by Marc Peyser
*2 The Dutch-speaking white settlers of South Africa, known as Boers, had been living in uneasy proximity to the expanding British colonial administration of the region throughout the nineteenth century. To escape British domination of the coastal areas, the Boers fled inland in the mid-nineteenth century. Continued tensions between the British and the Boers led to two wars, the first in 1880–1881 and a larger, more brutal war of 1899–1902. High casualties and accounts of atrocities made the second war increasingly controversial and unpopular.
*3 Arguably, he did Alice a favor. Just two days before the coronation, the king was felled by appendicitis and forced to undergo emergency (and very risky) surgery. He initially resisted his doctors’ advice, announcing that he was determined to go to Westminster Abbey in two days’ time. They agreed that he would get there—as a corpse—if he didn’t have the surgery. Edward gave in, and knighted his doctors in advance. The coronation was delayed until August 9, by which time the hordes of royalty and other notables who had come to London for the event had long-since packed up and returned home.
*4 When a telephone was installed at Sagamore Hill, in 1902, he hated it so much he refused to answer it. But in August 1905, when the U.S. Navy brought one of its submarines to Oyster Bay for a presidential inspection, the president ordered the hatches closed, climbed aboard, and piloted the largely unproven vessel under the water for almost an hour. Not long after leaving office, in 1910, he became the first president to ride in an airplane.
*5 In a neat little piece of irony, in 1934 the City of New York created the Sara D. Roosevelt Park, which to this day bisects Rivington Street, stopping traffic cold.
*6 A bit of it coming from Mrs. Taft, who didn’t make the trip but fumed about it from afar. She was especially peeved, on vacation with her sons in Great Britain, when a British train conductor ignored what should have been a foolproof command for assistance: “I am Mrs. William Howard Taft of Washington…My husband is the Secretary of War of the United States.” Even worse, the conductor only snapped to attention when she added, “You must have heard of him. He’s traveling now with Miss Alice Roosevelt.” Cordery, Alice, 117.
Chapter 3
DOMESTIC AFFAIRS
Even a U.S. congressman has to apply for his own wedding license, and on February 15, 1906, two days before his scheduled nuptials, Nick headed to the District Supreme Court in Washington to complete the paperwork. He arrived late, fifteen minutes after the 4:00 p.m. closing time, and with four wisecracking groomsmen in tow. The court clerk overlooked the buddies’ ribbing of Longworth: Are you sure you’ve got the $1 license fee? the best man asked him. Are you really thirty-six years old? But the clerk wasn’t going to tolerate any funny business when it came to the official procedures. Any previous marriages? he asked, checking off the items on his lengthy list. No, said Nick. Born in this country? Yes, Nick said. “This begins to look like a case of hazing,” said one of the smirking groomsmen. How about the future bride? the clerk asked. How old is she? What is her father’s full name? Where does the family live? Nick tried to keep smiling along with his pals, yet he couldn’t help but sigh and mop his forehead anxiously. And no wonder: he was facing perhaps the only person in the free world who could ask for Alice Roosevelt’s address with a straight face.1
Nick and Alice only gave themselves two months between announcing their engagement and their February 17, 1906, wedding day. It was a relatively short window that only served to magnify the frenzy of attention, like a big football game with the clock winding down. The press tailed Alice nearly everywhere: to dinners and doctor’s appointments, on trains and ferries, and most of all to destinations that might unearth any detail of the wedding day itself. When she and Nick spent an early February afternoon shopping in New York at Fifth Avenue dress shops, they literally stopped traffic. It took half a dozen mounted Gotham policemen to clear the crowds that gathered to ogle the happy couple.2
The hoi polloi weren’t the only ones jockeying for position. Official Washington and establishment New York were both desperate to get ringside seats for the ceremony, a problem considering that the White House East Room would only hold about eight hundred guests. Some folks with middling connections sent gifts before the invitations were mailed, in hopes of improving their chances. Others made conspicuous plans to be out of town, to avoid any embarrassment at being snubbed. “Everybody who has the slightest reason for expecting one of these priceless pasteboards is on the qui vivre, hoping, fearing, and planning,” said the Baltimore Sun the week before the family mailed out the invitations.3
