| Alice Roosevelt Longworth | |
|---|---|
Hand-tinted photograph of Alice Roosevelt by Frances Benjamin Johnston, taken around her debut in 1903. |
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| Born | February 12, 1884 U.S. |
| Died | February 20, 1980 (aged 96) U.S. |
| Spouse | Nicholas Longworth |
Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth (February 12, 1884 – February 20, 1980) was the oldest child of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States. She was the only child of Roosevelt and his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee.
Longworth led an unconventional and controversial life. Despite her love for her legendary father, she proved to be almost nothing like him. Her marriage to Representative Nicholas Longworth (Republican-Ohio), a party leader and 43rd Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, was shaky, and the couple's only child was a result of her affair with Senator William Borah of Idaho. She temporarily became a Democrat during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and proudly boasted in a 60 Minutes interview with Eric Sevareid broadcast February 17, 1974, that she was a "hedonist".
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Alice Lee Roosevelt was born in the Roosevelt family home at 6 West 57th St. in New York City. Her mother, Alice, was a Boston banking heiress. Her father, Theodore, was then a New York State Assemblyman. Two days after her birth, in the same house, her mother died of undiagnosed Bright's disease; also, on the same day, her paternal grandmother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, died of typhoid fever.
Theodore was so distraught by his wife's death that he could not bear to think about her. He almost never spoke of her again, would not allow her to be mentioned in his presence, and even omitted her name from his autobiography. Therefore, his daughter Alice was called "Baby Lee" instead of her name. She continued this practice late in life, preferring to be called "Mrs. L" rather than "Alice".
Seeking solace, Theodore retreated from his life in New York and headed west where he spent two years traveling and living on his ranch in North Dakota. He left his infant daughter in the care of his sister Anna Bamie Roosevelt, also known as "Bye". There are letters to Bamie that reveal Theodore's concern for his daughter. In one 1884 letter, he wrote, "I hope Mousiekins will be very cunning, I shall dearly love her."[1]
Theodore's choice of his sister Anna "Bamie" Roosevelt was not an offhand choice. Bamie had been deeply involved in his life and had been managing the Roosevelt family household since her debut in 1873. She personally decorated his lodgings while Theodore attended Harvard.[2] She was the only aunt with whom Longworth had a long-term relationship. Bamie was the one strong stabilizing influence on her. Longworth would later speak of her admiringly "If auntie Bye had been a man, she would have been president."[3] Bamie took Longworth under her watchful care, moving Longworth into her book-filled Manhattan house, until Theodore married again.
After Theodore's marriage to Edith Kermit Carow, Longworth was raised by her stepmother. During much of her childhood, Bamie was a remote figure who eventually married and moved to London for a time. But later, as Longworth became more independent, and came into conflict with her father and stepmother, Aunt "Bye" provided needed structure and stability. Late in life, Longworth said of her Aunt Bye: "There is always someone in every family who keeps it together. In ours, it was Auntie Bye."[4]
Increasingly, Longworth's parents would send her off to visit Bamie when they couldn't handle her. Likewise it would be Longworth's maternal grandparents in Boston, with whom Longworth would spend summers and holiday periods, including Thanksgiving.
After returning east, and running for and losing the election for mayor of New York City in 1886, Theodore Roosevelt went to London where he married a childhood friend, Edith Kermit Carow. He and Edith would have five children and remain married until his death in 1919. Edith would outlive both her husband and his famous cousin Franklin, dying in 1948. There were strains in the relationship between Theodore and his daughter, and he had very little interaction with her during her earliest years, leaving the work to other people, such as his sister Bamie, Longworth's maternal grandparents and even his second wife, Edith. Longworth was continually shuffled about from one house to another, even as a teenager, and she later said she often felt like he loved her "one-sixth" as much as the other children.
