Political families, similar in some ways, differ in the politicians they produce. The Adamses gave us two indifferent presidents and three brilliant diplomats. The Kennedys gave us one president, three senators, and two martyred icons. The Bushes have given us, so far, one senator, one president, and two governors.
But no family has yet matched the Roosevelts, whose two presidents (fifth cousins, linked by an outsized first lady) occupied the White House for twenty years. The Roosevelts defined the twentieth century.
The life of that Roosevelt family is described in two recent books: Betty Boyd Caroli’s The Roosevelt Women, a panoramic view of three generations of uppity females, and Edward J. Renehan Jr.’s The Lion’s Pride, an examination of Teddy Roosevelt’s four sons as they struggled, at war and in peace, with their father’s gigantic legacy.
The Roosevelts lived in a world of money and power and access, in which the White House seemed a family residence and everyone worth knowing a relative: Uncle Ted and Aunt Edith (President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt), Cousin Sallie (Delano Roosevelt), “Auntie Sister” (Alice Roosevelt Longworth), and Cousin Eleanor (Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt, a family member twice over). From Caroli’s panoramic view, two things emerge: The apparently singular traits of the most famous Roosevelts were in fact common to their family, and the Roosevelt presidents floated like corks on a warm sea of female support.
The social activism of Eleanor Roosevelt descends in a straight line from her grandfather Theodore (the president’s father), a compulsive philanthropist, whose “maniacal benevolence” led to the founding of numerous charities. Her political instincts and interests (though not her political party) were shared by her cousins, and her civil-rights activism was a family passion. Her boundless energy was shared by her uncle, Teddy Roosevelt, among others, as were her curiosity, her passion for travel, and her ability to function on three hours’ sleep. The fortitude shown by Franklin D. Roosevelt when stricken with polio was like that of “Bamie,” Teddy’s sister Anna, a lifelong victim of a crippling bone disorder who spent the last part of her life in a wheelchair. And both he and Bamie were like Teddy, who remade his body, having been born a fragile and asthmatic boy.
Teddy Roosevelt was surrounded by tough, feisty, and strong-minded women. The model of the Victorian patriarch, he was born into a family of such women; he married them, fathered them, and was adored by them all of his life. His soulmate and guide was his sister Bamie, a great political hostess and backroom adviser to statesmen, who shared his interests, his intellect, and his courage. As an adult, she was often mistaken for an older sister of her ravishing southern belle of a mother. But, while lacking good looks, Bamie shared with her brother (and with their niece, Eleanor) the gift of charisma. “When her face was animated, it was extraordinary,” said one observer. “She gave out a light and an animation . . . very, very rare.”
Despite Teddy’s affinity for strong women, historians usually dismiss as lovely and vacuous his first wife, Alice Lee (who died at age twenty-two in childbirth), though the fierce intelligence and wit of her only child seem to suggest otherwise. The future president, according to the standard view, returned to form when he married a second time, to Edith Carow — his childhood love who became one of the country’s premier first ladies, probably its most intelligent, and certainly its best read. Not precisely one’s idea of the stereotypical Victorian woman, Edith was devoid of sentiment, if not of feeling, refusing to gush, even about her own children. “Nothing can make them picturesque,” she said, when someone had been foolish enough to praise them. Of her grandchildren, she said, “I like to see their little faces, but I prefer to see their backs.” When scolded by someone for her tart comments, she asked for the privilege of “losing my temper as a Christmas gift.”
Edith is too dry for Caroli’s palate, but she was the ideal wife for the emotional Teddy, whose excesses she moderated. Renehan has it better when he writes, “Edith was Roosevelt’s touchstone, advocate, and most trusted advisor and supporter.” The historian David Burton points out that while Roosevelt was
exuberant, quixotic, and quick to judge, Edith was clear-eyed, restrained, and wary. . . . During their life together, TR became more disciplined and more cautious. . . . He learned, slowly and incompletely, no doubt, to calculate his positions, no matter how much he might bluster.
As first lady, Edith dazzled Washington and restored the shabby White House to elegance. She also lured many of the world’s greatest intellects to the presidential table, where, it was said, they listened to Teddy, but talked to Edith. Apparently, the first lady’s influence was something to behold. Caroli quotes Henry Adams: “Theodore stands in abject terror of Edith.” And cousin Franklin once noted that “Edith managed Theodore very cleverly without his being conscious of it.”
