9 Fidelity

The maneuvers of Wilson and his cabinet in the years leading up to American entry into World War I are interesting enough in their own right, but the period 1914–17 proved to be complicated for Wilson’s personal life as well. On August 6, just three days after the onset of the Great War, Wilson’s wife Ellen died in the White House of Bright’s Disease. Her last words were “Doctor, if I go away, promise me that you will take good care of my husband.”¹ The doctor was Cary T. Grayson, and on August 25 he told a friend of his, Edith Bolling Galt, that he had entered Wilson’s room to find him crying alone as he grieved the loss of his wife. “A sadder picture, no one could imagine,” Grayson told Galt. “A great man with his heart torn out.”² Nonetheless, by spring 1915 Wilson had fallen in love with Galt, and they married in December.

Wilson’s second wife, the former Edith Bolling, had married Norman Galt in 1896. He owned Galt’s, a well-known jewelry and silverware store in Washington. When he died in 1908, Edith took over the company. In addition to her friendship with Dr. Grayson, she also befriended Helen Woodrow Bones, Wilson’s cousin and Ellen’s personal secretary. On March 18, 1915, as Wilson completed his grieving, Bones invited Galt to tea following one of their routine walks. Stories conflict, but there developed some sort of chance meeting with Wilson, perhaps as he returned to the White House after playing golf. According to Galt’s account, Wilson then asked Grayson to invite Galt to dinner with the president, Grayson, Bones, and a Colonel Brown from Atlanta, who was staying at the White House. After dinner Grayson and Brown disappeared and Bones and Galt chatted with Wilson in front of the fire in the Oval Office. Galt found Wilson “perfectly charming and one of the easiest and most delightful hosts I have ever known.”³

Within a month Wilson and Galt were corresponding as lovers and seeing each other regularly. On April 28 he sent her a book by Philip Gilbert Hamerton. He had given Ellen a different book by the same author when they began courting back in July 1883.⁴ By the first week of May Wilson had started sending Galt poems by Shakespeare, accompanied on at least one occasion by his own original sonnet. In it he concluded: “‘Morning is coming, fresh, and clear, and blue,’ Said that bright song; and then I thought of you.”⁵ The next day he wrote, “Browning speaks somewhere of a man having two sides, one that he turns to the world, another that he shows a woman when he loves her. I think you have not opened your eyes to see that other side yet, though I laid it bare to you without reserve.”⁶ Wilson complained gently that Galt had difficulty seeing him as something more than the president—as both a “friend and lover.”⁷

Framing his love in theological language, Wilson told Galt, “Certainly God seems very near when I am with you.” In that letter he also quoted several lines from William Wordsworth’s poem “To B. R. Haydon,” beginning with “When Nature sinks, as oft she may.” He learned just a few hours after writing those words that the Lusitania had sunk.⁸ Initial reports said that no lives had been lost; nevertheless, Wilson cancelled his afternoon round of golf and learned that evening that the first report had been wrong. Very wrong. There had been many lives lost. On hearing the news, he bolted past the secret service detail into the streets of Washington and took a walk around the block during a light evening rain.⁹ At 10:00 pm Wilson learned that the death count exceeded 1,000. He turned immediately to Galt, writing a second letter to her in which he spoke of the “cruel compulsion of circumstances.” He surmised that the events of the day might cause Galt to pull away from him for his own good, so he could concentrate on the monumental task at hand. He urged her to stay with him through the national anguish. “Please think of me and not the circumstances,” he wrote. “We can take care of them, if we have one another for motive!”¹⁰ She did not pull away.

The Lusitania crisis seemed to seal their bond, as she thanked him for trusting and confiding in her.¹¹ He replied that she was the only bright thing in his life. Making a first veiled reference toward a marriage proposal that became official in October, he wrote on May 9, “If I could but have you at my side to pour my thoughts out to about them, I would thank God and take courage.” She had become his confidante, and he attributed their meeting to Providence, asking, “Do you think it an accident that we found one another at this time of my special need?” He recounted the events of the previous year, when he had no one by his side, and then asked her to think of him as he prepared his speech to the nation and the Lusitania notes to Germany.¹² She found his involving her in such momentous world affairs “so exciting, so virile” that she could not sleep.¹³

Early in their relationship, as America teetered on the verge of war, Galt found herself in a strange position. She was in love with Woodrow Wilson, yet he was her president and everyone else’s as well. When she attended her Episcopal church just two days after the sinking of the Lusitania, the awkwardness of her situation hit home when the congregation prayed the part of the liturgy that says, “Most heartily we beseech thee with thy favour to behold and bless thy servant The President of the United States.” As she prayed for her president, she forgot his office and thought of him only as her lover. She felt instantly ashamed for thinking of him as hers rather than the nation’s. “I hated myself,” she wrote, “and came home humbled.”¹⁴

And so went this whirlwind romance amidst tragedy, leading eventually to a December 18 wedding. Wilson’s second marriage provided him a confidante and soul mate. It also required that he end his long-running affair with Mary Allen Hulbert Peck.

In January 1907, the same month he first presented the Quad plan to the Princeton trustees, Wilson took his first winter vacation alone in Bermuda. In addition to being part of his new health regimen following the stroke of 1906, this was also a family tradition he learned from his father. Joseph Ruggles Wilson went on vacation alone nearly every summer when Wilson was young. In addition to rest and relaxation, Wilson used the time in Bermuda to prepare for his upcoming Blumenthal Lectures at Columbia University. As was so often the case, he told Ellen about the women he encountered on his trip. In his first letter he joked, “It is distinctly hard luck when a passenger list of one hundred and seventy-five yields not a single pretty woman—nor a married pretty one either!”¹⁵ We can only speculate over whether this reassured or worried Ellen. If the latter, perhaps the next few letters eased her concern, as he told her how much he longed for her and followed a week later with, “I love you. I love you. I love you. I wish I could say it a thousand times into your ear, holding you to my heart.”¹⁶

Wilson duly reported his daily activities to Ellen, including with whom he spent his time—with one exception: Mary Allen Hulbert Peck. Before leaving Bermuda, Wilson sent a note to Hulbert Peck saying he had called on her in the afternoon and had been sorely disappointed when she was not at home. He wanted to say goodbye. “It is not often that I can have the privilege of meeting anyone whom I can so entirely admire and enjoy,” he wrote. Acknowledging the pleasure they had shared, he expressed his desire to see her again.¹⁷