There were also tensions in the relationship between young Longworth and her stepmother, who had known her husband's previous wife and made it clear that she regarded her predecessor as a beautiful but insipid, childlike fool. As Longworth later recalled, her stepmother once angrily told her that if Longworth's mother, Alice Lee Roosevelt, had lived, she would have bored her father to death.[5] Despite these strains, it would be Edith, the demanding stepmother, who would save Longworth from a life possibly in a wheelchair or on crutches when Longworth came down with a mild form of polio and one leg and its muscles grew shorter than the other. By Edith's uncompromising regimen of nightly forced wearing of torturous leg braces and shoes, even over Longworth's sobs, Edith ensured that Longworth would grow up with almost no trace of the disability. Longworth was able to run up stairs and touch her nose with her toe well into her 80s.
In later years, Longworth expressed admiration for her stepmother's sense of humor and stated that they had shared similar literary tastes. In her autobiography Crowded Hours, Longworth wrote of Edith Carow, stating "That I was the child of another marriage was a simple fact and made a situation that had to be coped with, and Mother coped with it with a fairness and charm and intelligence which she has to a greater degree than almost any one else I know." [6]
Longworth, always spoiled with gifts, matured into young womanhood and, in the course, became known as a great beauty like her mother. However, continuing tension with her stepmother and prolonged separation and little attention from her father created a young woman who was as independent and outgoing as she was self-confident and calculating. When her father was governor of New York, he and his wife proposed that Longworth attend a conservative school for girls in New York City. Pulling out all the stops, Longworth wrote, "If you send me I will humiliate you. I will do something that will shame you. I tell you I will."
When her father took office following the assassination of President William McKinley in Buffalo (an event that she greeted with "sheer rapture"[7]), Longworth became an instant celebrity and fashion icon. While proud of her father's accomplishments, she also was painfully aware that his new duties would give her significantly less of his time even as she longed for more of his attention. She was known as a rule-breaker in an era when women were under great pressure to conform. The American public noticed many of her exploits. She smoked cigarettes in public, rode in cars with men, stayed out late partying, kept a pet snake named Emily Spinach (Emily as in her spinster aunt and Spinach for its green color) in the White House, and was seen placing bets with a bookie.
In 1905, Longworth, along with her father's Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, led the so-called "Imperial Cruise" to Japan, Hawaii, China, the Philippines, and Korea. It was the largest diplomatic mission in U.S. history, composed of 23 U.S. Congressmen (including her future husband Nicholas Longworth), seven Senators, and other diplomats and officials.[8] She made headlines wherever she went, being photographed with the Emperor Meiji of the Empire of Japan and the Empress Dowager Cixi of Qing Dynasty China, as well as attending sumo wrestling matches.
During the cruise to Japan, she made a splash by jumping into the ship's pool fully clothed, and coaxed a Congressman to join her in the water. (Years later Bobby Kennedy would chide Longworth about the incident, saying it was outrageous for the time, to which the by then octogenarian Longworth replied it would only have been outrageous had she removed her clothes.[9] In her autobiography, Crowded Hours, Longworth made note of the event, pointing out that there was little difference between the linen skirt and blouse she had been wearing and a ladies' swimsuit of the period.) The press dubbed Longworth's part in this government-sponsored trip to Asia "Alice in Plunder Land". She brought back enough silk from China for a lifetime of beautiful dresses and would wear a beautiful strand of costly pearls given to her by the Cuban government for the rest of her life. This diplomatic junket, and Longworth's ability to keep the press at bay by becoming the center of attention, contributed to her father's successful conclusion of the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 that ended the Russo-Japanese War, which eventually made her father the first American Nobel Peace Prize winner in history.
Once, a White House visitor commented on Longworth's frequent interruptions to the Oval Office, often because of her political advice. The exhausted President commented to his friend, author Owen Wister, after the third interruption to their conversation and after threatening to throw Longworth 'out the window', "I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both." [10]
Longworth was the center of attention in the social context of her father's presidency, and she thrived on the attention, even as she chafed on some of the restrictions such attention placed on her. In this, she resembled her father. She later said of Theodore, "He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening." [11]
Longworth was a medal awarder at the notorious 1904 Olympics in St. Louis.
