EDITH
Edith Kermit Roosevelt was Theodore Roosevelt’s first love and second wife. She was the first modern First Lady, elevating the role of presidential spouse to partner. She hired the first social secretary, redesigned the White House, entertained 40,000 guests in a single season, and counseled her husband on almost every decision before the nation. Edith and Theodore knew one another for 57 years and were married for 33 of them. She had a habitual reserve and more hardened perspective, and Edith was his political, moral, and emotional rudder. “Whenever I go against her judgment I regret it,” Theodore said of his wife. Edith was, in many ways, fated to marry Theodore and live in the shadow of a woman who was forever 22 in his memory. Her stepdaughter later observed: “I think she always resented being the second choice and she never really forgave him his first marriage.” Nevertheless, their marriage was a happy, intensely loving, and historic one.
“She managed TR very cleverly without his being conscious of it — no slight achievement as anyone will concede,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said of the woman he called Aunt Edith.
Others observed much the same: “Mrs. Roosevelt is more difficult of access; praise does not reach or define her. Just as the camera is focused, she steps aside to avoid the click of the shutter.”
Edith (left) with her sister, Emily (right), were the daughters of Charles Carow and Gertrude Tyler. Their father’s alcoholism and public decline overshadowed much of their childhood. Edith tried to hide her old and broken toys when her childhood friend, Theodore, would come over.
Solitary and reserved, Edith began writing poetry, often pining for Theodore, who was three years older than her, yet her increasingly constrained circumstances loomed large.
Edith wrote:
“Only one, one tiny room
Locked they find,
One thing curtain that they ne’er
Gaze behind,
There my lost ambitions sleep,
To their tear-wept slumber deep
Long consigned.
There my lonely sanctum is”
“I don’t believe I have been forced into the ‘first lady of the land’ model of my predecessors,” Edith Roosevelt reflected.
A friend of many decades who knew the Roosevelts before, during, and after the White House years said of Edith: “No ‘first lady of the land’ ever lived in the White House with less trepidation, with more simple dignity and inner indifference.” Because, this friend concluded, “Her family life was the all-important continuum.”
Edith outlived her husband by nearly 30 years. She made a point to leave Sagamore Hill, the home they shared, every year on the anniversary of his death. The stickers on Edith’s “Roosevelt” luggage are plentiful: the Caribbean, England, South Africa, France, and Italy. On one trip she went for two months around the world, traveling to India, Vietnam, Japan, China, Siberia, and Russia. She later captured the joy of travels in an essay entitled “Odyssey of a Grandmother”.