November 23, 2019 • 28 mins
Today we revisit a 2015 episode about Alice Roosevelt. The eldest daughter of Theodore Roosevelt was a firebrand who never shied away from the public eye. She was nicknamed "the Second Washington Monument" because of her social power, which she parlayed into political influence.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, Happy Saturday, everybody. In our recent episode on Francis
Benjamin Johnston, we mentioned that she was previous podcast subject
Alice Roosevelt's wedding photographer in nineteen o six, and that
prior episode came out in May oft so we thought
that there might be some folks in the audience who
have not heard it yet. And Alice is a fascinating
creature and you'll get a kick out of her. Yep,
(00:25):
So we are sharing that episode again today. Enjoy Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Holly Frod and I'm Tracy B. Wilson,
(00:46):
and today's show is going to feature a topic that's
been requested by quite a few listeners. Most recently it
was requested by listener Rachel, and not too far back,
it was requested by listener Lindsay And to kind of
set it up, so, being the child of a president
means that you are kind of constantly in the spotlight,
even if you don't want to be. You're scrutinized by
the press and judged by the public, and some kids
(01:08):
kind of struggle to keep their noses clean. But the
focus of today's episode did not bother with that. She's
kind of a wild child from the moment she stepped
into the White House in nineteen o one. Alice Roosevelt,
who's who we're going to be talking about, could have
given any modern famous kid, whether they're a presidential kid
or just a child star, a run for their money
in the wild behavior department, and she was completely unapologetic
(01:32):
about it for her entire life. Uh For example, she
kept an embroidered pillow in her home with one of
Tracy's favorite sayings embroidered on it, which is attributed to
her having said it, which is, if you can't say
something good about someone, sit right here next to me.
I actually did not know that that could be attributed
to her. I have always attributed it to Steele Magnolia's
(01:56):
It has often been, at least in the two biographies.
I looked at it in several other pieces. It is.
And one of the things with Alice is that a
lot of what you're getting is stories that were retold
by family members and friends. So it's possible that she
didn't say it initially, but she certainly everyone credits her
with that one. She was nicknamed the Second Washington Monument
(02:19):
because she managed to amass quite a bit of social
power in the US capital, and she parlayed that into
some political influence. And how much so is still a
bit of debate how much influence she really had politically,
but she certainly was very close to power for her
entire life. Uh, And so we will talk about that
life and how she maybe used that power. Alice was
(02:42):
born to Theodore Roosevelt and Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt on
February twelfth, four and most people know sort of about
the tragedy that happened in this family. Uh. Just two
days later, on February, Alice's father, Theodore Roosevelt, ran home
from his work as an assemblyman in the New York
State Legislature UH to their house at fifty seven Street
(03:07):
because grave news had come. His mother, Martha Bullock Roosevelt,
who was known as Middy, had died of typhoid fever.
On top of that tragedy, only a few hours later,
Roosevelt's wife, Alice, also died of Bright's disease. This is
a kidney condition that's characterized by high concentrations of protein
in the urine. She'd been living with Bright's disease for
(03:29):
quite some time, but her pregnancy had complicated the condition
and weakened her overall level of health. Uh. And as
you can imagine that double loss, to lose a parent
and your spouse within about four hours really devastated Roosevelt,
who was only twenty five at the time, and he
wanted quite plainly to escape all reminders of this loss.
(03:53):
He even went so far as to forbid the mention
of his wife, Alice's name, and his grief continued to
burden him um and by the end of eighteen eighty four,
he had decided to kind of pare down his involvement
in politics politics and to go west for a while.
So he moved out to the Dakota territories, and he
had spent time there before. Uh. We can talk about
(04:15):
that if we do a Teddy Roosevelt episode. And he
established Elkhorn Ranch there for a life that he wanted
to kind of live in isolation of ranching. He also
worked as a sheriff, and he did not take the
infant Alice with him, who was usually called baby Lee,
presumably because the name Alice, which was her given name,
(04:35):
caused Roosevelt so much pain, so he left Baby Lee
in New York. She stayed with Roosevelt's sister Anna, who
was called Baby and eventually Alice called her Anti By.
He wasn't totally absent as a father, though, there were
several times during the next two years where his work
brought him back East and he would spend time with
the baby during these trips, but Baby was her primary
(04:59):
parent during this period of Baby Lee's life. Uh In
June of eighteen eighty six, Alice's father was ready to
resume life in New York. The home that he had
contracted to be built just after his wife's death was completed,
and he resumed his role as Alice's father full time
as they moved into their Oyster Bay, Long Island house.
(05:20):
In December of eighteen eighty six, Theodore Roosevelt remarried, and
his new bride was Edith Carroll, who had been his
childhood's sweetheart. Edith and Teddy would have five children together.
Roosevelt ran for vice president on the ticket with William
McKinley in e The pair was reelected for a second term,
(05:42):
but then on September six of nineteen o one, McKinley
was shot by anarchist Leon Leon chol Gosh at the
Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and eight days
later the president died from his wounds, and Roosevelt, having
been vice president, became president. When the Roosevelt's moved into
the White House in Alice was seventeen, and she pretty
(06:04):
much immediately became a celebrity. She was known for her
wild antics and rebellious behavior. She was a party girl
to arrival any celebrity today, and she had started to
appear in gossip magazines back when she was sixteen. She
basically stayed there for her father's entire time in office. Yeah,
one biographer made a comment that all Edith and Teddy
(06:27):
needed to do to know what Alice had been up
to the night before was to open the morning paper,
because her antics were such a great drawers of readers
that papers would put them on the front page, even
sometimes pushing out much bigger and more important news. Alice smoked,
which you know, for a young lady, not not so delightful,
(06:49):
And when her father forbid her to do so under
his roof, she just moved that habit outside and so
she would start sitting on the White House roof to
enjoy cigarettes. She also played poker, and she bent on
her says. She was sort of famously photographed placing a
bed At one point. She would ride in cars with
men without chaperones. H she wore pants on occasion, which
(07:09):
of course was very Unladylake at that time, and she
would raise her own car through the streets of Washington.
