December 8, 2019 • 39 mins
Like parents and children often do, Theodore Roosevelt and his daughter Alice butted heads in part because they were so similar—both passionate, curious, strong-willed, and intelligent. Throughout her upbringing (tag-teamed by TR’s sister and his second wife), her teenage years in the White House, and her marriage to a congressman, Alice never, ever made things easy for herself or her father. Did TR ever master the art of handling his fiercely spirited daughter? Maybe not, but he definitely had some creative ways of trying.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
History Versus is a production of I Heart Radio and
Mental Flaws. In nineteen o five, a group of American
politicians set off to the Far East. The diplomatic delegation
included seven senators, more than twenty Congressman and Secretary of
(00:20):
War William Howard Taft, But there was one member in
particular who captivated the press. The twenty one year old
woman had been acting up the whole trip, setting off
firecrackers and shooting her revolver from the back of the
train before they even left the country. But her biggest
scandal happened aboard the steamship Manchuria. The young woman plunged
into the ship's swimming tank, fully clothed in a white
(00:42):
silk skirt and blouse. She had reportedly jumped on a
dare one that she had proposed herself. It would have
been scandalous behavior for any woman at that time, but
this prankster wasn't just any woman. This was Alice Roosevelt,
the oldest child of President Theodore Roosevelt. From Mental Flaws
(01:09):
and I Heart Radio, This is History Versus, a podcast
about how your favorite historical figures faced off against their
greatest foes. I'm your host Aaron McCarthy and for this round,
repeating t R against his daughter, Alice, a constant source
of stress for the twenty six President. Roosevelt once said,
I can be President of the United States, or I
can attend to Alice. So how did tr juggle running
(01:30):
the country with raising his oldest daughter. We're about to
find out. The Roosevelt family had all the elements of
a happy, conventional household. Theodore Roosevelt married his second wife
and childhood sweetheart, Edith Kermit Caro in Together they had
five children, Theodore the Third or Ted Jr. Kermit, Ethel, Archibald,
(01:52):
and Quentin. Growing up, the boys enjoyed boxing with their father,
while Ethel stuck to more ladylike activities like needlework. And
then there was Alice. Her brothers would tease her that
they didn't have the same mom as her, and that
like she found it very cruel and it was something
she was really sensitive about. That's Holly Fry from stuff
(02:12):
you missed in history class. And as she explains, Alice's
relationship with Edith wasn't any smoother. They fall into use
in some ways the classic kind of step mother step
daughter roles that we have come to expect from Disney films,
and a lot of that was sort of this forever
(02:32):
cloud that hung over the household of his first wife, Alice.
Before starting his life with Edith Teddy, Roosevelt had married
Alice Hathaway Lee in eighteen eighty. The daughter of a banker,
Alice Sr. Was known in Massachusetts social circles for her
charm and beauty. On meeting her, tr wrote, as long
as I live, I shall never forget how sweetly she
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looked and how prettily she agrees with me. Alice became
pregnant in eight eight three and gave to a healthy
baby girl named Alice Lee Roosevelt on February With a
lovely Boston socialite for a mother and an ambitious New
York politician for a father, Baby Alice should have had
it all, and then the unthinkable happened. Shortly after the
(03:16):
delivery Alice Senor fell Ill Teddy, who had been in
Albany working on a law of the day of his
daughter's birth, rushed home to New York City after receiving
news of her condition. He held her in his arms
as she passed in and out of consciousness. She had
what was then known as Bright's disease. Alice Hathaway Roosevelt
died on February at the age of twenty two. It
(03:40):
was the second loss tr had sustained that day. Just
hours earlier, his mother, Mitty Roosevelt, had succumbed to typhoid
fever barely two days old. Alice's life was already embroiled
in tragedy. If you put yourself in that position of
losing apparent that you're very close to and your sins today,
it's pretty me to understand that it completely changed his
(04:03):
relationship with the world, not just his new child, but
they were setting up this beautiful life that they had
planned out, and now everywhere he went was the memory
of his wife that had passed, and like that was
a big part of why he kind of decided that
he was gonna leave and go out with Just a
few months after his daughter was born, tr left her
(04:26):
with his sister Anna, who went by the nicknames Baby
and By, and retreated to the Dakota bad Lands. He
rarely inquired about Alice in the letters he mailed home.
He returned briefly to New York for business when she
was about five months old, and even in person, he
had trouble acknowledging her. He called her Baby Lee because
he couldn't bear to say her mother's name. But though
(04:48):
it wasn't always a parent, Alice was loved. One of
the first hints of fatherly affection from t R comes
from a letter dated September. He wrote, I hope Mousey
Kins will be very cunning. I shall dearly love her.
But the most stable source of love in Baby Alice's
life was Aunt Babie. That was one of those relationships
(05:09):
that ended up really really setting the tone of Alice's
life forever, because Baby became what she referred to as
like her biggest influence as a child. You know, it's
crazy to hear about how much influence Baby had on
Alice but also on tr and how often she would
just like drop everything to you know, help him make
(05:31):
political connections or do whatever it was that he needed done.
She was really his most trusted confidant for pretty much
the rest of his life. Like he would go to
her with personal decisions, with political decisions, with you know,
any kind of thing that he was ruminating and get
his sister's opinion, which is kind of interesting, Like there
(05:52):
I feel like there are not that many instances in history,
and then with as much power as him, who like
the first order of business when their face to the
decision is let me call my sister. Baby's influence on
Teddy lasted throughout his career as president. He often referred
to his sister's home as the other White House, and
(06:12):
according to their niece Eleanor Roosevelt, he made few serious
political decisions without talking with her first. Alice later remarked,
if Auntie Bay had been a man, she would have
been president, but she wasn't the only woman who mattered
to t R. Almost two years after Alice Sr. Died,
Edith kurmit Carow entered his life, or re entered it rather.
(06:32):
The couple likely had a teenage romance, and Edith ran
in the same social circles as Theodore. Edith was a
natural choice for his next wife. Her potential as a
stepmother was less of a concern for him. Alice had
lived with Baby for the first three years of her life,
and Tierra assumed things would stay that way even after
he remarried, but Edith had other plans. Edith was consisted
(06:55):
that child will become my child. She will come and
live with us, and we will be one big family together.
That which sounds really lovely, but it was fraught with sension.
According to historian Edmund Morris, tr Edith and Baby came
up with a plan to live together for a time
at Sagamore Hill, the Roosevelt's famous Long Island estate, to
ease Alice's transition to a new family. That family got
(07:16):
even bigger with the birth of Theodore Junior. Edith wanted
to be a good parent to her stepdaughter, but raising
a headstrong child like Alice wasn't always easy. When Alice
was a teenager, Edith, along with Teddy, proposed sending her
to a conservative boarding school in New York City. According
to historians Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Alice protested, saying,
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if you send me, I will humiliate you. I will
do something that will shame you. I tell you I will.
When she was older, Alice often spent time with Baby, and,
as Kathleen Dalton writes in her book Theodore Roosevelt a
strenuous life, she and Edith had very different ways of
managing Alice. Baby was generous, rarely hesitating to give her
(07:58):
niece whatever she wanted, while Edith believed children needed discipline.
As Alice grew into a young woman, her resemblance to
her mother became unmistakable, which made parenting her even harder
for Edith. It brings my heart when I read that
Edith a bad mouth Alice to her daughter Alice. It
was kind of a question where that was very pretty,
(08:18):
but she was also really stupid, like who looked say
that to a child? There was also this problem where,
of course, you know, theoter Roosevelt was out traveling a
lot of the times, which the one person who really
loved both of these women could not serve as any
kind of butter or mediator. They were just kind of
left to fight it out on their own. Tier also
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saw his late wife and his daughter. The distance that
existed between them Analis was a baby, along with his
refusal to talk about her mother, lingered throughout her childhood.
She would later say, I think it is true to
say that my father didn't want me to be a
guilty burden. He obviously felt guilty about it. Otherwise he
would have said at least once that I had another parent.
