Virginia Focus - White House Wild Child

Americans living in the White House today and throughout history are no strangers to critcism and controversy. However, one child of a former president seems to be a favorite because of her outlandish antics. On this episode, we're discussing the fascinating historical biography of America's most memorable first daughter, Alice Lee Roosevelt.  Shelley Fraser Mickle is the author of the book "White House Wild Child: How Alice Roosevelt Broke All the Rules and Won the Heart of America".

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to Virginia Focus. I'm Rebecca Hughes of the Virginia
News Network. Americans living in the White House today and
throughout history are no strangers to criticism and controversy. However,
one child of a former president seems to be a
favorite because of her outlandish antics. On this episode, we're
discussing the fascinating historical biography of America's most memorable first daughter,

(00:27):
Alice Lee Roosevelt. Shelley Fraser Michel is the author of
the book White House, Wild Child, How Alice Roosevelt Broke
all the rules and won the heart of America. Welcome
to the show, miss Michel. I'm glad you could spend
some time with us today and tell us about your
new book.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Well, it's an honor to be here. I've been looking
so forward to this because I know Virginia readers read,
so I'm eager to reach them, and I want to
just tell you start off by telling that famous quote
that President Theodore Roosevelt said about his daughter Alice that
he could either run the country or control Alice, but
he could not do both. And I know most people

(01:03):
know that quote, so I like to start off with it.
But It's been my absolutely joy and privilege to write
White House, Wild Child, because these people have more or
less evaporated from our awareness, and I find that so
hard to get my mind around, because basically, Alice was

(01:23):
the most famous woman in the world. She was the
first Princess Diana, and today I could compare her to
Taylor Swift in the way that Taylor is influencing a
generation of young women. Alice had blue eyes, and she
ignited a craze of fashion craze where everybody ran out
and bought something Alice blue. And when she appeared on

(01:46):
the street, young women surrounded her and applauded. She broke
the boundaries of the Victorian culture. And you need to know,
this was a time when women's names never appeared in
the newspaper except at the noun of their wedding and
after they've already died. So the fact that she could

(02:06):
generate more newspaper print than even her father says a
lot about what she did to that culture, which is
basically what Princess Diana and later our obsession with Jackie
Kennedy and now Taylor Swift is doing. Because women gained
confidence and bravery by seeing these role models do these things.

(02:26):
But what's really amazing to me for my research, Alice
was pathologically shy and she never spoke in public. She
only gave one like one speech when her husband was
running for Congress later in her life, but when she
was a young girl. And I'll tell a little bit
about this chronologically, so let me paint the picture of

(02:46):
her arriving in Washington, DC and back it up a
little bit with how this history echoes even into what
we're living today because T. R. Roosevelt became president, he
was vice president, he became president when William McKinley died
of a gunshot wound. And when he was shot, tr

(03:07):
yelled out, oh my gosh, they weren't shooting a man.
They were shooting government, which is basically what we're living
with today. And it was anarchy spreading around the world.
He knew that, and of course it ended in uniting
the war War one. But tr started carrying his own
gun then on because he assumed he would be next.

(03:28):
But you can't leave a vacuum of power very long,
so he took the oath within hours, and then he
got his family and moved into the White House. Teddy
was the first person to call the White House the
White House, and that is reflected in my title The
White House Wild Child, because before that it was just
known as the Executive Mansion or the President's House. So

(03:50):
there's a lot of people know about tr because he
was so famous and so charismatic. Everybody fell in love
with him, and of course he's considered one of our
top five presidents. And yet he didn't lead America through
a war. So let me paint this picture of Teddy
arriving at the train station in Washington, d C. With Alice.

(04:10):
People knew that he had six children, but they had
not met them, and Alice was the oldest. So she
stepped off the train wearing a line dress with violets
of bouquet violets in her waistband. And she was seventeen
years old, with her budding sexuality and absolutely drop dead gorgeous,
which you could see on the cover of the book

(04:30):
thanks to a portrait in the Smithsonian Institute. You need
to know that. And all of a sudden, the flash
bulbs started going off, and in those days, they left
a powder and that was the first invention of the
first camera of flashbulbs. So within a month, she was
the most photographed woman in the world. That's hard to digest,

(04:53):
isn't it. It's just incredible. And then she became the
most popular woman in the world. Now the background had
and why she became such a wild woman, a wild
child when she was born. Her mother, Alice Hathaway Lee,
died of Bright's disease, and no one even knew she
had the kidney failure until she went into labor. And

