“What we have a right to expect of the American boy,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt in the May 1900 issue of St. Nicholas magazine, “is that he shall turn out to be a good American man. Now, the chances are strong that he won’t be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He must not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He must work hard and play hard. He must be clean-minded and clean-lived, and able to hold his own under all circumstances and against all comers. It is only on these conditions that he will grow into the kind of American man of whom America can be really proud.” Reading that article, published a couple of months before Roosevelt would be nominated for Vice President and fifteen months before he would become President, it’s hard not to picture Roosevelt checking off the list of boyish and manly qualities he most admired in himself. But it’s also pretty clear that he is sincere.

This little four- or five-page article establishes several expectations for American boys; to a certain extent, he’s putting the burden on becoming “the kind of man of whom America can be . . . proud” squarely on the shoulders of the boy subscribers to the magazine. But their parents and teachers and other adults also had a burden to create the kind of world in which those characteristics could be nurtured. When we ask what kind of “burden” children and family were to a man like Roosevelt, I think it’s important to look at two complementary impulses: First, he believed he needed to protect his children while at the same time expose them to everything life had to offer. He based his conception of what their lives should be like on his own childhood, which he remembered to have been almost deliriously happy. That commitment to raising his daughters and sons to fruitful adulthood was more a happy responsibility than a burden, I suppose, but he also clearly accepted responsibility for extending that possibility to children and families less fortunate than his own. Roosevelt’s second impulse, then, was to join the burgeoning child welfare movement of the late nineteenth century. I’m no Roosevelt scholar, but his sympathy for the goals of the movement seems to have been a natural inclination that transcended political calculation. Roosevelt was certainly not famous as a child reformer. Other, perhaps bigger, ideas crowded his agenda—foreign policy, economic opportunity, conservation. But he was famous as a father, perhaps more so than any previous president.

It’s worth noting that this was an era in which Americans were accustomed to seeing young children in the White House. Unlike Presidents for most of the twentieth century, whose children were mostly grown up before their fathers became president, most of Roosevelt’s immediate predecessors—going back to Abraham Lincoln—had been fathers of minor children while serving as Chief Executive. The nation mourned the death of Lincoln’s son Willie during the Civil War. U. S. Grant had four children between the ages of 10 and 18 when he assumed the presidency; his and his wife’s writings and his children’s memoirs indicate he was a very warm father. Rutherford B. Hayes had several sons and one daughter, who was only ten when her father assumed the presidency. All of James Garfield’s five surviving children were under the age of twenty during his brief period in office, while Chester Arthur’s two young children—whose mother died just before he took office—were often featured at White House social events. Grover Cleveland was father to one famous child—an illegitimate son he took responsibility for as a bachelor before he was president—and five children by his young wife. The first two Cleveland children were watched closely by the press—according to an urban legend that is apparently untrue, his daughter Ruth was apparently the inspiration for “Baby Ruth” candy bars, while Esther was the only presidential child actually born in the White House. But Roosevelt was, perhaps, the most famous White House father—that is, until the current First Dad moved his family from Hyde Park to Pennsylvania Avenue. The “First Family” that moved into the old house in 1901 apparently brought with them an unprecedented energy. One long-time staffer once referred to the surplus of “self-expression” and “personality” that the Roosevelts brought to the mansion, while another said “A nervous person had no business around the White House in those days.”

This is really my first foray into Rooseveltiana, although TR made a couple of brief appearances in my book on children during the Civil War: his recollections of being aware of the war, of his army uniform, playing “Running the Blockade” (as though he was one of his mother’s Confederate brothers), his viewing of the procession of Lincoln’s body when it passed through New York on its way to Springfield. His war-time childhood fit nicely into some of the arguments I made: the somewhat detached experiences of northern, middle class children during the war, the politicization of even very young children, and the commercialization of the war experience for northern youngsters. But it also fits into the idyllic childhood that he described in his memoirs.

Roosevelt was famously devoted to his own father, and he seemed to want to replicate his romanticized relationship with Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., as he grew into his role as father to his own children. In many ways he was the model of a modern middle class father, who took an interest in the intellectual and physical development of his children while relying on their mother and servants to manage the household and many of the particulars of the children’s lives. He was especially representative, it seems to me, in what one historian calls the “newly important role for nineteenth-century fathers as their children’s playmates.” Although Roosevelt might have been, as the same historian writes, “the Progressive era’s paragon of virility and upright manhood,” that same commitment to action and “the strenuous life” fit perfectly into his enthusiastic play with his children indoors and, especially, outdoors. As he said, “children are better than books,” and his memoirs suggest that he put their interests first whenever possible.

