I have been asked to discuss Alice Roosevelt Longworth, but here’s the trick: Alice lived to be 96 years old. I have about 50 minutes to talk to you. Clearly I can’t do every part of her life, so what I’m going to do is concentrate on the First Daughter years.

Clay Jenkinson came up with this fabulous title: Alice Blues. This is a great double entendre, because the First Daughter years – the years when she was in the White House – is the period where Alice made her parents the most blue. So I thought we should concentrate on that, and afterwards in the panel and Q&A, there will be time to talk about other aspects of her life.

Let’s begin with a look at Alice’s parents. Alice Hathaway Lee was born into an elite Boston family, the daughter of a Boston banker. She married the son of an elite New York family, and together they produced this beautiful child, Alice Lee Roosevelt, born in February of 1884. But two days after young Alice’s birth, her mother died. Baby Alice was given into the care of Theodore Roosevelt’s sister, Anna, called “Bye” or “Bamie.” This was quite logical. Bye was a spinster sister, so she had no other obvious duties that she had to attend to. Alice was spoiled rotten by Auntie Bye. Of course she would have been: she’s the poor little Alice who just lost her mother. But truthfully, from everything we can tell, they loved each other. Alice loved Auntie Bye. Auntie Bye doted on Alice. Until Alice was an adult, Auntie Bye called her “my little blue-eyed darling.” It was very touching. So this was a good period in Alice’s life – not that she remembered too much of it, being this young, but important events happened that laid the groundwork for much of the rest of her life.

The next thing that happens, of course, is she has to ready herself to meet her new stepmother, Edith Kermit Carow. Theodore Roosevelt fell in love – or fell back in love – with his high school sweetheart. Edith married Theodore Roosevelt, and she believed it was her duty to raise her new husband’s daughter. She was very duty-driven. But when Alice joined that couple, Edith was already pregnant. And Alice confessed that she often felt like the outsider in the nursery, that she was never quite one of the gang. Sometimes this was very good for her, and she liked being special and different; but sometimes it wasn’t so great.

One of the ways we can see she’s different is that Alice was an avid reader, and she is the only child who grew up having full run of her father’s library. She never went to formal school, at least not for long. She was essentially an autodidact, trained at her parents’ knee. She read a very wide – and sometimes you might say a very odd – assortment of books. Sometimes she read books for all the wrong reasons. She read the Bible several times through, just to say she had. But I think this is interesting because this is one of the ways that Alice’s difference set her apart. And she will regret this. As an adult she will say, “I’m sorry that I didn’t get a proper training like my siblings got.”

I want to fast-forward now. When Theodore becomes president of the United States in 1901, and Edith becomes First Lady, Alice was catapulted into being First Daughter of the land. And now she’s all grown up. Alice was not just any 17-year-old at this time. She had, for one thing, hit that kind of sulky 17-year-old stage, and when her father became president, she told everyone that being First Daughter of the land was the last thing she wanted to do, thank you very much. But she also secretly really wanted him to be president, just like all of her siblings did. Alice, like the others, heard about McKinley’s death, and then did a little jig of happiness. Then they had to put on the proper face, to look like they were properly mourning for the president’s death.

Well, the desire not to be First Daughter was quickly supplanted by a desire to be First Daughter, because Alice began to count up the delicious opportunities inherent in this position, starting with making her debut in the White House. She and her stepmother stopped butting heads long enough to plan this important event. It is the first time that a debutante ball had happened in the White House. The debut was lavish, but the debutante herself was only moderately pleased with it, because she couldn’t have a cotillion – a dance where you gave out presents. Alice was all about the presents. She wanted it to be a really big party, but Edith and Theodore said no, it would be a family party. There were some other troubles, as well. The White House was being remodeled, and she didn’t have the dance floor she wanted. She said later, “I myself enjoyed it modestly.”

This event introduced her to society, but what introduced her to the world was the visit of Prince Henry of Prussia, who came to the United States to pick up the yacht that belonged to his relative, Kaiser Wilhelm. Alice had been pegged to christen the yacht. She practiced smashing champagne bottles in her back yard to make sure she would get it right. And she really enjoyed all the fanfare surrounding this. Prince Henry was supposed to be marriage material, but when he arrived, it turned out he was not only too old but he was also married. But Alice was invited to dinners, and she liked all the dinners, the press, the flowers. She loved the diamonds he gave her. She conducted herself very well during the weekend, and all the international newspapers were watching her, because both Germany’s enemies and Germany’s allies, as you might imagine, were paying close attention to this visit. Alice was given the nickname “Princess Alice.” She hated the name – sometimes. Sometimes she loved the name. It all depended on where she was in her life.

