From Roosevelt to Roosevelt

Jonathan Rees

As a good liberal, I’ve always claimed that my favorite President ever is/was Franklin D. Roosevelt.  After all, his legacy STILL defines what liberalism means and what government does down to this day.  However, as I’ve gotten older, my opinion of Franklin Roosevelt has grown steadily worse.  First, there’s how he treated Eleanor.  Second, there’s the fact that the New Deal didn’t go further.  Lastly, like making batches of wine, some bits of the New Deal have aged better than others.

As a historian, I’ve been drawn to an entirely different, somewhat less liberal President—Franklin Roosevelt’s distant relation, Theodore.  Sure, there’s the whole warmonger thing.  That’s not too appealing.  And as a liberal, Teddy’s presidency was not nearly as charged as his unsuccessful campaign’s platform in 1912.  But as a personality, Teddy Roosevelt has every other President beaten hands down (with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, but I’d still give the nod to Teddy there by a smidge).

Let’s look at the biographies.  When I read biographies, the part I usually hate comes right the beginning.  How many historical figures are more interesting in their youth than they are when they’re adults?  If you’ve ever read David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback you’ll know he stopped that book in Roosevelt’s early twenties and it still made me cry.  (I’m not telling why if you don’t already know.  You should read the book.)  I’m not a huge fan of Edmund Morris’ three-part TR biography, but unlike say Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon Johnson, where the research is the best trait it’s Morris’ subject that makes all three of those books worth reading.

Theodore Roosevelt and Valentine’s Day

Heather Cox Richardson

While for many people today February 14 brings images of candy, roses and a fancy dinner, for others that day has brought tragedy. To few has it brought more heartache than to Theodore Roosevelt.

February 16, 1880, marked one

Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt (1861-1884)

of the happiest days of TR’s life. He and the woman he had courted for more than a year, Alice Hathaway Lee, announced their engagement. Roosevelt was over the moon: “I can scarcely realize that I can hold her in my arms and kiss her and caress her and love her as much as I choose,” he recorded in his diary. The next four years were, according to TR, “three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others.”

Just four years later, on February 12, Roosevelt’s beloved wife Alice gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter, in the family’s New York City home. TR was at the state legislature in Albany, and learned the happy news by telegram. But Alice did not recover from the birth; she slid downhill from something at the time called “Bright’s Disease,” an unspecified kidney illness. A doctor friend tells me was probably caused, in her case, by a strep infection, incubated in the teeming city’s crowded homes.