TR sprinkled references to children throughout his autobiography—his own children, children of friends and relatives, children of impoverished laborers or as beneficiaries of child labor legislation, children suffering from epidemic diseases or as victims of war, children enjoying play and books and other pastimes. A search of the Google books version of his autobiography brings up 72 references to “children”—as well as seventeen for “child”—and this doesn’t include the times he refers to children by name or other terms. Of course, many of those references to children appear in asides and anecdotes crammed between descriptions of safaris and weighty political issues. Yet he consistently referred in his autobiography and other sources to the importance to him of his role as a father. Although he would have been disappointed had he lost the election of 1904, he wrote Kermit, then fifteen, that “no matter how things came out the really important thing was the lovely life I have with mother and with you children and that compared to this home life everything else was of very small importance.”

The origins of this apparently sincere love of being a parent began in his own childhood, which he clearly loved to recall. He described in amusing detail the rather uncomfortable furnishings of his childhood home on East 20th Street in Manhattan and the strict decorum followed in the city house. But he absolutely rhapsodized his family’s long summers in the country, which offered “a round of uninterrupted and enthralling pleasures” that included running barefoot, child-sized portions of farm work, a gaggle of pets, and freedom from scratchy upholstery. But one of the delights of the long winters spent cooped up in the city was Christmas, “an occasion of literally delirious joy.” He loved the presents and the rituals and, as a father, he “tried to reproduce them exactly for my own children.”

He seems to have felt that he had very large shoes to fill when it came to being a father: “My father,” he said simply, “was the best man I ever knew.” His moving description of Theodore Senior’s qualities suggest the kind of man that every boy should aspire to become: “He combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness. . . . With great love and patience, and the most understanding sympathy and consideration, he combined insistence on discipline.” Yet “we children adored him. We used to wait in the library in the evening until we could hear his key rattling in the latch of the front hall, and then rush out to greet him; and we would troop into his room while he was dressing, to stay there as long as we were permitted, eagerly examining anything which came out of his pockets.”

Although Bill Brands suggests that Roosevelt may have idealized his father to a nearly unhealthy degree, it also seems to be true that his desire to emulate his father, however impossible to achieve, animated Roosevelt’s drive to be the perfect father to his children and, in some ways, to all children. It’s difficult not to think that the younger Roosevelt was really describing himself when he wrote of the elder that “I never knew any one who got greater joy out of living than did my father, or any one who more whole-heartedly performed every duty; and no one whom I have ever met approached his combination of enjoyment of life and performance of duty.” Teddy was twenty years old when his father died at the age of forty-six, but he still had been able to observe his father’s devotion to “every social reform movement” and his involvement in “an immense amount of practical charitable work himself.” He was a big, powerful, man, but “his heart filled with gentleness for those who needed help or protection.” The children sometimes accompanied him to the Newsboys’ Lodging House on Thanksgiving, where they would help serve dinner. He was a particular friend and supporter of Charles Loring Brace, who started the Children’s Aid Society, which established various institutions for homeless children and originated the “orphan trains” to the west.

Buried in the middle of this ode to a dead father was the telling line, “He never physically punished me but once, but he was the only man of whom I was every really afraid.” He was punished for biting his older sister on the arm. Although he did not actually recall committing the crime, he recalled his guilt, and described a comical scene in which he took bread dough from the Irish cook and crawled under the table; his father got down on hands and knees and, despite having the dough thrown in his face and losing a step on the fleeing little boy, caught him as he ran up the stairs and meted out “punishment . . . that fitted the crime.”

Seeking to match this titan of fatherhood was, indeed, a burden, but a burden that Teddy embraced and apparently relished. Roosevelt had taught a Sunday school class at a local mission, which inspired his son to do the same for several years just before and while he was in college. And it is not a stretch to see in the second TR’s enthusiasm for social reform as an alderman, police commissioner, governor, and President the desire to match his own assessment of his father’s philanthropic interests.

In addition to the mainly descriptive insights into the appropriate childhood that appears in his memoirs, the St. Nicholas article suggested some of what he must have expected from his own children. It also highlighted several common themes for child welfare reformers, although his approach seems to be more in the context of old-fashioned virtues. He believed that each generation faced both “tendencies for good and for evil,” and saw signs in modern life that would help the rising generation make the right choices. He applauded the growing importance of athletics and physical exercise, which had overcome the “effeminacy and luxury of young Americans” born to rich parents. 571 He urged boys not to allow the competition to become the most important thing. Physical exercise and games were intended to create stronger bodies and a sense of rules and fair play; if followed to excess, these pastimes could actually inhibit the development of talents and values (the curious example he gave was the upper-class English obsession with fox-hunting, which he partly blamed for the poor performance of many officers in the Boer War). Play should have a constructive effect on all aspects of life: “I believe that those boys who take part in rough, hard play outside of school will not find any need for horse-play in school. While they study they should study just as hard as they play football in a match game.” Hard, fair play will nurture honesty and modesty, as well as kindness and a contempt for cruelty. “The boy can best become a good man by being a good boy—not a goody-goody boy, but just a plain good boy.”