When Prince Henry left, Alice’s fame grew. Then the Roosevelt family started to consider what kind of advantages this position could afford their daughter. Alice, for her part, I believe, looked to the mounting adulation of anonymous Americans as a substitute for the attention she never fully got from her parents. I think Alice really wanted uncomplicated and over-the-top concentrated love and she never got it from either one of her parents.

Publicity was easy to come by when you were Alice at this age, because her time in the White House intersected with an increase in the popular press. Not to mention that her father was a master at media manipulation, so she watched and learned as she saw what he did. And so, Princess Alice became the new standard for exciting headlines, because she became known for a string of extraordinary behaviors.

For example, she began to smoke. This was not what a well-behaved young woman of this era did. Theodore Roosevelt put his foot down – which he rarely did – and he said, “Alice, no daughter of mine will smoke in the White House.” And she said, “That’s alright, Father,” and she climbed to the roof and smoked on the roof of the White House.

Alice carried a pet snake to dinner parties in her purse. When the parties got boring, she opened her purse and let the snake slither down the dining table, to liven things up.

Alice went to the horse races. This was not necessarily so bad. But she bet on the horses. And she was photographed in the act of accepting her earnings from her bookie. Again, not what you hope for in the First Daughter.

Horses were great for Alice at the racetrack, but she very quickly traded the horse that she rode for an automobile. Alice didn’t want just any automobile. She wanted the new Red Devil Speedster, a gasoline-powered, not electric-powered car. She drove it very fast and got speeding tickets.

So Alice did all sorts of things that got her in trouble, or that got her mentioned in the newspapers, depending on your point of view. She had a “cunning little pocket pistol,” she said, which she used to shoot off from the back of trains as she went visiting people. She jumped, fully clad, into a swimming pool. She danced the hootchie-cootchie, the turkey trot, the hula, whatever was the newest dance. And her name was always in the paper, linked to various men, as though she were going to be marrying them. This made Edith crazy. Of course, it was not true.

Young Americans in particular loved the First Daughter. They sought her autograph, they wanted her photograph, they wanted her autographed photograph, they began to turn up in crowds wherever she went. Alice could bring out crowds of hundreds and hundreds of people, and by the time she was shopping for her trousseau in New York City, thousands of people came to see Alice Roosevelt. This is unheard of. This kind of celebrity is a very modern phenomenon. And while Alice is on the front pages, guess who’s not on the front pages – oh yeah, Dad.

One comic of the era is titled “When Alice Came to Town.” It shows Alice wearing a large hat – her trademark – and all surrounding her are newspaper photographers.

Soon there grew a market for Alice-inspired goods. Anything “Alice blue” – a color named after the steel-gray color of her eyes – would sell out. There were songs named after Alice. There were many postcards with her image on them. You could even get her on the back of your chocolate bar – like baseball cards today. You could see Alice everywhere.

One of my favorite comics of Alice is titled, “Alice, Where Art Thou.” The setting is a horse race, but everything has stopped. The horses have stopped, even the babies have stopped crying, and everyone is looking back because Alice is somewhere in the stands. She isn’t even in the comic.

So every time Alice managed to be out and about she got herself in the newspaper. Her father and mother were very unhappy about this. They accused her of courting publicity. Alice said, “Who’s courting publicity? All I have to do is step outside the White House and the media appears. I am not courting publicity.” But secretly she said, “But you know what, if Dad can do this, why can’t I?”

Theodore Roosevelt said, “I do not like the advertisements of you appearing at a portrait show. They distinctly convey the impression that any person who wishes to pay $5 may be served tea by you. I cannot consent to such use of your name and must ask you not to serve tea.” But Alice wanted to serve tea. She wanted to participate. This was a charity event. So she sweetly telegraphed her father that his note had arrived too late.

It was actions like these that made Theodore Roosevelt famously say to Owen Wister, “I can be president of the United States or I can attend to Alice. I cannot possibly do both.”

The attention Theodore Roosevelt could spare for Alice was usually in the form of lectures about courting publicity or about staying out too late or about not having serious enough interests. Alice said, “I was interested in everything that concerned father. I knew what was going on – probably because I could not have avoided knowing. I met all the people that came to the White House. I heard them talk. I talked with them and I think I had an adequate patter. But truth compels me to state that my major preoccupation was to have a good time, and a good time to me meant consorting with people of my own age, total irresponsibility, and perpetual rushing from place to place and from one amusement to the other with the curiosity of a puppy and as little sense of direction.”

