Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [338]
Alice, first of Theodore Roosevelt’s children to be born, was the final one to die, in 1980. By then she had been for at least six decades the acidulous, eccentric doyenne of Washington society, fawned over by presidents of every political stamp. Invitations to her famous dinners, at which she would convulse guests with imitations of Cousin Eleanor, were as prized as passes to the White House. Her attempts at writing—a family memoir and an aborted newspaper column—had nothing of the charm of her talk, which made something like poetry out of the non sequitur. Some of it was captured and distilled by an Englishman, Michael Teague, whose Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth was published in 1981. It amounted to a transcribed recording of the kind of erudite wit that used to be prized in the days when the well-born were also, by definition, the well-read.
Edith Kermit Roosevelt died in 1948 at the age of eighty-seven, still living in Sagamore Hill and surrounded with the Colonel’s books, guns, hides, horns, and glittering prizes, as if he were still liable to burst through the door with reporters in tow. By then she had adjusted, if not to bereavement of him, to the deaths in war of Quentin, Kermit, and Ted, comforting herself with grandchildren and her lifelong passion for reading. Her memories in her final, bedridden days extended back from the present, disagreeably dominated by Harry Truman, through seventeen administrations to that of Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps the earliest of these impressions (confirmed to her amazement by a visitor with a photograph) was of standing with six-year-old “Teedie” Roosevelt in a window overlooking Broadway, on the day that the Emancipator’s funeral procession came uptown, to a thump of drums.
AFTER THE OLD WOMAN had been buried beside her husband in Youngs Cemetery, the Roosevelt Memorial Association moved to execute its long-postponed plan to buy and restore Sagamore Hill as a museum. The purchase was announced in 1949, with a certain amount of weariness on the part of Hermann Hagedorn, who had yet to see his idol’s image recover from the desecration inflicted on it by Henry Pringle. Indeed, the RMA would soon have to rename itself the Theodore Roosevelt Association, to make clear to donors which president it wished to celebrate.
The enduring influence of Pringle’s book, however, was salutary, in that it compelled scholars to assess the Colonel as a man, and not a god or monster. Between 1951 and 1954, Harvard University published The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt in eight massive volumes. Edited and annotated with impeccable scholarship by Elting E. Morison, John M. Blum, and others, the series effectively filled a lacuna left by the Memorial Edition of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt thirty years before. It was perhaps even more impressive in its totality than the Hagedorn set—and not just because Morison admitted that his team had eliminated ten letters for every one of the fifteen thousand he printed. Excepting those frankly addressed to “posterity,” most were written only to be read by the recipients, and revealed a more personal Roosevelt than books and speeches he had meant for print. And the Colonel in his revelation proved to be, in Julian Street’s updatable phrase, arguably “the most interesting American” who ever lived.
In 1958, the year of the centennial of his birth, Carleton Putnam published Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, a superb piece of scholarship that was intended to be the first part of a four-volume biography. Only one small, significant omission marred the book