Did Fred Thompson Marry a Trophy Wife?
The gap in their ages may or may not become an issue in the election should the former senator choose to run for president. But it shouldn’t be considered unprecedented in a presidential couple as some political scientists have suggested. Quickly, before another myth is born, we had better set the record straight. Older men marrying younger women is an American tradition going back to the nineteenth century, presidents not excepted (though it should be stated at the outset that the primary matrimonial interest of most presidents has always been women who were wealthy or of high status).
It is easy to forget that presidents ever married young because the faces of presidential couples staring out from the picture books usually feature them in staid settings formal enough to pass for a Currier and Ives print. Some look as if their bodies had been prepared by the undertaker for a public viewing. But every once in awhile there’s a reminder. One such occasion came in the summer of 1947, sixty years ago. On July 1 that year papers across the country carried a brief announcement by the Associated Press of the death of Pearl Tyler Ellis. Who was she exactly? She was the daughter of the tenth president of the United States, John Tyler.
You may be thinking, if you remember your presidential tables, that Pearl must have been very old. After all her father, who was born in 1790 when George Washington was president, served in the White House in the 1840s. Remember the old slogan Tippecanoe and Tyler, too? He was that Tyler, the first man to succeed to the presidency upon the death of the incumbent (William Henry Harrison).
Pearl was old, but not extremely old. She was eighty-seven. I’ll do the math for you. She was born in 1860. Tyler at the time was seventy years old.
The AP story oddly did not explain how a president born in the eighteenth century happened to have a daughter who died in the middle of the twentieth century (one year after the beginning of the baby boom, I might add). Here’s the back story. When Tyler was president his first wife died four years after suffering a paralytic stroke. Tyler, still young enough at age fifty two to envision fathering a new family, quickly remarried, becoming the first of three presidents to marry while in office. (The other two were Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson.)
His betrothed was the beautiful (and wealthy) Julia Gardiner, the daughter of a New York state senator. Fittingly she is memorialized in a picture showing her decked out in jewels, including a tiara-like chain of stunning, shiny gems on her head. The couple married in 1844 in a secret wedding held in New York City. The public was notified after they returned to the White House.
The announcement stunned the country. Not only was Tyler remarrying less than two years after his first wife died, his new wife was considerably younger than he was. Age twenty-two, she was thirty years his junior. “Treaty of Immediate Annexation,” bannered the headline in the New York Herald.
Tyler had been courting her for some time when in February 1844 there was a tragic gun accident aboard a warship. Tyler escaped unharmed but two members of the cabinet died along with Julia’s father. Tyler tended to her so gently that she decided within months to marry him. As she had once idolized her father, she now idolized him, leading some biographers to believe she was after a father figure. “Papa was the only handsome man (except the President), I have ever seen,” she once confided.
Tyler was the most fecund of American presidents. He had had seven children with his first wife. Now he and Julia had another seven. Pearl was the last, born just two years before Tyler died.
The next president to marry while serving in office was Grover Cleveland. His marriage at age forty-nine to the twenty-one year old Frances Folsom also shocked the country because no one had realized he was shopping for a wife. But by then Americans had grown used to hearing of successful men marrying younger women. Just a few years earlier the wealthy James Roosevelt, age fifty-two, had married Sara Delano, age twenty-six. Their only child: Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Women today who marry older men are stigmatized as “trophy wives,” implying that their only virtue is their age. Some have accused Fred Thompson’s wife of falling into the category despite her record as an accomplished political aide before their marriage. I have some advice for Fred Thompson. The next time somebody disparages his marrying a younger woman he can rise to his full six foot six height and say in his baritone country twang that well, yes, he did marry a younger woman—just like John Tyler, Grover Cleveland, and FDR’s father.
And I have some advice to his critics. Don't vote against Thompson because he happens to have a young wife. If we are to restore seriousness to our politics--and nothing is more important in my opinion--then we have to begin to decide who we want in office on the basis of their experience, political judgment and agenda, not who they happen to be sleeping with.