At the time Wilson met her, Hulbert Peck was forty-five years old. Her first husband, Thomas Hulbert, had died in 1889, the year after the birth of her only child Allen Hulbert. She remarried Thomas Peck in 1890. The second marriage proved unhappy and by the time Wilson and Hulbert Peck met in Bermuda she had been estranged from her husband for about two years. Wilson acknowledged her married state in his first letter, using the salutation “My dear Mrs. Peck.” Hulbert Peck had been spending winters in Bermuda since 1892 to escape the cold of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where she lived. In her memoir she described herself as leading a “double life! One as Mrs. Peck in Pittsfield—the other as ‘The Widow Peck,’” as her friends called her, despite the fact that her second husband was still alive. Mrs. Peck was reserved and studious, while Widow Peck was “dashing and courageous,” swimming in the sea, leading children on excursions, and attending parties in the evenings where she danced with the men of the island. Wilson saw her from a distance and requested that mutual friends invite her to dinner so they could meet.¹⁸

Wilson had once told Ellen in a letter that she spoiled his enjoyment of other women because “They are interesting, and pleasantly feminine, but they are not fascinating in a sufficient degree to give a fellow pleasurable excitement in their presence.”¹⁹ Ellen wrote back, explaining to Wilson, “It is easy enough to define the ‘charm’ which I have and other women lack, it is simply that I love you with all my heart, and they do not.” She then added, “Of course it is highly probable that they would love you if the way were clear.”²⁰ The way was clear in Bermuda.

Wilson had barely returned to Princeton when he sent to Hulbert Peck a collection of essays by Walter Bagehot, one of the British scholars who had influenced his scholarly career. Wilson and Hulbert Peck had discussed Bagehot’s works together while in Bermuda sufficiently to have whetted her appetite for political conversation. Wilson also included one of his own essay collections, saying the latter had been sent so she could know him better.²¹ Hulbert Peck wrote back to Wilson, thanking him for the books. Then, in a vague reference, possibly to her marital difficulties, she wrote “I want you to know that you gave me strength and courage in a moment when my spirit faltered and the struggle seemed not worth while.” She told him how much she looked forward to reading his essays, even more than Bagehot’s. Later, she would say that on their first meeting Wilson reminded her of the scholarly episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, Phillips Brooks. Wilson, she said, had that “same spiritual look.”²²

Wilson returned to Bermuda the following January, three months after being defeated in the most intense round of the Quad fight. He and Hulbert Peck picked up where they had left off during their first meeting; she apparently found him and requested that they see each other.²³ By this time Ellen was aware of Wilson’s friendship with Hulbert Peck, and he told Ellen freely on January 26 that he had already seen her twice “and really she is very fine.” Ellen obviously believed, as she had from the time of their courtship, that Wilson was capable of platonic relationships with women. It probably helped that Hulbert Peck had a house full of people with her in Bermuda: her mother, son, stepdaughter, and two other boys were all staying there. Wilson gushed to Ellen that whereas before he had only known “how interesting her mind was,” he now saw Hulbert Peck as a mother figure for these young people. Moreover, she seemed to know everyone on the island, including Mark Twain, who arrived while they were there. Hulbert Peck and the great author reminisced like old friends, which they were.²⁴ We can only guess what Ellen made of this, because all of her letters to Wilson during this second Bermuda excursion are missing. But Wilson mentioned in one of his letters to Ellen that he would “remember your injunction.” The injunction must have been to avoid spending time alone with Hulbert Peck, for in the next sentence Wilson reminded Ellen for the second time in as many letters that there is a whole house full of people and assured Ellen, “It is a lively and most engaging household, in which one can never be alone.” He had even brought two pictures of her with him, and Hulbert Peck placed one of them on the mantelpiece of the drawing room. “So it sometimes seems almost as if my darling were there,” he assured Ellen. But all of this must have been troubling for Ellen, especially when he told her, “Your husband is as young and gay as the youngest member, never, unless expressly challenged to it, saying a single serious word.”²⁵ As Hulbert Peck recalled later, “I found him longing to make up as best he might for play long denied. That, I think, is why he turned to me, who had never lost my zest for the joy of living.”²⁶

While in Bermuda that second time (1908), Wilson drafted a petition urging the local government not to permit automobiles on the island. On the left margin of the draft, he wrote in shorthand “My precious one, my beloved Mary.”²⁷ He may have been trying out salutations to replace “My dear Mrs. Peck.” He eventually settled on “Dearest Friend,” a salutation he used with his closest male friends as well.

Months after his return from Bermuda in 1908, the Wilsons had an argument about his relationship with Hulbert Peck. While traveling in July he wrote a long letter to Ellen at the end of which he referred to the fight. Apparently quoting back to Ellen a charge she had hurled at him, he wrote, “‘Emotional love’—ah, dearest, that was a cutting and cruel judgment and utterly false.” But it was not false, and he acknowledged that Ellen’s charge was “natural,” even as he claimed it caused him pain. He assured Ellen he loved her and longed for her as he never had before, and wrote, “I have never been worthy of you—But I love you with all my poor, mixed, inexplicable nature, with everything fine and tender in me.”²⁸ Ellen’s brother Stockton Axson acknowledged how difficult Wilson’s relationship with Hulbert Peck was for Ellen, writing parenthetically that it was “scarcely beer and skittles” for his sister. But he said also that Ellen planned feminine company for Wilson in their home and took the girls to visit Hulbert Peck in order “to give countenance of her approval of the friendship.”²⁹

Wilson was not the only man with whom Hulbert Peck had a close friendship. She was known as something of a flirt and included in her autobiography a chapter on British admiral Lord John (Hellfire Jack) Fisher. Her relationship with him, carried out in full view of his wife, predated her meeting Wilson, but was similar in several respects. They danced, conversed, and generally enjoyed each other’s company. As she put it, “We danced the winter through.”³⁰ In 1910, when Fisher came to Philadelphia for a wedding, Hulbert Peck arranged for dinner with the admiral, Wilson, and two others at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria.³¹

But her relationship with Fisher and any number of others was in no way equal to her bond with Wilson, for it is Wilson and he alone who appears in the two-page introduction to her autobiography. He was the reason she wrote the memoir. Hulbert Peck’s life was unremarkable except that she had a loving relationship with the president of the United States. In that introduction she wrote of the triumvirate of Marys—Mary Allen, Mary Allen Hulbert, and Mary Allen Peck—along with the “various Mrs. Pecks” created by the media. Those media-created Mrs. Pecks were “all of them lurking behind the mist made to hide the real and spiritual qualities of Woodrow Wilson, our President.” She complained bitterly of the “petty persecutions” she experienced as a result of public rumors, but the aspersions cast on Wilson rankled even more.³² Other than herself, Wilson is the central figure of her autobiography, and she portrays her relationship with him as something that others simply could not understand or appreciate.