She would also barge in on meetings at the White House,
seemingly with causing trouble. As the only reason for having
done that. She claimed to be a pagan to fly
in the face of her very religious stepmother. She called
Christianity voodoo to kind of rile her up. She had
(07:30):
a pet snake named Emily Spinach that she carried around
the house with her and even some parties. There are
some accounts that say it was a Boa constrictor, but
others say it was a garter snake. I can hardly
imagine two less similar snakes. Yeah, the snake story is
one that um it gets told again because there are
(07:52):
often biographers used firsthand accounts from friends and relatives. Anybody
knows that, like even in your social group, there are
stories that have grown out of you know, their original proportions,
and so we really don't have a sense of the
snake situation and what the realities were of it. Some
will say she showed up at one party with a
(08:13):
huge boa constrictor on her neck. Others say she carried
this snake in her pocket all the time. And when
I was relaying this to some friends last night, while
we were talking about it, they thought, like the way
a child will pick up a weird animal and put
it in their pocket, and like, no, no, she was
like eighteen and nineteen at this point. She was just
carting around a snake for entertainment. Um. The press dubbed
(08:34):
her Princess Alice. So her favorite color, for example, was
a grayish blue, and that became very very trendy. It
was called Alice blue. She basically, you know, was a
celebrity icon at this point, and her father, the President,
is often quoted as saying, I can either run the
country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot
(08:54):
possibly do both. A friend of the family once said
that she was quote like a young wild animal that
had been put into good clothes. Uh and in n five,
so several years into their time at the White House.
She served as a good will ambassador, traveling to Asia
with a group of congressmen. And this was the first
(09:15):
time a first daughter had taken on such a duty.
And this trip, which was dubbed the Imperial Cruise. Uh,
it's entirely likely that President Roosevelt really looked at this
mission as a way to keep his troublesome eldest daughter
out of his hair for a little while. I feel
like that's a sitcom waiting to happen. Uh. And we're
(09:35):
going to get into the deal details of that trip
because some wacky things happened there. But before we do,
do you want to pause for a word from a sponsor.
Let's do that. So on this goodwill tour, Alice traveled
with a large group. There was Secretary of War William
(09:58):
Howard Taft, twenty three congressmen, and seven senators. Alice made
headlines everywhere she went, in part because of her wild behavior,
which continued on the road. She set off firecrackers on
the train on the first leg of the trip from
Washington to San Francisco. She fired her pistol from the
train as well, aiming as telegraph poles as they passed them. Yeah.
(10:22):
I read one account that suggested that she kind of
wrote it off, as well as the fourth of July,
this is how I'm celebrating when the light firecrackers inside
a train. I just it seems foolish, Alice, don't do it, uh,
And as well as the welcoming gaze of the press,
because they really did just follow her everywhere. She also
caught the eye of Representative Nicholas Longworth of Cincinnati. Taft
(10:46):
was apparently beside himself trying to serve as a chaperone
and keep Alice in this representative apart, because this man
was fifteen years her senior, But eventually Taft just gave
up and was like, I can't control this situation. The
following year, Alice actually married Longworth, who was a notoriously
womanizing drinker, and their ceremony was very lavish. It was
(11:08):
at the White House, and it was front page news.
This wedding took place on February seventeenth, nineteen o six,
and for Alice it represented a break for freedom. She
no longer had to live with her stepmother, and according
to the account of biographer Stacy Cordry, when Edith said
farewell to Alice, after the wedding, her parting words were,
I want you to know I'm glad to see you leave.
(11:30):
You have never been anything but trouble. So after a
honeymoon in Cuba, Alice and Nicholas settled into married life together.
And while it was not exactly the conventional romantic dream marriage,
it sort of worked for the two of them. Um,
they weren't really in love so much as they were
comfortable with one another. Presumably they were drawn together because
(11:50):
they were both sort of these big, extreme partying personalities. Uh,
and they both remained the people that they were before
they said their vows. So there was some headbutting, there
were some wild times, and there was some infidelity on
both sides of that equation. When her father's time in
the White House ended in nineteen o nine, Alice allegedly
(12:11):
buried a voodoo doll of the new First Lady, Nellie
Taft in a lawn before the new president moved in.
For that, and also for her very public criticism of
the Tafts, Alice was banned from the White House where
their tenure there. Yes, yeah, there were several times she's
not welcome in the White House. Um. A few years later,
(12:32):
the long Worth marriage would really be tested when Teddy
Roosevelt went toe to toe with Taft in a political battle.
The bigger issue for Alice than Nicholas's extramarital dalliances was
that her husband supported William Taft in the nineteen twelve
campaign against her father's newly formed progressive Bull Moose Party.
