White House has been building globally for over a decade; it just hasn’t been spotlighted. Moreover, the success of what I call the “Feminism ReBoot”—a new approach to feminism rooted in collaboration and supported by new forms of digital connections—has both been inspired by and inspired successes around the world. Like the roots of a powerful tree of change, local feminist networks have been reaching out to sister movements across the globe to create robust transnational feminist networks that build on the momentum of one another. We can trace the roots and branches of #MeToo in the U.S. to feminist movements such as #BringBackOurGirls in Nigeria, #MyStealthyFreedom in Iran, and #NudeBloggersofEgypt.

Notably, women’s movements in Guatemala and Chile have seen major milestones in the last two years alone, as feminist groups have come together to propel change and enact legislation in order to provide more rights to survivors of sexual violence. In February 2016, a Guatemalan court prosecuted two former members of the military for harrowing acts of sexual violence committed decades ago. In a historic ruling for rape survivors in Guatemala, two male suspects were found guilty of crimes against humanity for sexually abusing 15 Indigenous women and sentenced to a combined 360 years in prison. This victory encouraged more women to come forward and denounce their abusers.

Today, numerous women’s groups across Latin America are also working on changing restrictive abortion laws. In August 2017, a Chilean women’s movement known as Mujeres en Marcha Chile advocated for the passage of a new law that legalizes abortion under certain circumstances. This law was a major victory for women who have been pushing for abortion rights for decades, and it signaled that the door was now open for further reform. This month, Argentina followed suit with official approval to legalize abortion—a battle that a group of intergenerational and intersectional feminists has been waging for decades. Pumping fists clad in green handkerchiefs, activists took to the streets demanding reproductive choice, having organized through social media and underground networks.

Transnational feminist networks across the globe passed along strategies of success from Latin America to Asia. In India, a number of concerted movements and organizations fighting everyday sexual harassment and laws that target women’s morality came to a head in 2012, when the violent gang rape of Jyoti Singh on a bus resulted in her death. The outrage over this incident brought Indian women together to strategize for larger change. They began by organizing to bring down politicians who had been involved in sexual harassment. Over the next five years, the climate of India’s Supreme Court changed significantly, in no small part thanks to these efforts.

On September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court voted unanimously to repeal Section #377, a colonial-era law that criminalized homosexuality. The decision was met with absolute jubilation in India and served as inspiration to many activists around the world suffering from battlefield fatigue in the push for sexual and gender rights.

In South Korea over the past five years, women’s movements have been slowly gaining strength. #MeToo infused these movements with a new energy, and they have served as catalysts for large-scale reforms. The 2016 murder of a Korean woman exiting the bathroom at the Gangnam metro station inspired women to take to the streets in protest of sexual violence and assault. While these protests invited significant backlash, resulting in numerous women losing their jobs and being ostracized from their communities, they also inspired many more women to speak out and join in ongoing protests.  

Notably, in January 2018, Seo Ji-Hyeon, a well-known prosecutor, went public with the accusation that a former Ministry of Justice official groped her at a funeral in 2010. It became a watershed moment––between January and April 2018, hundreds of other women came forward with their stories. In March 2018, presidential candidate and Governor Ahn Hee-Jung resigned after he was accused of raping his secretary. Later that month, thousands came out for a marathon protest during which 193 women spoke for 2,018 minutes straight about their experiences with sexual assault. The event was significant in its magnitude as well as its location; it took place in the same area where, in 2017, thousands gathered for a mass candlelight demonstration against the now ousted president. South Koreans know the power of protest. And in April 2018, Korean President Moon-Jae addressed the #MeToo movement by publicly calling for a societal shift, specifically within corporate culture.