The first gift to arrive was actually charmingly humble: a bunch of turnips, sent by a Kansas farmer “who says the tillers of the soil shall not be outdone by the jewelers,” reported the New York Times.4 It was a short-lived victory for the tillers. The press positively salivated over the most lavish gifts: a $25,000 pearl necklace from the Cuban government; a $40,000 Gobelin tapestry from France; a diamond bracelet from the kaiser to match the one he gave her at the Meteor christening; and a whole treasure chest from her friend the dowager empress of China, which included jewelry, bolts and bolts of fabric laced with gold thread, and two fur coats—one ermine, one white fox.5 The bride salivated, too. “There was fantastic exaggeration about my wedding presents, so far as the number and grandeur was concerned,” Alice said later. “I had about the sort of presents that any girl gets from her relatives and friends and friends of the family, with the exception of a few from foreign potentates.”6 She was right to be defensive; not everyone was so enchanted by the 24-karat wedding news. When the Ohio House passed a bipartisan resolution congratulating its native son on his wedding, Senator P. W. Ward bashed it as “undignified”7 and “a joke.”8 “While it might do in a monarchy for the representatives of the people to congratulate the ruling powers on such an event, it was in bad taste for this nation,” Ward said, and he squashed the resolution like a cockroach.9
Remarkably, Ward’s wrath was by far the minority view. In fact, working-class Americans went out of their way to congratulate and celebrate Princess Alice. Some sent homespun presents: baked goods, stuffed animals, even a railcar full of coal, courtesy of the United Mine Workers of America.10 In New York, the Deaf-Mutes’ Union League stopped its annual dinner to deliver a special toast to Alice, which the New York Times said “was received with wild (but mute) enthusiasm.”11 In Boston, the bells on every public building and many of the churches pealed for fifteen minutes, as ordered by Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald.*1 And in Pittsburgh on the day of the wedding, roughly two thousand young women working at downtown department stores left their counters and walked to a nearby newspaper office so they could watch the official press bulletins about the wedding come over the wire. “They all seemed as thoroughly happy as though they had been personally concerned,” the New York Times said.12
No one would be happier to hear that than the father of the bride. TR owed much of his political success to his everyman image, which he cultivated amid the tumbleweeds of his Harvard degree, his Long Island estate, and his polo ponies. The Roosevelt children played a supporting role in that just-folks portrait. It was why he’d fumed when Alice frolicked in Newport and among the snobs of Mrs. Astor’s 400, why he pointedly enrolled his sons at the local Oyster Bay primary school along with the sons of the village’s servants (and made far less notice of shipping them off to Groton in their later years). He was (and still is) the youngest man to become president, and his irrepressible family underscored his vitality. “One of the great political assets for Theodore Roosevelt was the perception of him as a special father with a harmonious and engaging set of children,” one scholar noted.13
They were not the first conspicuously precocious offspring to invade the executive mansion. Forty years before, young Tad Lincoln set up a stand on the front lawn to charge admission to visitors; he once hitched the White House goats to a chair and drove his improvised sleigh through one of his mother’s receptions. But the Roosevelts had six rambunct
ious kids (well, five plus demure Ethel), and the evidence of their spirited lives practically perfumed the place, as did their pet guinea pigs, roosters, lizard, bear, rabbits, and blue macaw. When nine-year-old Archie was sick in bed with the measles, Quentin and Kermit loaded their pony, Algonquin, into the White House elevator so he could pay a get-well visit to their brother in his second-floor bedroom. Alice herself frequently strolled into official social functions with a green garter snake called Emily Spinach, named for its color and for her stepmother’s rail-thin, old-maid sister, Emily Carow.