(05:15):
tr Roosevelt adored his wife. He had the disposition that
when he fell in love, oh, it was deep and hard,
so making it even worse, Alice Hathaway Lee died in
his arms, and then downstairs in the Roosevelt mansion just
beside Central Park, his mother died of typhoid fever, and

(05:35):
so the grief was so horrible that t R could
not look in little Alice's eyes nor say her name.
So soon after they had two funerals, they had the
baptism of little Alice, and t R was so devastated.
That's when he went to the bad lands. And people
know a lot about that. For about TR it formed

(05:56):
his identity because he became known as him as a cowboy,
which is just a fun story in and of himself,
because he had a Harvard accent, and yet he was
riding this horse around saying to his co cowboys herding
the cows, rush there, hurry, hurry there, in this Harbord accent.

(06:17):
And they made fun of him. And of course he
wore spectacles, and they thought that was they called him
four eyes, and I thought that was a signal of
moral weakness. But anyway, that was part of the identities
that allowed him to win his second presidential administration. After
he acceded to power when William McKinley died, so Alice

(06:39):
moved into the White House and to get back at
her father silence of not saying her name or really
giving her, you know, avoiding her. But think about that,
people have asked me, how could that be? Well, think
about the fact she could never have a birthday because
that was the day of her mother and grandmother's death,
So her coming on to the planet was dark. So

(07:01):
she interpreted to our silence as disapproval. So she spent
her whole life, or at least half of it, trying
to get back in him, needling him. And the first
thing she did was become the wild child. So that
what she became known for was she carried a purse,
and then that purse was a copy of the Constitution,

(07:21):
a dagger, and a green snake named Emily Spinach. Oh
my god. Yeah, So get this. When she would smoke
in the White House, her father said, you can't smoke
under my roof, so she climbed to the roof of
the White House and smoked there. Oh and since it
was the days before phones or any of that, so
she sent a message to the newspapers to tell all

(07:44):
the journalists where she was and what she was up to,
and that made the news headlines. So that was part
of her antiques. You know, this book is just fun.
And I first learned about Alice with this famous quote
she had that was embroidered on a pillow in her house.
If you can't say anything nice about anyone, come sit

(08:05):
beside me. But that's all I knew about Alice really
when I started writing got the job to write her
life story. So where I got this idea is interesting
in and of itself too. I've been a writer of
novels for like fifty years, but to publish a novel
today you have to be cool. And if I was

(08:27):
ever cool, it's long since rubbed off. So I'm married
to a brain surgeon, and I was asking him to
help me come up with ideas to write a non
fiction book. So he trained under Joe Murray, who was
awarded the Nobel Prize for performing the first successful kidney transplant.

(08:47):
So my husband said, well, you know, that story about
Joe and the kidney would make a pretty good story.
So I thought that surely Walter Isaacson or David mccallaugh
had written that up, because it's considered one of the
greatest contributions to humankind in the twentieth century. But when
I researched it, I saw, well, every one of the
doctors and PhDs involved with it had written their memoirs.

(09:11):
But it was like going to grand rounds. There was
not anything that general public could really inhale and understand.
So I made it a c in college zoology. But
I told myself that if I could conquer this complicated
medical science and language that I could understand, I would

(09:34):
be doing a service to give the story to the
general public. So basically I did it just by courage
and ignorance. Goodness, we have those moments. So the book
did well and In my research for the book, I

(09:54):
found out that Charles Dickens had so many characters with
kidney failure and so many historical figures with kidney failure,
and one of those was Alice Hathaway Lee, Alice Roosevelt's mother.
So that's where the idea came from. So when I
began researching it, I learned I'm not by trade a

(10:16):
narrative historian. I've just turned myself into one. But it's
and then I have become accepted by fellow historians or
narrative historians, and a very great one here in our
nation has said that we live with delusions until history
changes us. And I thought about that, and I think

(10:39):
that's true. Writing this book certainly changed me in terms
of the art of politics and what tr did for
our country. So basically, Lincoln, when he was president, he
told himself, if he could keep the nation from breaking apart,
it would one day be the most powerful nation on earth.