She had actually advised her father against this move, but
(12:55):
she remained stalwartly loyal to him even when he disregarded
her advice, and she also opted to appear in her
husband's home district of Cincinnati with Hiram Johnson, her father's
vice presidential running mate, instead of with her husband on
his campaign, and Longworth lost that election, which Alice sometimes
took credit for uh, even though he did end up
(13:16):
getting reelected a couple years later. But Alison Nicholas did
manage to survive the upheaval their marriage did through. Through
that sort of disastrous and very rocky nineteen twelve election cycle,
their marriage remained intact, although politically it was pretty distant
at that point. They weren't sort of of the same
mind in any way. To add insult to injury, the
(13:38):
nineteen twelve presidential election went to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, due
in part to this split in the loyalties of the
Republican Party between Taft and Roosevelt. So just as Alice
had been vocally critical of Taft, she also vocally criticized Wilson,
and in some ways even more so. She was once
again banned from the White House after publicly making core
(14:00):
comments about the President. Not so long after this, uh,
Teddy Roosevelt died in his sleep. It was in January,
on January six of nineteen nineteen, and he was sixty
at this point, and he had a coronary embolism. And
at that point, Wilson had already proposed the League of
Nations in his nineteen eighteen speech before Congress as part
(14:22):
of his fourteen Points plan. Roosevelt had hated that, and
in turn, so did Alice because she pretty much always
followed her father's political leanings, and she rallied very hard
against the US becoming a member of the League of
Nations after her father died, and that the League did
formally form in Geneva, Switzerland in ninety So Teddy's eldest
(14:45):
daughter basically used every single scrap of influence she had
to sway politicians in Washington, d c. Against the idea
of joining the League, and whether it was her efforts
or not, the US never became a member. During the
nineteen twenties, Alice started an affair with the chair of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that was Senator William Bora
of Idaho. The two of them bonded over their shared
(15:08):
admiration of her late father and their love of literature.
She and the Senator with some letters to one another,
and they were deeply in love. As their affair became
less and less of a secret, Alice was dubbed Aurora
Bora Alice by the press and gossip circles, and in
Alice's husband, Nicholas Longworth, became Speaker of the House, and
(15:31):
that same year they also welcomed their one and only child, Paulina,
into the world, and Longworth was completely excited about this
baby and doated on her, even though the odds are
that the infant was in fact fathered by Alice's paramour Bora,
and that Nicholas actually knew that um. In a bittersweet
sort of coincidence, Paulina was born on February, which of
(15:53):
course is Valentine's day, but was also the same day
that Alice's mother and grandmother had died many years Also
in nine, Alice and Nicholas moved into their home at
two thousand nine Massachusetts Avenue Northwest, which is just west
of DuPont Circle. Alice would live there for the rest
of her life, and the house, which was built in
eighty one, would serve as a home base for the
(16:16):
First Daughter's many famed social events that she would host
for the next six decades. Uh In one Alice's husband,
Nicholas Longworth, died, and unfortunately, he didn't really leave much
behind in terms of finances for his widow. His family
money was almost entirely gone, and while her lover, William Bara,
(16:36):
lived another nine years, it doesn't appear that he really
helped his mistress out financially. Two years after her husband's death,
Alice published her memoirs Crowded Hours in an effort to
make some money. And this was also the year that
Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office. So just in case you
don't know the scoop, some people think that he was
(16:58):
much closer, much more closely relate did to Teddy Roosevelt
than he actually was Theodore Roosevelt and FDR only distant related.
They were fourth cousins once removed. I've also seen them
listed as fifth cousin, so h your command of genealogy
and how that works may affect your perception of that UM.
FDR's wife, Eleanor, however, was actually much more closely related
(17:20):
to the former president because Theodore Roosevelt had been her uncle.
Alice was really pretty cutting when it came to Franklin
and Eleanor. She once described Franklin Delanor Roosevelt as one
third SAP and two thirds Eleanor. Alice apparently would do
unflattering imitations of Eleanor at tea parties. I think we
recently got a request for us to do in a
(17:43):
whole episode about the Eleanor Alice spewed. We did, and
it's uh. I debated over it as we were prepping this,
and really at the end of the day that just
boils down to um a lot of descriptions of kind
of petty arguments. So that isn't the best for a
whole episode, but there were a lot of arguments and
(18:04):
a lot of nitpicking. It was one of those things
where like they would gossip to friends about one another
and kind of circulate really insulting things. Uh. You know,
it was a pretty catty situation. Uh. In Alice and
her half brother collaborated as editors on a book of poetry,
(18:27):
and that same year she put the house on Massachusetts
Avenue on the market, although it never sold. Her social
engagements became the invite in Washington, and Alice was pretty
open about her opinions, both political and social, and she
kind of used all of her social events as as
opportunities to broadcast these opinions to really the elite of Washington.
(18:48):
She also licensed her image for use in advertisements for
products like cigarettes and cold cream, and she did all
of this to try to support herself and Paulina. As
we are sort of nearing the end of Alice's life,
let's first pause for a word from one of our sponsors.
(19:11):
So Alice did continue to make political friends throughout her
entire life. That really was sort of her circle. So
she always knew, uh, kind of many people in power,
and she eventually became close friends with Richard Nixon when
he was serving as vice president and then when Nixon
became president, he would often invite Alice who usually went
by Mrs L to the White House. He even hosted
(19:34):
her eighty seventh birthday party there. So even though she
had been banned for a couple of different presidencies, she
was allowed back in eventually, but her close friendship with
Nixon did not survive. The Watergate scandal, Alice sort of
distanced herself from Nixon, and when asked about it, she
would claim that the whole thing, meaning that whole scandal,
had become quote boring. She also became close with the
(19:58):
Kennedy family despite their demo cratic affiliation, and in spite
of her lifeline position as a Republican, Alice supported the
Democratic Party in nineteen sixty four. In nineteen sixty eight.
I wonder how much of that had to do with
like the shifting ideologies of the parties at that point. Uh,
not an insignificant amount. Uh. You know, she was not
(20:20):
a woman who sort of just blindly went down party line.
She really was pretty thoughtful about her positions. She would
get sort of so adamant and passionate about them that
you might think that she had lost sight of the
forest for the trees in some cases, But I think
she really did, you know, welcome the ideas of other people.
