December 18, 1916--In a short evening ceremony limited almost exclusively to immediate family members, Woodrow Wilson married Edith Bolling Galt, a wealthy 42-year-old widow who had helped him snap out of a life-sapping depression following the death of his first wife the year before.
The President and the new First Lady, hoping for the kind of privacy they had enjoyed for much of their courtship, fled under the nose of impatient reporters by leaving the ceremony (which took place in Mrs. Galt’s D.C. home rather than the White House) in an unmarked car, then taking a private railroad car to Hot Springs, Va., for a three-week honeymoon.
In a couple of ways, the wedding and its aftermath signaled the powerful influence that Edith Wilson would exert on her new husband--taking the couple in directions that the President’s quieter, more depressed first wife, Ellen Wilson, probably would not have approved:
1) The restriction of wedding guests to family members allowed Edith to keep at arm’s length "Colonel" Edward House, a powerful unofficial confidante of the President. The ban on outsiders was not total--her own servants and, more important, the President’s personal physician, Dr. Cary Grayson, had been allowed to attend, so House was free to interpret the lack of an invitation as a snub. Ellen had met with House about appointments and had allied with him in passing her major cause as First Lady, an “alley bill” meant to help African-Americans by clearing the worst sections of D.C. of substandard housing. Edith, however, immediately disliked House, and eventually succeeded in banishing him from the President’s company--just one of a number of advisers who found themselves on the outs when they found themselves, for one reason or another, on her bad side.
2) Keeping reporters in the dark later also became the modus operandi of Edith after her husband’s devastating 1919 stroke. His paralysis, in the words of historian John Milton Cooper in his recent biography, Woodrow Wilson, “brought on the worst crisis of Presidential disability in American history.” Edith would collude with Admiral Grayson in hiding the full extent of her husband’s condition not only from the American people but even from his Vice-President, Thomas Marshall, and the Cabinet. (In an especially outrageous case of press manipulation, she invited New York World reporter Louis Siebold to become the first reporter to interview the President after his alleged “recovery.” As historian-novelist Thomas Fleming has noted, the piece was a farce, saying nothing about Wilson’s limited attention span or his nearly-illegible signature--and even inventing a “footrace” between reporter and subject that the President supposedly won. Naturally, Siebold won a Pulitzer Prize for his fictional reporting.)
But let’s give Edith Wilson her due: she was not only deeply loyal to her husband, but brought out a private passionate side of him that most who knew him from his service as president of Princeton and governor of New Jersey could scarcely have imagined.
I sensed this passion when I visited the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum last month in Staunton, Va., the President’s birthplace. Near the entrance of the museum was a short note from the President to his beloved. How was it signed? By “Woodrow”? By “Thomas,’
“Tom,” or “Tommy,” all variations of his real first name? Not a chance. The note was signed, simply, “Tiger.”
As the son of a Presbyterian minister who maintained his faith throughout his life, Wilson had a reputation for being high-minded and humorless. If you want to know the truth, that impression was so sweeping that many people would probably have rather hung around with Dick Cheney at a White House social gathering.
But appearances were deceiving. In childhood, Wilson was the adoring object of attention from his mother and sisters, and in adulthood he loved having even more adoring women around him:
*As a law-school student, he had felt such overwhelming love for his first cousin that he got into academic trouble by ignoring his studies to be with her, and he was devastated when she rejected his marriage proposal.
* With Ellen Wilson, he got into the habit of sharing as much of his papers as he could, until her growing sense of depression led him to keep the most distressing details of his career from her.
* Taking vacation amid an epic fight with a graduate-school dean at Princeton, Wilson became acquainted with Mary Hulbert Peck, a vivacious divorcee. Neither Wilson nor Peck left any clear impression later of exactly what happened, but at the least it was intimate enough that Wilson felt obliged to beg forgiveness of Ellen for his foolishness. Yet Wilson’s reputation as a straight-arrow led opponents to scoff that he could never have gotten involved in such foolishness. The best comment on this was made by Wilson’s 1912 rival for the President, Theodore Roosevelt, who not only declared that he would not spread rumors about Wilson’s affair, but that these whispers were, on their face, incredible: “No evidence could ever make the American people believe that a man like Woodrow Wilson, cast so perfectly as the apothecary’s clerk, could ever play Romeo.”
* Wilson’s depression following Ellen’s death had been so total that some close aides feared for him. Then, within only six months of her passing, his headlong love affair with Mrs. Galt led the same aides to dread that the public would turn against him for remarrying so soon. (Particularly worrisome was an item in an edition of The Washington Post that had noted that the President had been "entertaining" Mrs. Galt. Unfortunately, that edition had to be recalled because of a racy misprint of the word that assured the paper's readers that the President had been "entering" Mrs. Galt.) The nervous aides even invented false rumors that someone had gotten hold of compromising information about his relationship with Mrs. Peck. In agony, Wilson threw himself on the mercy of Mrs. Galt, who supported him and went ahead with the ceremony.
Colonel House had been crucial in persuading Wilson to push back the wedding at least till a year after Ellen Wilson’s death. That could not have warmed Edith to him, and a couple of years later, as the fight over the League of Nations proceeded, she finally managed to drive him from her husband’s circle.
