ALICE
Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt was intelligent, athletic, beautiful and beguiling. The daughter of a distinguished and wealthy Boston brahmin, she was one of the most sought after bachelorettes in Boston. Alice has been written off in history as a stereotypical privileged Victorian American, her influence on the man whom she alone called “Teddy” never fully appreciated. Progressive and curious, Alice drove Roosevelt to write a full-throated endorsement of women’s suffrage and equality in 1880. With Alice by his side, Theodore Roosevelt "rose like a rocket,” and, after her untimely death, he would not hold elected office for fifteen years. So bright and lively, Alice was universally known as “Sunshine” for her vivaciousness. She was the “rare and radiant maiden” of Theodore’s wildest imagination and he was shattered to lose her.
Alice had pale blue-gray eyes and dark, golden blonde hair. There are less than a dozen photographs known to exist of her. After her death, Theodore kept keepsakes including this picture of his late wife as an adolescent hidden from Edith, his second wife.
“I love to talk over everything with [Alice] from politics to poetry,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his diary. Contrary to what has often been written about Alice, she and Theodore exchanged ideas, many letters, and she encouraged his early support for progressive reform. Her letters recall a gamine, much like Audrey or Kate Hepburn in the century after Alice’s lifetime. It is easy to imagine, had Alice lived beyond 22, that she would have continued to support Theodore’s rise in politics.