In the Middle East and North Africa, countries where women’s rights are thought to be limited, feminist organizing, and the transnational feminist networks, have had significant successes. Consider Nigeria. After the extremist group Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls in April 2014, Nigerian activists took to social media, launching the #BringBackOurGirls campaign to bring worldwide attention to the plight of these girls and advocate for their release. The campaign was so successful in raising awareness that people across the globe, including Michelle Obama and the Pope, spoke out against the kidnappings. Through transnational collaborations, more than half of the girls have been returned, and Boko Haram, which could have been a major threat throughout the continent, has been contained.

In Tunisia, many women experienced physical and sexual assault, arrest, and even exile because of their prominent role in the Arab Spring. Nonetheless, they persisted and opened a new dialogue on women’s rights while also working toward regime change. Tunisian activists’ success has inspired a domino effect throughout the region. And while the changes feminists have been pushing for in part via social media and transnational collaboration have been incremental, the climate is shifting.

While we do not yet know the longer-term results of these movements, what all of them have in common is their fierce commitment to inclusive collaboration and to embracing and harnessing the power of intersectionality. Success inspires success, and their strategies and unrelenting activism have without a doubt moved the needle. In our globally networked world, women can quickly and easily hear about the victories of other women both at home and in faraway countries. Inspiration goes viral—the momentum of one movement leads to another.

Here in the U.S., these transnational women’s movements also inspired—and were inspired by—the Women’s March, which began as an American response to the election of Trump but quickly became global. In January 2017, millions of women marched in major cities on every continent. The anniversary marches have drawn millions, from Paris and Delhi to Nairobi, Cape Town, and Tbilisi, as organizers called on marchers to bring their #PowertothePolls. These marches—led by women of color—involved women who previously had not felt willing or able to engage with political processes, and increased the visibility of women’s political action.

The tidal waves of feminist activism, drawn from around the world, helped President-elect Joe Biden understand the power of choosing not just a woman, but a woman of color as his running mate. The election of Harris, a Black, Brown woman who is the daughter of immigrants, is a victory for the global struggle for a new, more inclusive and intersectional feminism.

While today we are witnessing the rise of autocracy and patriarchy around the world, looking closer, we can also see resistance to these forces growing and apathy decreasing. There was higher voter turnout in the U.S. this year than ever before, and a significant inspiration was Harris herself. And while we have to acknowledge the failures and slippage of resistance, we can also celebrate the power of the momentum that is pushing back, and how networked this power becomes across oceans and divides.

As the roots of Harris’s victory are important to acknowledge, so too are the branches that her win has already sprouted around the world. While Harris drew strength from global movements, her win has also inspired weary activists around the world to keep calling for progress. Their successes will only be amplified by social media—and will lay the groundwork for further reform for women around the world, and for generations to come.

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Nicolay, who eventually became Lincoln’s private secretary, may not be well-known today, but he was one of the most significant people working behind the scenes in the Lincoln administration and his efforts on behalf of the 16th president changed the course of American history. Possessed of organizational skills that Lincoln lacked, Nicolay managed White House operations and protected Lincoln’s time, allowing the president to become perhaps the nation’s most active and involved wartime commander-in-chief. Nicolay was devoted to Lincoln and his friendship eased the president’s burdens during the terrible ordeal of civil war. Following Lincoln’s assassination, Nicolay and his friend John Hay worked for years on a massive biography of Lincoln that shaped the president’s image as the good and wise Father Abraham who saved the Union, ended slavery, and gave America renewed freedom. Nicolay helped Lincoln achieve greatness in both life and legend.

Born Johann Georg Nicolai in 1832 in the village of Essingen in what is now Germany, Nicolay was five when his family arrived in the United States, anglicized its last name, and settled in a German immigrant community in Cincinnati, Ohio. When Nicolay’s mother died soon thereafter the family left for a series of western locations, eventually settling in Pike County, Illinois, where they operated a grist mill. While physically frail, the academically inclined George, as he was called, learned English quickly. By the age of 14 he had lost his father and been dismissed from the family mill by his eldest brother. But he soon landed a job at the Pike County Free Press in Pittsfield, the county seat of Pike County, Illinois.