The situation was dramatically different in the second Roosevelt White House, where Cousin Eleanor was widely known to the public but had little influence over her husband. Franklin D. Roosevelt, at times estranged from Eleanor, was much closer to his mother, Sara. She, another of the dreadnoughts who married into the Roosevelts, gave her son his good looks, his physical presence, and his boundless self-confidence. Still, he confided in no one, where Teddy Roosevelt encouraged the view that his career was a family enterprise, shared in full by his wife and his sisters. “Haven’t we had fun being governor of New York State?” he wrote his sister Corinne.
A generation before Eleanor, Bamie had been the eminence grise for her brother and his allies, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge among them. Lodge asked her advice on many serious matters and once sought her counsel to help avert an armed clash between Venezuela and Britain. Letters her brother sent when he was in Albany concerned such topics as whether or not he should run for vice president, what was the best way to rein in corporations, and the conduct of the Boer War. When president, he used her home on N Street as an alternative White House, slipping there in times of crisis to confer on great matters of state.
The political astuteness of Teddy and Bamie was even shared by some of the younger Roosevelts. In 1920, Teddy’s sister Corinne became the first woman to address a national political convention, rising to second the nomination for president of General Leonard Wood. By then, Corinne had been for more than ten years a professional speaker, lecturing to thousands on such topics as travel, books (she was a longtime friend of Edith Wharton), and politics. Her daughter Corinney married a farmer, Joseph Wright Alsop, and retired to the backwoods of Connecticut, where she commenced a career as a Republican assemblywoman and local town chairman. Corinney reared four children, two of whom became premier political writers, Stewart Alsop and Joseph Wright Alsop. It was her son Joseph who, in his memoirs, called her the consummate political professional — an assessment shared by Franklin D. Roosevelt. According to her son, Corinney could call a state election in Connecticut by three thousand votes in either direction, and a town vote in Avon by ten.
Like her mother, Corinney addressed a national convention, seconding in 1936 the Republicans’ nomination of Alf Landon to run against her cousin. Ever the realist, she then went back home to teach Avon townsmen how to split tickets, so that local Republican office holders would not be swept out in the coming FDR landslide. Close all her life to both Alice Longworth and Eleanor (even when those two were not speaking), Corinney was perfectly capable of working hard against her cousin Franklin’s ticket, and then cheerfully inviting herself to his inaugural festivities, unwilling to miss a good family party. “The fact that I disagree with you politically very frequently does not change my affection one iota,” she declared.
And yet, some passions were shared by all Roosevelts. “I want you to know how proud I was of you the other day — very proud of being a first cousin,” Corinney wrote Eleanor in 1939. “You are the first lady of the land in your own right!” The occasion was Eleanor’s resignation from the Daughters of the American Revolution after they refused to let the black singer Marian Anderson perform at Constitution Hall — just as Corinney’s mother, Corinne, had backed her brother when he had enraged much of the South by asking Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House.
Of course, it’s one thing to be the wife, sister, daughter, or niece of a dynamic and dominant male, and for the Roosevelt women, it worked out nicely. It’s another thing, however, to be the son or brother. There is evidence that Teddy Roosevelt, while a boon to the females around him, could be toxic to males. In the tight circle of his family, one member always seems to be missing. Teddy’s younger brother was Elliott, a charming boy who became a disturbed adolescent and a reckless man, dying at thirty-five as an outcast, addicted to morphine and alcohol. Never having worked a full day in his life, he could claim only one true accomplishment, fathering Eleanor.
Alcoholism was a recurrent theme in the Roosevelt family, but Elliott’s decline — his spells of lassitude, his mysterious headaches, the strange episodes in which he felt himself sinking — has a strong parallel to Teddy’s transformation from a weak and sickly child to the man who could read, write, fight, ride, hunt, shoot, wrestle — and lead. Similarly, though Teddy was a scrupulous parent, each of his four sons lived with inescapable pressure. The boys felt compelled to meet, match, and master the force of nature that was their father. “Don’t you think it handicaps a boy to be the son of a man like father, and especially to have the same name?” Renehan quotes Ted Jr. as saying. “I will always be honest and upright, and I hope someday to be a great soldier, but I will always be spoken of as Theodore Roosevelt’s son.”