Alice married Nicholas Longworth, a Republican U.S. House of Representatives member from Cincinnati, Ohio, who ultimately would rise to become Speaker of the House. Their 1906 wedding was the social event of the season. They bought a house at 2009 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., in Washington, D.C., now the headquarters of the Washington Legal Foundation.
A scion of a socially prominent Ohio family, Nicholas Longworth was 14 years Alice's senior, and had a reputation as a Washington, D.C. playboy. While the two made a handsome couple to the ever-interested public, their political differences and loyalties would cause private dissension.[12] Alice publicly supported her father's 1912 Bull Moose presidential candidacy, while Nicholas Longworth stayed loyal to his mentor, President Taft. During that election cycle, she appeared on stage with her father's vice presidential candidate, Hiram Johnson, in Nicholas Longworth's own district. Nicholas Longworth later lost by about 105 votes, and she joked that she was worth at least 100 votes (meaning she was the reason he lost). However, he was elected again in 1914 and stayed in the House for the rest of his life.
Alice Longworth's campaign against her husband caused a permanent chill in her marriage to Nick Longworth. During their marriage, Longworth carried on numerous affairs. As reported in Carol Felsenthal's biography of Alice, and in Betty Boyd Caroli's The Roosevelt Women, as well by TIME journalist Rebecca Winters Keegan, it was generally accepted knowledge in DC that Longworth also had a long, ongoing affair with Senator William Borah, and the opening of Longworth's diaries to modern historical researchers indicates that Borah was, by Longworth's own admission, the father of her daughter, Paulina Longworth (1925–1957).[13]
Alice Longworth was not without a sense of humor. On May 11, 1908, she amused herself in the gallery at the House of Representatives in Washington by placing a tack on the chair of an unknown but "middle-aged" and "dignified" gentleman. Upon encountering the tack, "like the burst of a bubble on the fountain, like the bolt from the blue, like the ball from the cannon," the unfortunate fellow leapt up in pain and surprise while Mrs. Longworth looked away.[14]
When it came time for the Roosevelt family to move out of the White House, Longworth buried a Voodoo doll of the new First Lady, Nellie Taft, in the front yard.[15] At many White House social activities such as dinners, Longworth frequently mocked the First Lady, rendering Mrs. Taft rather uncomfortable in Longworth's presence, though Longworth was some twenty years her junior. Mrs. Taft offended Longworth by offering her an invitation to the White House. Upon receiving the invitation, Longworth asked, "Me--who walked the halls of the White House for so many years?" Later, the Taft White House banned her from her former residence—the first but not the last administration to do so. During Woodrow Wilson's administration (from which she was banned in 1916 for a bawdy joke at Wilson's expense), Longworth worked endlessly against the entry of the United States into the League of Nations. Her Washington society dinners and reception lobbying are credited with helping to derail America's membership in the League of Nations.
Longworth didn't like Warren G. Harding any more than she had Taft or Wilson. Mrs. Longworth felt that Harding was crass, barely educated, and ill-suited for the job. She preferred his vice president, Calvin Coolidge. Her feelings toward First Lady Florence Harding grew more strained during the Hardings' years in Washington. Longworth felt that she had lost her best friend, Evalyn Walsh McLean, to Florence, and the relationship between Longworth—the Speaker's wife—and the President's wife grew bitter.
Following the death of her husband in 1931, Alice Longworth and her daughter continued to live near Dupont Circle on Massachusetts Avenue, Washington's Embassy Row. When asked if she would run for her late husband's seat, she declined. She did not like public speaking, seldom spoke at public receptions, and abhorred physical contact with the public and the "press of the flesh" that came so easily to her father; in short, campaigning did not suit her. Her final visits to Cincinnati were in order to fulfill obligations, not for pleasure. One such trip was made for the burial of her husband, another for the social debut of her daughter. When asked if she would be buried in Cincinnati, Mrs. Longworth said that to do so "would be a fate worse than death itself."