(09:00):
The curious thing is that he never seemed to realize
that I was perfectly aware of it and developing a
resentment tears. Aloofness wasn't the only reason Alis didn't see
more of her father. He was also hard at work
pursuing a political career. He served as both governor of
New York and Vice President of the United States while
Alice was a teenager. Then, in one following William McKinley's assassination,
(09:22):
Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as president. The roosevelts, we're
going to the White House. We'll be right back. At
the start of his presidency, Tira was a father to
six kids, ranging an age from three to seventeen. The
(09:42):
nation hadn't seen a presidential family quite like the Roosevelt
clan before. The children treated their new home as their
personal playground, the rollers getting down the hardwood floors, venturing
into crawl spaces, and throwing spitballs at a painting of
Andrew Jackson a crime. Tr put them on trial for
he found them. T Roosevelt's sons, Quentin and Archie, remembers
(10:03):
of what was called the White House Gang, which met
in the building's attic. Tr was an honorary member in
case the kids weren't enough of a handful on their own.
Teddy and Edith also had a menagerie of pets to
worry about. The family animals included, at one point or another,
a lizard, a bear, a badger, a hyena, a one
legged rooster, a pony, and guinea pigs. Here's the funny
(10:26):
story about the pony, whose name was algon Quin. One day,
when Archie was feeling ill, someone some sources say was
Quentin and Tier's other son, Kermit, while others say it
was footman Charles Reader decided to bring the animal up
to his room to cheer him up. Reportedly, the horse
was so fascinated by his reflection in the elevator mirror
that they had trouble getting him out. His oldest son,
(10:48):
ted almost had a nervous breakdown when he was a
kid because he felt so much pressure. And his you know, son,
Kermit was kind of a wild child, but in his
own way, like he was the one that wanted to
go to Africa with his dad and shoot things. And
I think her stuff. Sister Ethel was probably the most
chill of them all. She was like, I didn't want
to be in the spotlight, wanted to be super helpful
(11:08):
and then the two youngest boys, Archie and Clinton, sound
a little bit like a very fun hell on wheels.
They sound like a very fun sildren to read about.
But maybe not with Even though she was the oldest,
Alice got into the most trouble of them all. And
so Alice in the meantime, she had already before the election,
(11:30):
even started showing up in the press. You know, gossip
magazines loved her because she was a handful. She was
a smoker, which of course frowned upon, and at one
point tr forbid her to smoke under his roof, so
she would just go out on the roof of the
White House. She's like, I'm not under your roof. I'm
not breaking your role. Yeah, I'm technically abiding to the
(11:55):
letter of the law. Um. She would play poker, and
she would bet on horses, and she you know, would
drink a lot, and she was photographed doing all these things.
She would ride in cars with adults men with no chaperone,
which of course was terribly scandalous. Um. She would also
(12:15):
get in street races in her car in Washington, like
in the nation's capital, she keep drag racing down the street.
At one point she announced that she was turning pagans
just to kind of rile up the family. Um. Her
stepmother was very religious that she Alice would tell he
(12:36):
did that she thought Christianity was a form of voodoo.
Sounds like a teenager. The Roosevelt contern had some crazy
sundry issues when it came to pets, but she would
occasionally carry around the snake in her pocket that she
named Emily Spinach. That is a great snake name. It is.
It's good. I feel like that's also a good punk
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fan's name. So if any history rickly minded punk band,
they're looking for an as a good a good one
to spang Emily Spinach. The snake was named after Alice's
an Emily, because it was as thin as she was.
It was, also, in Alice's words, greenest spinach. So how
did the public react? In a weird way? They kind
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of loved her. She was called Princess Alice and the press,
and I mean, I think, you know, some of of
Teddy Roosevelt's appeal at the time was that he was, like, sure,
he was a politician, but he was also this you know, rugged,
kind of old school to use the phrase man's man
like he did go out in the hunt, and he
(13:43):
had no, no hesitation to go out into the wilderness
by himself. And so she in some way seemed like
the city extension of him. Right like that she was
also she had her father's wildness, and so there was
definitely some appeal in that. Like she started a trend
in color uh popular colors at the time because she
(14:05):
had she loved this particular shade of like a grayish blue,
and it started to become Alice blue. And suddenly you
saw Alice blue dresses, hats, accessories, everything. Alice Roosevelt was
the original white House wild child. Newspapers never missed an
opportunity for her name, whether in relation to a real
(14:25):
event like the hundreds of parties she attended, or a
piece of unsubstantiated gossip. Even the men who claimed to
have proposed to her were considered newsworthy. The press couldn't
get enough of Princess Alice, and they weren't the only ones.
Musicians wrote waltz is inspired by her. Her likeness was
put on postcards. Right now, we're listening to the song
(14:46):
Alice Blue Gown. Her father, on the other hand, was
less enamored of her behavior Tire often wrote posterity letters
for historians to study, and his daughter, who frequently did
things that threatened his reputation, was often on the receiving end.
In one letter, he said, do you know how much
talk there has been recently in the newspapers about your
(15:09):
betting and courting notoriety with that unfortunate snake. Do try
to remember that to court notoriety by bizarre actions is
underbred and unladylike. She spent lots of money, so much that,
according to Dalton, Edith once asked her, how would you
like to have Archie give up college to pay your debts?
(15:30):
The New York Times declared when she visited a horse race,
she has as much an attraction as the thoroughbreds. Before
the nineteen o four election, Alice said she got a
terrible lecture from father and mother on the family and
my extravagance and lack of morals. But Alice did make
some attempts to please her family. She became engaged in politics,
reading books about child labor, and going with her father
(15:52):
to meet important officials. At home, she tried getting along
with Edith and helped her with chores. But these streaks
of good behavior and never lasted long no matter how
she acted. Alice felt like an outcast among the Roosevelts,
and that became a self fulfilling prophecy. Father doesn't care
for me, that is to say, one eighth as much
as he does the other children, she wrote in her
(16:14):
diary in we are not in the least congenial. Why
should he pay any attention to me or the things
that I live for, except to look upon them with disapproval. Still,
when a congressman's wife criticized Alice for her bumptious awkward manners,
tr Dalton writes personally confronted his daughter's critic. But Alice
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was more similar to her father than she may have
felt at times. They both shared strong convictions, sharp intelligence,
and a passion for learning. Tire had a special fondness
for his like minded daughter, but with such big personalities
sharing the White House and the headlines, they were bound
to clash. It's been said that tr always wanted to
be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding,
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and the baby at every christening. One of the reasons
that they did butt heads is because they both were
kind of um spotlight grabbers. And she also felt like
she was competing with his wife and her five other
children for his attention when she kind of wanted more
than she was getting um and I'm sure that is
(17:18):
part of why she would do ridiculous things like margin
to his office when he was beating with his of state. Uh.
And it eventually reached the fever pitch where he kind
of came up with an idea that would get her
out of his hair for a little while, which is
was making her a good will ambassador. After unsuccessful attempts
to reign, Allison Tira could see that she needed an outlet.
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Sending hers as representative to important events had the added
bonus of granting him peace and quiet at home. Her
biggest job yet came in when she was twenty one.
The US was organizing a good will trip to Asia,
and she was to serve as a goodwill ambassador, with
stops planned for Hawaii, Japan, China, in the Philippines. It
was to be the largest political delegation from the United
(18:03):
States to ever visit the area. The trip turned out
to be historic in another way. Never before I had
a first daughter been given a role of such importance,
and Alice certainly made the most of it. She was
very good at dealing with other people that were empowered.
She was very good at at representing her father in
so far as she completely supported him, and and it
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was very eloquent. She was well spoken, even though she
always said she couldn't really like public speaking. She really liked,
you know, meeting with people and discussing what he was
doing with them. But the flip side is that she
was traveling with Haft, who was allegedly the person that
was going to be in charge of keeping her in line,
which I don't know why anyone thought that would work.