Well, Roosevelt finally found a way to give his headstrong daughter some kind of direction, and that was travel, or maybe it just was a way to refocus the spotlight on him. Only a few months after her debut, the first daughter went to Cuba. The Cubans had official expectations for Alice; she wasn’t there as an ordinary American. It was very clear that the Cubans saw her as the daughter of the hero of Kettle Hill and the President of the United States. So Alice traveled as her father’s goodwill ambassador in Cuba.

Alice was the first First Daughter to take on this role. During the visit in Cuba, she viewed a school for orphans, presided over charity receptions, attended teas, parties, and balls. There were cavalry reviews given in her honor. And she loved every minute of it. It turns out she was also very good at it.

So she began to do more and more traveling. She couldn’t always do what she wanted to do, because being First Daughter meant that any trip outside the country was fraught with international implications. For example, she couldn’t go to England because the Irish Americans here wanted there to be a statement about England’s bad treatment of Ireland. TR said, “I’m looking at three bags of mail piled up from Irish American voters, so you can’t go.”

But she managed to get to New Orleans. She went to Boston quite a bit, where her mother’s relatives spoiled her. She went to Newport, where the “malefactors of great wealth” hung out; those are the people Theodore Roosevelt didn’t like. In fact, no one in the family thought very highly of these very, very wealthy Americans with the possible exception of Auntie Bye. In Newport, Alice bet more, smoked more, bent more rules, and constantly worried about not having enough money to keep up with the lives of the Vanderbilts.

But she also had some Washington friends who really annoyed her parents. She was running with a pretty fast crowd that consisted principally of Marguerite Cassini, the daughter of the Russian Ambassador, and Cissy Patterson. These three young women were called the “Three Graces.” Maggie taught Cissy and Alice how to smoke. Alice taught Maggie and Cissy how to play poker. Cissy taught Alice and Maggie how to dance the latest dances. This kind of stuff made Edith and TR furious, and neither Edith nor TR was above making hurtful comparisons between certain other young women – cousins even, like Eleanor – who were more socially conscious, who were better people, who were doing better things with their lives.

So unlike cousin Eleanor, who was working in the tenements doing good; Alice was in the paper for her whirlwind schedule, for her appearances at dances, parties, social and official events. With and without her friends, she was in the paper, but it was never for her good works.

One of the first things these three young women were trying to do was to get a husband, because that’s what young women of her class did in that era. Alice fell in and out of love with amazing regularity as a young girl. In her diary from 1900 and throughout the First Daughter years, she kept track of all the little hearts she broke. She called them little heartlets. She even numbered them – #27 was Harold. But Alice had a hard time actually trying to meet young men while she was in the White House. She had no place to meet them, because the White House was full of her parents, reporters, and anyone else could come in and notice who the First Daughter was with. So, she met them at Auntie Bye’s house. Even when she did meet young men, she worried that they liked her because she was First Daughter, but not really for who she was. She worried about her women friends in the same way.

Well, this “husband hunt” gets problematic because all of the “Three Graces” set their sights on Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, America’s most eligible bachelor.

All of this comes together in 1905 – Alice’s celebrity, her love of travel, and her fears of finding a man who loved her for herself. Alice was not exactly a problem in the White House, but her ability to attract attention had become what Edith and TR labeled a “distraction for the family.” Now, Theodore Roosevelt loved Alice, there is no doubt about that, and he wanted to see all of his children happy. So, he settled on a plan for using her obvious charms and her diplomatic skills to good advantage, which also got her out of the spotlight. He sent her away on a trip to the Far East. Roosevelt was in the middle of negotiating a peace between Russia and Japan, and he wanted to send a high level delegation to East Asia. He decided to send along his daughter as an experienced goodwill ambassador, and she was thrilled about this.

On July 1, 1905, seventy-five congressmen and their wives, newspaper reporters, and Alice and Nick – but not Cissy or Maggie – left. William Howard Taft was Alice’s chaperone.

It was the first time Alice had been west of the Mississippi. Their first stop was San Francisco. Taft reported there was a great curiosity to see Alice Roosevelt. So as she did in Cuba, she met influential Californians and had formal duties during the day. At night she played poker.

Newspapers reported that Alice escaped her chaperone for a brief excursion through the fringes of Chinatown, which was infamous at the time. Alice wrote to her father, “I did not go to Chinatown in San Francisco, and I treated with scorn all invitations to do so.” She went on to say that she didn’t need to go there because there was an opium den and gambling place on board the ship. “But,” she said, “I hasten to assure you that I have frequented neither one of them.” She wrote this letter to her father to set the record straight because the newspapers had written such a scandalous story.