The President and the new First Lady, hoping for the kind of privacy they had enjoyed for much of their courtship, fled under the nose of impatient reporters by leaving the ceremony (which took place in Mrs. Galt’s D.C. home rather than the White House) in an unmarked car, then taking a private railroad car to Hot Springs, Va., for a three-week honeymoon.
In a couple of ways, the wedding and its aftermath signaled the powerful influence that Edith Wilson would exert on her new husband--taking the couple in directions that the President’s quieter, more depressed first wife, Ellen Wilson, probably would not have approved:
1) The restriction of wedding guests to family members allowed Edith to keep at arm’s length "Colonel" Edward House, a powerful unofficial confidante of the President. The ban on outsiders was not total--her own servants and, more important, the President’s personal physician, Dr. Cary Grayson, had been allowed to attend, so House was free to interpret the lack of an invitation as a snub. Ellen had met with House about appointments and had allied with him in passing her major cause as First Lady, an “alley bill” meant to help African-Americans by clearing the worst sections of D.C. of substandard housing. Edith, however, immediately disliked House, and eventually succeeded in banishing him from the President’s company--just one of a number of advisers who found themselves on the outs when they found themselves, for one reason or another, on her bad side.
2) Keeping reporters in the dark later also became the modus operandi of Edith after her husband’s devastating 1919 stroke. His paralysis, in the words of historian John Milton Cooper in his recent biography, Woodrow Wilson, “brought on the worst crisis of Presidential disability in American history.” Edith would collude with Admiral Grayson in hiding the full extent of her husband’s condition not only from the American people but even from his Vice-President, Thomas Marshall, and the Cabinet. (In an especially outrageous case of press manipulation, she invited New York World reporter Louis Siebold to become the first reporter to interview the President after his alleged “recovery.” As historian-novelist Thomas Fleming has noted, the piece was a farce, saying nothing about Wilson’s limited attention span or his nearly-illegible signature--and even inventing a “footrace” between reporter and subject that the President supposedly won. Naturally, Siebold won a Pulitzer Prize for his fictional reporting.)
But let’s give Edith Wilson her due: she was not only deeply loyal to her husband, but brought out a private passionate side of him that most who knew him from his service as president of Princeton and governor of New Jersey could scarcely have imagined.
I sensed this passion when I visited the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum last month in Staunton, Va., the President’s birthplace. Near the entrance of the museum was a short note from the President to his beloved. How was it signed? By “Woodrow”? By “Thomas,’
“Tom,” or “Tommy,” all variations of his real first name? Not a chance. The note was signed, simply, “Tiger.”
As the son of a Presbyterian minister who maintained his faith throughout his life, Wilson had a reputation for being high-minded and humorless. If you want to know the truth, that impression was so sweeping that many people would probably have rather hung around with Dick Cheney at a White House social gathering.
But appearances were deceiving. In childhood, Wilson was the adoring object of attention from his mother and sisters, and in adulthood he loved having even more adoring women around him:
*As a law-school student, he had felt such overwhelming love for his first cousin that he got into academic trouble by ignoring his studies to be with her, and he was devastated when she rejected his marriage proposal.
* With Ellen Wilson, he got into the habit of sharing as much of his papers as he could, until her growing sense of depression led him to keep the most distressing details of his career from her.
* Taking vacation amid an epic fight with a graduate-school dean at Princeton, Wilson became acquainted with Mary Hulbert Peck, a vivacious divorcee. Neither Wilson nor Peck left any clear impression later of exactly what happened, but at the least it was intimate enough that Wilson felt obliged to beg forgiveness of Ellen for his foolishness. Yet Wilson’s reputation as a straight-arrow led opponents to scoff that he could never have gotten involved in such foolishness. The best comment on this was made by Wilson’s 1912 rival for the President, Theodore Roosevelt, who not only declared that he would not spread rumors about Wilson’s affair, but that these whispers were, on their face, incredible: “No evidence could ever make the American people believe that a man like Woodrow Wilson, cast so perfectly as the apothecary’s clerk, could ever play Romeo.”
* Wilson’s depression following Ellen’s death had been so total that some close aides feared for him. Then, within only six months of her passing, his headlong love affair with Mrs. Galt led the same aides to dread that the public would turn against him for remarrying so soon. (Particularly worrisome was an item in an edition of The Washington Post that had noted that the President had been "entertaining" Mrs. Galt. Unfortunately, that edition had to be recalled because of a racy misprint of the word that assured the paper's readers that the President had been "entering" Mrs. Galt.) The nervous aides even invented false rumors that someone had gotten hold of compromising information about his relationship with Mrs. Peck. In agony, Wilson threw himself on the mercy of Mrs. Galt, who supported him and went ahead with the ceremony.
Colonel House had been crucial in persuading Wilson to push back the wedding at least till a year after Ellen Wilson’s death. That could not have warmed Edith to him, and a couple of years later, as the fight over the League of Nations proceeded, she finally managed to drive him from her husband’s circle.
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