The St. Patrick's Day Wedding That Married Two Roosevelts
On March 17, 1905, Franklin D. Roosevelt married his distant cousin Eleanor in New York, with her uncle — President Theodore Roosevelt — giving away the bride.
The wedding date was chosen for a parade. Eleanor Roosevelt's uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt, was already scheduled to be in New York City on March 17, 1905, for the St. Patrick's Day parade — so the young couple set their wedding for the same day, and the sitting president of the United States agreed to walk the bride down the aisle.
The romance had been a secret for years. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Harvard man from the wealthy Hyde Park branch of the family, met Eleanor — the orphaned niece of the president, from the Oyster Bay branch — on a train to Tivoli, New York, in the summer of 1902. They were fifth cousins. They fell in love, corresponded in secret, and became engaged on November 22, 1903. Franklin's formidable mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, opposed the match and made him promise to keep the engagement quiet for a year; she even dragged him on a Caribbean cruise in 1904, hoping distance would cool the romance. It did not.
The ceremony took place in the afternoon at the Manhattan home of Eleanor's cousins, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Parish Jr., at 6–8 East 76th Street. The Rev. Endicott Peabody, Franklin's old headmaster from Groton School, officiated. Eleanor wore a white satin gown trimmed with lace and carried lilies of the valley; her six bridesmaids, including the president's daughter Alice Roosevelt, carried pink roses. Franklin's best man was his Groton and Harvard schoolmate Lathrop Brown.
The groom was twenty-three, the bride twenty. The guest of honor stole the show anyway. Reporters crowded around President Roosevelt, fresh off his second inauguration, and when asked what he thought of a Roosevelt marrying a Roosevelt, he grinned: 'It is a good thing to keep the name in the family.' It was front-page news in The New York Times.
After a short honeymoon at Hyde Park — Franklin was still finishing law school at Columbia — the couple toured Europe that summer. Nobody at the wedding could have known what the marriage would become: the most consequential political partnership of the twentieth century. Franklin would lead the nation through the Great Depression and World War II; Eleanor would redefine the role of First Lady, holding press conferences, writing her daily 'My Day' column, and championing civil rights. It all began on a St. Patrick's Day in a Manhattan parlor, with a president giving away the bride.
Photo: National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), public domain.