Next they went to Honolulu, where Alice learned how to truly dance the hula and how to surfboard. Then they went to Yokohama. Alice said Yokohama was “banzai all the way.” The Japanese lined the roads, waved American flags, and cheered for Alice. Alice loved seeing the lands which she had read about as a young girl come alive before her eyes. She was very excited about this trip.

She was met by a raft of royalty, and Alice and Taft were treated like royal guests wherever they went. Alice remembered a garden party in Japan, where she thought they looked like a slightly stoned version of the ascot scene from My Fair Lady.

She wrote her father, “We have seen geisha dancing, wrestling, jujitsu, fencing and acting. I don’t think it would be possible to see more in 6 weeks than we have put in 6 days.”

Alice was having a good time doing her official duties. Japan meanwhile is not going to like the final outcome of the peace treaty, but this was not clear at the moment she was visiting. So, Alice was given the rare honor of visiting the Mikado, seeing the private garden, and sitting at his right hand at lunch. There were many more admiring crowds in Tokyo than in Kyoto. Taft said that every member of the party was cheered to the echo in Kyoto, especially Alice. Along the way, Alice picked up so many presents that her friends began to call her Alice in Plunderland.

After the signing of the treaty that concluded the war between Russia and Japan, a Japanese newspaper wrote, “Miss Alice Roosevelt, upon whose intelligence and resolute character the Americans pride themselves, frequently renders assistance to the President in delicate missions where tact and diplomacy are required. This visit must be considered as one of the happy preliminaries of a peace so swiftly concluded.”

They went to the Philippines, which was Taft’s real reason for making the trip. Roosevelt, as Taft put it, wanted to inspire the people of the islands and show them his interest in them and his confidence in their hospitality in the cordial reception of his daughter. She stayed in a palace, shook hundreds of hands, and had receptions, banquets, speeches, and balls. The Washington Post said, “The eyes of the whole world were upon her, representing – as she does – not only the chief executive of our nation but the typical American girl.”

As the strenuous daughter of a strenuous sire, she spent a fortnight spreading American goodwill in remote areas of the Philippines. This really was roughing it. She could live the strenuous life.

Back on the ship, the delegation sailed to Hong Kong and was met by more cheers. Alice decided she wanted to see Canton, despite the Chinese boycott of American goods that threatened our relationship with China at the time. There was clear evidence that Alice was not just the average American girl: posters were hung in Canton warning coolies against carrying the daughter of the American president. Alice actually took one of these posters home and it hung in her living room until the day she died.

After awhile, the party separated. Nick and Alice with the female chaperone and some other friends went on to China where they got to meet the formidable Dowager Empress of China. She had tremendous power and was happy to show her power. But Alice liked her because she showered her with expensive presents, and Alice got to ride through her garden carried aloft in a litter, while everyone else had to walk.

Then they spent ten days in Korea, where Alice said that she was more than fed up with official entertaining – with being treated, as they say, as temporary royalty. The real royalty, as far as Americans were concerned, was Alice and Nick. There is an unusual picture of both of them smiling and having a good time aboard the ship. This is unusual because the courtship between the First Daughter and Congressman Longworth was not going well, even though there were headlines of “Tropical Romance Anticipated.” William Howard Taft didn’t trust Nick Longworth at all – and they were neighbors, both from Cincinnati – but Taft doubted the validity, longevity, and purpose of Nick’s courtship.

Taft wrote to his wife, “Alice tells me she is engaged to Nick. They are a curious pair of lovers. I don’t think that either is much in love with the other. She is very young, childish, and undisciplined but if she is under someone’s good influences she could be made into a fine woman. As it is, Nick’s influence over her is not good. Alice is quite a favorite abroad, but everyone thinks Nick unworthy of her.” Everyone, that is, except TR, who saw Nick as an older man and as a kind of steadying influence on his daughter.

Well, as you know, they concluded their courtship successfully; Nick proposed. Once their wedding plans were announced, the floodgates opened. Alice called the two months between their engagement and the wedding “a turmoil.” There was song written about them. They were married February 17, 1906. It was a spectacular, but brief, wedding.

She embarked on her destiny with lots and lots of presents. She got some amazing presents from world leaders. Because she had won over the hearts of most Americans, and they really loved her, she got all sorts of presents and couldn’t even write all the thank you notes.

She also started the next phase of her life with a decided ambivalence toward Nick. They will not have a happy marriage. One photograph released to the newspapers shows her looking exhausted and miserable in her wedding dress.