Lincoln at the time was a circuit-riding attorney who often argued cases in the Pike County courthouse, across the street from the newspaper’s offices. Nicolay followed Lincoln’s court appearances and budding political career with growing interest and enthusiasm. Like Lincoln, Nicolay was drawn to the new Republican Party, which opposed slavery’s expansion. And like Lincoln, he was vehemently opposed to Senator. Stephen A. Douglas’s 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which negated the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and permitted slavery anew in territory that had been closed to it.

At the Free Press, Nicolay worked his way up from printer’s apprentice to reporter to sole proprietor. The paper supported Republican candidates in Illinois, including Ozias M. Hatch, who after his election as Secretary of State in 1856 invited Nicolay to become his chief clerk. After selling the newspaper, Nicolay moved to Springfield to join Hatch’s staff in 1857. While executing his duties at the state library and election archives, located directly across the street from Lincoln’s law office, Nicolay finally got to meet Lincoln in person. Although Lincoln was 23 years older than Nicolay they became fast friends, often conversing and playing chess in the State Library.

In 1858, Lincoln ran for Douglas’s senate seat, engaging in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates that cemented his reputation as a moderate and reasoned anti-slavery voice within the Republican Party. He lost the race, but Republican leaders decided that transcripts of the debates should be published and distributed nationally to promote the party’s cause. Lincoln called on Nicolay to hand deliver the copies to a publishing company in Ohio, writing in his letter of introduction, “Mr. Nicolay is a good Republican … a good man and worthy of any confidence that may be bestowed upon him.” Given these sentiments, it didn’t take long for Lincoln and Nicolay to forge a partnership in politics.

Lincoln’s star was on the rise. Many Republicans thought he’d make a great vice presidential candidate in the 1860 election, but he and Nicolay envisioned something more. In February, 1860, Nicolay began pushing Lincoln’s prospects for a presidential run, writing an editorial endorsing Lincoln for president in the Pike County Free Press. Nicolay was present at the Chicago convention when Lincoln won the nomination. Soon thereafter, Lincoln offered him the position of campaign secretary.  

Lincoln liked Nicolay and admired his abilities, but there was also a political calculation in choosing a widely respected German immigrant to play a key role in his administration. German American voters had been alienated by the Democratic Party’s defense of slavery, as well as by the American (or “Know Nothing”) Party and its anti-immigrant positions. When the “Know Nothings” merged into the coalition forming the new Republican Party, German American voters were unsure where they belonged. By appointing Nicolay his private secretary, Lincoln assured German Americans that he was not a nativist.

As the Private Secretary to the president, Nicolay became the de facto first White House chief of staff. He brought his friend Hay on board as an assistant. Nicolay served as a gatekeeper of access to Lincoln, coordinating daily White House routines that included managing the president’s schedule, handling correspondence, and even ordering filing cabinets for proper storage of the administration’s paperwork (no longer was Lincoln allowed to carry around important documents in his hat). Nicolay served as the principal liaison between the White House and Congress. He sat in on Cabinet meetings and presidential interviews and took careful notes. He drafted important documents and letters. He assisted First Lady Mary Lincoln with state dinners and other matters of protocol, experiencing tense relations with her when she overspent and fudged the accounts. Nicolay and Hay were Lincoln’s sounding boards as the president conducted business in D.C. and went on missions to various parts of the country beyond as the president’s trusted eyes and ears. Nicolay conducted multiple treaty negotiations with Native American tribes. His organization of the president’s schedule freed Lincoln to spend critical hours each day in the War Department’s telegraph office monitoring developments in the field. Without Nicolay’s focus, Lincoln could have been lost in a sea of detail.