During the Great Depression, when she, like so many other Americans, found her fortunes reversed, Longworth appeared in tobacco advertisements to raise money. She also published an autobiography, Crowded Hours. The book sold well and received rave reviews. TIME Magazine praised its "insouciant vitality."[16] Her library was filled with autographed works from Tennyson, Yeats, and Ezra Pound.
The widow Longworth maintained her stature in the community, socially and politically, garnering her the nickname "the other Washington Monument". Mrs. Longworth served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention on more than one occasion, declining to address the convention.
Longworth's wit was legendary in Washington, DC, and that wit could have a deadly political effect on friend and foe alike. When columnist and cousin Joseph Alsop claimed that there was grass-roots support for Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, the Republican hope to defeat F.D.R. in 1940, Longworth said yes, "the grass roots of 10,000 country clubs."[17] Longworth demolished Thomas Dewey, the 1944 opponent of her cousin Franklin, by comparing the pencil-mustached Republican to “the little man on the wedding cake.” The image stuck and helped Governor Dewey lose two consecutive presidential elections.
Paulina Longworth married Alexander McCormick Sturm, with whom she had a daughter, Joanna (b. July 1946). Sturm died in 1951. Following the death of Paulina in 1957 (by an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, for many years suspected of being a suicide, although Longworth never agreed with that assessment), Alice Longworth fought for and won the custody of her granddaughter, Joanna Sturm, whom she raised. Not very long before Paulina's death, she and Longworth had discussed the care of Joanna in case of such an event. In an article in American Heritage in 1969, Joanna was described as a "highly attractive and intellectual twenty-two-year-old" and was called "a notable contributor to Mrs. Longworth’s youthfulness.... The bonds between them are twin cables of devotion and a healthy respect for each other’s tongue. 'Mrs. L.,' says a friend, 'has been a wonderful father and mother to Joanna: mostly father.'[18]
In contrast to her relationship with her daughter, Mrs. Longworth doted on her granddaughter, and the two were very close. Upon Paulina's death, her cousin Eleanor Roosevelt sent condolences and the two mended their broken relationship despite their continued political differences.
From an early age, Longworth was interested in politics. When advancing age and illness incapacitated her Aunt Bamie, Longworth stepped into her place as an unofficial political adviser to her father. Longworth warned her father against challenging the renomination of William Howard Taft in 1912. She took a hard-line view of the Democrats and in her youth sympathized with the conservative wing of the Republican Party. She supported her half-brother, Ted Roosevelt, when he ran for governor of New York in 1924. When Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, Longworth publicly opposed his candidacy. Writing in the Ladies' Home Journal in October 1932, she said of FDR, "He is my father's fourth cousin once removed.... Politically, his branch of the family and ours have always been in different camps, and the same surname is about all we have in common.... I am a Republican.... I am going to vote for Hoover.... If I were not a Republican, I would still vote for Mr. Hoover this time."[19]
Longworth developed a genuine friendship with Richard Nixon when he was vice president, and when he returned to California after Eisenhower's second term, Longworth kept in touch and did not consider his political career to be over. She encouraged Nixon to reenter politics and continuted to invite him to her famous dinners. Nixon returned these favors by inviting Longworth to his first formal White House dinner, and to the 1971 wedding of his daughter Tricia Nixon.
