Women--Biography

Stacy A. Cordery examines the life of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, providing a biography of Theodore Roosevelt’s first born child. Cordery looks at her troubled childhood, her rebellious spirit as a young woman, and her celebrated marriage to Congressman Nicholas Longworth. Cordery details  Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, her support of isolationism in the years before World War II, and her decades long place as a fixture in the Washington, D.C., political scene. A text box within the article contains an excerpt from Owen Wister about Theodore Roosevelt’s frustration at his inability to control his daughter.

Two photographs of Longworth, one with her siblings and the other with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, supplement the text.

Collection

Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal

Creation Date

2000

Charles W. Snyder examines the lives of Flora Whitney Miller and Quentin Roosevelt and their doomed engagement in his review of Charles O. Bishop’s Flora & Quentin: A Roosevelt and a Vanderbilt in Love during the Great War. Snyder limits his review of the book to a few comments while providing brief biographies of Miller and Roosevelt, with an emphasis on the latter’s brief military service in World War I. Snyder contends that Roosevelt “was utterly unfit for aerial combat” because of his poor eyesight and injured back, and he notes that later in her life Miller successfully guided the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Collection

Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal

Creation Date

2014

Creator(s)

Snyder, Charles W. (Charles William), 1949-

In her review of Stacey A. Cordery’s biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Kathleen A. Dalton asserts that Cordery is too often uncritical of her subject, and Dalton highlights her differences with Cordery over Longworth’s relationships with, and treatment of, Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. Dalton writes that as a biographer Cordery often accepts Longworth’s point of view, but Dalton believes that Cordery has written “the best biography ever” of Longworth, showing her to be a substantial figure who should be remembered for more than just her sharp tongue and reactionary politics.

A photograph of Longworth and a text box with the mission statement of the Theodore Roosevelt Association supplement the text.

Collection

Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal

Creation Date

2008

In his review of Hermione Lee’s biography of Edith Wharton, Harry N. Lembeck describes in detail her home in Lenox, Massachusetts, known as The Mount. Lembeck also discusses her relationships with her friend Walter Berry, her lover William Morton Fullerton, and fellow writer Henry James. Lembeck highlights her relationship with Theodore Roosevelt which centered on their mutual love of books and reading, their dislike of Woodrow Wilson, and their desire to see the United States abandon its neutrality and enter the Great War in Europe. Lembeck also highlights some aspects of Wharton’s writing that had been previously ignored.

Seven photographs supplement the text, including five of The Mount. One shows Wharton with two of Roosevelt’s sons, Quentin Roosevelt and Archibald B. Roosevelt. A text box with the mission statement of the Theodore Roosevelt Association also appears in the article.

Collection

Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal

Creation Date

2008

Kristie Miller explores Theodore Roosevelt’s relationship with three women: Julia Stockton Dinsmore, her niece Martha (Patty) Selmes, and Selmes’s daughter, Isabella Greenway King. Miller notes that Roosevelt became close friends with Selmes and her husband Tilden Selmes during his years as a rancher in Dakota Territory, and she also examines Roosevelt’s friendships with his fellow Rough Riders, Robert Ferguson and John Greenway, the first two husbands of King. Miller highlights Roosevelt’s appreciation of Dinsmore’s poetry, King’s active participation in politics, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s friendship with King. The article includes photographs of all three women.

Collection

Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal

Creation Date

2004

Creator(s)

Miller, Kristie, 1944-

Linda E. Milano reviews Betty Boyd Caroli’s The Roosevelt Women and John A. Gable examines eight books published to coincide with the centennial of the Spanish-American War in the “Book Reviews” section. Milano praises aspects of Caroli’s work, but she details what she considers the sometimes inaccurate and unfair depiction of Ethel Roosevelt Derby. Gable likes the two pictorial histories of the war by Stan Cohen and Ron Ziel, and he also admires the two works based on primary sources, Wallace Finley Dailey’s editing of Theodore Roosevelt’s war diary and Jeff Heatley’s compilation of newspaper accounts about the Rough Riders’ return to New York state. While Gable notes three other works, he devotes four paragraphs to a detailed critique of Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan by Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels which he labels a “trashy book” for its reliance on unreliable sources and its agenda of belittling Roosevelt’s actions in the war. 

The section includes a text box containing the mission statement of the Theodore Roosevelt Association. 

John A. Gable, editor of the Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, reviews three works and Richard H. Collin a fourth in the “Book Reviews” section. Gable examines a history of Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure as Police Commissioner of New York City, a biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and a reissue of Hermann Hagedorn’s classic study of Roosevelt’s time in Dakota, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands. Collin studies a work on the relationship between Roosevelt and the naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. Gable lists sixteen changes introduced to the New York City Police Department (NYPD) by Roosevelt, and he finds Jay S. Berman’s study important as the first book solely devoted to Roosevelt’s years with the NYPD despite his misgivings about its use of academic language and police jargon.

Gable focuses on Hagedorn’s research and on his relationship to the Roosevelt Memorial Association rather than on the content of the book, but he quotes David McCullough in arguing that Roosevelt in the Bad Lands remains valuable to those wanting to know about Roosevelt’s time in the West. In reviewing Carol Felsenthal’s Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Gable quotes from newspaper reviews, compares the book to previous biographies, and asserts that it is the best overall study of “Princess Alice” done to date. Collin highlights episodes, mostly negative, from Mahan’s career, and argues that Richard W. Turk’s study of the Roosevelt-Mahan relationship is deeply flawed by its lack of knowledge of Roosevelt, factual errors, and a weak bibliography. A photograph of USS Theodore Roosevelt appears in the Collin review.

Collection

Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal

Creation Date

1988

John A. Gable reviews two biographies of Alice Roosevelt Longworth: James Brough’s Princess Alice: A Biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Howard Teichmann’s Alice: The Life and Times of Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Gable asserts that Teichmann has written the better book of the two, and he conveys that preference by quoting three passages from his work. Gable says that for literary quality, neither book matches Longworth’s own memoir, and he says that both books are at their best when they “let Mrs. Longworth do the talking.” Because Longworth is still alive, Gable says that the last word on Princess Alice has not yet been written. 

Nicholas LaBella reviews and endorses Kevin Brownlow’s The War, the West, and the Wilderness which studies silent films dealing with World War I, nature documentaries, and the American West.  Brownlow argues that Theodore Roosevelt was an important figure in the early years of the silent film industry either as a subject or an inspiration for a film. LaBella notes the importance of Roosevelt’s African safari to the genre of nature films.

Sylvia Jukes Morris, wife of Theodore Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris, asks readers for help with a biography she is writing about Roosevelt’s wife, Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt. She asks readers to share information or sources they may have about Edith Roosevelt, and she provides her contact information.

Collection

Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal

Creation Date

1976

Creator(s)

Morris, Sylvia Jukes