ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH
Alice Roosevelt Longworth was the first and only child of Theodore Roosevelt and his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee. Alice, unlike her mother, lived a most ample life, being the first of the Roosevelt children born in 1884 and the last to die in 1980 at age 96. Alice met every president from her father to Gerald Ford and consulted with many of them. Her formidable wit, sharp mind, and witty repartee were renown, leading the press to dub her “the second Washington monument.”
Photograph by Pirie MacDonald, February 17, 1900. Theodore Roosevelt Collection Photographs, Houghton Library, Harvard College.
Alice was the eldest of six Roosevelt children and, of course, the only one not born to Edith. Here Alice is pictured with her siblings just after her 16th birthday, and sixteen years to the day that she was baptized at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, the site of her mother and grandmother’s funeral one day prior.
President Theodore Roosevelt famously said he could “either run the country or control” Alice but he “could not possibly do both.”
Alice gave as good as she got, later describing her father as wanting to be “the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”
Father and daughter had each other pegged, and undoubtedly in his eldest daughter Roosevelt saw something of himself: brilliant, barrier-busting, and bristling with life. Alas, as a woman, Alice’s rebellion was not as welcome in the world as his.
Alice defiantly struggled with the constraints and expectations of the age on her gender.
Alice, seen here at age three with newborn Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., looked uncannily like her deceased mother. Edith and her stepdaughter struggled at times to maintain a productive relationship.
As she grew, Theodore Roosevelt must have seen in Alice— athletic, beautiful, beguiling, and possessed of an effortlessly effervescent personality— flashes of his first wife.