People assumed that marriage would stop Alice from her crazy antics, would settle her down, and would stop her from being the First Daughter. In fact, Alice was always the First Daughter. She would go on to have a fascinating life, in the center of Washington politics. She and Nick would become leaders of Washington society. She would surround herself with some of the world’s most interesting people. She fought political battles, wrote a memoir, campaigned a little bit, led the anti-Franklin forces in Washington during the New Deal in WWII years. But from 1906 to 1919, from the time Alice left the White House to the time TR died, Alice was much closer to her father than she had been before.

In many ways, she is very much like her father. I would like to conclude by giving you some thoughts about Alice and TR, which I did not put in my book because I am a historical biographer, not a psychologist. I have given a lot of thought to the relationship between TR and Alice.

I think it is wrong to reduce Alice to nothing more than a reaction to her father, but it would be just as wrong to deny his effect on her. If you look at her life through a TR lens, his guilt about his remarriage meant that she never adjusted as healthily as possible to her mother’s death; they never talked about it. Theodore Roosevelt never said his first wife’s name. They never sat down and had a heart to heart talk about what it meant that her mother was gone.

This theme is continued by TR’s remarriage to a woman who clearly wasn’t cut out to be a mother to Alice. Edith herself said, “I am not the best mother for this high spirited child.” So his remarriage and his distance meant that Alice lacked their undivided attention. She sought it elsewhere, and I hope I showed you that she got it from the public.

His guilt and Edith’s unwillingness to put her foot down compromised Alice’s education. Who knows what she would have done if she would have received a proper education because she was very, very smart. Most people said that she was the smartest of all TR’s children. Neither Edith nor TR knew how to handle her as she became a teenager. There was not enough communication. Alice wrote about this in her diary and other places. So they let her go her own way, and I’m not sure that this was necessarily the best thing to happen to her.

She also married a father-figure who was just as distant as her real father was to her. Also, Nick Longworth occupied in his family the same place that TR occupied in his family. Just as the Roosevelt women doted on Theodore, Nick’s two sisters called Nick the “firstborn of Israel.” So Nick had that same type of doting females in his family that TR had.

In a marriage like this, where Alice has a big personality and a big ego, and Nick is used to being the center of everything – is it going to work? I think Alice craved a kind of power, so she could have power over situations that she usually lacked. Without the self esteem to go into politics herself, which she could have – it would have been unusual for a woman of that era and background – but she could have.

Alice loved what TR loved; politics, science, the environment. She embraced progressivism when he was its hero. In 1912, Alice chose her father over her husband when TR formed the Progressive Party and Nick remained in the Republican Party. She cast her lot in the Progressive Party with her father. She led the defeat of the League of Nations as an older woman, as part of a memorial to her father. I don’t know how much was her own thinking, or how much of that was that TR first championed a different kind of League of Nations than President Wilson did.

She did not abort her own child, when she could have. Alice was pregnant, Nick Longworth was not the father, she could have had an abortion. She didn’t. Why? It was a different era, so the scandal that would have attached itself to that sort of thing didn’t have to happen, as it would today. Alice grew up hearing about the Race Suicide club, and grew up with TR’s belief that you should have a big family. Well, Alice, at age 40, finally got pregnant but her husband wasn’t the father. Remember, this is a different medical system, and she decides to have the baby at age 40.

She also did not divorce Nick, even though she wanted to in 1912. She didn’t divorce Nick. Was this because of her father’s position on marriage and his beliefs? Was it the era? Or was it something else?

There are many more questions to be considered, but I want to conclude with this: People always ask me about Alice’s daughter, her only child, Paulina. This is a very sad story. Alice was a terrible mother. I wonder if this is something she came by honestly. TR may have been a good father to his sons, if you don’t count Ted’s breakdown, but he was not an ideal father to his oldest daughter. I think she needed a kind of attention from him that she never got. If he was her role model as a parent, no wonder she failed. Edith was not a good role model as a parent. Auntie Bye turns out not to have been a good role model as a parent.

Not that Alice didn’t make something of her life, she did. But as her biographer I have always been pursued by the belief that she might have done other things, or different things, had she had different parents. On the other hand, as others have noted, Eleanor Roosevelt had a much worse childhood – worse in every way – and she did lots of things with her life. But you know what Alice would say to that, right? Yes, but who was really happy… Eleanor was miserable, I lived a happy life!

Is it better to say that you lived a not so happy but productive life or a really happy, more hedonistic life? I want to leave you with these thoughts because that’s what professors do. We muddy the waters after you thought you had things figured out, and we make you really think. Thank you for your time.