President Abraham Lincoln sits between John George Nicolay (left) and John Hay (right) in Washington, D.C., in November 1963. Hay wrote in his diary, “We had a great many pictures taken … Nico & I immortalized ourselves by having ourselves done in a group with the Prest.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Nicolay continued working for Lincoln through the president’s 1864 election to a second term, but decided he wanted to depart the White House shortly thereafter. Living in Washington had meant enduring long periods of separation from the love of his life, Therena Bates, who remained in Pittsfield, and Nicolay was growing weary of confrontations with Mrs. Lincoln. He accepted Lincoln’s offer of an appointment as American consul at Paris, but was still in his White House job—returning from a mission to Cuba—when he learned that the president had been assassinated. Devastated, he remained in his secretary post until he and Hay had organized Lincoln’s presidential papers and made the presidential office ready for Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson.

Nicolay and Bates got married and headed off for a new life in Paris in June of 1865. Their daughter, Helen, was born there the following year. Nicolay served as consul at Paris until he was replaced by an appointee of President Grant in 1869. He returned to the U.S. and became a naturalized American citizen on October 12, 1870. (Apparently no one, including President Lincoln, had known that Nicolay wasn’t a citizen.) In 1872 he was selected to be Marshal of the U.S. Supreme Court. This enabled Nicolay and his family to live in Washington, D.C., and allowed him to begin the legacy-cementing literary work he really wanted to do: prepare a history and biography of Abraham Lincoln and his era.

Nicolay and Hay worked with Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s son, who gave them access to Lincoln’s presidential papers. Doing painstaking research, Nicolay and Hay shunned hearsay and undocumented tales about Lincoln and relied on credible documentation for every aspect of their 10-volume, 4,800-page work, Abraham Lincoln – A History, which was published by the Century Company in 1890. The work was more than a mere biography of Lincoln. It assembled a detailed military history of the Civil War and reported on the machinations of the cabinet, Congress, and the military. It portrayed Lincoln as a witty and wise man who loved to tell stories. It detailed how Lincoln bore the suffering of war on his shoulders while his faith in God grew deeper, and the ways he saw beyond the immediate ups and downs of war, keeping the ultimate goal of preserving the Union ever in his mind. It was the first scholarly validation of the president’s greatness and became the foundational work for all the scholarly writing on Lincoln to follow.

This massive effort was not viewed as flawless, but it was widely praised when it was published, and it shaped a heroic image of Lincoln that persists to this day. In Nicolay and Hay’s telling, Abraham Lincoln could do no wrong. His motives were always pure, his fairness, kindness, and wisdom were without parallel, and only he possessed the qualities of mind and character needed by the nation in its moment of gravest crisis. The book was a work of filial love, scholarly yet biased, by two men who, in their early manhood, had viewed Lincoln as an all-wise father figure who could do no wrong, the man who had saved the nation and ended slavery.

The self-effacing Nicolay—the Father of Lincoln Scholars—is practically invisible in the volumes. He always chose to work behind the scenes for his hero, mentor, and friend.

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All presidents run up against the limited power of the office. To some extent, Trump’s efforts have been stymied by institutional limits on presidential powers and the separation of powers that are built into the American Constitution. The U.S. Presidency was designed to be limited by the courts and Congress.

But the forces that have been holding some of Trump’s changes at bay go well beyond the separation of powers. They reveal something about the nature of power itself and the impotence of self-proclaimed strongmen like Trump when they fail to properly grasp it. Power is not strength. It can never belong to a single individual, nor can it be a feature of a particular office. It is a phenomenon that rises up—and dies—with a group. As soon as the group disperses, power also disappears.

Hannah Arendt, political philosopher and scholar, in 1969. Photo by Associated Press.

The sharp distinction between power and strength comes from the work of Hannah Arendt, the German-American political thinker who was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Strength, Arendt explains, is a function of the instruments one can literally possess and hold, whether these are the muscles one has or the instruments one wields. Strength helps an individual act. Power, though, is something entirely different; Arendt defines it as the human ability not just to act, but to act with others. And as such, power can arise only from within a broad, plural, group of people encompassing differences both big and small.

