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By Root 3306 0

He remained a shipping executive with various lines throughout the 1930s. Commerce satisfied Kermit no more than banking. His nomadic nature and marvelous talent for languages fought against the confinements of marriage and work. Depression steadily claimed him. He became a philanderer and insatiable drinker and, as his body thickened, developed a startling resemblance to his father. Dour and bloated, he rejoined the British army as soon as Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. He drove himself to fight well at the Battle of Narvik, but the condition of his heart—that vulnerable organ of so many Roosevelts—alarmed regimental medics, and he was declared unfit for further service. Returning stateside in 1941, he drank himself to the point of collapse and had to be institutionalized. The President, who had a soft spot for Kermit as a Democrat malgré lui, heard about his dereliction and appointed him a major in the U.S. Army in Alaska, far from the fleshpots of New York. There, on 4 June 1943, Kermit killed himself with a bullet to his head.

Archie went to work in 1920 for the oil company that was to embarrass his eldest brother. He resigned with belated outrage when the Teapot Dome scandal broke. Never one to dissemble his moral opinions, Archie testified against Sinclair Oil before a Senate investigative committee in 1924. After that he went into investment banking and spent the rest of his civilian career as a municipal bond salesman. He prospered enough to survive the Great Depression, living a quiet family life with his beloved “Gracie.” Like Ted, Archie was an isolationist at the beginning of World War II. But the waters of Pearl Harbor had hardly resettled in December 1941 before he was back in uniform as a lieutenant colonel. Fighting on Biak Island, New Guinea, in May 1944 he was wounded in the same arm and leg that had been so severely shattered a quarter-century before. In a further replay of the events of 1918, he was awarded another Purple Heart and Silver Star and sent home to convalesce. On VJ-Day, he was the last of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons still alive.

He did not age well, turning to Scotch and Communist-bashing as antidotes to the constant pain of his war wounds. During the McCarthy era, his conservatism deteriorated into political paranoia. His only attempt at a book, apart from an unfinished, conspiracist memoir, was a selection of some of his father’s worst speeches, published in 1968 as Theodore Roosevelt on Race, Riots, Reds, Crime. According to Archie, President Roosevelt had railed in 1903 against the civic threat posed by “Beatniks.” Family members hurriedly bought up as much of the print run as could be found in bookstores and let the old warrior go into retirement. As he lay dying in 1979, a confused recluse in Florida, he kept repeating, “I’m going to Sagamore Hill.”

Each of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons except Quentin fathered four children. Ethel and Richard Derby also contributed four, although little Richard died prematurely at age eight. Ethel survived until 1977, outliving Dr. Derby by fourteen years. In most respects private and shy, a Republican supporter of the civil rights movement, she retained in old age a startling ability to bellow the word “Americanism” at dinner parties.

Flora Whitney died in 1986, inevitably wikipeded as “a wealthy socialite.” Having become, at age twenty-one, almost a widow and almost a daughter to Quentin’s parents, she spent a year trying to recover from his death—not to mention the Colonel’s. A statue of Flora carved by her mother early in 1919 shows her hollow-eyed beneath a bandeau, trying to force herself into the depths of a small armchair. In 1920 she married one of Quentin’s Harvard friends, but found him an inadequate substitute. Her second marriage, to the artist George Macculloch Miller III, was successful. Flora fulfilled herself further by becoming the rescuer, dominant executive, and lifetime patron of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The last person anyone would have expected to add to the number of Roosevelt grandchildren was Alice, who in 1925 scandalized