In October 1908 the Wilsons visited Hulbert Peck at her home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. From that time forward the relationship became a twisted triangle. Wilson also arranged for his daughter Jessie to visit Hulbert Peck the next time Jessie was in Boston,³³ and Hulbert Peck’s son Allen visited Wilson from time to time, on one occasion even dropping in unexpectedly at roughly the same time that Jessie was with Hulbert Peck in Boston.

By early November, when William Jennings Bryan lost his third bid for the presidency, Wilson confided to Hulbert Peck that, with the Commoner now discredited as leader of the Democratic Party, he might seek the presidency himself.³⁴ After she left for Bermuda a few days later, Wilson ordered books and had them sent to her and began to ask her for advice about running for governor.³⁵

Hulbert Peck spent the winter of 1908–9 alone in Bermuda. Wilson could not go, and extant letters between them are sparse, but during this time he began offering Hulbert Peck counsel as she extricated herself from her marriage to her estranged husband. Wilson’s advice seemed too professionally distant, lacking in emotion, she believed. But Wilson assured her, “I must use my head…. I must risk seeming cold in order to be of any real service at all.”³⁶ He apparently advised her to seek a legal separation but not an immediate divorce. “Things may look one way in Bermuda,” he wrote, “another when you see them at close range in America.” Once everything was resolved and her suffering ended one way or another, she would see that his advice “was not cold, whatever else it may have been.”³⁷

In March, Hulbert Peck had to return suddenly to Pittsfield because one of her stepdaughters was gravely ill and the other had decided without warning to get married. Thomas Peck cabled her and she left the island for New York on board the SS Trinidad. Before leaving, she cabled Wilson requesting that he meet her in New York to help her through customs. To her and Wilson’s shock, Mr. Peck showed up as well, leading to an awkward encounter in which Hulbert Peck explained the presence of the president of Princeton University to her husband. Peck returned to the hospital where his daughter lay ill, while Wilson escorted Hulbert Peck to the Manhattan Hotel.³⁸

When Hulbert Peck returned from Bermuda again in May, Wilson was giddy with excitement at the prospect of seeing her, this time without Mr. Peck around. But she arrived at Grand Central Station in New York just after he had to leave for Hartford, where he gave an address at Hartford Theological Seminary. “Isn’t that typical of the way life teases and tantalizes us?” he wrote. “If I could only be here tomorrow! Tomorrow is your birthday.” Instead they made a rendezvous on his return.³⁹ Where his gifts had originally been books, this time he sent her a brooch, and he called her on the telephone whenever possible, describing their conversations as “tantalizing.”⁴⁰

By mid-summer Wilson had become her confidante and advisor. When a troubling local gossip column laid bare her marital difficulties, she confided in Wilson. He was happy that she had, telling her that he had been sent to her at this time of her life precisely to serve in this way. He described his letters as “imaginary conversation with you,” and even subscribed to the Springfield Republican newspaper because it covered Pittsfield. He read an item on water rationing during the summer drought, and imagined Hulbert Peck unable to use her garden hose, and learned of the “arbitrary temper” of her chief of police in forbidding women to make speeches on suffrage.⁴¹

In August, Wilson returned from his summer quarters in Lyme, Connecticut, to New York, then Princeton, to serve as pallbearer in the funeral of a former classmate who had also served on the Princeton board. He carefully outlined the exact days he would be in New York, so that Hulbert Peck could travel to meet him. Her son was accompanying her in apartment hunting, as she prepared to move to the city. The three spent an evening together, and she gave Wilson a new edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse, one of his favorite books, which she had custom bound for him.⁴²

As she separated from her husband officially and moved to New York, Hulbert Peck became increasingly dependent on Wilson, and the triangulated relationship between her and both Wilsons continued. Then, in early 1910, the relationship moved to an altogether new level. In the throes of marital separation proceedings, Hulbert Peck was unable to go to Bermuda, so Wilson went alone. The pace of the letters accelerated. “Write me a long letter,” Hulbert Peck begged Wilson, “tell me of our blessed isles. Ah! If only I were there.”⁴³ After four days in Bermuda without her he was beside himself. “I cannot dissociate any part of [this island] from you. I meet some memory of you at every turning, and am lonely wherever I go because you are not there!…You must really come down to relieve me.”⁴⁴ But she could not. Having recently separated and moved to New York, she lacked the money. Moreover, she was concerned about leaving her son, as he was just finding his feet in the business world, and she was planning a trip to see her pregnant stepdaughter in Minneapolis. Nevertheless, as Wilson wrote, referring to Hulbert Peck in the third person, “I am with her all the time in thought while I am here. This is her isle.”⁴⁵ Writing the same day, she told him virtually the same things—how she longed to be there with him and that he must enjoy every part of the island for her. “You are an adorable person—and I count it the greatest honor and happiness and privilege of my life that you call me friend….I miss you horribly—woefully. And it’s even worse than I feared to have you so far away.”⁴⁶

While alone in Bermuda, Wilson wrote to Hulbert Peck and Ellen, sometimes on the same day. He missed both women and wished they could both be with him there. Without salutations, one would be hard pressed to tell which woman he was writing to. On one occasion, he began a letter to Ellen on Sunday morning, set it aside and that night wrote to Hulbert Peck, telling her that he had met one of her friends, “the pretty lady,” at a dinner party the night before. His conversation with the woman, which he had enjoyed, served as a surrogate for his desire to be with Hulbert Peck, but, as he wrote, “Having discovered that Bermuda consisted of you, I am not willing enough to be pleased by anything less than you.”⁴⁷ The next morning, after having received a letter from Ellen, he resumed his own to her from the day before. After telling her of the delightful time he was having, he wrote, “But I would give it all for five minutes with you in my arms.”⁴⁸ This is an odd statement coming just hours after his telling Hulbert Peck, “No other woman can ever stray into Bermuda who fully satisfies the ideal—because there is no other in the world!”⁴⁹ Hulbert Peck wrote back concerning “the pretty lady”: “She is sweet and charming and quite lovely to look at, but you will not find her in the least like this friend of yours, so she can’t crowd me out of my particular niche in your heart.”⁵⁰ He never spoke of physical affection with Hulbert Peck as he occasionally did with Ellen. But this was clearly a man with two lovers, even if sexual consummation occurred with only one.