But also a group of congressmen, and so there were
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a lot of people on this trip and Alice kind
of exploited every opportunity to party with all of them.
The party and culminated with Alice's infamous plunge into the
steamship's pool. She dared a congressman to do the same,
and he did, which was considered completely scandalous, although she
(19:12):
always reacted about by saying it would only have been
really outrageous if I had taken off my clothes. We
were both fully dressed. It was fine to make matters
even more scandalous outlets reported that it was Washington playboy
Nicholas Longworth she had course to jump in the pool
with her. Though Alison Longworth did spend a lot of
time together on that trip, she later admitted it had
(19:32):
been a different congressman who accepted her dare. She also
didn't really seem to care what people thought of her,
and so she was willing to do almost anything in
the interest of having fun and continuing to kind of
court that image that she had of being, you know,
TR's wild child daughter. Is there anything on record about
(19:53):
how her father reacted to that little dip in the pool?
I mean, I think I think about my father's reactions
all the stuff that I did when I was a
kid and still do, and theologist because my stupid kid
and I am, that's in a very similar reaction. Oh
stupid kid. You kind of wonder if he was just like,
(20:15):
that's Alice, can't controller, can't do it all. Yeah, He's like,
that's tasts problem right now. At this point, future President
William Howard Taft was the country's Secretary of War. Japan
and Russia were in an expensive conflict, and part of
Taft's mission was to have a meeting with the Japanese
Prime Minister. Babysitting should have been the least of his concerns.
(20:38):
It had to have an age to like to measurably
during that trip. I mean, I can't even imagine how
stressful that I would have. Band Like, here is my
drunken wild child. You're in charge of keeping track of her,
and you have to do it while traveling with a
bunch of men. She's going to flirt with and also
make important political deals while you're not worrying about my
(21:01):
wild child daughter. Yeah, exactly if you were to think
about something similar happening in the modern instance, right, Like,
it's hard to come up with an equivalent of a
president handing there this behaving child off to hear someone
else and just be like, keep an eye on my kid,
who's gonna carry does the whole way by the way
(21:24):
that she's just gonna pull out on a whim and
shoot it things, shoot at the sky. Yeah, I cannot
imagine the stress the chaps felt at that time. I
feel like he must have given up at a certain point. Again,
just like her parents, Taft was probably like, I can
only do so much here, my stupid kid. I think
(21:47):
because she lost her mother so early, and because I'm
sure the president realized that there was this gap in
her life and that not only had she lost her mother,
but he never of her mother. So I think that
probably set into his willingness to just let her be
the kids she was. He also valued the fact that
(22:09):
she was smart as a whip and that she was independent,
Like you liked that about her. It's why he liked
his sister baby like that, she too was really smart
and very independent. And so I mean he admires the
very qualities that were becoming a pain in the neck
for his life. So there's a juxtaposition there, um, And
I mean that's something that ship fled to all his kids,
(22:31):
which said similar things to his his son's you know,
like whatever you do, like, do not lose your smartness.
That's the most important part of you. You're very smart
and clever. So I think while he was probably publicly going, hey,
that's my stupid kid, he was also in his private
library going but I'm kind of proud of that. Even
when she appeared to be having too much of a
good time, Alice never wasted an opportunity to gain political acumen.
(22:55):
Her wild world tour, along with her adventures in the
White House, shaped her into a woman that didn't just
hob nob with political heavy hitters, but could hold her
own against them. I mean, she was barging in on
meetings that should have had like major security. Additionally, you know,
when she's traveling with all these congressmen and other people
that have you know, are high ranking within the political structure,
(23:17):
and she's getting drunk with them, I could only imagine
what she learned along the way. And she, I mean,
to her credit, was very smart and she took in
all that information and synthesized it into a pretty impressive
knowledge of the workings of not just politics like how
they appear on paper, but really how relationships among politicians worked.
(23:39):
Political lessons weren't the only things Alice gained on her
trip to Asia. She would go on to marry the
man who newspapers falsely reported her jumping into the pool
with Ohio State Senator Nicholas Longworth, who was responsible for
the long Worth Act of nineteen o two, which regulated
municipal bonds in Ohio. So six, she gets married to
Nick Longworth, who was he He was first a lawyer
(24:01):
and then he's now Ohio senator. He was also a
notorious woman either. He was, like al was, a party person.
He was super fun, He dressed really cute. He was
adorable at charming, you know. For Alice, who was feeling
pretty stifled in the White House, to have someone who
was in politics and was in a position of power
(24:24):
because he was also like yes, left party to her,
that was wildly appealing. The Longworth personality isn't discussed as
much as Alice's. He wasn't afraid to indulge in body behavior.
For example, according to one story, when a member of
the House ran his hand over long worth S bald
head and said, nice and smooth, feels just like my
wife's bottom, Longworth touched his head and replied, yes, so
(24:47):
it does. He was also pretty open about the fact
that he was a ladies man. I mean, he and
Alice were kidred spirits in many regards. I think the
one really good thing in their match, which had it problems,
was that they sought each other, you know what I mean,
Like they understood the other person in ways that I
think a lot of people who were more concerned with
(25:07):
propriety would never have understood. In nineteen o six, Alice
Mary Nicholas Longworth in a lavish ceremony worthy of America's princess.
She walked down the aisle on her father's arm, wearing
lace from the dress her birth mother had worn to
her wedding twenty six years earlier. She chose to have
no bridesmaids waiting for her at the altar. Instead, she
commanded the undivided attention of the one thousand guests in attendance.
(25:31):
She cut the cake with the Military Aids sword. After
the ceremony, Edith reportedly told her stepdaughter, I want you
to know that I'm glad to see you go. You've
never been anything but trouble. Lucky for her, Alice didn't
take the comment personally and blamed it on the stress
of the wedding. The first daughter was officially Mrs Alice Longworth,
(25:53):
the wife of an important politician, But if anyone thought
Mary life would change Alice's rambunctious ways, they did know
her well enough. She continued getting into trouble well into adulthood.
One day, when she was feeling bored in the Capital's
gallery at the House of Representatives, she slipped attack on
the chair of an unnamed gentleman. The New York Times
(26:14):
reported that when he sat down, like the burst of
a bubble on the fountain, like the bolts from the blue,
like the ball from the cannon, he sprang into the
ambient atmosphere, painfully, conscious he had come into close contact
with something sharp. He seemed angry. He glared around, but
the president's daughter was looking the other way. There's also
(26:35):
the story of how she welcomed her father's successor by
bearing a voodoo doll on the White House grounds before
moving out. She was supposedly banned from the Taft White
House after that. Later in life, she was quoted as saying,
I'm amused, and I hope amusing. I've always believed in
the adage that the secret to eternal youth is arrested development.
(26:56):
Back in that day, in theory, a woman would get
married and kind of settled down. And it didn't seem
like there was any settling down for Alice. No, she
stayed her shame self. She was never the like shy
and retiring violet type. I think at that point, you
know she had never lived a life like that. She didn't,
(27:18):
But how would she even switch years to that? Because
it wasn't anything you've ever known. You know, she had
had had really a lot more freedom than those young
women of the time, and just was not interested in
giving that up. I don't think even if Alis was
able to find ways to keep her inner child alive,
she couldn't escape adulthood completely. I've been dealing with the
(27:40):
reality of her marriage, and I talk about your marriage.
It's not like the fairytale romance marriage where like he
swept her off her feet and they, you know, lived
happily ever after, devoted to one another. They understood each other,
and so they were very much the stee people that
they were before they ever said abouts. So they bought
(28:01):
it fits because they were both pretty strong, lived and
kind of outgoing, outrageous people. But there was also some
infidelity on both sides, which we didn't really seem to mind.