The distinction between strength and power becomes even starker when contrasted with violence. Arendt explores these distinctions in her 1970 essay On Violence, which she wrote against a backdrop of violent student movements around the world and the glorification of violence by thinkers like Franz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre. Responding to what she saw as a dangerous conflation of power and violence, Arendt argues that the two are antithetical. Violence, for Arendt, is closely related to strength: It is an instrument that augments strength. But while violence and strength certainly command obedience (it’s difficult, to say the least, to dissent at the barrel of a gun), we shouldn’t confuse either with power, Arendt explains—nor can we conflate obedience with legitimacy. A strongman made even stronger by his possession of the instruments of violence is not, Arendt shows us, more powerful or more authoritative.

American democracy presumes power and resists strength. Resting on the will of the people, our republic was designed to do away with government as the “rule of man over man”—a government that, Arendt notes, the American founding fathers thought “fit for slaves.” Institutions and offices of governance have no power of their own; they are manifestations and materializations of power, which lies only with the people. Thus, if it is to be an office of power and not violence, the Presidency, as much as Congress, needs numbers of people. Without the people, the Presidency loses that “living power” that prevents it from petrification and decay.

But power is not just numbers. The distinction between power and strength is not merely a preference for majority rule. Being powerful isn’t, as political organizers would often have us believe, about speaking with one voice. Power is predicated on plurality. For Arendt, the assemblage of different, if not opposing, opinions and identities is the very thing that gives power to a movement. Arendt describes plurality simply, if a little enigmatically, as “the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.” What she means here is that power demands more than the many, or even the majority or everyone, acting together. The group must comprise individuals who meaningfully differ in their opinions from one another such that there are others with whom one acts. It is in acting “in concert” with those who hold different opinions that the power created by a movement remains with the people. If the group can be summed up by one opinion or identity—white working class, conservative, immigrant—the group is no better than an undifferentiated mob that might be swayed to carry out the orders of a dictator. It is no better than a potential instrument of violence.

That potential clarifies the first weeks of the Trump presidency—for both his supporters and his opponents. People have questioned Trump’s legitimacy on a number of grounds: He lost the popular vote, Russia may have interfered in the election, he lacks experience in government. But in some ways the biggest long term threat to his legitimacy lies in his lack of power. By reducing the office to his dictates as a “strong leader,” Trump has signaled that he might see the Presidency more as an instrument of strength than a manifestation of power. His assaults on anyone who questions his decisions, from the press and the judiciary to his own federal bureaucracy, portend a President for whom governance looks suspiciously like the imposition of strength from above that the Founding Fathers sought to eradicate. When Trump revels in the possibility that he might rule solely through the strength of his leadership, he threatens to strip the American political sphere of the various perspectives that make it a constant source of power and legitimacy. He threatens the very power of American democracy.

Through this lens, it is not clear that those who support Trump have much to celebrate, no matter how ardently they may share his views. In acceding to this kind of ruler, we undermine democracy as a system of self-rule and undermine our own power as a people to govern. Indeed, many support Trump precisely because he is “strong” and presumably willing and able to take over the reins of governance from the people. As efficient as strong leaders may be in affecting change, we must be cognizant of what we are giving up in complying with this kind of rule.

At the same time, those who oppose Trump shouldn’t take their own democratic credentials for granted. Power has high standards. Numbers are not enough—not the numbers of the popular vote or the unanimous decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (captured by Hillary Clinton’s “3-0” tweet). The burgeoning anti-Trump movement will only become a powerful force in American society when it is a coalition of different opinions that come together for a public good beyond any particular interest. If the opposition can capture plurality, it not only enacts the kind of American society it purports to embrace, but also can serve as a legitimate, democratic force of governance. Its power and legitimacy will come from that fact that such a group can claim to speak and act as a true public—a group of diverse opinions, interests, and identities. Because, as Arendt tells us, what is at stake in politics is not one’s own life and the particular interests one holds, but the world itself.

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But I don’t think it went nearly far enough. Her influence, like that of many first ladies, is still not fully understood and is often underestimated. She was wise to keep it that way while she was in the White House—as the example of more publicized first ladies perhaps shows. Now, she deserves more credit.