Hulbert Peck kept hoping she might make it to Bermuda that winter. In a February letter she wrote, “My stubborn thought pulls me Bermudaward constantly.”⁵¹ Wilson responded, “Ah! If I could only make you realize! There are people here who love you.”⁵² A few days later, referencing a conversation Hulbert Peck had with Wilson’s daughter, he wrote, “How I should have liked to overhear it [their conversation about him], if only for the pleasure of laughing at the two ladies whom I love.”⁵³ A few months later he called her “the friend I love in Minneapolis,” as she visited her stepdaughter there.⁵⁴ These were indirect ways of telling her that he loved her, something he never said explicitly. But, as he wrote in 1911 of her letters to him, “I can read between all the lines and know all the things that have not been said.”⁵⁵

Ellen accepted her husband’s attraction to Hulbert Peck, as pitiful as she viewed it, but she was not beyond tweaking her rival when possible. While Wilson was in Bermuda alone Ellen and the Wilsons’ daughter Nellie went into the city to see a play. The theater was close to Hulbert Peck’s apartment, so the two called on her before the show. Hulbert Peck and her mother Mrs. Allen were not dressed, so Mrs. Allen tried to keep the two Wilson women occupied while Hulbert Peck took all of fifteen minutes to do her hair. The scene was similar to an occasion when she kept Lord Fisher waiting for her. “I was always dilatory and helter-skelter,” she explained. “He fumed in the drawing room below for a few seconds. Then he angrily whacked the ceiling with his cane.”⁵⁶ Ellen did no cane whacking, but, with the show about to start, the Wilson women headed out the door. Hulbert Peck ran into the hallway in her robe, caught them at the elevator, and invited them back for tea after the play. They accepted, returned after the show, and had a delightful visit, all of which Ellen was sure to tell Wilson about in her next letter.⁵⁷

By the end of February Hulbert Peck had given up all hope of joining Wilson in Bermuda and said she would just have to wait for him to return to his “devoted friend.”⁵⁸ Wilson worked out the details for their next rendezvous. He told Ellen that, because of quarantine and customs, he would miss the early train from New York to Princeton, but would be home in time for supper on Monday, March 7.⁵⁹ Then he wrote to Hulbert Peck, “Heaven send the good old Bermudian [to] get me in at such time as will enable me to see my dear, dear friend before I must start for Princeton…. I should be in your presence again and have one of the hours with you that means so much to me!”⁶⁰ If he missed her, he wrote the day before his departure, he would return to New York a day or two later for a rendezvous.⁶¹

We cannot know for sure if they met in New York before he returned to Princeton from his 1910 trip. Once back in the throes of the Princeton Quad fight his letters to her became less frequent and much shorter, often a mere line or two attempting to set up a lunch or a quick visit to “No. 39,” which was his reference to her apartment on 39 East 27th Street. His letters sometimes listed train schedules for her to come to Princeton, and they spoke on the phone when they could. When Hulbert Peck traveled to Minneapolis that spring to visit her stepdaughter again, Wilson called New York “empty and forlorn” and said he hated even to go near the city.⁶² On her birthday, May 26, 1910, he wrote saying that as a six-year-old boy he must have known and been very joyful the day she was born. He thanked her for “coming and looking me up in your forty-fifth year,” which would have been 1907, when they met.⁶³

The following winter Hulbert Peck went to Bermuda without Wilson. It was her turn to play the lonely islander. He had been elected governor and had no chance to get away from a life far busier than he had ever experienced or even thought possible. He saw her off from Pier 47 in New York in early December, afterward pronouncing the city once again “empty.”⁶⁴ During her stay, a rumor developed that Hulbert Peck was engaged to the governor of Bermuda, Sir Frederick Walter Kitchener. Wilson resented the rumor and wondered what kind of gossip started such a falsehood.⁶⁵ Throughout the winter and spring of 1911 Wilson wrote faithfully to his “Dearest Friend” in Bermuda. His letters recount his spectacular successes as governor, rumors of his presidential candidacy, his concern for her health, but, most importantly, his missing the “adorable” Mrs Peck. On one occasion he wrote, “For my own part, I cannot think of anyone else in Bermuda…. Mrs. Peck is Bermuda, not only for me but for scores of others.”⁶⁶

Hulbert Peck finally filed for divorce in December 1911, but was shocked when the announcement appeared on the front page of the New York Times.⁶⁷ The filing merely represented the legal situation catching up with reality. She was a free woman, more in love with Wilson than ever, and becoming dependent on him. Few of her letters survive; Wilson most likely destroyed them. But she kept his and later sold them to his biographer Ray Stannard Baker. The few letters of hers that remain extant are filled with admiration, praise, and deep affection. “I am just beginning to realize to the full my blessed freedom,” she wrote in July, five months before actually filing legal papers. “It is wonderful.” She then added, “You are the larger part of my life.” Then, after several lines of praise concerning his potential run for the presidency, “I am the proudest woman in the world to feel that you find me worthy of calling me yours.”⁶⁸ As it became more and more apparent that Wilson would run for president, Hulbert Peck worried. “I can see you receding from me now [but] only in the opportunities for seeing you often however, and I always understand.”⁶⁹

Hulbert Peck’s divorce was finalized in July 1912, within days of Wilson’s nomination. When she wrote to him she signed her letter “M. A. Hulbert,” leaving him to figure it out. “And now tell me what has happened,” he responded. “Have you been set free? I hope with all my heart that dreaded trial is entirely over.”⁷⁰ It was. She was now Mary Allen Hulbert. She moved out of New York and took up residence in Nantucket.