I'm sure there were some arguments that were such things
that the bottom line was that they kind of were like, well,
this is how it works for us. Alice and Nicholas
had the same problems that afflict many troubled marriages. Her
(28:25):
husband's playboy lifestyle didn't end on his wedding day, and
he carried out numerous affairs, but there was a bigger
issue looming over their union politics. We'll be right back
(28:46):
in Theodore Roosevelt vied to take the Republican presidential nomination
away from incumbent President William Howard Taft, and tensions in
the long Worth household reached their peak. Nicholas supported Taft. Obviously,
Alice parted her father, and she actually went and appeared
in her home district, her husband's home district of Cincinnati,
(29:08):
with Hiram Johnson, who was her father's vice presidential running mate,
instead of appearing with her husband on his campaign, which
was kind of a slap in the face. Longworth lost
that election, and as the political rift between her and
Nicholas widened, Alice put less effort into maintaining their marriage.
(29:28):
It wasn't long before she started pursuing extramarital affairs of
her own. Alice started an affair in the nineteen twenties
with the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that
was Senator William Bora of Idaho, and that relationship not
only went on for a long time, but they got
really pretty sloppy about concealing it, so it kind of
became public knowledge. She got the nickname Aurora Laura Alice
(29:53):
in gossip papers. I mean they would be seen together
out on the town and they, you know, kind of
freely seemed to be very deeply in love. If you
read their letters, I mean, everybody would want someone to
write about them the way they write about each other.
And she actually had a daughter, Paulina born, which is
recorded as Alice and Nicholas's child. It is very very
(30:15):
highly likely that was in fact Laura's child, although Lalworth
did not seem to care because he was absolutely devoted
to Paulina. In her her very later life, in her nineties,
a reporter asked her if she would get married again,
if she could do it all over, and she said
that she would not. She said, I might live with people,
but not for long. I really wouldn't want to do
anything pondering or noble or taking a position about someone again.
(30:38):
But I might rather just spend the night with them
or an afternoon or substating. In many ways, Alice was
ahead of her time. There was no blueprint for free
spirited women navigating public life in early twentieth century America,
but there was another outspoken, strong lived woman in politics
born the same year as Alice, who arguably succeeded where
(31:01):
Alice struggled. Her cousin, Eleanor. Eleanor Roosevelt was the daughter
of Elliott Bullock Roosevelt, Theodore, Roosevelt's younger brother. She lost
both of her parents at a young age. Her mother
died of diphtheria when she was just eight years old.
Two years later, her father, an alcoholic, jumped from a
window while suffering from alcohol withdrawal induced delirium, then had
(31:21):
a seizure and died. She ended up spending a lot
of time at Sagamore Hill with her uncle tr and
it was there that she developed a lifelong rivalry with Alice.
Eleanor would wed her uncle's fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
of the Hyde Park, Roosevelt's Alice would ways say that
those weren't the real Roosevelt um Theodore, and Baby's regard
(31:44):
for their niece likely fueled Alice's jealousy. Dalton explains that
in Baby's eyes, personable, politically minded Eleanor was more roosevelt
Ian than unpolished Alice. Tr would point to Eleanor's respectable
conduct as an example for his daughter to aspire to that.
Alice had no interest in being more like her cousin,
and when FDR entered the White House she made those
(32:05):
feelings especially clear. She would also really really garbage, unkind
impressions of Eleanor at parties. I can't imagine being on
the receiving end of someone with saus the sharp and
unkind wit uh. And even late in her life, like
when she had already come down a lot and said
a lot of nice things about people that she used
(32:26):
to be pretty unkind about, said, I'm probably bad about
people who have no gold, fine and marvelous thoughts. That's
so depressing. I could never stand a little pious family
things that my sanctimonious kind of used to you. But
they're all dead now. She held her dad in such
high esteem and to some degree put him on a pedestal,
(32:47):
which I think a lot of people have over the years.
But her devotion was utterly unwavering, to the point that
basically there was Teddy Roosevelt and there was the rest
of the world, and no one else could measure up.
Alice lost her father in nineteen nine and her husband
in nine. In nineteen fifty seven, her daughter Paulina overdosed
from sleeping pills at age thirty one, leaving behind a
(33:09):
ten year old daughter named Joanna. Alice fought for custody
of her grandchild and one in many ways she kind
of fulfilled a similar role that aunt By had done
for her, making it a family tradition of really strong, independent,
very outspoken women raising the next generation. Yeah, and then
you have to wonder if maybe she had some more
(33:30):
respect for Edith after that situation. I do think life's experience,
and in particular her experience reading Paulina and then Joanna,
really did shift how she thought about her relationship with
Edith and how both of them handled it, even without
the men in her life connecting her to that world.
Alice lived the rest of her life in Washington, d C.
(33:51):
And stayed involved in politics. She and Nick had moved
it to a house at to Con Circle, and that
home was the site of a lot of gathering and
a lot of her true influence. We probably won't ever
know because it wasn't documented. It was largely exerted in
this social setting. Although she was certainly a local supporter
(34:13):
of various politicians over the years, very vocal sporter of Mixon,
she also came to be known as the other Washington
Mondument because she was recognized as a significant figure in Washington,
which automatically would become with an influence. Alice's later years
were only slightly less exciting than her youth had been.
She made friends with people across the political spectrum. Nixon
(34:36):
would often call her up from the White House, and
according to some friends, Alison Robert Kennedy had a thing
for each other despite their forty year age gap, but
she didn't extend her affections to just anyone. She notably
refused to meet with Jimmy Carter, the last setting president
in her lifetime. In his eulogy for Alice, Carter wrote,
she had style, she had grace, and she had a
(34:59):
sense of humor that can generations of political newcomers to
Washington wondering which was worse to be skewered by her
wit were to be ignored by her. Alice Roosevelt Longworth
died on February and age. Decades after her death and
more than a century since she last occupied the White House,
her legacy as first daughter is more relevant than ever.
(35:22):
She was the first in a long line of presidential
children that hit the spotlight. You know, she was the first,
the first first daughter who had like this, this sort
of ambassador goodwill situation. She was really one of the
first ones that became a focus of the press, and
(35:45):
even quoted that focus. It was like, yes, of course,
look at me in my ridiculous behavior. She kind of
shifted the way we think about the leadership of our
country and its family. I find that aspect of politics
completely fascinating period, like the fact that once someone is
in politics, we scrutinized their kids. They're distant relatives there,
(36:08):
but that to mean he's a really interesting thing. And
she was part of building that idea that that it
was pressworthy to cover the doings of a of a
child of the president. She also played a major part
in shaping her father's legacy, even if he didn't always
show her the affection she craved and didn't always approve
of the way she acted. Tr could always count on
(36:30):
having Alice in his corner because of how deeply she
loved her father, and because she outlived him, of course,
she really was able to find of help continue to
bolster and shape his image as time went on, and
ensure in many ways that the tr that we think
about now is the TR we think about now? Like
(36:51):
she continued to always speak of him and write about him,
and only the most praising ways, even when she would
say things like he always wanted to be the center
of attention. So I guess the ultimate question is, if
we're looking at t R versus Alice, who's the winner?
(37:16):
Is there a winner? It just feels like a rare
instance where they both sort of want Like he was
able to continue as presidency, and he came out of it,
you know, in many ways historically looking pretty good. She
was able to live a very lovely life. She was
very smart and ascute in terms of business as her
husband had passed, and she was almost immediately thinking about
(37:39):
way she could ensure that she had plenty of money
to live on going forward. So she wrote her memoirs
at that point and capitalized on that. And she likens
her image to be on things like cold cream and
cigarettes and other products. Um, yeah, they kind of posed
ended up succeeding in life in ways that in some
part we're due to each others behavior even as much
(38:01):
as they So I'm gonna call it a win. Wind
History Versus is hosted by me Aeron McCarthy. This episode
was written by Michelle dead Check with research by me
and additional research by Michael Salgarolo fact checking by Austin Thompson.
(38:24):
Joe Wigan voiced Theodore Roosevelt in this episode. The executive
producers are Aaron McCarthy, Julie Douglas, and Tyler Klang. The
supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The show was edited by
Dylan Fagan and lowber Land Team Special thanks to Holly Fry.