Lady Bird Johnson was a political adviser, moral compass, and informal therapist for her husband, who was, according to Lyndon Johnson’s adviser Joe Califano, essentially a manic-depressive. “She helped him when he was down,” he told me while I was researching my book about first ladies. “She leveled it out for him.” Larry Temple, who served as special counsel to President Johnson, said “there was nobody closer during my time to LBJ than Lady Bird Johnson. Absolutely no one whose advice, whose counsel, whose judgment he sought and took more than Lady Bird Johnson.” When the first lady occasionally left the White House, Temple knew to tread carefully. “If she were gone,” he remembered, the president was “like a caged animal.”

Lady Bird Johnson came into the White House in mourning after President Kennedy’s assassination, unlike most first ladies who are celebrated with inaugural balls. But she wasted no time once she moved in. The Highway Beautification Act of 1965, which cleaned up the nation’s highways and limited billboards, was her signature issue as first lady. But her job as a trusted adviser to her husband gave her influence on many other topics throughout LBJ’s presidency. For example, she helped inform her husband’s decision to push through Congress the historic Civil Rights Act, which overturned Jim Crow segregation laws. She knew that action needed to be taken after witnessing firsthand the humiliation of her family’s cook, Zephyr Wright, when they drove together from the Johnsons’ Texas ranch to Washington. Hotel managers in the South refused to offer her a room because Wright was African-American.

Johnson’s first lady was furious at such discrimination. But she also knew the South well, as she grew up in a small East Texas town. During the presidential election campaign, she helped her husband to victory when she traveled 1,628 miles across eight southern states on her “Lady Bird Special.” She rallied fellow southerners, some of whom resented her husband for forcing them to change their way of life with his civil rights legislation. She made 47 speeches on the whistle-stop train trip and bravely stood up to hecklers with signs that read, “Black Bird, go home!”

When she wasn’t campaigning, Lady Bird Johnson wielded power quietly. Though she was a trailblazer—the first wife of a U.S. president to have her own press secretary and the first to campaign without her husband—she did not make her influence widely known. She was in the White House from 1963 to 1969, before many tenets of feminism were widely accepted, and she was expected to focus on being a wife and mother. If this meant that she did not get the praise she deserved, she also avoided much of the criticism heaped on other first ladies who came after her.

The most criticized first ladies were Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton. Much has been made of Reagan’s covert power: She famously instigated the dismissal of her husband’s chief of staff, Don Regan, and persuaded President Reagan to appoint more moderate Republicans as advisers. Men in the West Wing called her “Evita” (after Argentina’s powerful first lady Eva Perón) and “The Missus” behind her back. She became a lightning rod for her husband’s administration and had to shoulder the burden of criticism.

President Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson in the Oval Office on June 5, 1968, as President Johnson learns by phone of Robert F. Kennedy’s death.

So did Hillary Clinton, who was equally unapologetic about her influence in her husband’s administration. (Clinton is the only first lady to have run for public office, making her second bid for the presidency this year.) Many voters were aghast when Bill Clinton named his wife to head up his ambitious health care reform plan. She also took up an office in the West Wing—a controversial decision that she later told Laura Bush she regretted making.

Lady Bird Johnson, by contrast, worked out of a small blue sitting room overlooking the rose garden in the White House’s second floor. She used her influence surreptitiously but effectively. Mornings, when the Johnsons breakfasted together in the bedroom, President Johnson would listen intently. “He felt that she had no alternative agenda except his best interest and she would tell him what he needed to hear whether he wanted to hear it or not,” the Johnsons’ daughter, Luci, told me. She laughed and explained that her mother was “that one person who’s going to tell him if there’s spinach in his teeth so he has a chance to get to a mirror and get it out.”