(11:01):
And TR Roosevelt is the first president to have fulfilled
that prophecy. So that was very interesting and meaningful for
me to learn how that was. Tr practiced politics as
an art, and he taught me that, you know, politics
is a lot like an iceberg. You see what's above

(11:21):
the surface, but not what's below. And I'll tell you
a little bit about how he To illustrate that, when
Alice was in her twenties and still the most famous
young woman in the world, he decided to send her
on an Asian tour halfway around the world. Because the

(11:42):
Japanese Russian War had just broken out. Russia sent troops
into Manchuria, very similar to what's happened today, and tr
wanted to end that war and get on top of
it because he knew that Japan was eyeing the Hawaiian
Islands and were a threat to the nation. So he decided,
this is how clever he was. He said that Alice

(12:05):
was going to get on this ship and go around
and stop at China and Japan and Russia and all
these nations, and along with her on the ship, which
was named the Manchuria. She got on that ship in
San Francisco, and along with her was the Secretary of
War William Taft. So when Alice did all these things
and went off somewhere, all the press followed her. And

(12:29):
while they were away, William Taff would sneak in to
have meetings with the diplomats from those various countries to
ask them what did they want in a treaty. So
an interesting aside to that was the first thing Alice
did was jump in the swimming pool on the ship's
deck in her clothes, and of course that was written
up everywhere, and Robert Kennedy never let her forget that.

(12:52):
He became a great friend of hers, and anytime they
were at a party together, he made a bee line
to sit beside her and kept remind you jumped in
the swimming pool and all your clothes, And she always said, well,
at least I wasn't nicked.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
And the funny thing about that was their bathing suits
at that time were like today's soccer uniform, no big deal.
But on that ship was also the man she had
picked out to marry, Nick Longworth. So when they got
back home, Alice made the announcement to the press, Oh
I'm engaged. They asked Nick about it, he said, I

(13:29):
don't remember proposing, but Alice announced it and brought it off.
But the point of this is so fascinating. The Treaty
of Portsmouth is what ended the Russian Japanese War and
t R was first president to be awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize for doing that, and what he did to

(13:50):
accomplish it is amazing considering his ego. You know, he
was an exhibitionist, but he had character. He's just was
adorable in the fact that he wanted to be and
center of every speech and everything. When we got off
the stage, he would go to his best friend, Cabot
Lodge and say, how did I do? What do I
need to do better? Was my voice too squeaky? I mean,

(14:11):
he's just endearing because he was a fabulous leader, but
he had the ability to change and to take criticism.
So when he had the Japanese and Russian diplomats come
to the presidential yacht, which was harbored in New Hampshire
the Treaty of New Hampshire, he did not go. He
stayed home in the White House, which is unbelievable considering

(14:35):
his ego. But he arranged for everybody to stand up
and eat. No one could sit down because he knew
that they would fight over who was sitting next to
home in terms of gaining favor and more power. So
to me, I just think that's fascinating, And for someone
as old as I am. I lived through the ending

(14:55):
of the Vietnam War, and they fought about the size
of the shape of the table in Paris when they
met to try to end that war, and that's why
they ended up with a round table. So if you're
any student of politics, what I invite my readers to
do is look at how we've had presidents who studied
history and copied tr You know, what he did as

(15:17):
an art of politics still affects our politics today. So
moving into her middle years, Alice she couldn't give up
needling her father, which he always did, and when LBJ
unveiled a statue of her father in Washington, d C.

(15:38):
She still wouldn't give a speech. She deferred the microphone
and refused to speak, and a journalist came up and said, well,
what do you think, and she said, well, I think
it's very nice actually, But then she said, you know,
I specialize in meanness, and she did all that sweet
mischief of childhood segued into kind of snarky meanness. But

(16:04):
she couldn't give off her power of being power broker,
so almost all the candidates for president would come to her.
She had a four story mansion near DuPont Circle in Washington,
d C. And they would all come to her, hoping
they would get her endorsement, and hoping that she would
not light them up in newspapers. Because Alice turned out

(16:25):
to be the first Twitter, the first Twitter feed. And
so I'm going to tell you some of the things
she said that made her very famous and scary for
any politician. She said, Calvin Coolidge looked like he had
been weaned on a pickle what And Thomas Dewey, she said,
was like the little man on the wedding cake, and

(16:45):
that became an image that he could never overcome. She
branded him immediately. She called Lyndon Johnson a rogue elephant
to his face. She called him old sly boots, and
he had gallbladder surgery, and he was known as a
very uncouth Southerner. Of course, that's why the Kennedys didn't

(17:05):
like him. But after he had his gallbladder surgery, he
held up his shirt to show everybody the scar, all
the journalists, and they took pictures of it. And Alice said, well,
thank god it wasn't his price state. I mean, she
could really go over the line, couldn't she. And then
about Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, who was her cousins. She

(17:27):
called FDR two thirds Mush and one third Eleanor and
when he was running for his fourth term. And some
people have mentioned this to me because it was really
awful what she did, but I understand it. She was
telling people because her brother, Theodore Junior wanted was running

