A 1915 Spring in Washington

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Lusitania. You heard about the tragic deaths that resulted in this attack, but how about another view? Director Robert Enholm at the President Woodrow Wilson House explains what was happening in President Woodrow Wilson's life during this tragedy.

The azaleas and dogwoods are abloom as spring erupts across Washington, D.C.

President Wilson’s wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, had died in the White House that previous summer, the very week that the German Empire invaded Belgium to commence the “Great War.” The fall and winter were hard as Wilson dealt with his personal grief and witnessed the growing tragedy of the global war and strained to keep the United States out of the cataclysm.

The arrival of springtime is always greeted with a smile in Washington, and it must have been especially so for President Wilson in 1915. The longer days and bright flowers were accompanied by a personal turn of events: The President had fallen in love! In late March, through serendipitous circumstances, President Wilson had been introduced to a Washington widow named Edith Bolling Galt. They fell for each other immediately.

The circumstances for this budding romance were difficult. How does a sitting President woo a lady in the early twentieth century? There were no tweets or email. Telephones were still novel, and telephone conversations were not confidential. Prevailing rules of decorum prevented the couple from even meeting together without a chaperon.

The answer in 1915 was handwritten letters. Woodrow Wilson and Edith Bolling Galt commenced a flurry of romantic correspondence, much of which has survived to the modern day.

Mr. Woodrow Wilson and Edith Wilson
on their Wedding Day in 1916
President Woodrow Wilson House

President Woodrow Wilson even sent a letter on the day that the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German torpedo. The passenger ocean liner on her way from New York to Liverpool sank in 18 minutes. Nearly 1,200 died, 127 of them Americans.

Many thought the sinking of the Lusitania would plunge the United States immediately into The Great War. Instead, it took two years, until April 1917, before President Wilson sought a declaration of war.

President Wilson relied on diplomacy in responding to the Lusitania sinking. His love for Edith Bolling Galt surely provided emotional strength to him in this time. By Sunday, May 9, President Wilson was writing to her:

“My love for you passes current expression. I need you. … Do you think it an accident that we found one another at this time of my special need and that it meant nothing that we found each other so immediately and so joyously? … I hope that you will be thinking of me to-night. I shall be working on my speech for to-morrow and on our note to Germany. Every sentence of both would be freighted with greater force and meaning if I could feel that your mind and heart were keeping me company!” 

-(The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Arthur Link, ed., vol. 33, 1980) 

It was an amazing spring in Washington.

-Director Robert Enholm

Mrs. Wilson's Travels

           After President Woodrow Wilson’s death in 1924 his wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, remained dedicated to her husband’s work and memory. She personally worked with President Wilson’s biographer and with those responsible for writing the 1944 film, Wilson.[1] Mrs. Wilson was also responsible for preserving her husband’s birthplace in Staunton, Virginia as a museum, and it was Mrs. Wilson who donated their S Street home in Washington, D.C. and its contents to the National Trust for Historic Preservation after her death.[2] However, the former First Lady was not satisfied in protecting her husband’s legacy in the United States, and she often traveled abroad in order to continue her work around the world.

            Mrs. Wilson became familiar with international travel during her husband’s time in office. After World War I, Mrs. Wilson accompanied her husband to Europe while he negotiated the Treaty of Versailles, making her the first current First Lady to travel to Europe.[3] After President Wilson’s death, Mrs. Wilson felt that, in addition to guarding her husband’s historical reputation, it was her duty to travel the world in order to continue the work that he started with the League of Nations.

President and Mrs. Wilson in Paris, Photo from Library of Congress

           In 1929, Mrs. Wilson set off on a world tour, during which she visited China, England, France, and Japan. Her cousin, Rudolph Bolling Teusler, was the head of the St. Luke’s International Hospital in Tokyo at the time, and he came to the United States in order to be with Mrs. Wilson as she traveled from New York to Paris. Teusler’s wife, children, and one of his coworkers from St. Luke’s eventually joined the party in France.[4] Mrs. Wilson made more trips in the 1930’s to new places, such as Egypt, Poland, Germany, and Mexico. Every year, Mrs. Wilson traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, the head quarters of the League of Nations, in order to “observe the workings of the organization her husband has labored so hard to establish.”[5]

            However, while Mrs. Wilson certainly worked to support the League of Nations after her husband’s death, other Americans continued to reject the idea. Many people in congress were afraid that the United States would become a de facto member if they worked too closely with the League of Nations, and Washington therefore avoided working with Geneva whenever possible. Furthermore, the League’s association with the very flawed Treaty of Versailles soon caused the international community to lose faith and confidence in the League of Nations.[6]

President Roosevelt signing the Declaration of War with Japan, Photo from Library of Congress

             However, the idea of an international organization did not disappear. On December 8, 1941, with Mrs. Wilson in the audience, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on the Japanese Empire, bringing the United States into World War II. The war ended a little less than four years later and the American public, by then veterans of two global conflicts, supported the idea of a new organization, which would become the United Nations.


-Sophia Vayansky, Fall 2014 Intern

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[1] “First Lady Biography: Edith Wilson,” National First Ladies’ Library.

[2] Caroli, Betty Boyd, “Edith Wilson,” Encyclopedia Britannica.

[3] “First Lady Biography: Edith Wilson,” National First Ladies’ Library.

[4] Streich, Mary, “Edith Wilson & the Orient: 1928, 1932.”

[5] Streich, Mary, “Edith Wilson & the Orient: 1928, 1932.”

[6] “League of Nations, 1920,” United States Department of State, Office of the Historian.