(20:41):
She liked to have political discourse, so I'm sure when
someone made a case for a situation that she thought
was certainly sensible and made sense to her, she didn't
necessarily see it as changing sides so much as no,
I'm still going on with my convictions. They just happened
to align with these people at the moment. Uh. Another
(21:02):
tragedy struck in ninety seven when Alice's daughter Paulina died
from a combination of sleeping pills and alcohol UH sometimes
referred to as a purposeful overdose, sometimes couched in slightly
more nebulous terms, but Pullina did leave behind a daughter,
Joanna Storm, and Alice actually raised her granddaughter after Pullina's death.
(21:26):
As the years were on, that house outside of the
DuPont's circle grew shabby and cluttered, but it really didn't
seem to concern the aging first daughter so much. She
let the yard grow over and the house filled up
with papers. She started spending the majority of her time
on the third floor with her books and a well
stocked refrigerator for snacks during reading breaks. And it does
(21:48):
sound a little like gray gardens, but she did not
go completely broke. Yeah, and she still had servants. She
had made a rule that the servants weren't allowed to
stay at the house because she didn't like being awakened early.
One story goes that the servants would arrive at eleven
and she would usually tell them to go away, and
she would go back to sleep until one o'clock in
the afternoon. Um but yeah, she wasn't like isolated without people.
(22:14):
Um but Mrs l did start to lose her mental
edge eventually, but her granddaughter Joanna visited frequently. They stayed close,
and Joanna also sort of started this effort to make
sure that Alice's friends were stopping by and that Alice
wasn't like a lonely old lady in a crumbling house.
She really wanted her to stay social. Alice died in
(22:35):
a week after her birthday at the age of nineties six,
in accordance with her wishes. She had a very quiet burial,
and she had outlived all of her half siblings from
her father's second marriage. Yeah, it's kind of one of
those interesting things. You usually expect the wild party child
to burn out much earlier than the rest of the family,
but she just kept on going. And she was a
(22:57):
spitfire the whole time. Um. In her memoirs, Alice, who
very obviously to everyone loved and admired her father, was
pretty open though that she struggled with some resentment with him,
particularly about his move west after her mother died. She
really felt that he had kind of abandoned her as
an infant, and she also admitted that she had been
(23:17):
really jealous and angry at having to vie for his
attention to compete with his second wife once he did
come back to New York and then their five children, Like,
she just felt like she never got to have her
father to herself. She wrote in her diary while she
lived at the White House, quote, father doesn't care for me,
that is to say, one eighth as much as he
does for the other children. I pray for a fortune.
(23:41):
I care for nothing except to amuse myself in a
charmingly expensive way. Yeah. It sort of reads like such
a classic psychological study of like a child that acts
out for attention. Um and sort of, you know, her
feelings of being ignored and unwanted kind of lead to
that behavior that really informed her entire life. Uh. But
(24:03):
one of the things that I really love about Alice
is that she is as quotable as can be. What
really made her standouts throughout all of her years were
her amazing quips, some of which were very catty and
some of which were just sort of wonderfully witty. So
I thought to close out we would cover a few favorites. Uh,
do you want to tell the first one? Yeah, So
(24:23):
Joe McCarthy tried to call her by her first name,
and she said, no, Senator McCarthy, you are not going
to call me Alice. The truckman, the trashman, and the
policeman on the black may call me Alice, but you
may not. I sort of love that. Uh. The one
that I really love her quote is that she once said,
my specialty is detached malevolence her life so much. Her
(24:51):
life philosophy was bill what's empty, empty, what's full? And
scratch where it itches. It seems like very sensible at Yeah,
we um. She reminds me a bit of of Edna
st Vincent Malaya. And and we actually got a letter
after our episode on Edna say Vincent Malay from somebody
(25:13):
who was kind of chagrined that we had talked about
her shenanigans. In a gleeful way, whereas if if she
had been a man, we would not have talked about
it in a gleeful way. And like there was a
whole aspect of it had to do with her being
expelled from school and allowed back in because she was
a celebrity, which is not totally germane to this episode.
(25:33):
But I think part of that is that, uh, when
when Alice was behaving this way, she was challenging the
status quo, and men doing similar things were maintaining the
status quo. So that is why when women quote misbehave
sometimes we sound quite gleeful about it. But I love
(25:55):
anybody that's a spitfire. Um, But I can totally see
as well how she was just a pain in the neck,
like I can't. Can you imagine if a modern president,
like if we heard a story of like President Bush's
twins when he was in office or President Obama's girls
just jamming themselves into meetings, like we would never hear
(26:17):
the end of it in the press, and how horrifying
it was. But Alice did this stuff and somehow people
just loved her so much that they thought it was hilarious.
It's like, oh, she interrupted, another important meeting in the
White House, like who would do that? Well? Making her
a good Will ambassador is one of those things where
I'm like, what where are you thinking? That really sounds
(26:37):
like she's just gonna pants the ambassador from China and
then runaway giggling, and that would just be horrible for introductions. Yeah,
so in that regard it might be good. Am I
do this with a question mark. I'm not actually saying
this is a good thing, but her having taken up
with long Worth, with this man who was much older,
and kind of having that little adventure on that trip
(26:59):
may have saved some embarrassment. Yeah she was occupied and
could not pant somebody, But yeah she I could see
where she would be a lot to deal with. And
it is interesting. One of the articles that I read
for this was actually written by a biographer of hers,
but it was contextualizing it, uh in sort of looking
(27:23):
at modern president's children and how there is to some
degree this this unspoken rule of like you leave the
kids out of it and you don't really focus on them. Uh.
But that like remember when President Obama's children, I don't
remember which of the girls it was like rolled her
eyes at some event and people were all in a
twitter about it, and she's like, are you kidding me?