To learn more about this episode and Theodore Roosevelt, check
out our website at mental flush dot com, Slash History Versus.
(38:45):
That's mental flus dot com. Slash h I S t
O R y vs. History Versus is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental Floss. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
History Versus is a production of I Heart Radio and
Mental Flaws. In nineteen o five, a group of American
politicians set off to the Far East. The diplomatic delegation
included seven senators, more than twenty Congressman and Secretary of
(00:20):
War William Howard Taft, But there was one member in
particular who captivated the press. The twenty one year old
woman had been acting up the whole trip, setting off
firecrackers and shooting her revolver from the back of the
train before they even left the country. But her biggest
scandal happened aboard the steamship Manchuria. The young woman plunged
into the ship's swimming tank, fully clothed in a white
(00:42):
silk skirt and blouse. She had reportedly jumped on a
dare one that she had proposed herself. It would have
been scandalous behavior for any woman at that time, but
this prankster wasn't just any woman. This was Alice Roosevelt,
the oldest child of President Theodore Roosevelt. From Mental Flaws
(01:09):
and I Heart Radio, This is History Versus, a podcast
about how your favorite historical figures faced off against their
greatest foes. I'm your host Aaron McCarthy and for this round,
repeating t R against his daughter, Alice, a constant source
of stress for the twenty six President. Roosevelt once said,
I can be President of the United States, or I
can attend to Alice. So how did tr juggle running
(01:30):
the country with raising his oldest daughter. We're about to
find out. The Roosevelt family had all the elements of
a happy, conventional household. Theodore Roosevelt married his second wife
and childhood sweetheart, Edith Kermit Caro in Together they had
five children, Theodore the Third or Ted Jr. Kermit, Ethel, Archibald,
(01:52):
and Quentin. Growing up, the boys enjoyed boxing with their father,
while Ethel stuck to more ladylike activities like needlework. And
then there was Alice. Her brothers would tease her that
they didn't have the same mom as her, and that
like she found it very cruel and it was something
she was really sensitive about. That's Holly Fry from stuff
(02:12):
you missed in history class. And as she explains, Alice's
relationship with Edith wasn't any smoother. They fall into use
in some ways the classic kind of step mother step
daughter roles that we have come to expect from Disney films,
and a lot of that was sort of this forever
(02:32):
cloud that hung over the household of his first wife, Alice.
Before starting his life with Edith Teddy, Roosevelt had married
Alice Hathaway Lee in eighteen eighty. The daughter of a banker,
Alice Sr. Was known in Massachusetts social circles for her
charm and beauty. On meeting her, tr wrote, as long
as I live, I shall never forget how sweetly she
(02:54):
looked and how prettily she agrees with me. Alice became
pregnant in eight eight three and gave to a healthy
baby girl named Alice Lee Roosevelt on February With a
lovely Boston socialite for a mother and an ambitious New
York politician for a father, Baby Alice should have had
it all, and then the unthinkable happened. Shortly after the
(03:16):
delivery Alice Senor fell Ill Teddy, who had been in
Albany working on a law of the day of his
daughter's birth, rushed home to New York City after receiving
news of her condition. He held her in his arms
as she passed in and out of consciousness. She had
what was then known as Bright's disease. Alice Hathaway Roosevelt
died on February at the age of twenty two. It
(03:40):
was the second loss tr had sustained that day. Just
hours earlier, his mother, Mitty Roosevelt, had succumbed to typhoid
fever barely two days old. Alice's life was already embroiled
in tragedy. If you put yourself in that position of
losing apparent that you're very close to and your sins today,
it's pretty me to understand that it completely changed his
(04:03):
relationship with the world, not just his new child, but
they were setting up this beautiful life that they had
planned out, and now everywhere he went was the memory
of his wife that had passed, and like that was
a big part of why he kind of decided that
he was gonna leave and go out with Just a
few months after his daughter was born, tr left her
(04:26):
with his sister Anna, who went by the nicknames Baby
and By, and retreated to the Dakota bad Lands. He
rarely inquired about Alice in the letters he mailed home.
He returned briefly to New York for business when she
was about five months old, and even in person, he
had trouble acknowledging her. He called her Baby Lee because
he couldn't bear to say her mother's name. But though
(04:48):
it wasn't always a parent, Alice was loved. One of
the first hints of fatherly affection from t R comes
from a letter dated September. He wrote, I hope Mousey
Kins will be very cunning. I shall dearly love her.
But the most stable source of love in Baby Alice's
life was Aunt Babie. That was one of those relationships
(05:09):
that ended up really really setting the tone of Alice's
life forever, because Baby became what she referred to as
like her biggest influence as a child. You know, it's
crazy to hear about how much influence Baby had on
Alice but also on tr and how often she would
just like drop everything to you know, help him make
(05:31):
political connections or do whatever it was that he needed done.
She was really his most trusted confidant for pretty much
the rest of his life. Like he would go to
her with personal decisions, with political decisions, with you know,
any kind of thing that he was ruminating and get
his sister's opinion, which is kind of interesting, Like there
(05:52):
I feel like there are not that many instances in history,
and then with as much power as him, who like
the first order of business when their face to the
decision is let me call my sister. Baby's influence on
Teddy lasted throughout his career as president. He often referred
to his sister's home as the other White House, and
(06:12):
according to their niece Eleanor Roosevelt, he made few serious
political decisions without talking with her first. Alice later remarked,
if Auntie Bay had been a man, she would have
been president, but she wasn't the only woman who mattered
to t R. Almost two years after Alice Sr. Died,
Edith kurmit Carow entered his life, or re entered it rather.
(06:32):
The couple likely had a teenage romance, and Edith ran
in the same social circles as Theodore. Edith was a
natural choice for his next wife. Her potential as a
stepmother was less of a concern for him. Alice had
lived with Baby for the first three years of her life,
and Tierra assumed things would stay that way even after
he remarried, but Edith had other plans. Edith was consisted
(06:55):
that child will become my child. She will come and
live with us, and we will be one big family together.
That which sounds really lovely, but it was fraught with sension.
According to historian Edmund Morris, tr Edith and Baby came
up with a plan to live together for a time
at Sagamore Hill, the Roosevelt's famous Long Island estate, to
ease Alice's transition to a new family. That family got
(07:16):
even bigger with the birth of Theodore Junior. Edith wanted
to be a good parent to her stepdaughter, but raising
a headstrong child like Alice wasn't always easy. When Alice
was a teenager, Edith, along with Teddy, proposed sending her
to a conservative boarding school in New York City. According
to historians Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Alice protested, saying,
(07:37):
if you send me, I will humiliate you. I will
do something that will shame you. I tell you I will.
When she was older, Alice often spent time with Baby, and,
as Kathleen Dalton writes in her book Theodore Roosevelt a
strenuous life, she and Edith had very different ways of
managing Alice. Baby was generous, rarely hesitating to give her
(07:58):
niece whatever she wanted, while Edith believed children needed discipline.
As Alice grew into a young woman, her resemblance to
her mother became unmistakable, which made parenting her even harder
for Edith. It brings my heart when I read that
Edith a bad mouth Alice to her daughter Alice. It
was kind of a question where that was very pretty,
(08:18):
but she was also really stupid, like who looked say
that to a child? There was also this problem where,
of course, you know, theoter Roosevelt was out traveling a
lot of the times, which the one person who really
loved both of these women could not serve as any
kind of butter or mediator. They were just kind of
left to fight it out on their own. Tier also
(08:39):
saw his late wife and his daughter. The distance that
existed between them Analis was a baby, along with his
refusal to talk about her mother, lingered throughout her childhood.
She would later say, I think it is true to
say that my father didn't want me to be a
guilty burden. He obviously felt guilty about it. Otherwise he
would have said at least once that I had another parent.
