Edith Roosevelt

First Lady

• Born: August 6, 1861
• Birthplace: Norwich, Connecticut
• Died: September 30, 1948
• Place of death: Oyster Bay, New York

President:Theodore Roosevelt 1901–1909

Overview

Edith Kermit Roosevelt—for many decades held up as the ideal First Lady—was a reluctant presidential spouse who successfully negotiated the difficulties of balancing official duties as a president’s wife with her own desires to maintain her privacy and put her family duties first. An intensely private woman, she nonetheless became the role model as Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and a semipublic figure of First Lady. Her sense of privacy has made her a somewhat shadowy historical figure, often obscuring her role in shaping the “office” of First Lady and preventing the public from fully knowing her best qualities such as vigor of character and acumen as a household manager.

Early Life

Edith Kermit Carow was born in 1861 to Gertrude Tyler Carow and Charles Carow, of the shipbuilding Carow family, whose business had suffered under Edith’s alcoholic father. She could trace her American ancestors, who included Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, back to the 1630s. As a child, Edith was very well read, even bookish. She also had a reputation for inscrutability that became one of her lifelong personal trademarks. Nonetheless, she developed a close friendship with Corinne Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s younger sister, that only disintegrated after her marriage to Theodore. Edith received her formal education at the prestigious Miss Comstock’s School.

Marriage and Family

Edith Carow’s courtship and marriage to Theodore Roosevelt had many elements of a Victorian romantic melodrama. She and Theodore, who was three years her senior, had been around each other since they were young children. Although they had made no plans, there was an unspoken understanding that they would someday marry. That understanding was broken after a quarrel. Soon after, Theodore courted and married a beautiful, aristocratic Boston debutante named Alice Hathaway Lee. Edith, however, remained in his social circle and even attended his wedding. Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt died of Bright’s disease in 1884, shortly after the birth of her daughter, Alice. Although the grieving Theodore at first avoided Edith, after an awkward chance meeting they soon resumed what had been broken off and became engaged by November, 1885. They then arranged to travel separately to England and were married there in 1886.

Once she and Theodore had settled into married life, they did not look back. Edith insisted on raising Theodore’s daughter Alice as her own, in part to reduce the influence that Theodore’s sister Anna Roosevelt Cowles (who had cared for the infant Alice) held over him. Theodore and Edith’s own five children included four sons: Theodore, Jr., born in 1887; Kermit, born in 1889; Archibald, born in 1894; and Quentin, born in 1897; and a daughter, Ethel, born in 1891. The Roosevelts’ family life was very happy overall, with Theodore very much involved in his children’s lives. Edith was a strict but loving mother, who took much effort to treat Alice as well as or better than her own children. However, she developed the closest lifelong relationship with her second son, Kermit, her clear favorite among her children. Edith also had an intimidating streak and could command husband or children by a simple measured tone of voice.

For all of his devotion to family, when duty called, Roosevelt had little compunction about leaving his wife’s side to fulfill it. For example, Roosevelt organized the First Volunteer Cavalry, called the Rough Riders, while Edith, though not deathly ill at the time, was recovering from surgery to remove a tumor. During Roosevelt’s rise to public prominence, money troubles were a periodically recurring theme in their marriage. This may have had more to do with Edith’s ingrained fears of financial instability than the state of the family fortunes. Although some of her economizing measures, such as making her own toothpaste, were more symbolic than anything, they were based on her awareness of the tension between maintaining financial solvency and living in the style expected of people of the Roosevelts’ social class.

Following their marriage, Edith remained an important, if sometimes unintended, influence on Theodore’s career trajectory. In 1894, for example, he planned to run for mayor of New York, but Edith was opposed to it. He chose not to run and Edith, in a comparatively rare display of deep emotion, expressed remorse at what she saw as her failure as a wife. Later, Theodore disregarded Edith’s opposition to his successfully seeking the vice presidential slot on the 1900 Republican ticket, on the basis of the comparative inconsequentiality of the vice president’s job. Edith, while continuing to raise her large family, adjusted herself to the social demands incumbent upon the wife of a public official, albeit on her own terms. She cleverly avoided the uncomfortable task of shaking many strange hands by holding a bouquet in public receiving lines. Similarly, she assiduously avoided having her picture taken or distributed for publicity purposes. Although she was never happy with Theodore’s decision to accept the vice presidential slot, she dutifully supported her husband. Then, on September 13, 1901, President William McKinley died from an assassin’s bullet.

