The Honorary Roosevelt

Those daughters and nieces–Alice and Eleanor, among a less-well-known but equally impressive and feisty collection–were no slouches themselves, but none quite had the bizarre mixture of privilege and extreme physical hardship, along with such heart-pounding, heart-breaking romance. Two of Greenway’s best friends were Eleanor, and her cousin Corinne, daughter of TR’s kid sister. Her first two husbands were Rough Riders who had been with TR in Cuba during his “crowded hour.” And as detailed in this new biography by Kristie Miller, most of her hours also were crowded, with a series of incidents that beggar belief.

Isabella herself was an honorary Roosevelt; in fact, TR had known her from birth. He had met her parents in Mandan, North Dakota, where he had fled following the deaths of his first wife and his mother, and where he found her mother “seductive,” and dandled Isabella as a four-month-old tot. Then he went back to New York, married again, had four other children (after Alice, whose birth killed her mother), and resumed the political career that, by 1900, would make him vice president.

Isabella stayed in the West in obscurity. But her life changed in 1901, when she and her mother came to live in New York with relatives, not far from the Roosevelt homestead at Sagamore Hill on Long Island, just as Roosevelt (on William McKinley’s death) became president, and vaulted the girl who was born in the Badlands into the center of the country’s social and political life. In 1905, as Miller tells us, Greenway attended a ball given by the Mrs. Astor, at which “six hundred guests passed through a foyer filled with poinsettias and Easter lilies, palm trees and roses, (and) then assembled for dancing in an immense ballroom, its walls covered with paintings. . . . Supper was served in an ebony and gold dining room. . . . This too was like a scene from an Edith Wharton novel; in fact, four days later Edith Wharton invited the young belle to dine.”

It was all a long way from Mandan, as was her marriage later that year to Robert H.M. Ferguson, almost 20 years her senior and godfather to TR’s children Kermit and Ethel, which established them firmly in New York’s upper strata, where they mingled with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Three years later, all this indulgence came to an end when Ferguson was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sentenced to a series of out-of-town sanatoriums, where he would live out the rest of his days.

At 22, Isabella packed up her two children and invalid husband and headed to Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, and began 14 years of struggle, exhaustion, and stress. Two years later, Ferguson had grown worse, and they relocated to a camp near Silver City, New Mexico, where, as Miller says, “camp life was primitive. There were outhouses and no running water; water was caught in tubs as it ran off the roofs of the tents.” It was a far cry from Fifth Avenue, and these were trying years, marked by an isolation broken only by visits from various Roosevelts, and a gradual emotional drawing-away from a husband who had, by degrees, stopped being a mate and companion, and become a charge and a duty instead.

During these years, Greenway was often described as being strained, drawn, and burdened, but just when you thought she was becoming a Desperate Housewife, she fell in love with John Greenway, another Rough Rider (and a neighbor in close-by Arizona), who lived 200 miles away. Like a knight in a legend, he promised to wait for her; and so he did, while he went to war, and she nursed a husband, who, after being told of this arrangement, became not unexpectedly still more remote. They married in 1923, a little more than a year after the death of Bob Ferguson, and for more than two years were exceedingly happy. Then John Greenway died from complications of surgery, a week before she miscarried their child, a multiple blow that recalled Theodore’s loss of his wife and mother. But like TR’s 40 years earlier, her years of emotional trauma were over. And her political life was about to begin.

Twice widowed at 40, with three children and $2 million, Greenway went into politics, like the Roosevelt woman she was. In the blinding glare that comes off Franklin and Theodore, one tends to forget just how assertive were all these women, and how even Eleanor was no more than one of a type. TR’s big sister Bamie was a noted adviser to statesmen. His daughter Alice had a shrewd, though destructive, political intellect. His young sister Corinne addressed Republican conventions, and worked up a career as a lecturer. Her daughter Corinne was a career politician in Connecticut (working at times against FDR, with whom she stayed friendly) as well as the mother of Stewart and Joseph Alsop, the premier political reporters of their age.

It should have surprised no one when, soon after her husband’s death, Greenway had become a political dynamo, as well as an entrepreneur and one of the founding mothers of Arizona’s industrial life. “An old friend . . . found she had ‘changed quite a lot, or perhaps I’ve only seen a side of you which I hadn’t supposed to exist. . . . You really are a high-powered executive . . . Lord only knows what you will try to do next.'”

Deflecting a move to draft her for governor, Greenway threw herself into FDR’s run for the presidency, winning the next year a special election to Congress, where the press described her as a “luscious personality” (though enriched by a heavy patina of sorrow) and a “full-blown rose.” Always a babe, she wrung passionate letters from the sculptor of her late husband’s statue, and a proposal of marriage from Harry O. King, a onetime deputy administrator of the National Recovery Administration, whom she wed in 1939 when she had left Washington.

Roosevelts continued to run through her life, as in 1940, when she broke ranks to vote for Wendell Willkie (which did not break up her friendship with Eleanor) and on April 5, 1945, when she entertained the artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, en route to Warm Springs to paint what would be the last portrait of FDR. Isabella herself died eight years later, mourned by the rest of the Roosevelts, to whom she had been, if not a blood sister, very much in that family’s mold.

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.