Just after his nomination Wilson began slipping away from his Sea Girt, New Jersey headquarters to a friend’s place in Atlantic Highlands. There, in seclusion, he wrote one of his most passionate letters, as he sealed himself off from the crush of the campaign. “My thoughts turn constantly to Nantucket,” he told her, “searching for my dear friend—seeking some glimpse of what she is doing or thinking.”⁷¹ Their fortunes had been reversed. She had been in the “cage” of a bad marriage but was now free. He, by contrast, found himself trapped by publicity and an utter lack of privacy. Of freedom he wrote, “Now that I have lost it and you have found it, do you not see that I must depend upon you to supply me with air for my lungs?”⁷² He would rely on her to tell him what the real world looked like. He would need to see the world’s beauty through her eyes.⁷³ On board a friend’s yacht, it was his turn to fanaticize about a quick trip to Nantucket. “What is the quickest and best way from New York, if a fellow ever could get away for a Sunday (say)?” he wrote.⁷⁴

During the campaign Wilson spoke of the press hounding his every move,⁷⁵ and repeatedly of how her letters served as his refuge from the campaign, complaining more than ever when she failed to write regularly. The isolation of the campaign brought back to him the same longing he had experienced when he was in Bermuda without her. He told her over and over again how much he missed and needed her. When he gave a campaign speech near Nantucket, he looked at the women of the crowd, hoping that she would attend.⁷⁶

These letters were a departure from the previous year, when Wilson had been more circumspect. As talk of a presidential run began in the summer of 1911, Wilson made a point of mentioning Ellen in his letters to Hulbert. He and Ellen had her visit the Wilson family in September, and the threesome quite visibly went to dinner and the theater in New York two months later. All this might have protected Wilson if any of his letters to Hulbert from Bermuda surfaced publicly. If that happened, he could say in response that Hulbert was a family friend, as close to Ellen as to himself. But after lapsing back into secret love letters as the campaign began, he worried as never before that the relationship might be exposed. He told Hulbert he trusted virtually no one.

Wilson’s worst fears seemed warranted when he heard in September that the Republican Senator Elihu Root had knowledge of a letter implicating Wilson in Hulbert’s divorce. Wilson asked her to help him determine if any such letter had gotten loose, as it would ruin his campaign. Nothing came of the rumor, and there is nothing extant in Root’s papers or in the papers of incumbent president William Howard Taft related to the incident.⁷⁷ But Wilson worried again a few weeks later when he found that one of his secretaries had opened one of Hulbert’s letters.⁷⁸ Then, in October, less than a month before the election, Wilson learned that a man called “T.D.” had told a judge “certain things” that were then relayed to Hulbert’s divorce judge. T.D. was Thomas Dowse Peck, Hulbert’s former husband. Hulbert had been in contact with him. Wilson wrote on October 27, “I wonder if T.D. is lying to you now.” He referenced several notes from T.D. to Hulbert that she had forwarded in a previous letter. Apparently, a former tutor of Hulbert’s son was also of concern to Wilson. “Is he, too, inclined to lie vindictively?” he asked Hulbert.⁷⁹ One of Roosevelt’s campaign staff allegedly advised him to make hay out of the Wilson–Hulbert rumors. Roosevelt thought the strategy unbecoming and unlikely to work, allegedly quipping “You can’t cast a man as a Romeo who looks and acts so much like the apothecary’s clerk.”⁸⁰

Following the scare, Wilson grew once again more circumspect and made a point of referencing Ellen in his letters to Hulbert. She offered the Bermuda house to him and Ellen after the election, and they took her up on the offer. Wilson wrote to Hulbert while there, saying how much he wished she could join him, Ellen, and the girls, and how much he expected Hulbert to at any minute walk into one of the rooms of her house.⁸¹ When Hulbert went to Bermuda just after the family returned stateside, both Wilsons saw her off when she sailed.⁸²

The relationship continued by letter throughout 1913 and the first half of 1914, as Wilson’s presidency got off to a rousing start. Spooked by the campaign scare, Wilson’s letters from the White House remained circumspect, with the plural “we” used most often. “We are all well.” “We think often, very, very often, of you.” We regret that our summer in England will result in “putting a whole sea between you and us.”⁸³ He also invited Hulbert to Princeton after the election. She went to church with the Wilsons and even helped Ellen shop for an inauguration gown. But Wilson still backslid from time to time. In March, writing from the White House, he responded to a letter in which Hulbert had expressed her own sense of uselessness, of her watching life instead of living it. He told her that he had a job for her that would be of real service to her nation. She could even do it from Bermuda. “I am in as dead earnest as I ever was in my life; and this is what I mean….I want you to escape from Glencove [Bermuda], send your spirit over sea to Washington, to give me a holiday, and I shall rejoice.”⁸⁴ On another occasion, he wrote similarly: “Will you not kindly join in the enterprise of governing the country we love?”⁸⁵ He had many advisers to help him with his head, he told her, but few loving friends to strengthen his heart. “I wish I had you in my Cabinet!” he joked. “Is there no way?”⁸⁶ A few months later, Hulbert sent him a tie and a gift for his daughter’s wedding.

Wilson also increasingly offered advice and aid on more mundane matters. As Hulbert dealt with her son’s inability to find stable employment, Wilson hoped to bring the listless Allen to the White House or some other location where he could talk seriously with the young man. Wilson also supplied Hulbert and her travel associates a letter of introduction when they traveled to Egypt, just in case they encountered difficulty in any country. Hulbert said they never used the letter, but used to joke about it. Whenever the service at a restaurant or hotel proved substandard, one of the group would say in jest, “Get the letter.”⁸⁷

As he had in the year he went to Bermuda alone, Wilson again pulled double duty letter writing during the summer of 1913. Ellen took the girls to Cornish, New Hampshire, leaving Wilson a “bachelor” in the White House, as he called himself. He wrote letters to both Ellen and Hulbert on Sundays, when he devoted himself to personal correspondence. As had been the case before, with the exception of his telling Ellen explicitly that he loved her and that she was his “darling,” it is difficult to tell which letters were to which woman.⁸⁸ Writing affectionately to both women, again on the same day, he told each that his heart was “the seat of my life.”⁸⁹ The next Sunday, he thanked Ellen for all the sacrifices she had made for his career and for believing in and standing by him.⁹⁰ Then he reminisced with Hulbert, “Do you remember how we used to sit on the shore in Bermuda and talk [of rumors of his running for president]…? Your contribution to those conversations was a serene, unreasonable faith in me, for which I blessed your heart with all the feeling that was in me.”⁹¹

