Young Congressman McKinley Regrets He is Unable to Attend Wedding of Simon Wolf’s Daughter: Mrs. McKinley Is Ill

Long before William McKinley became a national and international figure, I had made his acquaintance and won his friendship and good-will, which ended only when he passed to eternal rest. We often met at his home in Canton, Ohio, and at the house of a mutual friend, M. Ruhman, the son-in-law of Rabbi Levinsky, the author of the Family and School Bible. When he was elected a member of Congress this intimacy continued, and many social and pleasant hours were passed in my home and in his rooms at the Ebbitt House, where he lived his whole Congressional career. He was at all times genial, and no matter what he had to do, either for his constituents or his friends, he was ever the same patient, courteous, and self-sacrificing gentleman.

                                              Simon Wolf, The Presidents I Have Known from 1860-1918


Here Congressman William McKinley, still a “Jr.,”, informs his Jewish  friend Simon Wolf, still a Washington bureaucrat, that due to his wife's ill health, the couple will not be attending the wedding of Wolf’s daughter Florence to New York merchant Frederick Gotthold. He sends, in their place, their good wishes.

Ida McKinley was, famously, a chronic invalid. Four years into her marriage to the ever-solicitous “Bill”, she suffered a breakdown with the death of her mother and two infant children. She was, by all accounts, epileptic, and by some accounts, drug-addicted. She survived her husband, however, some six years.
 

Autograph Letter Signed (“William McKinley Jr.”), as Congressman, 1 page, quarto, House of Representatives, Washington, June 12, 1878. To Simon Wolf.