Presidency and First Ladyship

Edith, coming into the role of First Lady unexpectedly and somewhat reluctantly, made a quick enough adjustment to allow her to do things that would leave a visible stamp on the role. For example, to maintain control of the flow of information to the public, she hired Belle Hagner as her social secretary, setting a precedent for subsequent First Ladies. Hagner took on responsibility both for correspondence and for doling out photographs and information to the many reporters who were hungry for news about the young and vigorous first family. Despite the increased demands on her as First Lady, Edith was determined that her young children should have a normal upbringing, which meant shielding them as much as possible from the prying eyes of the press. She set aside time each day for her children and frequently wrote to her sons who were at boarding school.

Edith Roosevelt’s greatest accomplishment as First Lady, supervising the renovation and refurbishing of the Executive Mansion (which was only renamed the White House during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration), grew out of her desire to create the private space necessary to maintain a semblance of normal family life. Although others had previously proposed additions to the Executive Mansion in order to deal with this long-recognized problem, Edith and Theodore Roosevelt were the first to overcome earlier objections on aesthetic grounds. Although it was Theodore who contracted and publicly dealt with the architectural firm McKim, Mead, and White, Edith’s influence was evident throughout the project. For example, the creating of a third floor within the mansion and the building of the West Wing for office space created a clear division for the first time between public and private areas in the White House. In her supervision of the redecoration, she also permanently set the expected mode of interior decoration of the public rooms, transforming them from the earlier ornate Victoriana to the spare, elegant Federalism that is now familiar to visitors and tourists. Finally, Edith was instrumental in shoring up the status of the White House as a public museum and monument as well as an executive office and residence. She followed Caroline Harrison’s efforts to preserve and display former administrations’ White House china. Her other significant accomplishment in this area was to designate space for display of First Lady portraits.

In the traditional White House hostess role, Edith not only excelled but also was a shaping force in Washington, DC, society. She introduced high culture to the White House entertainment scene with her musicales, which featured performers such as Pablo Casals (who would perform at the White House again during the Kennedy administration). As First Patron of the Arts, Edith also influenced Congress to appropriate funding for what would become the National Gallery of Art.

Her high standards, however, had a darker side. In addition to barring African Americans and middle- or working class people from her social events, she also excluded those whose moral and sexual behavior transgressed her strict personal code of conduct. To help ensure that her standards were understood within official Washington society, she held regular meetings with wives of cabinet officers to help establish social rules. Her other purpose for these meetings was to establish standards for White House entertainment and to disseminate information on her entertainment style to Washington hostesses, with the expectation that they were not to try to upstage the First Lady.

As much as she was greatly admired for her acumen as hostess, she did not escape the sometimes petty criticism of the way she played her semipublic role. The most famous criticism was of her decidedly economic attitude toward clothing and her unwillingness to spend what it took to remain at the height of fashion. A snide critic wrote that “the wife of the President, it is said, dresses on $300 a year and looks it.” Edith, however, was proud enough of her economies to clip and save the offending article. It should also be noted that the role she played in her husband’s administration was not always limited to the accepted traditional roles of decorator and hostess. For example, she was the first president’s wife to accompany her husband on an official trip abroad, traveling with Theodore in 1906 to visit the new Panama Canal. She also served as an unofficial diplomatic go-between on occasions.

Given the social prominence of the Roosevelt family in addition to Theodore’s position as president, it did not take long before the public and the private would intersect on the Roosevelts’ social calendar. The first of these was the formal debut of Edith’s stepdaughter, Alice. Four years later came Alice’s wedding to Congressman Nicholas Longworth. The wedding was billed as the social event of the year and became the closest thing Americans experienced to a royal wedding, receiving detailed newspaper coverage. To prevent party-crashing, selected reporters and photographers were included in the preparations. For Edith, however, it was a source of fatigue. When Alice thanked her stepmother for the wedding, a wearied and irritated Edith responded, “I want you to know that I’m glad to see you leave. You have never been anything but trouble.”