If the rhetoric of fatherhood that Roosevelt frequently employed seems almost impossible, it was—he could not always be a perfect father. He was frequently gone, and sometimes worried about his absences. When the children were very small, they were frequently with relatives or servants—or with their stepmother while he was away from home. Brands remarks at one point that “Fatherhood was growing on him.” That’s a useful corrective to the way Roosevelt wrote about himself as a father; like every man, especially a particularly independent man who may have associated the death of his beloved first wife with the birth of his daughter Alice. He may have projected his sneaking guilt about those absences onto his brother Elliott, whose addictions and extramarital affairs not only threatened to ruin the family name, but also displayed a complete rejection of his parental responsibilities. So, however sincere Roosevelt was in his statements about his children, they are inevitably idealized versions of their lives together.

It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Roosevelt had a philosophy of childhood, but he certainly had a collection of deeply held beliefs about appropriate ways to raise children and the appropriate ways for children to behave. Simply put, Roosevelt believed that childhood should be fun and purposeful. His life, and the lives he tried to create for his children, seemed to embody phrase that child welfare reformers liked to use during this period. First coined by the social worker Florence Kelley, it asserted that all children deserved “A Right to Childhood,” and that the future of the Republic depended on creating a system by which that right could be protected.

Although there’s no evidence that he was familiar with Kelley’s words, which were published in a statistic-heavy, academic tome, Theodore Roosevelt never sounded more like a child welfare reformer than when he talked about his own childhood, or the ideal childhood that he briefly described in the St. Nicholas article. In fact, Roosevelt, like most Progressives, was much more interested in boyhood than in girlhood; one of the most pressing social issues in the urban United States in the early twentieth century, at least according to child welfare reformers, was the “boy problem”: adolescent and pre-adolescent males who lacked healthy outlets for their energy, were without order or guidance in their search for vocations and avocations, could not participate in older traditions like apprenticeships. Many of the great Progressive era reforms for children—playgrounds, expanded opportunities for attending high school, juvenile court systems, and various programs intended to bolster boys’ morals. As perhaps the only historian in the room to have co-directed a stage version of the play (back when I was teaching high school English in Iowa years ago), I can’t resist mentioning that the whole premise of the con in The Music Man, set in small-town Iowa in 1912, was to provide wholesome and distracting entertainment in the form of a brass band for boys who might otherwise turn to playing pool and smoking.

I’d like to contextualize TR’s parenting within an ethos that children’s historians have been exploring for some time: the spirit of the times in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in which childhood and children came to be seen differently than they had before. These ideas seem to be reflected in TR’s sense of himself as a father, as well as in his interests as a politician and policy-maker. TR was not necessarily seen as a leader in child welfare reform, but his personal beliefs and style certainly seem to have reflected the ideas that inspired this movement.

Roosevelt became president just a few months before Ellen Key, a Swedish sociologist and educator, published a book whose wishful thinking nevertheless inspired a generation of reformers and, decades later, a generation of historians of childhood. She called it The Century of the Child, and it was less a reflection of reality than a call to arms to policy makers, teachers, parents, manufacturers—everyone, really—to put the interests of children and the priorities of childhood at the center of family, of community, of government policies. Although TR would never have agreed with Key’s socialism, her acceptance of free love, or harsh criticism of traditional Christianity, in a larger sense the president and the sociologist were parts of the same arc in the evolution of ideas about childhood. He would have approved of her rejection of the idea “that things must remain just as they are, since human nature remains the same,” and he might well have admired her philosophy that only by acknowledging the “holiness of generation”—by which she met the coming generation—would society truly advance. I’m no Roosevelt scholar, but I don’t think he would have disagreed with her assertion that the future development of human beings could not be left to accident; “Civilisation should make man conscious of an end and responsible in all . . . spheres where up to the present he has acted only by impulse, without responsibility.” She called this a “scientific view of humanity.” Late in the book she criticized society for allowing a generation of young people to “have lost their ideals without getting new ones in their place.” Such a development impoverishes a civilization, leaving its youngest members cynical and empty. “But when the young generation is inspired with the feeling of having great acts to do, a new century begins.”