In early June 1914, Wilson told Hulbert that Ellen had taken ill, not knowing, of course, that the First Lady was less than two months from death. Ironically, Hulbert was also ill and in the hospital.⁹² Through the next two months he wrote to his ailing mistress and told her about his afflicted wife. When Ellen died Wilson wrote a brief note to Hulbert that read, in its entirety, “Of course you know what has happened to me; but I wanted you to know direct from me. God has stricken me almost beyond what I can bear.”⁹³ Hulbert wrote the same day, reminding Wilson, “Whatever comes, God is good I know.”⁹⁴ Hulbert’s letters in the weeks after Ellen’s death helped sustain him, and he poured out his grief to her, imploring her to keep writing.⁹⁵ In gratitude, Wilson told Hulbert that, while her words of comfort concerning Ellen helped, what he found most helpful was merely her talking about herself. He told Hulbert he was happy that she was

getting once again the sort of faith in God’s providence that sustains more than anything else can. I think I should go mad without it!…Thoughts of you, especially comfortable ones,…took me away from myself and taught me once again, what we are so slow to comprehend, that happiness lies, not in anything that you can get out of thinking about yourself, but always in being glad about others and living outside yourself in the free atmosphere of God’s big world.⁹⁶

One can hardly imagine a more complete conflation of love for God, romantic love for a woman, and general love for humanity. As he so often did, Wilson brought everything under the broad umbrella of romantic Christianity.

In October, as Wilson urged neutrality in the war in Europe, Hulbert moved with her son to Boston. Allen fell ill and was near death for a time, but recovered by the end of November. Then he experienced a significant business misfortune that dissipated most of his wealth. On the same day that Wilson heard from Hulbert of the financial disaster, he wrote five letters to friends in Boston, inquiring about possible employment for her.⁹⁷ She then requested that Wilson pray for her son and try to find him a government position, possibly, she suggested, in the Forest Service.⁹⁸ Instead, Wilson wrote a general letter of recommendation for Allen and forwarded it to Hulbert. Allen then moved out of Hulbert’s house and headed to New Orleans, then on to Los Angeles, where he purchased another business, this time in the film industry.⁹⁹

Wilson also attempted to help Hulbert get an article on food published in the Ladies Home Journal. She sent him a handwritten draft of “Around the Tea Table—Afternoon Tea.” He had it typed, edited the piece himself, and sent it on to the journal’s editor. He warned Hulbert that he had been rejected for publication enough times to know better than to predict what the editor would do.¹⁰⁰ But, with the president’s endorsement, anything was possible. The editor accepted the article for publication and sent Hulbert a check for $50.00. She attributed the article’s success to Wilson’s help and recommendation,¹⁰¹ subsequently writing a cookbook that Wilson offered to help get published as well.¹⁰²

After Wilson met Edith Galt on March 23, 1915, his letters to Hulbert became less frequent and more perfunctory. In one tardy missive he insisted that he really had no time to answer her recent letter in a timely manner. He began to sign his letters with the more formal “Cordially and sincerely Yours” rather than the more intimate “Your devoted friend.”¹⁰³ When Hulbert told Wilson she was coming to Washington, he begged off having her visit the White House, saying he would be so busy they would see each other only at meals. He was actually spending every spare minute with Galt.¹⁰⁴ Hulbert came to town anyway on May 31 and later called it “the tonic of that one day of happiness,” which suggests that Wilson must have seen her at least briefly.¹⁰⁵

From May 6 to July 21 Wilson wrote well over fifty letters to Galt and five to Hulbert. Hulbert began to speak of a “wall” that had developed between them, and she attributed it to the events surrounding the Lusitania and the war in Europe. But Wilson could not end the relationship easily because he had allowed himself to be drawn into the financial distress caused by Allen’s ill-conceived business ventures, and Hulbert needed his help. She asked Wilson to serve as an intermediary for a payment of $7,500 to a lawyer friend of hers who would be in Washington in June.¹⁰⁶ Six days later she wrote from New York, informing Wilson that Allen needed $6,000 by the twenty-fifth “or he feels his efforts in business life will be in vain.”¹⁰⁷ Wilson replied with worry at her “perplexity,” and spoke of his concern that Allen might not know what he was doing. Then, on June 25, perhaps in reply to a direct request, he told her how sorry he was that he waited too long to be of any help.¹⁰⁸ She gave him a second chance. Hulbert needed to sell some of her son’s properties in the Bronx so that she could move to California. Wilson relented and bailed her out in September, when he purchased the properties himself for $7,500. Hulbert maintained that Wilson neither profited nor took a financial loss, but she was sure the transaction became the basis for subsequent media charges of “huge sums of money paid to Mrs. Peck.”¹⁰⁹

Hulbert moved to Los Angeles during the summer of 1915 to live with her ne’er-do-well son. Wilson wrote, “This is just a message of the most affectionate good-bye. Los Angeles seems a very long way off, and we shall miss you.”¹¹⁰ He seemed relieved to have her so far away. The eight-year affair, which after Ellen’s death had been non-adulterous, emotionally or otherwise, was winding down, but not uneventfully. The same month that Wilson sent the money to Hulbert, Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, also Wilson’s son-in-law, told him of an anonymous letter which claimed that Hulbert was showing his letters to people in southern California. Colonel House believed that McAdoo made up the story in an attempt to get Wilson to reveal more about the affair, so those in the administration could better protect the president, or at least prepare for the bombshell that would fall should the public learn of Wilson’s payments to Hulbert.¹¹¹

It was in this context that Wilson had his day of reckoning. He realized that, before he could marry Galt, he needed to tell her about Hulbert, especially given that the affair seemed about to become public. On Saturday, September 18, he wrote a note telling Galt, “There is something, personal to myself, that I feel I must tell you about at once.” Rather than having Galt come to the White House, Wilson said he would take “the extraordinary liberty” of going to her house instead.¹¹² But Galt claimed in her memoir that, while she agreed for the president to visit her at her residence, Dr. Grayson came alone, telling her the president could neither face her nor even write down what he had to tell her. Instead, Grayson told her that Hulbert was putting out rumors that would hurt the president.¹¹³