Even with the blurring of her private roles as mother of the debutante, or bride, and her public role as First Lady, Edith was careful to guard her privacy. She assiduously sought to avoid drawing what she saw as needless attention to her daily doings. This avoidance of the spotlight made Edith a diametric contrast to her publicity-courting stepdaughter, “Princess” Alice, who reveled in her celebrity status as First Daughter and made the press regularly with her style, active social life, and willingness to test the limits of proper behavior during that period.

Following the Roosevelts’ departure from the White House in 1909, Edith found herself missing life there, as much as she welcomed the comparative quiet and privacy of Sagamore Hill, their home on Long Island. Although she opposed Theodore’s premature announcement not to seek a third term, when he decided to run on the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party ticket in 1912, she told him to face the fact that he would never be president again. As before, her private and restrained persona provided an important balance to her husband’s exuberance.

Legacy

Edith Roosevelt, the former First Lady, did not content herself simply with staying home and presiding over Sagamore Hill. When Theodore went on his famous post-presidential African safari, Edith traveled in Europe, accompanied by her daughter Ethel. Later, in 1913, when Theodore set off with his son Kermit on their exploration of the Brazilian wilderness along the River of Doubt, Edith traveled with him as far as Brazil, to the starting point of the expedition. She then rejoined him at the point where his party emerged from the wilderness.

The death of their youngest son, Quentin, in World War I grieved Edith deeply but affected Theodore even more. Neither did widowhood and old age easily slow Edith down. After Theodore’s death in 1919, she not only continued but expanded her travels, both alone and with her daughter Ethel.

During these years, Edith also increased her participation in public life—and partisan politics. Her emergence into public life was prompted somewhat ironically by the nomination of her husband’s cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt for president. After receiving hundreds of congratulatory telegrams and letters by people who mistakenly believed her to be Franklin’s wife or mother, she came out publicly in support of his opponent, Herbert Hoover, as much to distance herself from Franklin’s branch of the extended Roosevelt family as for political reasons. Her subsequent public appearances included a speech in support of Hoover before a huge crowd in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Although she became recognized as an accomplished political speaker late in life, she still resolutely refused to talk to the press.

Edith, in failing health by the late 1940s and having lost two more of her sons in World War II, spent her last days at Sagamore Hill, cared for by her daughter Ethel. Private to the end, she burned Theodore’s letters to her, save for one bundle of love letters found at her bedside when she died in 1948.

Edith’s greatest legacy was to institutionalize the role of First Lady as First Hostess and set a standard for those who followed her. She also was a pioneer among First Ladies in raising public awareness of the White House’s status as a historical site and museum. Since her tenure, the role of First Lady as official First Hostess, as created by Edith Roosevelt, has shown a remarkable staying power. Although the style and scope of White House hospitality changed somewhat over the twentieth century (most notably in welcoming a greater spectrum of the American people to White House functions), the high standards for the hostess set by Edith have largely remained and have, as much as possible, been scrupulously followed.

Bibliography

Anthony, Carl Sferrazza. First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents’ Wives and Their Power. Vol. 1. New York: William Morrow, 1990.

Caroli, Betty Boyd. First Ladies. Expanded ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Caroli, Betty Boyd. The Roosevelt Women. New York: Basic Books, 1998.

Collier, Peter, with David Horowitz. The Roosevelts: An American Saga. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Hagedorn, Hermann. The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill. New York: Macmillan, 1954.

Lansford, Thomas A. A “Bully” First Lady: Edith Kermit Roosevelt. New York: Nova History, 2003.

Lansford, Thomas A. “Edith Roosevelt and the 1902 White House Renovation.” In Life in the White House: A Social History of the First Family and the President’s House. Edited by Robert P. Watson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.

Morris, Sylvia Jukes. Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980.

Renehan, Edward J., Jr. The Lion’s Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.