Kinship: First cousin twice removed of the post–World War II Smith generation.

Early Life

Marie Civilise Alexandre was born in 1891 into a family that combined mercantile achievement and social prominence. Her father, John Ernest Alexandre, had been a leading shipping merchant and founder of the Alexandre Steamship Line, while her mother, Helen Lispenard Webb, was a granddaughter of General Alexander S. Webb, president of the College of the City of New York and a Civil War hero. The family divided their time between their Manhattan residence and their summer estate, Spring Lawn, in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Marriage to Frederic Schenck

Marie Alexandre’s wedding to Frederic Schenck, instructor in English literature at Harvard University and son of Mrs. J. Frederick Schenck of Lenox, took place on June 30, 1917, in St. Anne’s Catholic Church, Lenox. The event was one of the season’s most distinguished ceremonies and reflected the wartime alliance of American and French intellectual circles.

A report described:

“A special dispensation from the Archbishop of Massachusetts was obtained for the afternoon wedding and because Mr. Schenck is not a member of the Catholic Church. A touch of the military activities of the day was given by the presence of the French officers who are at Cambridge training the Harvard regiment.”

The ushers included Professors and Harvard colleagues, among them Roger B. Merriam and Rev. Joseph T. Addison, as well as members of New York society—David M. Osborne, Fulton Cutting, Charles Lanier Lawrence, and T. Lawrence Riggs.

“The bride, who entered the church with her cousin, J. Harry Alexandre, who gave her in marriage, was in a regal gown of white and silver lace, entrainée. ... Mr. and Mrs. Schenck received on a covered terrace, with a background of greens and bay trees.”

Wartime and Later Activities

Tragically, the marriage was short-lived; Frederic Schenck died in 1919. Marie, left a widow at twenty-eight, turned her energy toward charitable and religious work. During the Second World War she became head of the American Committee for the Aid of British Catholics, a relief organization that supplied funds for mobile chapels, temporary altars, nurseries for evacuated children, and aid to priests and hospitals affected by bombings.

Death

Marie Civilise Alexandre Schenck died on September 25, 1967. She was remembered for her grace, her early participation in the distinguished social world of Lenox and New York, and her later devotion to humanitarian work during one of the most difficult periods of the twentieth century.