Whether Wilson visited or not, he did write a confession in shorthand. In it he mentioned letters that “disclose a passage of folly and gross impertinence in my life,” for which he felt “deeply ashamed and repentant.” He spoke of his “deep humiliating grief and shame” that he had forgotten “standards of honorable behavior by which I should have been bound.” He claimed in the confession that the affair had been non-sexual, writing, “Neither in act nor even thought was the purity or honor of the lady concerned touched or sullied.” Given his passionate letters from Bermuda, the “thought” part of such a claim is highly dubious. More believable was Wilson’s claim that the affair did not compromise his allegiance to Ellen, for, as we have seen, he never stopped loving and adoring her and seemed capable of loving both women at the same time, however pitiful this often seemed. Wilson claimed, again believably, that Ellen forgave him the affair. The most peculiar aspect of this confession is his mention of Christianity—not in the context of his having had the affair, but rather with regard to the threatened publication of letters between himself and Hulbert. “I do not understand by what principle either of common honor or of Christianity,” he wrote, but then referred not to his own sin but instead to “the theft and publication of these letters.” Only the alleged theft of the letters, not the relationship that produced them, violated common honor and Christianity.¹¹⁴

Whether he gave Galt a copy of the confession, read it to her, or wrote it to rehearse what he wanted to tell her more extemporaneously, we do not know. It may have even been a press release he planned to use in the event that the letters actually became public. He had told House that, if there were trouble over the affair, he would come clean, take his public humiliation, and get the matter behind him. He preferred this to having the sword of blackmail hanging over his head indefinitely.¹¹⁵

For Galt, the revelation of the affair became “the awful earthquake of Saturday night.”¹¹⁶ The affair was not in the distant past. He had been sending Hulbert money throughout the entire time he had been falling in love with Galt. She said the next morning that she had reacted unreasonably, but one wonders if it were considerably stronger than that. It may have been fury, because she quotes Wilson pleading desperately, “Stand by me. Don’t desert me.”¹¹⁷ Whether he actually said these things in person or through Grayson, we cannot be sure. Whatever the case, after Grayson’s departure Galt sat up in her house all night in a big chair by a window, where she often worked through life’s problems. And she worked through this one, writing to Wilson on September 19 that she was ready to follow where love led.¹¹⁸ She sent that letter to Wilson, but he did not reply, and she did not see him for three days. Finally, Grayson came and requested she visit an ill Wilson in the White House. Once there, she told Wilson that learning of the affair had caused her to doubt whether happiness could be permanent. In the midst of the exhilaration and joy of new love the revelation “fell like a rocket from the unseen hand of an enemy, the blow from which I am still staggering.” But she recovered quickly. For Wilson’s part, he felt released from hypocrisy when he decided to end the secret. “That discovery set me free,” he wrote.¹¹⁹ While on their honeymoon three months later, Wilson pulled from his pocket the unopened letter Galt wrote on the morning of September 19, after Grayson’s first visit. He told Galt he had never opened it for fear she had written to break off the engagement.¹²⁰

As the engagement went forward, the couple had to decide when to make it public. Galt did not want him to tell anyone until they were ready for a public announcement, but Wilson felt an obligation to tell Hulbert himself. So he wrote to her on the same day that the newspapers trumpeted the news. “Before the public announcement is made,” he wrote, “I want you to be one of the first to know of the good fortune that has come to me. I have not been at liberty to speak of it sooner. I am engaged to be married to Mrs. Norman Galt of this city, a woman I am sure you would admire and love.”¹²¹

Of course, Hulbert received the letter after she had already read of the engagement in the newspapers. She was devastated, replying, “I have kissed the cross,” and adding

The cold peace of utter renunciation is about me, and the shell that is M.A.H. still functions….God alone knows—and, you, partly, the real woman Mary Hulbert—all her hopes and joys, and fears, and mistakes. I shall not write again this intimately, but must this once….Write me sometimes, the brotherly letters that will make my pathway a bit brighter.

She was also gracious, saying, “You have been the greatest, most ennobling influence in my life. You helped me to keep my soul alive, and I am grateful. I hope you will have all the happiness that I have missed.” Unable to resist one last fantasy, she wrote, “Why can’t you run away to California for a moment?”¹²²

Hulbert and her son were still on the verge of financial ruin, and she was desperate enough to swallow her pride and beg Wilson for more money. “We have $1800.00 left to live on,” she told him a month later. She added, ominously, “If we fail, it is the end. And I am going in some way if it does.”¹²³ She outlined what she needed from Wilson financially and followed with “You cannot imagine the humiliation I feel in again asking for help.” Mixing her financial and emotional states together, she wrote, “The shell known as M.A.H. still functions. I could laugh if it were not all so tragic. Do your best for your old friend.” Acknowledging she had no one else to turn to, she added, “And I suddenly find myself alone on my life raft…. Unless you are indifferent you will see the necessity for action, and hasty action. Please telegraph C.O.D. if you can attend to this at once.”¹²⁴

Correspondence between Wilson and Hulbert nearly disappears from the record at this point, but there was another letter scare when Wilson ran for re-election in 1916. An agent Hulbert believed was associated with McAdoo came to her and her son in California. The agent allegedly told Hulbert, “Those two boys in Washington are worried about you.” “What two boys?” Hulbert asked. “Why the President and Mr. McAdoo,” came the reply.¹²⁵ Shortly thereafter her cottage appeared to have been searched. Then one of her relatives appealed to her patriotism, arguing that her turning over the letters would help elect a new president who would join the fight in Europe. Either bluffing or forgetting what was in them, she told the relative the letters only “redowned to Woodrow Wilson’s credit.”¹²⁶ According to her account, the relative then brought an agent of the Republican Party who offered her money and a trip to Europe, claiming that a member of Wilson’s cabinet was ready to testify in impeachment proceedings. She was also approached by reporters trying to dig up a story.¹²⁷

Hulbert refused these overtures, notified Wilson of the plot, and asked him to send someone to her so she could tell the whole story. She received a brief reply that read, in part, “We hope that you will feel that you can avail yourself by letter of our friendship and write me fully about what it is that concerns you in which we could be of service.”¹²⁸ In Wilson’s papers there is no indication of who wrote and sent this letter to Hulbert. Hulbert claimed it came from Edith.¹²⁹ In the spring of 1917, Hulbert held an auction to sell many of her possessions back east. The event was delayed, she claimed, because her goods being transported from Bermuda had been stopped on the seas. The dealer in charge of her auction allegedly told her later that reporters and secret servicemen appeared with instructions that all her letters and other documents be sent to Washington.¹³⁰