It’s no accident that perhaps the most famous quotation about Alice grew out of her frolicking around the White House as if it were her private playground. One day during Theodore’s first term, his old college buddy Owen Wister, who wrote The Virginian and other best-selling novels, dropped by for a visit. As the two men were chatting in the president’s private office about preserving a national forest in Wyoming, Alice (with Emily Spinach) bounded in to say hello, then bounded out just as quickly. After the men resumed their talk, she barged in again to ask her father a question and left again. Just as Wister was regaining his train of thought, Alice arrived for the third time. “Alice,” said her father, “the next time you come I’ll throw you out the window!”14 When Wister turned to the president to ask why he couldn’t do anything about Alice’s manners, Theodore replied, “I can run the country or I could control Alice. I can’t possibly do both.”15
At least that’s the way Alice told the story, and the way it’s recorded in all her biographies. Except that’s not exactly what Wister said. In Wister’s own telling, he and the president merely concluded their chat with Theodore’s writing him a note intended to help with the Wyoming forest. It was Wister who inserted the “I could control Alice” quip into his memoir, explaining that “a friend once asked” the president what he could do about Alice. (Wister never mentions the snake, either.) Does this mean the story is apocryphal? Not necessarily. But the Oyster Bay Roosevelts were certainly eager to co-opt the homespun narrative: spirited child, befuddled parent—just like Leave It to Beaver.
As PR campaigns go, Alice’s wedding was a case study in media manipulation. The details of the dress (white silk trimmed in satin and lace and embroidered with the Roosevelt family coat of arms, a twelve-foot train, and, most important of all, “not a particle of Oriental material”)16 were spoon-fed to the papers, much to their dismay. “For some reason best known to the president, but not understood by friends of the family—especially the feminine friends—extraordinary measures have been taken by Mr. Roosevelt to prevent publicity being given to any details of the trousseau,” whined the New York Times.17 There were no photographs taken of the event itself; no reporters allowed inside. There weren’t any bridesmaids, either. Alice had been expected to select her sister, Ethel, or Corinne Robinson, her last unmarried first cousin. She chose not to share her limelight.
Instead, she commandeered it. After the brief, fifteen-minute ceremony, the family and some close friends headed to a private dining room in the White House for a reception brunch. (The little people—a.k.a. the Supreme Court justices, the congressmen, the various foreign dignitaries—were shunted off to their own reception in the State Dining Room.) When it came time to slice the three-tiered wedding cake (romantically dappled with orange blossoms and doves), the knife provided proved too feeble for the job. Alice promptly turned to one of the White House military aides, grabbed his sword, and hacked away. Her father might have stolen the show at Eleanor’s wedding, where the guests, mesmerized by Uncle Ted’s war stories, didn’t even bother to watch her cut her cake. But no one was going to upstage Alice.
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Eleanor herself didn’t attend the Longworth wedding. She was six months pregnant with her first child and therefore deemed unfit to be seen in polite society. So Franklin took Mama. “Alice looked remarkably pretty and her manner was very charming,” Sara reported to Eleanor.18 She didn’t mention Franklin’s cameo in the proceedings, but it was one of Alice’s favorite moments. “The only funny incident I recall was when we—Nick, myself, and my father—were just about to be photographed in the Oval Room, and my veil had become disarranged and someone said, ‘Who is tall enough to adjust the bride’s veil?’ And up popped Franklin to do the job. I wish I had a picture of that.”19
Less than three months later, Eleanor gave birth to Anna Eleanor (the Roosevelts were fond of recycling girls names, too) on May 3, 1906. Eleanor would later admit that she struggled mightily, and often unsuccessfully, with the demands of motherhood. Her own mother, more interested in high society than in the rich but ordinary thrills of parenthood, wasn’t much of a role model. Neither was her grandmother. As a child, her most nurturing relationships had been with Aunt Bye and with her father, when he wasn’t propped up at the local bar or locked up in a sanitorium. As a result Eleanor was a deeply insecure parent. She hired strict French or English nurses, nannies, and governesses and allowed them, not her, to be the boss. “If I had it to do over again, I now know that what we should have done was to have no servants those first few years,” she said. “My children would have had far happier childhoods.”20 She would listen to almost anything but her own instincts. One winter morning a neighbor called the family’s New York City home and threatened to alert the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children because one-year-old Anna was crying her head off—again. Eleanor liked to put Anna in a makeshift metal cage on the windowsill to get fresh air during her nap, but she refused to comfort the baby when she started to wail. “I thought I was being a most modern mother,” Eleanor confessed. “I knew you should not pick up a baby when it cried, that fresh air was very necessary, but I learned later that the sun is more important than the air, and I had her on the shady side of the house!”21