Key was more a visionary than a fortune-teller, because in many ways the twentieth century could be seen as being far more deadly and complicated for children than any century before. Yet her ideas—translated into English in 1909—inspired a number of countries to take their responsibilities toward children more seriously, leading to the startling reforms that have culminated in many European countries’ vast network of policies and programs for children and mothers.

In the United States, although child welfare reformers had been campaigning against child labor, promoting better health (with “baby contests,” among other rather odd ideas), organizing groups like the Boys Club and the Boy Scouts, regulating newsboys and milk production, extending the school year and day, sending public nurses into poverty-stricken neighborhoods, and offering countless other ideas to better the material lives, especially, of children. Pediatrics had become one of the first recognized specializations in medicine late in the nineteenth century, social workers had begun earning professional degrees at the University of Chicago at the turn-of-the-century, and dozens of settlement houses had been established in American cities during the late Gilded Age. But most of these programs and campaigns were put forward by private associations or state or local governments. The federal government would not make a serious effort to address the specific problems and opportunities of childhood until 1909—and it would happen because of Theodore Roosevelt. Just as Key’s book provided one convenient bookend to the beginning of his administration, so does the 1909 White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children provide a convenient and meaningful book to the ending.

The conference was not Roosevelt’s idea. Child welfare reformers had regularly held conferences—the most prominent was the annual National Conference on Charities and Corrections—on health and legal issues, playground development, nutrition, and education. Settlement houses like Hull House sponsored workshops for welfare workers and parents alike, while the General Federation of Women's Clubs and the National Congress of Mothers advocated for more federal support of children's issues. Well-attended "Child Welfare Exhibits" were held in New York City and Chicago in 1911, with exhibits and demonstrations on the problems facing children and on ways to solve them. The men and women who founded these organizations, attended their conferences, and wrote for their publications were professional journalists, social workers, and experts in a number of fields related to urban life. A modern American might call them "policy wonks" who had broken free from the amateur, religious oriented reformism of the nineteenth century. They were less judgmental than previous generations, more interested in the well-being than in the souls of the people they were trying to help, and dedicated to bringing the resources of local, state, and federal governments—as well as private interests—to bear on social problems.

And Roosevelt had close relationships with a number of them. Among the originators and participants in the Washington Conference were a number of men and women with whom Roosevelt had worked in New York, including social workers, policy makers, and political supporters. They included Charles Loring Brace, Jr., son of the founder of the Children’s Aid Society, which Brace, Sr., had founded in the 1850s and which sponsored the famous orphan trains of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Roosevelt had volunteered as an adolescent and young man at Brace Senior’s newsboys lodging house. Others were: Elmer Ellsworth Brown, Roosevelt’s appointee as U. S. Commissioner of Education; Homer Folks, head of the New York State Charities Aid Association, with whom Roosevelt had served on various boards and committees related to mental illness and other health issues; Edward T. Devine, editor of the reform magazine Charities and the The Commons, and a close political associate from New York; John Joy Edson, who had served on several housing and welfare committees with TR and on the inauguration committee for the president (he was currently President of the Board of Charities of the District of Columbia); Lillian D. Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement in New York; and Jacob Riis, whose reporting and pioneering photography of New York slums had inspired Roosevelt when he was a police commissioner. Owen R. Lovejoy, the child labor activist, would work with Roosevelt to form the Progressive Party, while Jane Addams would second his nomination for president in 1912.

In their letter to the President requesting that he convene the conference, the reformers quoted Roosevelt’s message to Congress in 1904, in which he recommended the creation of a juvenile court for the District of Columbia and said, “No Christian and civilized community can afford to show a happy-go-lucky lack of concern for the youth of to-day; for, if so, the community will have to pay a terrible penalty of financial burden and social degradation in the to-morrow.”

Meeting in Washington in late January 1909, just a few weeks before Roosevelt would leave office, these nearly 200 very serious men and women discussed how best to care for the startling number of children and youth living in institutions, including 93,000 in orphanages and group homes, 50,000 in foster homes, and perhaps 25,000 in juvenile correctional institutions.

In his report to Congress a month after the conference closed, Roosevelt endorsed its recommendations and argued that “the interests of the nation are involved in the welfare of this army of children no less than in our great material affairs.” Roosevelt may not have been the first president to suggest that the well-being of children was a good thing for the nation, but he was the first one to make specific recommendations to Congress. He asked Congress to help the government establish a system of best practices for caring for dependent children that would focus on home rather than institutional care—which dovetailed nicely with Roosevelt’s own belief in the nurturing qualities of home and hearth. And he also asked them to establish a federal “children’s bureau,” whose main priority would be conducting research on “these questions relating to childhood.” He also urged Congress to pass such laws as would bring the practices and policies of the states and territories into line with federal standards; “such legislation” was “not only important for the welfare of the children immediately concerned, but important as setting an example of a high standard of child protection by the National Government to the several States of the Union.”