(17:48):
for wanted to run for president, and everybody assumed that
he would, and Alice was his adviser. And so she
was mad at FDR for running over and over four
times and winning a course. So she started telling Americans
to write in Hitler right in space. Just totally outrageous.
She got so mean, it was difficult to deal with

(18:12):
all these kinds of things. The most outrageous thing I
think she did that harkins into today, which is part
of what I'm talking about. She lived in ninety six,
so at some point they had a gay parade outside
of her house, and she went out to watch it,
and she said she loved it, and she said she

(18:33):
didn't have any attitude or opinion about sex as long
as people didn't do in the street and scare of
the horses. So then she said she received a letter
from that group asking if she would like to be
an honorary homosexual, and of course she answered yes. She

(18:55):
had a masst ectomy when she was eighty, and she
always told the press the only octogenarian going topless in Washington.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
But she was just so witty and clever and mean,
which it hearkens into today again. But one thing that
drew me to this story, also in a different kind
of way, is I grew up in Faulkner, Land and
studied everything he said about being a writer, a good writer,

(19:25):
which I aspired to be. And he said that if
you're going to write today, don't write about the nuclear age.
Write about the heart in conflict with itself. And Alice
certainly had that because she had a haunted childhood. No
one ever spoke of her mother or told her anything
about her mother. Oh wow. And then yeah, so she

(19:47):
said it was psychologically just difficult. Yeah. So I want
to tell you about Bammy, But I don't know how
much time we have. Do you play music when it's
time for me to get off?

Speaker 1 (19:58):
No, I'll let you know when we're almost there, sep,
we've got another eight minutes or so.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
Okay, okay, because this is the best part, okay, but
the part I'm so proud of in writing this book.
When Alice Lee was dying, Bammy, who is t R's
older sister by about three years, knew that she was
dying and sent for a wet nurse. And that's interesting
in and of itself because they were so prevalent then.

(20:23):
They usually were immigrant women, very well paid because upper
class women didn't want to nurse their babies for fear
it would ruin their figures. So these wet nurses earned
a better living than their husbands could earn being a laborer.
So they were in great need and it was a
great employment. So they sent for this wet nurse, and

(20:44):
Bammy took that child for the first three years of
her life. And Bemmy decided then that being a mother
was her whole goal in life. But let me tell
you who Mammy Bemmy was, because this is amazing. She
was born with a hump on her back, and David
McCollough thinks it was due to Pott's disease, and it
may have been, but I decided it was a congenital malformation.

(21:06):
And her father, Theodore Roosevelt Senior, was the most amazing
man in the world. They got their wealth, the Roosevelts
did by selling plate glass in the building boom of Manhattan,
Old New York. And so he worked for his father
for a while, but was boarded to tears. So he
decided what he loved more than anything in the world

(21:28):
was children, So he started an orphanage. He gave us
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History.
He became well known philanthropists. So every day he had
Bammy see an orthopedic doctor, and he made her a brace.
And every day great Heart would carry little Bamy down

(21:52):
and put that brace on her, and she lay face
down on a couch all day in that brace. And
then great Heart would come a running up the stairs
at night and bringing some toy that had an oven,
and he would make believe cakes and teas with his daughter.
And it gave her this extraordinary self confidence because she

(22:14):
was the center of his life. And that's an important
part to get across. And I like to say this
to my readers. I've been to several book clubs, and
in the middle of our meetings, usually our husbands and
boyfriends will come tiptoeing in to steal our snacks. So
I like to say that this book men will enjoy
as much as women. And there's so many subjects that

(22:37):
will be fun to talk about, mainly seeing the contrast
of t R with Alice as a father and then
great Heart as a father to Bamy, and compare those
two because Alice never had that sense of well being
that great Heart gave to Bamy. And so I'm suggesting

(22:58):
that we might have co ed book club discussions and
in that start talking about how much a father means
to a daughter. So it's kind of a fun subject
there to discuss while reading this book. So Bammy became
the engineer of TR's whole career. And they said what

(23:21):
Rixy was? Eleanor Lillian? Rixy was a journalist who went
to Alice in her last decades and said, I want
to write your biography. Do I have your permission? And
Alice said, well, why don't you do? Aunt Bammy because
if she had been born a man, she would have
been president. So Bammy and you'll get to read in
the book about how she was educated because her father

(23:43):
sent her outside of Paris to be educated by Madame Silvisturr,
who believed that women if they were educated, would influence
men to create justice in the world. So she dedicated
her whole life to educating young women who would be
powerful in the world politics. So Bammy really benefited from

