page_title: Sumner Welles
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Sumner Welles / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: The Cosmos Club, located at 2121 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., following the Second North American blizzard of 2010.
context_page_description: Benjamin Sumner Welles was an American government official and diplomat in the Foreign Service. He was a major foreign policy adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and served as Under Secretary of State from 1936 to 1943, during FDR's presidency.
  Born in New York City to a wealthy, well-connected political family, Welles graduated from Harvard College in 1914. He entered the Foreign Service at the advice of Franklin Roosevelt, who was a family friend. Welles was excited by Woodrow Wilson's ideas about how American principles could reorder the international system based on liberal democracy, free-trade capitalism, international law, a league of nations, and an end to colonialism.
  Welles specialized on Latin American diplomatic affairs, and served several posts in Washington and in the field. President Calvin Coolidge distrusted Welles because of his divorce and private sex life. He left public service and from bases in his two mansions in the Washington area he wrote a book on the history of the Dominican Republic.
context_section_description: On April 14, 1915, Sumner Welles married Esther "Hope" Slater of Boston, the sister of a Harvard roommate, in Webster, Massachusetts. She came from a similarly prominent family that owned a textile empire based in Massachusetts. She was descended from industrialist Samuel Slater and granddaughter of the Boston painter William Morris Hunt. Welles and his wife had two sons:
  Benjamin Welles (1916–2002), a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, later his father's biographer,
  Arnold Welles (1918–2002)
  In 1923, Slater obtained a divorce from Welles in Paris "on grounds of abandonment and refusal to live with his wife".
  Welles occasionally gained public notice for his art dealings. In 1925, for example, he sold a collection of Japanese screens that had been on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for several years.
  On June 27, 1925, Welles married Mathilde Scott Townsend (1885–1949), "a noted international beauty" whose portrait had been painted by John Singer Sargent, in upstate New York.  Until World War II, the Welles' lived on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., in the landmark Townsend Mansion, which later became the home of the Cosmos Club.  Mathilde died of peritonitis in 1949 while vacationing in Switzerland with Welles.
  Welles spent the bulk of his time a few miles outside of Washington in the Maryland countryside at a 49-room "country cottage" known as Oxon Hill Manor designed for him by Jules Henri de Sibour and built on a 245-acre property in 1929. He entertained foreign dignitaries and diplomats there and hosted informal meetings of senior officials. FDR used the site as an occasional escape from the city as well.
  On January 8, 1952, Welles married Harriette Appleton Post, a childhood friend (and a granddaughter of architect George B. Post, designer of the New York Stock Exchange) who had previously married and divorced twice, and had resumed the use of her maiden name, in New York City at the bride's home on Fifth Avenue.
  He died on September 24, 1961 at age 68 in Bernardsville, New Jersey. He is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
caption: Welles home, the Townsend Mansion, taken in 2010
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