Teddy Roosevelt has quite a reputation for not having too many damns to give. As a sickly child suffering terribly from asthma, he was warned to take it easy or he wouldn’t live long. He replied to the doctor, “I’m going to do all the things you tell me not to do.” He won the Medal of Honor at the Battle of San Juan Hill. As president, he invited golden glove boxers around to spar – one match left him blind in one eye. He discovered uncharted rivers in the Amazon, and even gave an hour-long speech right after being shot in the chest.
Then there was his daughter, Alice Lee Roosevelt.
Suffice to say, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
When Roosevelt took over the White House, following the 1901 assassination of William McKinley, he had bigger things than running the United States on his mind. As he told a visitor, “I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both!”
Alice loved to ride in fast cars, ride fast horses – and bet on racehorses with bookies – and sneak a smoke on the White House roof. She carried a pet garter snake named Emily Spinach in her purse. In 1903, she rode in a submarine in Narragansett Bay, two years before her father became the first president to go underwater in a sub.
She is “more than a fair portrait and landscape painter … speaks several languages” and “is fond of poetry, favoring Keats and Shelly”, a columnist wrote in 1905. The columnist said that a member of the snooty Knickerbocker Club in New York “after seeing the zest with which she danced, remarked in his languid way, ‘Bah, Jove! She is a chip off the old block.’”
Also in 1905, Roosevelt sent Alice on a diplomatic voyage to the Far East. The entourage included wealthy playboy congressman Nicholas Longworth III. As happens, romance bloomed at sea. Longworth soon discovered what a handful Alice could be. “One morning Congressman Longworth, Miss Alice’s devoted slave, presented himself attired in white flannels,” reported the New York World. Alice promptly dared him to jump into the ship’s pool, then dived in herself, fully clothed. “What could poor Longworth do, flannels and all but gallantly follow the president’s daughter?”
When the pair married at the White House in 1906 – the first White House wedding since 1874 – it was a gala occasion.
Crowds of spectators gathered outside the White House gates to get a peek at the wedding guests. The guests included Nellie Grant Sartoris, Supreme Court justices, congressmen, diplomats and Alice’s cousin, future president Franklin D Roosevelt. FDR’s wife, Eleanor, was pregnant and stayed home.
At noon, Alice, wearing a long white satin dress, marched up the aisle in the East Room on the arm of President Roosevelt. After vows were exchanged, the bride “tripped down from the altar like a school girl, and in the exuberance of her mood almost danced her way through the assemblage of nearly a thousand admiring men and women”, reported The Washington Post, which devoted its entire front page to the wedding.
Then came the moment to cut the wedding cake.
When the big wedding cake was served, Alice exclaimed to the military guard, “Your sword, Major, your sword.” Drawing his sword, the guard “grasped the blade and thrust the pearl mounted hilt in the bride’s direction”, the Hartford Courant reported. “Without any hesitation, she took the weapon firm in her right hand and with one sharp thrust of the point into the centre of the cake cut deep into it. Then deftly drawing the sword hilt downward, she divided it.”
Longworth, however, continued his playboy ways. In a famous incident, a fellow congressman joked that Longworth’s bald head “Feels just like my wife’s bottom.” Whereupon Longworth ran his hand over his head, too, and replied, “Yes, so it does.”
Once again, though, Alice proved herself a match for the menfolk, having numerous affairs. Indeed, the couple’s only child, when Alice was 41, was, she confessed in her private diary, the child of Senator William Borah. Nonetheless, Longworth doted on daughter Paulina until his death six years later.
In the 1912 election, when Roosevelt left the Republican campaign and formed his own Bull Moose Party, Longworth remained a loyal Republican. Alice duly campaigned for Bull Moose, against her husband. He lost by 105 votes – and Alice joked that she was worth at least 100 of them.
Yet they stayed married until Longworth’s death in 1931. She never remarried.
“Mrs L” became known for her tart tongue. After telling bawdy jokes about President Woodrow Wilson, she was banned from the White House. She called President Warren G Harding “just a slob”. She said, “the Hoover vacuum is more exciting” than President Herbert Hoover but supported him against cousin Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election. Still, Alice often visited the White House during FDR’s four terms. According to the syndicated column Capital Stuff, she once said Roosevelt was “one part mush and two parts Eleanor”.
In 1974, she told The Post that, “I don’t think I am insensitive or cruel. I laugh, I have a sense of humor, I like to tease. I must admit a sense of mischief does get hold of me from time to time.” That sense of mischief would include burying a voodoo doll of incoming First Lady Nellie Taft in the front yard of the White House. The Tafts barred her from the White House.
She presided over Washington society from her home on Embassy Row and became known as the capital’s “other Washington Monument”. A pillow in her sitting room was embroidered with a saying she popularized: “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anyone, come and sit here by me.”
Stars and Stripes
Alice died in 1980, just over a week after her 96th birthday. She was the longest-lived presidential child.