(09:00):
The curious thing is that he never seemed to realize
that I was perfectly aware of it and developing a
resentment tears. Aloofness wasn't the only reason Alis didn't see
more of her father. He was also hard at work
pursuing a political career. He served as both governor of
New York and Vice President of the United States while
Alice was a teenager. Then, in one following William McKinley's assassination,
(09:22):
Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as president. The roosevelts, we're
going to the White House. We'll be right back. At
the start of his presidency, Tira was a father to
six kids, ranging an age from three to seventeen. The
(09:42):
nation hadn't seen a presidential family quite like the Roosevelt
clan before. The children treated their new home as their
personal playground, the rollers getting down the hardwood floors, venturing
into crawl spaces, and throwing spitballs at a painting of
Andrew Jackson a crime. Tr put them on trial for
he found them. T Roosevelt's sons, Quentin and Archie, remembers
(10:03):
of what was called the White House Gang, which met
in the building's attic. Tr was an honorary member in
case the kids weren't enough of a handful on their own.
Teddy and Edith also had a menagerie of pets to
worry about. The family animals included, at one point or another,
a lizard, a bear, a badger, a hyena, a one
legged rooster, a pony, and guinea pigs. Here's the funny
(10:26):
story about the pony, whose name was algon Quin. One day,
when Archie was feeling ill, someone some sources say was
Quentin and Tier's other son, Kermit, while others say it
was footman Charles Reader decided to bring the animal up
to his room to cheer him up. Reportedly, the horse
was so fascinated by his reflection in the elevator mirror
that they had trouble getting him out. His oldest son,
(10:48):
ted almost had a nervous breakdown when he was a
kid because he felt so much pressure. And his you know, son,
Kermit was kind of a wild child, but in his
own way, like he was the one that wanted to
go to Africa with his dad and shoot things. And
I think her stuff. Sister Ethel was probably the most
chill of them all. She was like, I didn't want
to be in the spotlight, wanted to be super helpful
(11:08):
and then the two youngest boys, Archie and Clinton, sound
a little bit like a very fun hell on wheels.
They sound like a very fun sildren to read about.
But maybe not with Even though she was the oldest,
Alice got into the most trouble of them all. And
so Alice in the meantime, she had already before the election,
(11:30):
even started showing up in the press. You know, gossip
magazines loved her because she was a handful. She was
a smoker, which of course frowned upon, and at one
point tr forbid her to smoke under his roof, so
she would just go out on the roof of the
White House. She's like, I'm not under your roof. I'm
not breaking your role. Yeah, I'm technically abiding to the
(11:55):
letter of the law. Um. She would play poker, and
she would bet on horses, and she you know, would
drink a lot, and she was photographed doing all these things.
She would ride in cars with adults men with no chaperone,
which of course was terribly scandalous. Um. She would also
(12:15):
get in street races in her car in Washington, like
in the nation's capital, she keep drag racing down the street.
At one point she announced that she was turning pagans
just to kind of rile up the family. Um. Her
stepmother was very religious that she Alice would tell he
(12:36):
did that she thought Christianity was a form of voodoo.
Sounds like a teenager. The Roosevelt contern had some crazy
sundry issues when it came to pets, but she would
occasionally carry around the snake in her pocket that she
named Emily Spinach. That is a great snake name. It is.
It's good. I feel like that's also a good punk
(12:58):
fan's name. So if any history rickly minded punk band,
they're looking for an as a good a good one
to spang Emily Spinach. The snake was named after Alice's
an Emily, because it was as thin as she was.
It was, also, in Alice's words, greenest spinach. So how
did the public react? In a weird way? They kind
(13:22):
of loved her. She was called Princess Alice and the press,
and I mean, I think, you know, some of of
Teddy Roosevelt's appeal at the time was that he was, like, sure,
he was a politician, but he was also this you know, rugged,
kind of old school to use the phrase man's man
like he did go out in the hunt, and he
(13:43):
had no, no hesitation to go out into the wilderness
by himself. And so she in some way seemed like
the city extension of him. Right like that she was
also she had her father's wildness, and so there was
definitely some appeal in that. Like she started a trend
in color uh popular colors at the time because she
(14:05):
had she loved this particular shade of like a grayish blue,
and it started to become Alice blue. And suddenly you
saw Alice blue dresses, hats, accessories, everything. Alice Roosevelt was
the original white House wild child. Newspapers never missed an
opportunity for her name, whether in relation to a real
(14:25):
event like the hundreds of parties she attended, or a
piece of unsubstantiated gossip. Even the men who claimed to
have proposed to her were considered newsworthy. The press couldn't
get enough of Princess Alice, and they weren't the only ones.
Musicians wrote waltz is inspired by her. Her likeness was
put on postcards. Right now, we're listening to the song
(14:46):
Alice Blue Gown. Her father, on the other hand, was
less enamored of her behavior Tire often wrote posterity letters
for historians to study, and his daughter, who frequently did
things that threatened his reputation, was often on the receiving end.
In one letter, he said, do you know how much
talk there has been recently in the newspapers about your
(15:09):
betting and courting notoriety with that unfortunate snake. Do try
to remember that to court notoriety by bizarre actions is
underbred and unladylike. She spent lots of money, so much that,
according to Dalton, Edith once asked her, how would you
like to have Archie give up college to pay your debts?
(15:30):
The New York Times declared when she visited a horse race,
she has as much an attraction as the thoroughbreds. Before
the nineteen o four election, Alice said she got a
terrible lecture from father and mother on the family and
my extravagance and lack of morals. But Alice did make
some attempts to please her family. She became engaged in politics,
reading books about child labor, and going with her father
(15:52):
to meet important officials. At home, she tried getting along
with Edith and helped her with chores. But these streaks
of good behavior and never lasted long no matter how
she acted. Alice felt like an outcast among the Roosevelts,
and that became a self fulfilling prophecy. Father doesn't care
for me, that is to say, one eighth as much
as he does the other children, she wrote in her
(16:14):
diary in we are not in the least congenial. Why
should he pay any attention to me or the things
that I live for, except to look upon them with disapproval. Still,
when a congressman's wife criticized Alice for her bumptious awkward manners,
tr Dalton writes personally confronted his daughter's critic. But Alice
(16:35):
was more similar to her father than she may have
felt at times. They both shared strong convictions, sharp intelligence,
and a passion for learning. Tire had a special fondness
for his like minded daughter, but with such big personalities
sharing the White House and the headlines, they were bound
to clash. It's been said that tr always wanted to
be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding,
(16:58):
and the baby at every christening. One of the reasons
that they did butt heads is because they both were
kind of um spotlight grabbers. And she also felt like
she was competing with his wife and her five other
children for his attention when she kind of wanted more
than she was getting um and I'm sure that is
(17:18):
part of why she would do ridiculous things like margin
to his office when he was beating with his of state. Uh.
And it eventually reached the fever pitch where he kind
of came up with an idea that would get her
out of his hair for a little while, which is
was making her a good will ambassador. After unsuccessful attempts
to reign, Allison Tira could see that she needed an outlet.
(17:41):
Sending hers as representative to important events had the added
bonus of granting him peace and quiet at home. Her
biggest job yet came in when she was twenty one.
The US was organizing a good will trip to Asia,
and she was to serve as a goodwill ambassador, with
stops planned for Hawaii, Japan, China, in the Philippines. It
was to be the largest political delegation from the United
(18:03):
States to ever visit the area. The trip turned out
to be historic in another way. Never before I had
a first daughter been given a role of such importance,
and Alice certainly made the most of it. She was
very good at dealing with other people that were empowered.
She was very good at at representing her father in
so far as she completely supported him, and and it
(18:26):
was very eloquent. She was well spoken, even though she
always said she couldn't really like public speaking. She really liked,
you know, meeting with people and discussing what he was
doing with them. But the flip side is that she
was traveling with Haft, who was allegedly the person that
was going to be in charge of keeping her in line,
which I don't know why anyone thought that would work.
But also a group of congressmen, and so there were
(18:50):
a lot of people on this trip and Alice kind
of exploited every opportunity to party with all of them.
