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By Root 3878 0

walks, feeding it honey and nuts, and playing hard with it, as with an oversize dog. Eventually, when it got too big, the president had to donate it to a zoo.14 As Riis noted in his Theodore Roosevelt: The Citizen (a well-written campaign biography of 1904), the family had so many pets they were hard to count. White rats, opossums, and raccoons were at one time or another White House residents.15 Peter the rabbit hopped about, sometimes sleeping under sofas or inside closets. In between important meetings, Roosevelt would feed mice to his barn owl, a reddish-chested female. Aquariums were full of horned toads, painted turtles, and salamanders. A medium-size iguana used to wander about the White House corridors as freely as did Maude the pig. Roosevelt’s son Theodore Jr. raised a pet lamb named “Teddy” as if it were a family dog. All that was missing was a pushmipullyu, or the White House could have been renamed Puddleby-on-the-Marsh.16

When President Roosevelt was awake late, he sometimes recorded habits of his domestic cats, usually for his children to enjoy. “Tom Quartz is certainly the cunningest kitten I have ever seen,” he wrote to Kermit from the White House. “He is always playing pranks on Jack and I get very nervous lest Jack should grow too irritated. The other evening they were both in the library—Jack sleeping before the fire—Tom Quartz scampering about, an exceedingly playful wild creature—which is about what he is. He would race across the floor and then jump upon the curtains or play with the tassels. Suddenly he spied Jack and galloped up to him. Jack, looking exceedingly sullen and shamefaced, jumped out of the way and got upon the sofa, where Tom Quartz instantly jumped upon him again. Jack suddenly shifted to the other sofa where Tom Quartz again went after him. Then Jack started for the door, while Tom made a rapid turn under the sofa and around the table and just and away and the two went tandem out of the room—Jack not reappearing at all; and after about five minutes Tom Quartz started solemnly back.”17

Roosevelt had long been a promoter of guinea pigs as first-rate pets for children; and he kept five in the White House: Admiral Dewey, Dr. Johnson, Bishop Doane, Fighting Bob Evans, and Father O’Grady.18 And then one afternoon a sixth materialized out of thin air. A few weeks after New Year’s 1904, the magician Harry Kellar put on a show for the president’s family. “I went along and was as much interested as any of the children, though I had to come back to my work in the office before it was half through,” Roosevelt reported to his son Kermit. “At one period Ethel gave up her ring for one of the tricks. It was mixed up with the rings of five other little girls, and then all six rings were apparently pounded up and put into a pistol and shot into a collection of boxes, where five of them were subsequently found, each tied with a rose. Ethel’s however, had disappeared, and he made believe that it had vanished, but at the end of the next trick a remarkable bottle, out of which many different liquids had been poured, suddenly developed a delightful white guinea pig, squirming and kicking and looking exactly like Admiral Dewey, with around its neck Ethel’s ring, tied by a pink ribbon.”19

Hearing about how President Lincoln had kept a turkey named Jack around the White House after sparing its life one Thanksgiving, the president adopted a one-legged rooster as a favorite pet, prohibiting the cook from even thinking about breaking its neck. Then there was the pet turkey which became friendly with the president’s two parrots. The Washington Evening Star reported: “There is no home in Washington so full of pets high and low degree as the White House, and those pets not only occupy the attention of the children, but the President is himself their good friend, and has a personal interest in every one of them.”20 As the White House usher Ike Hoover put it, “A nervous person had no business around the White House those days.”21

First Lady Edith Roosevelt tolerated her husband’s obsession with having live animals