It didn’t help that she spent the first decade of her married life, as Eleanor noted, “just getting over having a baby or getting ready to have one”—six children in ten years.22 Nor did it help that the third born, Franklin junior, died when he was less than eight months old of influenza, pneumonia, and a weakened heart. “To this day,” she wrote twenty-eight years later, “I can stand by his tiny little stone in the churchyard and see the little group of people gathered around his tiny coffin and remember how cruel it seemed to leave him out there alone in the cold.”23
But the biggest blockade between Eleanor and her children was erected by her mother-in-law. Sara Roosevelt was used to being the boss; she had been overseeing the family’s sizable estate and finances since her husband died in 1900, and she had run much of Franklin’s life since, well, forever. It was only natural—at least to Sara—that she should raise the next generation, too. She would hire the domestic staff for Franklin and Eleanor, inform them when to call the pediatrician, babysit when the parents were away, and rule (or sometimes overrule) on any and all child-rearing techniques. Her explanation to her grandchildren for usurping Eleanor’s authority was simple: “Your mother only bore you. I am more your mother than your mother is.”24 Fiat by Sara lasted well into the children’s adulthood. When James was in college, he bought a convertible that he ruined one winter night when he left the top down just before a blizzard. He asked his parents to buy him a new car, and when they refused, he went straight to Granny. She promptly replaced the old car with a new—and better—one. A few years later, when Franklin junior*2 was in an auto accident and his parents were unsympathetic, she did the same thing.
There was no better symbol of Sara’s hegemony than the home she had built on New York’s East Sixty-Fifth Street. She had long insisted that Franklin and Eleanor would need space for a growing family. As a Christmas present to them in 1905, she bought the lot at 49 East Sixty-Fifth Street. As a present to herself, she bought the adjoining lot, at 47 East Sixty-Fifth—and enlisted an architect to design the two houses as twins. The six-story brownstones shared their entryway and featured sliding doors that connected the two buildings on three floors, at their dining rooms, drawing rooms,
and a space on the fourth floor where the children slept. A few weeks after the families moved in, FDR walked into the master bedroom and found Eleanor sitting at her dressing table in tears. “I said I did not like to live in a house which was not in any way mine, one that I had done nothing about and which did not represent the way I wanted to live,” she said later.25 That wasn’t entirely true; FDR and ER had reviewed and even amended the architect’s plans and shopped for at least some of the contents. The problem was Mama. She already controlled big swaths of ER’s daily life (mandatory walks together every morning at 10:00, joint embroidery classes, regular lunches, weekly trips to the theater with Franklin, not to mention the children). The conjoined houses meant that ER could never escape her mother-in-law. “You were never quite sure when she would appear,” Eleanor said, “day or night.”26
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Alice might have avoided the kind of wedding Eleanor endured, but she stepped into an astonishingly similar marriage. Nick was a hard-driving, hard-partying, Harvard-educated lawyer with an eye for the ladies, a trait Eleanor had yet to discover in her husband. Also like Franklin, Nick brought to the marriage a widowed, overbearing mother-in-law. He wasn’t an only child, but Nick was Susan Longworth’s only son, which meant she treated her quick-witted, violin-virtuoso baby boy (nicknamed Colie) like a demigod just the same. “They were devoted to one another and she was completely absorbed in everything that concerned him,” Alice said.27 When he was first elected to Congress, in 1902, Susan moved to Washington with him, “so as to keep in touch with the details of her adored Colie’s public life,” said his sister Clara.28 When every newspaper in the country was reporting that Nick and Alice were going to get engaged, Susan refused to believe it, even after Taft himself gave her the news. “He is a thoroughly confirmed bachelor,” Mrs. Longworth informed Taft.29 (Nick and Alice were engaged two months later.) She was determined to remain the most important woman in his life. In fact, she was determined about everything. “She was a rather formidable lady who was better dressed and straighter backed than anyone in Cincinnati,” Alice said. “I see her now leaving the house in a carriage with a stream of little furs indecently assaulting each other round her neck and down her front.”30