He even asked her to grade his speeches. In a phone call after a news conference on March 7, 1964, Lady Bird Johnson asked her husband, “You want to listen for about one minute to my critique, or would you rather wait until tonight?” “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “I’m willing now.” Her major takeaway: He needed to speak more slowly and stop looking down at his notes so often. “I’d say it was a good B-plus,” she said. In 1968, right before LBJ shocked the nation in a live, nationally televised address when he said he would not be seeking another term, it was Lady Bird Johnson who walked into the Oval Office with a note. “Remember—,” it read, “Pacing and drama.”

It was also Lady Bird Johnson who, in 1964, insisted on releasing a statement in support of their close friend and top political adviser, Walter Jenkins, who was arrested on what was then called a “homosexual morals” charge in a YMCA men’s room a few blocks from the White House. Lyndon Johnson wavered, suggesting they keep quiet for political reasons. But Lady Bird Johnson would not abandon their friend in his hour of need. “If we don’t express some support to him,” she said, “I think that we will lose the entire love and devotion of all the people who have been with us.”

After the Johnsons retired to their Texas ranch in 1969, LBJ lived only four more years, dying of a heart attack in 1973 at age 64. Lady Bird Johnson outlived her husband by almost thirty-five years, but they were fulfilling ones for her. She continued her work on environmental causes in Texas, founding the National Wildflower Research Center. She planned her husband’s library and could often be found working in her office there. And she became the grande dame of former first ladies, calling her successors to check in on them during difficult times in the White House. Rosalynn Carter told me that during the Iran hostage crisis, “Lady Bird Johnson often reached out with concern.”

No one understood better how tricky a position the office of first lady could be. Her example shows that Americans seem to want their first ladies to be seen and not heard. Johnson knew this instinctively, and she was able to stay above the fray in a way that Reagan and Clinton were not. But that didn’t mean Johnson wasn’t powerful. Though it operated in the shadows, her influence was real and lasting.

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Her mother was happy with the match: If Joshua wanted their daughter to marry an American, how could Louisa do better than the son of the vice president of the United States? Her father, however, was less thrilled; he would have preferred a Southerner over a Yankee. John Quincy’s mother, Abigail Adams, was furious. When she guessed the engagement—he had avoided telling her—she wrote to him, “I would hope for the love I bear my country, that the siren, is at least half blood.”

As it happened, Louisa was already an American citizen. The proof is there—the plain fact of it, printed and indexed—in the annals of the Maryland State Senate: “An ACT to declare Joshua Johnson, merchant, his wife and children, citizens of this state.” Back then, what it meant to be an American was still being worked out: Louisa, for instance, was made a citizen of the state of Maryland, not the United States, at a time when the United States were, not was. There were vast dissimilarities in the union that seemed to matter—differences between the North and South, East and West. And there were differences between an American from London and an American from America. When Louisa married John Quincy, the United States was an idea, a place that existed only in stories and in her father’s claims to difference. It was no more real to her than the inside of St. James’ Palace or playing “duchess” in her dress-up games.

In the United States, a woman, in addition to making the home a “bosom” of comfort where her husband could take comfort from his rasping cares, represented the embodiment of political values in private life, the repository of republican virtue. While insulated from the corruptions of public life, the American woman was to represent and safeguard morality, and to instill that morality in children. She was supposed to educate sons and daughters—especially sons—to love their country, their father, and their God; to distrust state power; to exalt purity and self-sacrifice.

Louisa had learned these lessons, but incompletely. She learned to soothe cares by singing in the parlor, not by serving a well-cooked meal and well-scrubbed floor. She learned to decry the King of England, but accompanying John Quincy to Prussia after their marriage, she had delighted in dancing with the King of Prussia. She resented the call to self-sacrifice.

Louisa was 26 when she first stepped onto American soil. It was a dim, cold day—Thanksgiving—when she arrived at the Adams’ paternal mansion in Quincy. “Had I stepped into Noah’s Ark,” she wrote in her memoir Adventures of a Nobody, “I do not think I could have been more utterly astonished.”

