1915: President Wilson married Edith Galt

We remember President Wilson for World War I and for marrying Edith Galt after his first wife died.  

We remember First Lady Edith Wilson for her role after Mr. Wilson suffered a stroke.  

No one really knows for sure whether Mrs. Wilson “ran the country” as some suggest.    

We do know that President Wilson was very ill, as reported by Michael Alison Chandler in 2007:

The stroke was a turning point for Wilson’s presidency and, many argue, the world. Wilson collapsed Oct. 2 in the White House after a national tour seeking support for the Treaty of Versailles and America’s entrance into the League of Nations. He went into seclusion for the remainder of his presidency. The treaty he had so strongly championed was rejected by the Senate in March 1920.
“This is the worst instance of presidential disability we’ve ever had,” said John Milton Cooper, a Wilson scholar at the University of Wisconsin. “We stumbled along . . . without a fully functioning president” for a year and a half, he said.
The public was largely left in the dark about Wilson’s condition. The official White House line was that the president was suffering from “nervous exhaustion.” Other presidents have also concealed health problems, historians say, but the secrecy that enveloped Wilson’s illness seems difficult to imagine today.

Many people have written that Mrs. Wilson turned into an acting president, or the person who handled all of the president’s documents, and apparently, made decisions for him.

We don’t know for sure.   We do know that President Wilson was disabled and that The League of Nations died in the US Senate.    

Mr. Wilson died in 1924 and Mrs. Wilson in 1961.