On this date in history (Dec. 18, 1915) -- President Woodrow Wilson married Edith Galt

from Real Clear Politics e-newsletter -- (Carl Cannon, writer):

Three marriages took place in the White House during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, but none of them were his own. First daughter Jessie married in the East Room in 1913; the following year her sister Eleanor took her vows in the Blue Room. The president’s niece Alice Wilson enjoyed that setting so much she was married in the same room in 1918.

But the president himself had lived in that residence with his first wife, Ellen – the mother of those girls -- and he was still mourning her death when he met Edith Bolling Galt, so they married in a private ceremony in her home December 18, 1915.
Despite his grief, Wilson had been instantly taken with the outgoing Edith, who was descended from Virginia aristocracy and claimed to be related to Pocahontas. In the words of first lady historian Allida Black, Edith Galt was “charming and intelligent and unusually pretty.”
She was also interested in politics and public affairs. This knowledge came in handy after her husband was incapacitated with a stroke during his second term. Wilson administration critics called her “Mrs. President” and the “secret president” and the “first woman to run the government.”
These descriptions were not intended as compliments, but Edith Wilson brought some of this on herself. Even before Wilson’s stroke, she let it be known that she preferred being called “Mrs. Woodrow Wilson," and afterward she insisted that he not resign, explaining that she believed that being idle would kill him.
Edith Wilson gave mixed signals when describing her own role in this period. In her memoirs, published in 1939 long after her husband’s death, Edith claimed that as first lady she “never made a single decision regarding the disposition of public affairs.”
Yet she also described this period of Wilson’s presidency as her “stewardship” and said his doctors urged her to help him by deciding what papers – and which people -- would be brought before the president, while leaving most matters of routine policy to the cabinet.

Most Wilson scholars are sympathetic toward Edith, who was put in an untenable position because of a deficiency in the U.S. political system – the lack of a provision for the disability of the chief executive. This oversight was not addressed until 1967, with the passage of the 25th Amendment.

By then, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson had passed away. But she resided for the last 37 years of her life in the couple’s home on S Street in Northwest Washington, and lived long enough to ride in John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural parade. She died in late December that same year -- on Woodrow Wilson’s birthday  (Dec. 28).