As far as we can tell, after the letter scare of 1916 there was no more contact between Hulbert and Wilson until Wilson made his western swing in the fall of 1920 trying to drum up popular support for the Peace of Versailles and League of Nations. While in Los Angeles the new Wilsons, Woodrow and Edith, invited Hulbert to dinner. Hulbert found Edith to be “junoesque, but handsome, with a charming smile that revealed her strong, white teeth.” Continuing this left-handed compliment, Hulbert wrote in her autobiography, “She played well that most difficult role of being the third party to the reunion of two old friends endeavoring to relive the incidents of years in a single afternoon.”¹³¹ By contrast, Edith called the meeting, a luncheon with this “faded, sweet-looking woman who was absorbed in her only son.” In her memoir, Edith recounted how Hulbert prattled on about Allen from lunchtime until darkness fell. “So wrapped up was she in her own problems that I am sure she forgot how fast the time was flying,” Edith recalled. Then, in the context of the exhausted Wilson, just a few days shy of physical collapse, Edith added, “Poor woman, weighed down with her own problems, of course, she did not understand.”¹³² As the Wilsons left, he once again offered to help Hulbert. She declined but said he could help her son. Wilson took down Allen’s new address in New York.

Hulbert claimed that, four years later, she had a premonition on the day Wilson died. Living back in New York, she wrote that on February 3, 1924, when the whole country knew Wilson lay dying, she attended church. She was late, as usual, and when she reached the door the service was already in progress. “As I approached the door, suddenly there came to me a realization that he was dead. I entered knowing that he was dead. I had spoken to no one, and no one had told me. Yet I knew. And a feeling of peace was upon me. I had no sense of mourning, only the certain sense that he would always live in the heart of the world as in mine—a great man.”¹³³ That night she took out Wilson’s copy of The Oxford Book of Verse, which he must have returned to her at some point. She read from Dominus Illuminatio Mea, the same lines he had read to her on the Bermuda shore:

For even the purest delight may pall,

And power must fail and the pride must fall,

And the love of the dearest friends grow small—

But the glory of the Lord is all in all.¹³⁴

What does one make of all this? Why did Wilson allow himself to have this affair, why did it seemingly remain non-sexual, and why did he triangulate Ellen and his children? Perhaps most importantly, how did he reconcile his actions with his strong sense of universal moral ideals?

Wilson had acknowledged earlier in his life that he was nearly helpless in the presence of attractive women. In 1889, he told Ellen “I am peculiarly susceptible to feminine attractions. A pretty girl is my chief pleasure, a winsome girl my chief delight: girls of all degrees of beauty and grace have a charm for me which almost amounts to a spell.” He wrote this, of course, shortly after having fallen in love with his own first cousin Hattie. Fortunately, he married a woman not given to jealousy, he told Ellen, for a jealous woman would be miserable married to him.¹³⁵ Six years later he told Ellen it was a wonder she trusted him out of her sight.¹³⁶ That year, while in Baltimore for his annual lectures at Johns Hopkins, Wilson confessed to Ellen, “I have all the roving, Bohemian impulses the wildest young colt could have.” There were, he said, a thousand and one things that tempted him in the city, some of them amusing or innocent, others questionable or wrong. For this reason, he stayed mostly in his room grading papers. Still, he mused, “If I had no conscience, and no fear, and could do it, not grossly, but like an epicure, I would lead the most irregular of lives.”¹³⁷ With Hulbert, Wilson did just that. He led an irregular life, not grossly, not even secretly as far as Ellen was concerned. But like an epicure—“a person who cultivates fine taste,…a person dedicated to sensual enjoyment.”

Wilson accepted this fatal attraction to women as something like a secondary addiction. Unlike primary addictions such as alcoholism or drug use, a secondary addiction can be managed. And, if managed well, it will not destroy the one afflicted. As he wrote in that 1889 letter to Ellen, “She knows—for she knows me—that other women may play upon the surface of my susceptibilities, but that she is part of me and that I look at them, as it were, through her.”¹³⁸ With Ellen’s complicity and help he did his best to keep the affair from becoming sexual. Virtually powerless to end it until Galt forced his hand, he would instead moderate and channel his love and affection for the other woman. That, he believed, was the best he could do. As long as he looked at Mary Allen Hulbert through Ellen Axson Wilson, his emotional affair could be managed, even if not justified.

There is also a romantic element here, as there was for so much of Wilson’s thought. He not only experienced other women through Ellen, but he also, as he told Galt, experienced God through the love of a woman. The non-sexual romantic feelings Wilson experienced with women were not only similar to his experience of God, but in his view were in and of themselves broadly religious experiences. His public religion consisted of justice and equality. But, privately, religion had been reduced to a romantic experience, stripped of theological content. Most of his friendships with women remained non-sexual and platonic. The relationship with Hulbert, however, while likely remaining non-sexual, was certainly not platonic. He allowed himself to fall in love with her in a way that went far beyond friendship and rivaled, if not equaled, his being in love with Ellen and later Galt. In this sense, Wilson’s relationship with Hulbert was both a quasi-religious experience and also sin by every standard Wilson had ever believed or advocated. The curious conflation of religious experience and sin may have been what so mortified and embarrassed him when he finally confessed to Galt.

Before Galt, Wilson managed his attraction to Hulbert in part by expiating his guilt through public service. As he told Galt in the context of his confession in September 1915, “I have tried, ah, how I have tried to expiate folly by disinterested service and honorable, self-forgetful, devoted love.” He believed he had succeeded “for all but a little space” of his life.¹³⁹ “But that little space defeats the lifetime,” he confessed to Galt, “and brings me to you stained and unworthy.”¹⁴⁰ For having disappointed Galt, Wilson said, “May God forgive me as freely as he has punished me! You have forgiven me with a love that is divine, and that redeems me from everything but the bitterness of having disappointed you.”¹⁴¹ It is hard to tell if Wilson was as sorry for disappointing God as he was for disappointing Galt. Perhaps there was no difference.