(24:05):
her guidance and later this is even more interesting the
fans of Eleanor Roosevelt. She was sent to study with
Madame silver Steer because Eleanor Roosevelt was an orphan. I
don't know if many people know that, but when you
read a book about Eleanor and Madame Sylvisteer said Eleanor
Roosevelt would had the warmest heart of any young woman

(24:26):
she had ever met. And of course she lived that
out in her lifetime. But Bammy came home from France
and took over t R's life because his father had died.
When great Heart died, t R. Replaced his wonderful father's
influence by Bammy's, and Bammy encouraged tr to run for

(24:49):
the New York Assembly because great Heart said to his son,
he said, there's so much corruption in our government after
Lincoln that I fear for your children and grandchildren. So
that's stuck in TR's mind, and a lot of people
don't know this. It really grabbed me t r was
a genius. He could read three books in a day.

(25:12):
He himself wrote and published forty books, and so he
was well educated. Spoke several languages. Butchered him, but he
didn't care. He would just blab on in German or
French whatever. He was fearless. In fact, one of the
things that really affected me about the Rose, about people
that inspire me every day is they took a bite

(25:34):
out of life and let it dribble down their chins.
And of course a lot of people know that tr
suffered from great depression, especially after he lost Alice Hathawie Lee.
But also you know that great speech the man in
the Arena, So he was very brave. And what I
loved about him getting across to readers is he lived

(25:56):
with a lot of health problems, but he never paid
attention to them. He overcame them. With today it seems
like everybody is complaining about some physical complaint. And tr
outgrew or battled asthma and a heart condition, and Colic
had digestive problems. And so every day when I wake up,

(26:18):
I kept thinking about how they took a bite of
life and let it dribble down their chins. And Alice
said that they absolutely globbled books. She taught herself physics
and astronomy. But her stepmother, Edith Carra, who married t R.
They were childhood sweethearts, and Edith Carro always said, I'm

(26:39):
gonna when I grow up, I'm gonna marry Theodore Roosevelt,
and she did after Alice Hathaway Lee died, and so
she became a mother a stepmother to Alice, and they
never got along. Edith Kara was always jealous of Alice
Hathaway Lee, and she kept saying telling people, if she
had lived, she would aboard TR to death. That's awful,

(27:06):
I know, And so Alice heard that, and that was
one of the main things she heard about her mother.
But Bammy stayed TR's advisor all through his presidency. She
had a house in Washington. They called it the Little
White House because he had held all of his cabinet
meetings there. And he never did anything in his presidency

(27:28):
that he didn't run by her. And so Alice grew
up seeing him come to Bammy's house and overhearing that.
And the other point I want to make is that
in my research I found every instance of when TR
led the nation through a crisis, and Alice was sitting
at his knee, So there's an opportunity there to learn
how he ended the coal crisis and of course the

(27:50):
war between the Japanese and Russia. So there's a lot
there that we can apply to our own knowledge of
what a good president is and how the art of
politics is practice.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
And I love that you call that the art of politics,
because that really is what it is, and we are
coming to the end of our time. But I wanted
to also, you know, comment that we look at politics today,
we listen to the news, and if you listen to
it too much, you just get angry, right, because you
think that today is like no other time. But what
you're explaining to us is that back in the early

(28:22):
nineteen hundreds and such, it was just as corrupt and
just as many problems. And we're not facing anything today
that we haven't already faced in some form or fashion, right.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
Right, except that tr had character, Right, he was honest
to the ants degree. He learned to manipulate. He would
get it done in kind of underhanded or what you
could call a corrupt way, but he was heading towards
something good.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
So where can people get your book.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
Oh yeah, we need to say that real quick. Any
anywhere books are sold on Amazon, and you can google
either my name, Shelley Fraser Michel or White House Wild Child,
and all sorts of things will come up. Because I've
been in a lot of trouble. I just hadn't gotten
caught yet, just.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
Like well, not like Alice, because she got caught. Maybe
she could learn a thing or two from you.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
Well, thank you so much for your time today.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
Thank you, thank you. I'm so honored that you've had
me on the blabberon like this. Take care, Rebecca.

Speaker 1 (29:27):
I hope you've enjoyed today's show. Thanks for tuning into
the show on your favorite local radio station. You can
now listen to this show or past shows through the
iheartapp or on iHeart dot com. Just search for Virginia
Focus under podcasts. I'm Rebecca Hughes with a Virginia news network,
and I'll be here next week on Virginia Focus