The party and culminated with Alice's infamous plunge into the
steamship's pool. She dared a congressman to do the same,
and he did, which was considered completely scandalous, although she
(19:12):
always reacted about by saying it would only have been
really outrageous if I had taken off my clothes. We
were both fully dressed. It was fine to make matters
even more scandalous outlets reported that it was Washington playboy
Nicholas Longworth she had course to jump in the pool
with her. Though Alison Longworth did spend a lot of
time together on that trip, she later admitted it had
(19:32):
been a different congressman who accepted her dare. She also
didn't really seem to care what people thought of her,
and so she was willing to do almost anything in
the interest of having fun and continuing to kind of
court that image that she had of being, you know,
TR's wild child daughter. Is there anything on record about
(19:53):
how her father reacted to that little dip in the pool?
I mean, I think I think about my father's reactions
all the stuff that I did when I was a
kid and still do, and theologist because my stupid kid
and I am, that's in a very similar reaction. Oh
stupid kid. You kind of wonder if he was just like,
(20:15):
that's Alice, can't controller, can't do it all. Yeah, He's like,
that's tasts problem right now. At this point, future President
William Howard Taft was the country's Secretary of War. Japan
and Russia were in an expensive conflict, and part of
Taft's mission was to have a meeting with the Japanese
Prime Minister. Babysitting should have been the least of his concerns.
(20:38):
It had to have an age to like to measurably
during that trip. I mean, I can't even imagine how
stressful that I would have. Band Like, here is my
drunken wild child. You're in charge of keeping track of her,
and you have to do it while traveling with a
bunch of men. She's going to flirt with and also
make important political deals while you're not worrying about my
(21:01):
wild child daughter. Yeah, exactly if you were to think
about something similar happening in the modern instance, right, Like,
it's hard to come up with an equivalent of a
president handing there this behaving child off to hear someone
else and just be like, keep an eye on my kid,
who's gonna carry does the whole way by the way
(21:24):
that she's just gonna pull out on a whim and
shoot it things, shoot at the sky. Yeah, I cannot
imagine the stress the chaps felt at that time. I
feel like he must have given up at a certain point. Again,
just like her parents, Taft was probably like, I can
only do so much here, my stupid kid. I think
(21:47):
because she lost her mother so early, and because I'm
sure the president realized that there was this gap in
her life and that not only had she lost her mother,
but he never of her mother. So I think that
probably set into his willingness to just let her be
the kids she was. He also valued the fact that
(22:09):
she was smart as a whip and that she was independent,
Like you liked that about her. It's why he liked
his sister baby like that, she too was really smart
and very independent. And so I mean he admires the
very qualities that were becoming a pain in the neck
for his life. So there's a juxtaposition there, um, And
I mean that's something that ship fled to all his kids,
(22:31):
which said similar things to his his son's you know,
like whatever you do, like, do not lose your smartness.
That's the most important part of you. You're very smart
and clever. So I think while he was probably publicly going, hey,
that's my stupid kid, he was also in his private
library going but I'm kind of proud of that. Even
when she appeared to be having too much of a
good time, Alice never wasted an opportunity to gain political acumen.
(22:55):
Her wild world tour, along with her adventures in the
White House, shaped her into a woman that didn't just
hob nob with political heavy hitters, but could hold her
own against them. I mean, she was barging in on
meetings that should have had like major security. Additionally, you know,
when she's traveling with all these congressmen and other people
that have you know, are high ranking within the political structure,
(23:17):
and she's getting drunk with them, I could only imagine
what she learned along the way. And she, I mean,
to her credit, was very smart and she took in
all that information and synthesized it into a pretty impressive
knowledge of the workings of not just politics like how
they appear on paper, but really how relationships among politicians worked.
(23:39):
Political lessons weren't the only things Alice gained on her
trip to Asia. She would go on to marry the
man who newspapers falsely reported her jumping into the pool
with Ohio State Senator Nicholas Longworth, who was responsible for
the long Worth Act of nineteen o two, which regulated
municipal bonds in Ohio. So six, she gets married to
Nick Longworth, who was he He was first a lawyer
(24:01):
and then he's now Ohio senator. He was also a
notorious woman either. He was, like al was, a party person.
He was super fun, He dressed really cute. He was
adorable at charming, you know. For Alice, who was feeling
pretty stifled in the White House, to have someone who
was in politics and was in a position of power
(24:24):
because he was also like yes, left party to her,
that was wildly appealing. The Longworth personality isn't discussed as
much as Alice's. He wasn't afraid to indulge in body behavior.
For example, according to one story, when a member of
the House ran his hand over long worth S bald
head and said, nice and smooth, feels just like my
wife's bottom, Longworth touched his head and replied, yes, so
(24:47):
it does. He was also pretty open about the fact
that he was a ladies man. I mean, he and
Alice were kidred spirits in many regards. I think the
one really good thing in their match, which had it problems,
was that they sought each other, you know what I mean,
Like they understood the other person in ways that I
think a lot of people who were more concerned with
(25:07):
propriety would never have understood. In nineteen o six, Alice
Mary Nicholas Longworth in a lavish ceremony worthy of America's princess.
She walked down the aisle on her father's arm, wearing
lace from the dress her birth mother had worn to
her wedding twenty six years earlier. She chose to have
no bridesmaids waiting for her at the altar. Instead, she
commanded the undivided attention of the one thousand guests in attendance.
(25:31):
She cut the cake with the Military Aids sword. After
the ceremony, Edith reportedly told her stepdaughter, I want you
to know that I'm glad to see you go. You've
never been anything but trouble. Lucky for her, Alice didn't
take the comment personally and blamed it on the stress
of the wedding. The first daughter was officially Mrs Alice Longworth,
(25:53):
the wife of an important politician, But if anyone thought
Mary life would change Alice's rambunctious ways, they did know
her well enough. She continued getting into trouble well into adulthood.
One day, when she was feeling bored in the Capital's
gallery at the House of Representatives, she slipped attack on
the chair of an unnamed gentleman. The New York Times
(26:14):
reported that when he sat down, like the burst of
a bubble on the fountain, like the bolts from the blue,
like the ball from the cannon, he sprang into the
ambient atmosphere, painfully, conscious he had come into close contact
with something sharp. He seemed angry. He glared around, but
the president's daughter was looking the other way. There's also
(26:35):
the story of how she welcomed her father's successor by
bearing a voodoo doll on the White House grounds before
moving out. She was supposedly banned from the Taft White
House after that. Later in life, she was quoted as saying,
I'm amused, and I hope amusing. I've always believed in
the adage that the secret to eternal youth is arrested development.
(26:56):
Back in that day, in theory, a woman would get
married and kind of settled down. And it didn't seem
like there was any settling down for Alice. No, she
stayed her shame self. She was never the like shy
and retiring violet type. I think at that point, you
know she had never lived a life like that. She didn't,
(27:18):
But how would she even switch years to that? Because
it wasn't anything you've ever known. You know, she had
had had really a lot more freedom than those young
women of the time, and just was not interested in
giving that up. I don't think even if Alis was
able to find ways to keep her inner child alive,
she couldn't escape adulthood completely. I've been dealing with the
(27:40):
reality of her marriage, and I talk about your marriage.
It's not like the fairytale romance marriage where like he
swept her off her feet and they, you know, lived
happily ever after, devoted to one another. They understood each other,
and so they were very much the stee people that
they were before they ever said abouts. So they bought
(28:01):
it fits because they were both pretty strong, lived and
kind of outgoing, outrageous people. But there was also some
infidelity on both sides, which we didn't really seem to mind.
I'm sure there were some arguments that were such things
that the bottom line was that they kind of were like, well,
this is how it works for us. Alice and Nicholas
had the same problems that afflict many troubled marriages. Her
(28:25):
husband's playboy lifestyle didn't end on his wedding day, and
he carried out numerous affairs, but there was a bigger
issue looming over their union politics. We'll be right back
(28:46):
in Theodore Roosevelt vied to take the Republican presidential nomination
away from incumbent President William Howard Taft, and tensions in
the long Worth household reached their peak. Nicholas supported Taft. Obviously,
Alice parted her father, and she actually went and appeared
in her home district, her husband's home district of Cincinnati,
(29:08):
with Hiram Johnson, who was her father's vice presidential running mate,
instead of appearing with her husband on his campaign, which
was kind of a slap in the face. Longworth lost
that election, and as the political rift between her and
Nicholas widened, Alice put less effort into maintaining their marriage.