(27:45):
Do you know what Alice Roosevelt did? Just like if
a thirteen year old girl rolls her eyes like you
consider yourself lucky on that one because it could be
like it was in the early nineteen hundreds, which is
just sort of a funny way to couch it. Thank
(28:05):
you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you have heard an email address or of Facebook you
are l or something similar over the course of today's episode,
since it is from the archive that might be out
of date now, you can email us at history podcast
at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History and
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast,
(28:28):
the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
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Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, Happy Saturday, everybody. In our recent episode on Francis
Benjamin Johnston, we mentioned that she was previous podcast subject
Alice Roosevelt's wedding photographer in nineteen o six, and that
prior episode came out in May oft so we thought
that there might be some folks in the audience who
have not heard it yet. And Alice is a fascinating
creature and you'll get a kick out of her. Yep,
(00:25):
So we are sharing that episode again today. Enjoy Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Holly Frod and I'm Tracy B. Wilson,
(00:46):
and today's show is going to feature a topic that's
been requested by quite a few listeners. Most recently it
was requested by listener Rachel, and not too far back,
it was requested by listener Lindsay And to kind of
set it up, so, being the child of a president
means that you are kind of constantly in the spotlight,
even if you don't want to be. You're scrutinized by
the press and judged by the public, and some kids
(01:08):
kind of struggle to keep their noses clean. But the
focus of today's episode did not bother with that. She's
kind of a wild child from the moment she stepped
into the White House in nineteen o one. Alice Roosevelt,
who's who we're going to be talking about, could have
given any modern famous kid, whether they're a presidential kid
or just a child star, a run for their money
in the wild behavior department, and she was completely unapologetic
(01:32):
about it for her entire life. Uh For example, she
kept an embroidered pillow in her home with one of
Tracy's favorite sayings embroidered on it, which is attributed to
her having said it, which is, if you can't say
something good about someone, sit right here next to me.
I actually did not know that that could be attributed
to her. I have always attributed it to Steele Magnolia's
(01:56):
It has often been, at least in the two biographies.
I looked at it in several other pieces. It is.
And one of the things with Alice is that a
lot of what you're getting is stories that were retold
by family members and friends. So it's possible that she
didn't say it initially, but she certainly everyone credits her
with that one. She was nicknamed the Second Washington Monument
(02:19):
because she managed to amass quite a bit of social
power in the US capital, and she parlayed that into
some political influence. And how much so is still a
bit of debate how much influence she really had politically,
but she certainly was very close to power for her
entire life. Uh, And so we will talk about that
life and how she maybe used that power. Alice was
(02:42):
born to Theodore Roosevelt and Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt on
February twelfth, four and most people know sort of about
the tragedy that happened in this family. Uh. Just two
days later, on February, Alice's father, Theodore Roosevelt, ran home
from his work as an assemblyman in the New York
State Legislature UH to their house at fifty seven Street
(03:07):
because grave news had come. His mother, Martha Bullock Roosevelt,
who was known as Middy, had died of typhoid fever.
On top of that tragedy, only a few hours later,
Roosevelt's wife, Alice, also died of Bright's disease. This is
a kidney condition that's characterized by high concentrations of protein
in the urine. She'd been living with Bright's disease for
(03:29):
quite some time, but her pregnancy had complicated the condition
and weakened her overall level of health. Uh. And as
you can imagine that double loss, to lose a parent
and your spouse within about four hours really devastated Roosevelt,
who was only twenty five at the time, and he
wanted quite plainly to escape all reminders of this loss.
(03:53):
He even went so far as to forbid the mention
of his wife, Alice's name, and his grief continued to
burden him um and by the end of eighteen eighty four,
he had decided to kind of pare down his involvement
in politics politics and to go west for a while.
So he moved out to the Dakota territories, and he
had spent time there before. Uh. We can talk about
(04:15):
that if we do a Teddy Roosevelt episode. And he
established Elkhorn Ranch there for a life that he wanted
to kind of live in isolation of ranching. He also
worked as a sheriff, and he did not take the
infant Alice with him, who was usually called baby Lee,
presumably because the name Alice, which was her given name,
(04:35):
caused Roosevelt so much pain, so he left Baby Lee
in New York. She stayed with Roosevelt's sister Anna, who
was called Baby and eventually Alice called her Anti By.
He wasn't totally absent as a father, though, there were
several times during the next two years where his work
brought him back East and he would spend time with
the baby during these trips, but Baby was her primary
(04:59):
parent during this period of Baby Lee's life. Uh In
June of eighteen eighty six, Alice's father was ready to
resume life in New York. The home that he had
contracted to be built just after his wife's death was completed,
and he resumed his role as Alice's father full time
as they moved into their Oyster Bay, Long Island house.
(05:20):
In December of eighteen eighty six, Theodore Roosevelt remarried, and
his new bride was Edith Carroll, who had been his
childhood's sweetheart. Edith and Teddy would have five children together.
Roosevelt ran for vice president on the ticket with William
McKinley in e The pair was reelected for a second term,
(05:42):
but then on September six of nineteen o one, McKinley
was shot by anarchist Leon Leon chol Gosh at the
Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and eight days
later the president died from his wounds, and Roosevelt, having
been vice president, became president. When the Roosevelt's moved into
the White House in Alice was seventeen, and she pretty
(06:04):
much immediately became a celebrity. She was known for her
wild antics and rebellious behavior. She was a party girl
to arrival any celebrity today, and she had started to
appear in gossip magazines back when she was sixteen. She
basically stayed there for her father's entire time in office. Yeah,
one biographer made a comment that all Edith and Teddy
(06:27):
needed to do to know what Alice had been up
to the night before was to open the morning paper,
because her antics were such a great drawers of readers
that papers would put them on the front page, even
sometimes pushing out much bigger and more important news. Alice smoked,
which you know, for a young lady, not not so delightful,
(06:49):
And when her father forbid her to do so under
his roof, she just moved that habit outside and so
she would start sitting on the White House roof to
enjoy cigarettes. She also played poker, and she bent on
her says. She was sort of famously photographed placing a
bed At one point. She would ride in cars with
men without chaperones. H she wore pants on occasion, which
(07:09):
of course was very Unladylake at that time, and she
would raise her own car through the streets of Washington.