The Children’s Bureau, which was finally established by Congress in 1912 as a small agency within the Department of Commerce and Labor, has been overshadowed by other Roosevelt initiatives (in fact, it was less an initiative than an idea that he adopted), but it marked the first time that the federal government created a permanent agency devoted to a single class of Americans (at least those not living on Indian reservations or disabled soldiers and their families). Julia C. Lathrop was named first head of the agency, and although she had a tiny budget (only $25,000 in its first year) and a small staff, over the next thirty years the Bureau—the first federal agency in the world dedicated to the children—conducted research on child labor and health issues, published pamphlets on childrearing and nutrition, and sponsored events celebrating infant and children's health. One of its successes was convincing Congress to pass the Sheppard-Towner Act in 1921, which appropriated $7 million to establish local departments of maternity and infant hygiene. During its first three decades of existence, the Bureau published scores of studies, some hundreds of pages long, on childcare, child heath, and child labor. Some historians of the Bureau are critical of its focus on a narrowly middle-class set of values and assumptions and on its framing of child welfare as a "woman's issue." These approaches, as well as the failure of the federal government to support its programs with adequate resources, hindered the effectiveness of the Bureau and made its eventual absorption into federal agencies inevitable. It’s now a division of the Department of Health and Human Services with an annual budget of $7 billion.

These two bookends to Roosevelt’s presidency—the notion of the 20th century as the “Century of the Child” and the first federally sanctioned professional conference on issues related to children—established both the philosophical and the scientific linchpins to a new century of thought about American childhood and children. Roosevelt was instinctively drawn to the issues; he must have found the huge gap between the kinds of childhood he and his children enjoyed and the childhoods endured by millions of other American children difficult to accept.

So what exactly was the “burden of being Roosevelt” as he applied it to the process of growing from child to adult? It seems that his own children took seriously the line from St. Nicholas in which we said, “he won’t be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy.” Theodore Junior was a successful businessman, governor of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and highly decorated army officer in the First and Second World Wars who died in France after going ashore in one of the first waves on D-Day. Kermit, despite a sickly childhood, became an avid outdoorsman, accompanying his father to African in 1908 and to the Amazon a few years later. He also started his own shipping company and served in both world wars. Like his brothers, Archibald also served with distinction, suffering a wound in 1918 and, during the Second World War, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the South Pacific. Unlike his brothers he survived and worked for many years as a Wall Street broker. Quentin followed his brothers into the service during the First World War and was shot down and killed a few months before his twenty-first birthday. The two daughters could not serve their country so formally—although Ethel did work for the Red Cross during the First World War—but they seemed to have carried the Roosevelt “burden” by developing strong personalities and unique characters. There were inevitable costs, and the burden that being a Roosevelt placed on at least some of his children was, particularly in the case of Kermit, too much. Alice’s relationship with Teddy was famously complicated, characterized by extremes and estrangements. As the oldest, and as the one who had been deserted when the grief-stricken Roosevelt went west, she probably felt his ambivalence and intensity more than the other children. As Bill Brands wrote, the guilt that Roosevelt felt for the frequent absences and outside responsibilities “surfaced in the intensity of his rambunctiousness with them and in the high—sometimes impossibly high—standards he set for them, by both exhortation and example. Alice responded by rebelling, Ted by breaking down physically, Kermit by fleeing the country.”

“It is exceedingly interesting and attractive to be a successful business man, or railroad man, or farmer, or a successful lawyer or doctor,” Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography. “Or,” he somewhat slyly continued with a catalogue of all the interesting things he had been, “a writer, or a President, or a ranchman, or the colonel of a fighting regiment, or to kill grizzly bears and lions.” However, “for unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.” If fatherhood was a burden, Roosevelt wore it lightly. But he also took it seriously, and characteristically brought that seriousness to his efforts at social reform. The twentieth century turned out not to have been the century of the child, although, admittedly, childhood in the West, especially, saw improved standards of living and greater expectations of that “right” to childhood that Florence Kelley had written about. But many of the challenges facing children while Roosevelt was raising his sons and daughters and while he was developing at least a hint of a federal policy on children remain huge obstacles for many American children: poverty, access to health care and to good schools, disrupted families. If those conditions were never really a burden that Roosevelts of any generation really had to face, they are certainly the burdens facing most children of any era.