(29:28):
It wasn't long before she started pursuing extramarital affairs of
her own. Alice started an affair in the nineteen twenties
with the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that
was Senator William Bora of Idaho, and that relationship not
only went on for a long time, but they got
really pretty sloppy about concealing it, so it kind of
became public knowledge. She got the nickname Aurora Laura Alice
(29:53):
in gossip papers. I mean they would be seen together
out on the town and they, you know, kind of
freely seemed to be very deeply in love. If you
read their letters, I mean, everybody would want someone to
write about them the way they write about each other.
And she actually had a daughter, Paulina born, which is
recorded as Alice and Nicholas's child. It is very very
(30:15):
highly likely that was in fact Laura's child, although Lalworth
did not seem to care because he was absolutely devoted
to Paulina. In her her very later life, in her nineties,
a reporter asked her if she would get married again,
if she could do it all over, and she said
that she would not. She said, I might live with people,
but not for long. I really wouldn't want to do
anything pondering or noble or taking a position about someone again.
(30:38):
But I might rather just spend the night with them
or an afternoon or substating. In many ways, Alice was
ahead of her time. There was no blueprint for free
spirited women navigating public life in early twentieth century America,
but there was another outspoken, strong lived woman in politics
born the same year as Alice, who arguably succeeded where
(31:01):
Alice struggled. Her cousin, Eleanor. Eleanor Roosevelt was the daughter
of Elliott Bullock Roosevelt, Theodore, Roosevelt's younger brother. She lost
both of her parents at a young age. Her mother
died of diphtheria when she was just eight years old.
Two years later, her father, an alcoholic, jumped from a
window while suffering from alcohol withdrawal induced delirium, then had
(31:21):
a seizure and died. She ended up spending a lot
of time at Sagamore Hill with her uncle tr and
it was there that she developed a lifelong rivalry with Alice.
Eleanor would wed her uncle's fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
of the Hyde Park, Roosevelt's Alice would ways say that
those weren't the real Roosevelt um Theodore, and Baby's regard
(31:44):
for their niece likely fueled Alice's jealousy. Dalton explains that
in Baby's eyes, personable, politically minded Eleanor was more roosevelt
Ian than unpolished Alice. Tr would point to Eleanor's respectable
conduct as an example for his daughter to aspire to that.
Alice had no interest in being more like her cousin,
and when FDR entered the White House she made those
(32:05):
feelings especially clear. She would also really really garbage, unkind
impressions of Eleanor at parties. I can't imagine being on
the receiving end of someone with saus the sharp and
unkind wit uh. And even late in her life, like
when she had already come down a lot and said
a lot of nice things about people that she used
(32:26):
to be pretty unkind about, said, I'm probably bad about
people who have no gold, fine and marvelous thoughts. That's
so depressing. I could never stand a little pious family
things that my sanctimonious kind of used to you. But
they're all dead now. She held her dad in such
high esteem and to some degree put him on a pedestal,
(32:47):
which I think a lot of people have over the years.
But her devotion was utterly unwavering, to the point that
basically there was Teddy Roosevelt and there was the rest
of the world, and no one else could measure up.
Alice lost her father in nineteen nine and her husband
in nine. In nineteen fifty seven, her daughter Paulina overdosed
from sleeping pills at age thirty one, leaving behind a
(33:09):
ten year old daughter named Joanna. Alice fought for custody
of her grandchild and one in many ways she kind
of fulfilled a similar role that aunt By had done
for her, making it a family tradition of really strong, independent,
very outspoken women raising the next generation. Yeah, and then
you have to wonder if maybe she had some more
(33:30):
respect for Edith after that situation. I do think life's experience,
and in particular her experience reading Paulina and then Joanna,
really did shift how she thought about her relationship with
Edith and how both of them handled it, even without
the men in her life connecting her to that world.
Alice lived the rest of her life in Washington, d C.
(33:51):
And stayed involved in politics. She and Nick had moved
it to a house at to Con Circle, and that
home was the site of a lot of gathering and
a lot of her true influence. We probably won't ever
know because it wasn't documented. It was largely exerted in
this social setting. Although she was certainly a local supporter
(34:13):
of various politicians over the years, very vocal sporter of Mixon,
she also came to be known as the other Washington
Mondument because she was recognized as a significant figure in Washington,
which automatically would become with an influence. Alice's later years
were only slightly less exciting than her youth had been.
She made friends with people across the political spectrum. Nixon
(34:36):
would often call her up from the White House, and
according to some friends, Alison Robert Kennedy had a thing
for each other despite their forty year age gap, but
she didn't extend her affections to just anyone. She notably
refused to meet with Jimmy Carter, the last setting president
in her lifetime. In his eulogy for Alice, Carter wrote,
she had style, she had grace, and she had a
(34:59):
sense of humor that can generations of political newcomers to
Washington wondering which was worse to be skewered by her
wit were to be ignored by her. Alice Roosevelt Longworth
died on February and age. Decades after her death and
more than a century since she last occupied the White House,
her legacy as first daughter is more relevant than ever.
(35:22):
She was the first in a long line of presidential
children that hit the spotlight. You know, she was the first,
the first first daughter who had like this, this sort
of ambassador goodwill situation. She was really one of the
first ones that became a focus of the press, and
(35:45):
even quoted that focus. It was like, yes, of course,
look at me in my ridiculous behavior. She kind of
shifted the way we think about the leadership of our
country and its family. I find that aspect of politics
completely fascinating period, like the fact that once someone is
in politics, we scrutinized their kids. They're distant relatives there,
(36:08):
but that to mean he's a really interesting thing. And
she was part of building that idea that that it
was pressworthy to cover the doings of a of a
child of the president. She also played a major part
in shaping her father's legacy, even if he didn't always
show her the affection she craved and didn't always approve
of the way she acted. Tr could always count on
(36:30):
having Alice in his corner because of how deeply she
loved her father, and because she outlived him, of course,
she really was able to find of help continue to
bolster and shape his image as time went on, and
ensure in many ways that the tr that we think
about now is the TR we think about now? Like
(36:51):
she continued to always speak of him and write about him,
and only the most praising ways, even when she would
say things like he always wanted to be the center
of attention. So I guess the ultimate question is, if
we're looking at t R versus Alice, who's the winner?
(37:16):
Is there a winner? It just feels like a rare
instance where they both sort of want Like he was
able to continue as presidency, and he came out of it,
you know, in many ways historically looking pretty good. She
was able to live a very lovely life. She was
very smart and ascute in terms of business as her
husband had passed, and she was almost immediately thinking about
(37:39):
way she could ensure that she had plenty of money
to live on going forward. So she wrote her memoirs
at that point and capitalized on that. And she likens
her image to be on things like cold cream and
cigarettes and other products. Um, yeah, they kind of posed
ended up succeeding in life in ways that in some
part we're due to each others behavior even as much
(38:01):
as they So I'm gonna call it a win. Wind
History Versus is hosted by me Aeron McCarthy. This episode
was written by Michelle dead Check with research by me
and additional research by Michael Salgarolo fact checking by Austin Thompson.
(38:24):
Joe Wigan voiced Theodore Roosevelt in this episode. The executive
producers are Aaron McCarthy, Julie Douglas, and Tyler Klang. The
supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The show was edited by
Dylan Fagan and lowber Land Team Special thanks to Holly Fry.
To learn more about this episode and Theodore Roosevelt, check
out our website at mental flush dot com, Slash History Versus.
(38:45):
That's mental flus dot com. Slash h I S t
O R y vs. History Versus is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental Floss. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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