| Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt |
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Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt (July 29, 1861 – February 14, 1884) was the first wife of Theodore Roosevelt. They had one child, Alice Lee Roosevelt.
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Born in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, the daughter of Caroline Watts (née Haskell) and George Cabot Lee, a prominent banker, Alice was tall for the era at 5'7", charming, athletic, strikingly beautiful and intelligent. Called "Sunshine" by her family and friends,[1] Theodore proved no match to her charms.
She met Theodore "T.R." Roosevelt on October 18, 1878, at the home of her next-door neighbors, the Saltonstalls; T.R. was a classmate of young Richard Saltonstall (her cousin) at Harvard University. Of their first encounter, he would write, "As long as I live, I shall never forget how sweetly she looked, and how prettily she greeted me."
For young T.R. it was "love at first sight." By Thanksgiving (only a few weeks after meeting her), he had decided Alice was to be his wife; the following June he proposed. She put T.R. off, however, taking another eight months before saying "yes".[2] There is no specific record detailing why she declined Theodore's first offer, but it could be that she was a little put off by the "thin, pale youngster with bad eyes and a weak heart" who reeked of arsenic.[3]
On February 13, 1880, an ecstatic Roosevelt recorded in his diary his great joy that the woman of his dreams, whom he had actively courted for more than a year, had finally accepted his proposal of marriage. Knowing that his love was reciprocated and that he could now "hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose" gave the enraptured young Roosevelt enormous satisfaction. They announced their engagement on February 14, 1880.
Roosevelt, aged 22, married Alice Lee, aged 19, on October 27, 1880 (his 22nd birthday), at the Unitarian Church in Brookline, Massachusetts. Among the guests at their wedding, and at the reception in the home of the bride's parents, was Edith Carow, later to become Roosevelt's second wife. The couple's "proper" honeymoon was delayed until the following summer by Theodore's acceptance into Columbia Law School and after two weeks at the family home in Oyster Bay the couple went to live with Theodore's widowed mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt[4]
Alice Roosevelt died in New York on Valentine's Day, February 14, 1884, on the fourth anniversary of their engagement, from Bright's disease, and childbirth complications. She was 22 years old. (On the same day and in the same house, Roosevelt's mother, Martha "Mittie" Bulloch Roosevelt also died, of typhoid fever.) T.R. was so distraught by Alice's death that except for a diary entry ("The light has gone out of my life") he hardly ever spoke of her again. In a short privately published tribute to Alice, Roosevelt wrote:
She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; As a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died. Her life had been always in the sunshine; there had never come to her a single sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for the bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness. Fair, pure, and joyous as a maiden; loving , tender, and happy. As a young wife; when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her—then, by a strange and terrible fate, death came to her. And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.[5]
Richard Nixon made reference to these comments upon his resignation for the presidency in 1974. Paying tribute to Roosevelt and his inner courage, he remarked that "only when you have been in the deepest valley can you know how magnificent it is to reach the highest mountain".
While he made some oblique references to Alice in the months after her passing, Roosevelt never spoke of her publicly again. He refused to have her name mentioned in his presence. When asked about her mother by Alice's daughter and namesake, she was referred to Roosevelt's sister, Anna "Bamie" Roosevelt for information and learned details of her mother only from her aunt. So final was this decision to try to put Alice's loss out of his life, that she is not even mentioned by name in his autobiography.[6]
The Roosevelts had one daughter:
In the immediate aftermath of his wife's death, Theodore turned the care of their newly-born infant daughter to his elder sister Anna, also known as Bamie, and embarked on a journey of personal discovery to his ranch in the Badlands of North Dakota. From this interlude Roosevelt would emerge a renewed man and would go on to the Presidency of the United States in 1901.
Alice Hathaway Roosevelt was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, next to her mother-in-law.