In The Lion’s Pride, Renehan largely restricts himself to the wartime exploits of the Roosevelt children, but the sense comes through strongly that these were people doomed by the fact that to them the heroic act was normal and the outstanding act seldom good enough. Teddy Roosevelt, who had left Edith’s sickbed for his own “crowded hour” in San Juan in 1898, was heartbroken when President Wilson refused to allow him — an obese and sickly 56-year-old — to get back in uniform during World War I. He even harangued his niece Eleanor that her husband, Franklin, then an assistant secretary of the Navy, should get at once into action, though his requests to do so had already been turned down.
It was inevitable that Teddy would push his four sons into battlefield glory, having reared them not to flee danger, but to run headlong into it. “All the Roosevelt children . . . absorbed or inherited his reckless, all-or-nothing approach to hazards,” Renehan tells us. “Throughout World War I, Ted Jr. would be alternatively praised and criticized as an officer who routinely and boldly moved ahead of the line.” Of the third son, Archie, one contemporary said, “an absolute selfless gladiator who insisted on being the first to smell the enemy’s bad breath.” The second son, Kermit, had to be told by his British colonel that some victories could be had “without full frontal assaults into the gaping mouths of enemy guns.”
Kermit won the British War Cross. Ted Jr. was gassed, shot, and cited for “conspicuous gallantry.” Archie, after winning the Croix de Guerre, was retired with a “one hundred percent” disability from a dire knee injury. Quentin, the youngest, was commended for his “utter fearlessness,” and praised in the New York Sun for “attacking three enemy airplanes single-handedly, and shooting one of them down.” Three days later, he himself was shot down over France.
Quentin’s makeshift grave soon became a shrine for Allied soldiers. An airfield on Long Island was named in his honor, as was a French battleship. As his sister wrote his fiancee, Flora Whitney, “So often we hear from people who have been to his grave. It has become a sort of pilgrimage, both for our people, and the French.” When his body was disinterred and taken to an Allied cemetery in Normandy, the original stone was sent to Sagamore Hill and placed under the flagpole. “There are things worse than death,” Teddy had written. “For nothing under heaven would I have my sons act otherwise.”
In civilian life too, there were numerous casualties among male Roosevelts, as painful as those found in war. Left to himself, Ted Jr. would have stayed in the army, the life for which he was brilliantly suited. But expectations — his own, and those of his father’s most passionate followers — pushed him into politics. In 1924, he lost a bid to follow his father into the statehouse in Albany, and he carried the scar of this failure the rest of his life. A worse fate befell Kermit — he of the “white head and black heart” — who followed the path of his late uncle Elliott. He drank heavily, deserted his family to live with a mistress, and disappeared entirely for long periods of time. When World War II broke out, he sought redemption in battle, but his will and his health had been broken. Trying to stash Kermit where he could do the least damage, Franklin D. Roosevelt and George Marshall sent him to a base in Alaska where his duties were minimal. There, on July 3, 1943, he committed suicide, shooting himself in the mouth.
It was only in war that Teddy’s sons found their metier. Back in uniform as a brigadier general, Ted Jr. underwent a renaissance, participating in the invasions of Europe and Africa. With his son Quentin, he made up the only father-and-son team on D-Day, hitting Utah and Omaha beaches. Days later, his promotion to major general on Eisenhower’s desk, he died of a heart attack at fifty-seven, the most decorated man in the history of the U.S. Armed Forces, and the second son of Teddy Roosevelt to give up his life for his country.
At the age of forty-eight, Archie was given command of an infantry battalion at New Guinea, performing so bravely that “Roosevelt Ridge” would be named in his honor. Wounded by a grenade in the same knee he had injured almost twenty years earlier, he was discharged — again with a “one hundred percent” disability, the only man in American history to be given that designation twice.
In the North Room of Sagamore Hill, along with the stuffed and mounted heads of the beasts he shot on safari, Teddy Roosevelt’s death mask and the twisted axle of the airplane in which his son Quentin died are displayed. When the mask and axle were removed by squeamish curators who thought they might offend tourists, an enraged Archie Roosevelt ordered them back. “The removal,” complained Archie, was an act of people who “did not understand the Roosevelts, and did not understand what we did in the war, who we were before the war, or who we were after.”
BETTY BOYD CAROLI
The Roosevelt Women
Basic, 511 pp., $ 30
EDWARD J. RENEHAN JR.
The Lion’s pride:
Theodore Roosevelt and His Family In Peace and War
Oxford University Press, 289 pp., $ 27.50
A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