She would also barge in on meetings at the White House,
seemingly with causing trouble. As the only reason for having
done that. She claimed to be a pagan to fly
in the face of her very religious stepmother. She called
Christianity voodoo to kind of rile her up. She had
(07:30):
a pet snake named Emily Spinach that she carried around
the house with her and even some parties. There are
some accounts that say it was a Boa constrictor, but
others say it was a garter snake. I can hardly
imagine two less similar snakes. Yeah, the snake story is
one that um it gets told again because there are
(07:52):
often biographers used firsthand accounts from friends and relatives. Anybody
knows that, like even in your social group, there are
stories that have grown out of you know, their original proportions,
and so we really don't have a sense of the
snake situation and what the realities were of it. Some
will say she showed up at one party with a
(08:13):
huge boa constrictor on her neck. Others say she carried
this snake in her pocket all the time. And when
I was relaying this to some friends last night, while
we were talking about it, they thought, like the way
a child will pick up a weird animal and put
it in their pocket, and like, no, no, she was
like eighteen and nineteen at this point. She was just
carting around a snake for entertainment. Um. The press dubbed
(08:34):
her Princess Alice. So her favorite color, for example, was
a grayish blue, and that became very very trendy. It
was called Alice blue. She basically, you know, was a
celebrity icon at this point, and her father, the President,
is often quoted as saying, I can either run the
country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot
(08:54):
possibly do both. A friend of the family once said
that she was quote like a young wild animal that
had been put into good clothes. Uh and in n five,
so several years into their time at the White House.
She served as a good will ambassador, traveling to Asia
with a group of congressmen. And this was the first
(09:15):
time a first daughter had taken on such a duty.
And this trip, which was dubbed the Imperial Cruise. Uh,
it's entirely likely that President Roosevelt really looked at this
mission as a way to keep his troublesome eldest daughter
out of his hair for a little while. I feel
like that's a sitcom waiting to happen. Uh. And we're
(09:35):
going to get into the deal details of that trip
because some wacky things happened there. But before we do,
do you want to pause for a word from a sponsor.
Let's do that. So on this goodwill tour, Alice traveled
with a large group. There was Secretary of War William
(09:58):
Howard Taft, twenty three congressmen, and seven senators. Alice made
headlines everywhere she went, in part because of her wild behavior,
which continued on the road. She set off firecrackers on
the train on the first leg of the trip from
Washington to San Francisco. She fired her pistol from the
train as well, aiming as telegraph poles as they passed them. Yeah.
(10:22):
I read one account that suggested that she kind of
wrote it off, as well as the fourth of July,
this is how I'm celebrating when the light firecrackers inside
a train. I just it seems foolish, Alice, don't do it, uh,
And as well as the welcoming gaze of the press,
because they really did just follow her everywhere. She also
caught the eye of Representative Nicholas Longworth of Cincinnati. Taft
(10:46):
was apparently beside himself trying to serve as a chaperone
and keep Alice in this representative apart, because this man
was fifteen years her senior, But eventually Taft just gave
up and was like, I can't control this situation. The
following year, Alice actually married Longworth, who was a notoriously
womanizing drinker, and their ceremony was very lavish. It was
(11:08):
at the White House, and it was front page news.
This wedding took place on February seventeenth, nineteen o six,
and for Alice it represented a break for freedom. She
no longer had to live with her stepmother, and according
to the account of biographer Stacy Cordry, when Edith said
farewell to Alice, after the wedding, her parting words were,
I want you to know I'm glad to see you leave.
(11:30):
You have never been anything but trouble. So after a
honeymoon in Cuba, Alice and Nicholas settled into married life together.
And while it was not exactly the conventional romantic dream marriage,
it sort of worked for the two of them. Um,
they weren't really in love so much as they were
comfortable with one another. Presumably they were drawn together because
(11:50):
they were both sort of these big, extreme partying personalities. Uh,
and they both remained the people that they were before
they said their vows. So there was some headbutting, there
were some wild times, and there was some infidelity on
both sides of that equation. When her father's time in
the White House ended in nineteen o nine, Alice allegedly
(12:11):
buried a voodoo doll of the new First Lady, Nellie
Taft in a lawn before the new president moved in.
For that, and also for her very public criticism of
the Tafts, Alice was banned from the White House where
their tenure there. Yes, yeah, there were several times she's
not welcome in the White House. Um. A few years later,
(12:32):
the long Worth marriage would really be tested when Teddy
Roosevelt went toe to toe with Taft in a political battle.
The bigger issue for Alice than Nicholas's extramarital dalliances was
that her husband supported William Taft in the nineteen twelve
campaign against her father's newly formed progressive Bull Moose Party.
She had actually advised her father against this move, but
(12:55):
she remained stalwartly loyal to him even when he disregarded
her advice, and she also opted to appear in her
husband's home district of Cincinnati with Hiram Johnson, her father's
vice presidential running mate, instead of with her husband on
his campaign, and Longworth lost that election, which Alice sometimes
took credit for uh, even though he did end up
(13:16):
getting reelected a couple years later. But Alison Nicholas did
manage to survive the upheaval their marriage did through. Through
that sort of disastrous and very rocky nineteen twelve election cycle,
their marriage remained intact, although politically it was pretty distant
at that point. They weren't sort of of the same
mind in any way. To add insult to injury, the
(13:38):
nineteen twelve presidential election went to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, due
in part to this split in the loyalties of the
Republican Party between Taft and Roosevelt. So just as Alice
had been vocally critical of Taft, she also vocally criticized Wilson,
and in some ways even more so. She was once
again banned from the White House after publicly making core
(14:00):
comments about the President. Not so long after this, uh,
Teddy Roosevelt died in his sleep. It was in January,
on January six of nineteen nineteen, and he was sixty
at this point, and he had a coronary embolism. And
at that point, Wilson had already proposed the League of
Nations in his nineteen eighteen speech before Congress as part
(14:22):
of his fourteen Points plan. Roosevelt had hated that, and
in turn, so did Alice because she pretty much always
followed her father's political leanings, and she rallied very hard
against the US becoming a member of the League of
Nations after her father died, and that the League did
formally form in Geneva, Switzerland in ninety So Teddy's eldest
(14:45):
daughter basically used every single scrap of influence she had
to sway politicians in Washington, d c. Against the idea
of joining the League, and whether it was her efforts
or not, the US never became a member. During the
nineteen twenties, Alice started an affair with the chair of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that was Senator William Bora
of Idaho. The two of them bonded over their shared
(15:08):
admiration of her late father and their love of literature.