The Adamses were as determined to see the differences as she was. To them, she was “a fine lady”—not a compliment. Louisa was given special foods at dinner, a separate plate piled with preserves. She was treated with solicitous attention, which “appeared so strongly to stamp me with unfitness.” She felt unfit herself. She had been trained to run a staff of servants. Abigail—whom Louisa saw as a kind of American archetype—bragged of waking at 5 to milk the cow.

Louisa was an Adams, but she rebelled against rooting herself in Quincy’s stony soil. As someone who came to know the United States from the outside looking in, Louisa was prone to reflect on what her American identity meant in ways that most native-born Americans rarely do. She could see what others could not always see: that even though men claimed to have completed a social revolution, a meritocracy of virtue, they were as other men were: ever sensitive to hierarchical distinctions. She was quick to see the demagogic susceptibility of democracies and the triumph of emotions and instincts over the republic of reason. She was skeptical of the American faith in the perfectibility of man. She distrusted “the inflating and vainglorious fancies which we are too apt to attach to human greatness.”

Louisa saw how ridiculous, and how tragic, were the heroes of the American pantheon: the “peering restlessness” of Thomas Jefferson; the wild, tyrannical tendencies of the quintessential democrat Andrew Jackson; the maneuvers of politicians who denied playing politics. And she saw how great the great could be, too. Of her father-in-law, John Adams, she once wrote, “Every thing in his mind was rich, racy, and true.”

She had to prove herself as an American, because others were quick to see her as something else. She and her husband had to bat down stories that the English Prince Regent had asked them to represent him at the christening of the English minister’s wife; James Monroe even asked John Quincy if the story was true. Western members of Congress referred to her “diplomatic tricks.”

“One of the greatest taxes I have to pay is that of concealing that I am a traveled lady,” she wrote drily to John Adams after grimacing through a particularly terrible music performance. During John Quincy’s (unacknowledged) campaign for the presidency and then for reelection, she tried to combat rumors about her nationality in an unprecedented way, writing a kind of campaign biography about herself. “Having never before appeared in print, and possessing no ability for authorship, [the writer] is indifferent to criticism, and careless of effect,” she wrote, “so long as she has the happiness to show that Mrs. Adams is the daughter of an American Republican Merchant.”

But she understood that being an American was not as simple as a matter of birth—even for those born in the United States. She saw, from afar (from Russia, in fact, where her husband was the U.S. minister plenipotentiary), how the War of 1812 united a disparate people once besieged, because she saw the effect it had on herself. “If I could correctly judge of the effect upon the feelings of our Nation of this transaction, by those which it has produced among the Americans we have here, I should look upon it as a blessing rather than a calamity,” she wrote to John Quincy. “Our Situation is perilous in the extreme,” she wrote to John Quincy, “but it is extreme distress alone which can ever discover to us the extent of our resources.”

But she also came to realize how fragile the bonds that held the country together were. She believed that factions and political parties would pull the country apart; she knew that the persistence of slavery would cause a violent rupture. She saw how tenaciously, how quickly, people held to their own local customs and mores, sometimes at great cost.

And this was hard for her, because she did not really have a local identity. She lived a life of trunks and packing cases; sometimes said she had no home. She wrote three memoir sketches, but she gave them titles without identification or antecedent: Record of a Life. Narrative of a Journey. Adventures of a Nobody.

She was an Adams, but unlike the Adamses, she had to construct her identity as an American. She would be independent. She would learn to take care of herself, to stand up for herself. She would claim rights. “In the marriage compact there are as in every other two parties, each of which have rights strictly defined by law and by the usages of society,” she once wrote furiously to her husband, protesting how he made decisions for her life without her input. She would think about what it meant to be a woman, and what it meant to be a daughter, wife, and mother. She would learn to write well, and in writing to assert her selfhood.

She would accept that it was hard, and a never-finished process. In that, perhaps, she did embody a true American ideal. Thinking of women, she wrote, “Under all circumstances we must never desert ourselves.”

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