Although she did not support John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election, she became very enamored of the Kennedy family and "learned how amusing and attractive Democrats could be."[20] She developed an affectionate, although sometimes strained, friendship with Bobby Kennedy, perhaps because of his relatively thin skin. When she privately made fun of his scaling the newly named Mount Kennedy in Canada, he was not amused. She even admitted to voting for President Lyndon Johnson over Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 because she believed Goldwater was too mean.[21]
By the 1950s, Longworth's health began to fail her. In 1955, she fell and suffered from a broken hip. In 1956, Longworth was found to be suffering from breast cancer, and though successfully undergoing a mastectomy at the time, she was later found to have cancer in the other breast in 1970, requiring a second mastectomy. Taking the medical procedures in stride, she referred to herself as the only "topless octogenarian" in Washington. After these surgeries, Longworth's health was not as strong as it once had been, but she continued a rigorous schedule and maintained her social rounds. By 1960, at age 76, after a noticeable loss of weight and frail appearance with a continued cough and shortness of breath, Longworth was advised by family and friends to see a physician. She was diagnosed with emphysema as a result of many years of heavy smoking.
Longworth was a lifelong member of the Republican party. Yet her political sympathies began to change when she became close to the Kennedy family and Lyndon Johnson. She voted Democratic in 1964 and was known to be supporting Bobby Kennedy in the 1968 Democratic primary.
It is possible her change in political leanings was the result of the social upheavals occurring in American society at the same time. Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing into the 1970s, the struggle of African Americans for social and legal equality could not have escaped the notice of a woman always known for approaching everyone she first met with respect, without regard for their station in life. As an example of her attitudes on race, in 1965 her African American chauffeur and one of her best friends, Turner, was driving Longworth to an appointment. During the trip, he pulled out in front of a taxi, and the driver got out and demanded to know of him, "What do you think you're doing, you black bastard?" Turner took the insult calmly, but Longworth did not and told the taxi driver, "He's taking me to my destination, you white son of a bitch!"[22]
After RFK was murdered in 1968, she again supported her friend Richard Nixon, just as she had done in his 1960 campaign against JFK. Her long friendship with Nixon ended at the conclusion of the Watergate Scandal, specifically when Nixon quoted her father's diary at his resignation, saying, "Only if you've been to the lowest valley can you know how great it is to be on the highest mountain top." This infuriated Longworth, who spat curse words at her television screen as she watched him compare his early departure from the White House (in the face of probable impeachment and possible criminal prosecution) to her idealistic young father's loss of his wife and mother on the same day due to illness. Nixon, however, called her "the most interesting [conversationalist of the age]" and said, "No one, no matter how famous, could ever outshine her."[23]
She remained cordial with Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, but a perceived lack of social grace on the part of Jimmy Carter caused her to decline to ever meet him, the last sitting President in her lifetime.
Longworth's last public appearance, televised nationwide on PBS, was the 1976 Bicentennial of the United States, attended by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. Joseph Alsop and other friends were taken aback when Longworth came on the screen, escorted to the head of the receiving line by her granddaughter's close friend Robert Hellman. She had her own reception line later, greeting old friends of many years for the last time—including some old-timers from the White House kitchen staff, most of whom were African Americans.
After many years of ill health, Longworth died in her Embassy Row home in 1980 of emphysema and pneumonia, with contributory effects of a number of other chronic illnesses. She was 96. Alice Roosevelt Longworth is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.
Of her quotable quotations, her most famous found its way to a pillow on her settee: "If you haven't got anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me."[15] To Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had jokingly remarked at a party, "Here's my blind date. I am going to call you Alice," she responded acidly, "Senator McCarthy, you are not going to call me Alice. The trashman and the policeman on my block call me Alice, but you may not."[24] She informed President Lyndon B. Johnson that she wore wide-brimmed hats so he couldn't kiss her.[25] On another occasion, asked by a Ku Klux Klansman in full regalia to take his word for something, she refused, saying "I never trust a man under sheets." And when a well-known Washington senator was discovered to have been having an affair with a young woman less than half his age, Mrs. Longworth quipped, "You can't make a soufflé rise twice."[26]
Though Longworth was Theodore Roosevelt's firstborn child, she was the last of his children to die, surviving all five of her half-siblings from her father's second marriage.