Before the rise of the Wedding Industrial Complex, home weddings were more popular than they are today, for both wedding and reception or just the latter.* Logistics for such a function are challenging at best, simply because of the number of wedding guests required or desired overwhelm an ordinary house. And when a sitting President of the United States is the bridegroom, everything takes on added significance.
Which brings us to Woodrow Wilson, the third President to marry in office**, and his December 18, 1915 wedding to that fascinating and attractive (but not universally liked) widow, Edith Bolling Galt. “No information about the plans for the wedding are available as yet,” reported The New York Times when the wedding was announced October 6, “but it is generally assumed that Mrs. Galt will prefer a wedding in her own home to one in the White House.” And the next day came the reason: “. . . it has been disclosed that the President and Mrs. Galt have agreed that it shall not take place in the White House because of the formality which would be necessary there.”
Even so, the arrangements were left to the White House Chief Usher, Ike Hoover, who was not pleased. “It made the arrangements doubly hard. At the White House, where facilities are ample, it would have been a different matter. But the President wanted simplicity.”*** Of course then it was much more traditional for a bride to be married from her own home than anyplace else, too.
What that meant for any home wedding, especially this one, was removing all the furniture from the rooms involved (yes, that meant everyone would have to stand throughout), installing a floral backdrop for the marriage ceremony, and some sort of arrangement for refreshments. The bride’s home “was small and inadequate for such a use as the wedding,” Hoover wrote, “but I set about the arrangements vigorously . . .” in the two rooms where everything would happen, wedding and supper reception.
There’s nothing like a good bay window, and the bride’s was transformed into a semicircular bower of maidenhair ferns studded here and there with her favorite purple orchids, and with a canopy of “Scotch heather, symbolic of the origin of the President’s forebears.” Two pyramids of roses and a prie-dieu covered in white satin completed the arrangement. Uniquely, the florist installed a small mirror in this backdrop so the Happy Couple could glimpse their friends while the service was taking place. (The groom glimpsed, the bride did not, “so impressed with the occasion that she saw little of what was going on.”) At the extreme opposite end of the two rooms a large portable table was installed for the catered buffet.
“Fifteen or twenty would have been a crowd,” Hoover observed, but President Wilson had told him 40 guests. Unfortunately the combined families took up almost all that space, and they still had to consider Cabinet members and their wives as well as personal friends. “. . . there were many keen disappointments” on the friend list, according to Hoover. It is ever thus. As it was they had to shoehorn over 50 people inside, so that there was no room for the musicians; they had to play from the upper floor!
At 8:30 PM, the minister took his position, and then the musicians struck up the wedding march from Lohengrin as the Happy Couple came down the stairs alone together; they had no attendants. After the service, when “a normal state of mind return[ed] to the assembly,” the President and First Lady received congratulations where they stood. Under the circumstances, Etiquetteer can’t imagine there would be room for a proper receiving line, just a general scrimmage.
After the bride cut the cake — “She did it well, for not only did she place the knife in the cake, but herself served several pieces to those near-by, including the President”**** — “all partook freely of the buffet supper and remained standing all the while.” And it was quite a simple, elegant supper:
Oyster Patties
Boned Capon — Virginia Ham — Rolls
Chicken Salad — Cheese Straws
Biscuits with Minced Ham
Pineapple Ice — Caramel Ice Cream — Cake
Fruit Punch — Coffee*****
Bon-Bons — Salted Almonds — Chocolates
Etiquetteer can’t help but feel for the caterer’s staff and the bride’s household servants who had to handle all this in such crowded conditions. Let’s hope they were tipped well!
Etiquetteer would really like to see the return to the intimacy of the home wedding — but also has a soft spot for all those disappointed friends who could not be invited because the house was too small.
*Etiquetteer sees fondly the eagle-eyed reader waiting eagerly to contribute that home weddings were generally only enjoyed by Protestant or non-denominational households and are not permitted to Catholics (and surely to other religions as well, for which Etiquetteer cannot cite chapter and verse at this moment). From foryourmarriage.org: “For Catholics, marriage is not just a social or family event, but a church event. For this reason, the Church prefers that marriages between Catholics, or between Catholics and other Christians, be celebrated in the parish church of one of the spouses. Only the local bishop can permit a marriage to be celebrated in another suitable place.”
**Everyone remembers bachelor President Grover Cleveland marrying his beautiful young ward Frances Folsom in the Blue Room, but they sometimes forget President John Tyler marrying beautiful young Julia Gardiner because they did not marry in the White House.
***Forty-Two Years in the White House, by Irwin Hood (Ike) Hoover, Chief Usher, 1934, page 68. All subsequent quotes are from this invaluable book.
****One hopes he was nearby!
*****Sorry, tea drinkers!