She and the Senator with some letters to one another,
and they were deeply in love. As their affair became
less and less of a secret, Alice was dubbed Aurora
Bora Alice by the press and gossip circles, and in
Alice's husband, Nicholas Longworth, became Speaker of the House, and
(15:31):
that same year they also welcomed their one and only child, Paulina,
into the world, and Longworth was completely excited about this
baby and doated on her, even though the odds are
that the infant was in fact fathered by Alice's paramour Bora,
and that Nicholas actually knew that um. In a bittersweet
sort of coincidence, Paulina was born on February, which of
(15:53):
course is Valentine's day, but was also the same day
that Alice's mother and grandmother had died many years Also
in nine, Alice and Nicholas moved into their home at
two thousand nine Massachusetts Avenue Northwest, which is just west
of DuPont Circle. Alice would live there for the rest
of her life, and the house, which was built in
eighty one, would serve as a home base for the
(16:16):
First Daughter's many famed social events that she would host
for the next six decades. Uh In one Alice's husband,
Nicholas Longworth, died, and unfortunately, he didn't really leave much
behind in terms of finances for his widow. His family
money was almost entirely gone, and while her lover, William Bara,
(16:36):
lived another nine years, it doesn't appear that he really
helped his mistress out financially. Two years after her husband's death,
Alice published her memoirs Crowded Hours in an effort to
make some money. And this was also the year that
Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office. So just in case you
don't know the scoop, some people think that he was
(16:58):
much closer, much more closely relate did to Teddy Roosevelt
than he actually was Theodore Roosevelt and FDR only distant related.
They were fourth cousins once removed. I've also seen them
listed as fifth cousin, so h your command of genealogy
and how that works may affect your perception of that UM.
FDR's wife, Eleanor, however, was actually much more closely related
(17:20):
to the former president because Theodore Roosevelt had been her uncle.
Alice was really pretty cutting when it came to Franklin
and Eleanor. She once described Franklin Delanor Roosevelt as one
third SAP and two thirds Eleanor. Alice apparently would do
unflattering imitations of Eleanor at tea parties. I think we
recently got a request for us to do in a
(17:43):
whole episode about the Eleanor Alice spewed. We did, and
it's uh. I debated over it as we were prepping this,
and really at the end of the day that just
boils down to um a lot of descriptions of kind
of petty arguments. So that isn't the best for a
whole episode, but there were a lot of arguments and
(18:04):
a lot of nitpicking. It was one of those things
where like they would gossip to friends about one another
and kind of circulate really insulting things. Uh. You know,
it was a pretty catty situation. Uh. In Alice and
her half brother collaborated as editors on a book of poetry,
(18:27):
and that same year she put the house on Massachusetts
Avenue on the market, although it never sold. Her social
engagements became the invite in Washington, and Alice was pretty
open about her opinions, both political and social, and she
kind of used all of her social events as as
opportunities to broadcast these opinions to really the elite of Washington.
(18:48):
She also licensed her image for use in advertisements for
products like cigarettes and cold cream, and she did all
of this to try to support herself and Paulina. As
we are sort of nearing the end of Alice's life,
let's first pause for a word from one of our sponsors.
(19:11):
So Alice did continue to make political friends throughout her
entire life. That really was sort of her circle. So
she always knew, uh, kind of many people in power,
and she eventually became close friends with Richard Nixon when
he was serving as vice president and then when Nixon
became president, he would often invite Alice who usually went
by Mrs L to the White House. He even hosted
(19:34):
her eighty seventh birthday party there. So even though she
had been banned for a couple of different presidencies, she
was allowed back in eventually, but her close friendship with
Nixon did not survive. The Watergate scandal, Alice sort of
distanced herself from Nixon, and when asked about it, she
would claim that the whole thing, meaning that whole scandal,
had become quote boring. She also became close with the
(19:58):
Kennedy family despite their demo cratic affiliation, and in spite
of her lifeline position as a Republican, Alice supported the
Democratic Party in nineteen sixty four. In nineteen sixty eight.
I wonder how much of that had to do with
like the shifting ideologies of the parties at that point. Uh,
not an insignificant amount. Uh. You know, she was not
(20:20):
a woman who sort of just blindly went down party line.
She really was pretty thoughtful about her positions. She would
get sort of so adamant and passionate about them that
you might think that she had lost sight of the
forest for the trees in some cases, But I think
she really did, you know, welcome the ideas of other people.
(20:41):
She liked to have political discourse, so I'm sure when
someone made a case for a situation that she thought
was certainly sensible and made sense to her, she didn't
necessarily see it as changing sides so much as no,
I'm still going on with my convictions. They just happened
to align with these people at the moment. Uh. Another
(21:02):
tragedy struck in ninety seven when Alice's daughter Paulina died
from a combination of sleeping pills and alcohol UH sometimes
referred to as a purposeful overdose, sometimes couched in slightly
more nebulous terms, but Pullina did leave behind a daughter,
Joanna Storm, and Alice actually raised her granddaughter after Pullina's death.
(21:26):
As the years were on, that house outside of the
DuPont's circle grew shabby and cluttered, but it really didn't
seem to concern the aging first daughter so much. She
let the yard grow over and the house filled up
with papers. She started spending the majority of her time
on the third floor with her books and a well
stocked refrigerator for snacks during reading breaks. And it does
(21:48):
sound a little like gray gardens, but she did not
go completely broke. Yeah, and she still had servants. She
had made a rule that the servants weren't allowed to
stay at the house because she didn't like being awakened early.
One story goes that the servants would arrive at eleven
and she would usually tell them to go away, and
she would go back to sleep until one o'clock in
the afternoon. Um but yeah, she wasn't like isolated without people.
(22:14):
Um but Mrs l did start to lose her mental
edge eventually, but her granddaughter Joanna visited frequently. They stayed close,
and Joanna also sort of started this effort to make
sure that Alice's friends were stopping by and that Alice
wasn't like a lonely old lady in a crumbling house.
She really wanted her to stay social. Alice died in
(22:35):
a week after her birthday at the age of nineties six,
in accordance with her wishes. She had a very quiet burial,
and she had outlived all of her half siblings from
her father's second marriage. Yeah, it's kind of one of
those interesting things. You usually expect the wild party child
to burn out much earlier than the rest of the family,
but she just kept on going. And she was a
(22:57):
spitfire the whole time. Um. In her memoirs, Alice, who
very obviously to everyone loved and admired her father, was
pretty open though that she struggled with some resentment with him,
particularly about his move west after her mother died. She
really felt that he had kind of abandoned her as
an infant, and she also admitted that she had been
(23:17):
really jealous and angry at having to vie for his
attention to compete with his second wife once he did
come back to New York and then their five children, Like,
she just felt like she never got to have her
father to herself. She wrote in her diary while she
lived at the White House, quote, father doesn't care for me,
that is to say, one eighth as much as he
does for the other children. I pray for a fortune.
(23:41):
I care for nothing except to amuse myself in a
charmingly expensive way. Yeah. It sort of reads like such
a classic psychological study of like a child that acts
out for attention. Um and sort of, you know, her
feelings of being ignored and unwanted kind of lead to
that behavior that really informed her entire life. Uh. But
(24:03):
one of the things that I really love about Alice
is that she is as quotable as can be. What
really made her standouts throughout all of her years were
her amazing quips, some of which were very catty and
some of which were just sort of wonderfully witty. So
I thought to close out we would cover a few favorites. Uh,
do you want to tell the first one? Yeah, So
(24:23):
Joe McCarthy tried to call her by her first name,
and she said, no, Senator McCarthy, you are not going
to call me Alice. The truckman, the trashman, and the
policeman on the black may call me Alice, but you
may not. I sort of love that. Uh. The one
that I really love her quote is that she once said,
my specialty is detached malevolence her life so much. Her
(24:51):
life philosophy was bill what's empty, empty, what's full? And
scratch where it itches. It seems like very sensible at Yeah,
we um. She reminds me a bit of of Edna
st Vincent Malaya. And and we actually got a letter
after our episode on Edna say Vincent Malay from somebody
(25:13):
who was kind of chagrined that we had talked about
her shenanigans. In a gleeful way, whereas if if she
had been a man, we would not have talked about
it in a gleeful way. And like there was a
whole aspect of it had to do with her being
expelled from school and allowed back in because she was
a celebrity, which is not totally germane to this episode.
(25:33):
But I think part of that is that, uh, when
when Alice was behaving this way, she was challenging the
status quo, and men doing similar things were maintaining the
status quo. So that is why when women quote misbehave
sometimes we sound quite gleeful about it. But I love
(25:55):
anybody that's a spitfire. Um, But I can totally see
as well how she was just a pain in the neck,
like I can't. Can you imagine if a modern president,
like if we heard a story of like President Bush's
twins when he was in office or President Obama's girls
just jamming themselves into meetings, like we would never hear
(26:17):
the end of it in the press, and how horrifying
it was. But Alice did this stuff and somehow people
just loved her so much that they thought it was hilarious.
It's like, oh, she interrupted, another important meeting in the
White House, like who would do that? Well? Making her
a good Will ambassador is one of those things where
I'm like, what where are you thinking? That really sounds
(26:37):
like she's just gonna pants the ambassador from China and
then runaway giggling, and that would just be horrible for introductions. Yeah,
so in that regard it might be good. Am I
do this with a question mark. I'm not actually saying
this is a good thing, but her having taken up
with long Worth, with this man who was much older,
and kind of having that little adventure on that trip
(26:59):
may have saved some embarrassment. Yeah she was occupied and
could not pant somebody, But yeah she I could see
where she would be a lot to deal with. And
it is interesting. One of the articles that I read
for this was actually written by a biographer of hers,
but it was contextualizing it, uh in sort of looking
(27:23):
at modern president's children and how there is to some
degree this this unspoken rule of like you leave the
kids out of it and you don't really focus on them. Uh.
But that like remember when President Obama's children, I don't
remember which of the girls it was like rolled her
eyes at some event and people were all in a
twitter about it, and she's like, are you kidding me?
(27:45):
Do you know what Alice Roosevelt did? Just like if
a thirteen year old girl rolls her eyes like you
consider yourself lucky on that one because it could be
like it was in the early nineteen hundreds, which is
just sort of a funny way to couch it. Thank
(28:05):
you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you have heard an email address or of Facebook you
are l or something similar over the course of today's episode,
since it is from the archive that might be out
of date now, you can email us at history podcast
at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History and
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast,
(28:28):
the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
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