Theodore Roosevelt's Diary

Three of my friends regularly send me Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Letters From an American. One lives across town, one lives on the Central Coast of California, and one lives in central Massachusetts. A history professor, Richardson summarizes the current public affairs news or political topics of the day, in case you don’t have time to digest it yourself.

If you ever think you’re having a lousy Valentines Day, I recommend her entry from last night about Valentines Day for Theodore Roosevelt in 1884, when he was just 25 years old. His mother and his young wife, who had just given birth to their daughter Alice two days before, both died in his arms on the same day, only hours apart.

Richardson provides a photo of the diary entry written that night by Theodore (his family’s nickname for him was Teedie; only when he became famous did newspapers and the public begin to call him Teddy, but he was never called that by close family and friends). Roosevelt just marks the day with a large, savage X, and wrote “the light has gone out my life.”

I responded to my good friend Lou in central Massachusetts that I’ve actually held that original diary in my hands, a rare gift, because the diary is usually not on display, and is preserved by expert curators in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division. It’s a small volume, not much bigger than the size of my palm, and leather-bound, if memory serves. I can’t remember the occasion that allowed me in the non-public stacks, but I produced so many cool history shows from the Library of Congress, and the National Archives (both the branch in downtown DC and the branch in College Park, Maryland), at most of the presidential libraries, at state historical sites and archives like the Massachusetts Historical Society, and at the Smithsonian, that I was often afforded rare moments like that. At the Library of Congress, in that same room, I once held the Wright brother’s diary, opened to the page where they recorded the world’s first human flight in an aeroplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903. I held an original NAACP flag reading, “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday.” I held and read John Adams’s letter home describing his first personal introduction to King George III in London, shortly after the end of the American Revolution. (Imagine that scene!)

At the National Archives, they sometimes display what they described to me as American “gasp documents:” Dwight Eisenhower’s “In Case of Failure” note, announcing that the June 6, 1944 D-Day invasion of France had failed, and taking the blame; Robert E. Lee’s letter resigning his US Army commission; Albert Einstein’s 1939 letter to President Roosevelt, explaining nuclear fission, telling him that incredibly powerful bombs are now possible. The presidential libraries, branches of the National Archives, are awash in gasp documents: Ronald Reagan’s goodbye letter, revealing his Alzheimers, Harry Truman’s love letters to Bess, JFK’s letter to his mother Rose, asking her not to write to heads of state asking for their autographs (she had just solicited one from Nikita Khrushchev). The LBJ Library in Austin has the all-time “gasp” documents of a sort: the President’s secretly-recorded phone conversations, hours and hours of them. In 1998, I spent a full year listening to LBJ on the phone, debuting conversations to the public for the first time ever during the first year of on a long-running C-SPAN Radio series on these tapes, aired almost as soon as they were declassified and released by archivists in Texas. (If you’ve never heard what my colleagues and I just called “Pants,” well, you haven’t lived.) One day I brought a camera crew to the National Archives in College Park to shoot a short interview about a new Nixon tapes release, and found John Ehrlichman in a cubby, probably listening to himself.

Maybe one of my favorite moments at the National Archives downtown was exploring the stacks of the Legislative Archives, the records of Congress, with a legendary archivist named Mike Gillette. The man knew where to find anything. We were poking around looking for something, when he looked up at me and asked, “Would you like to see the Louisiana Purchase?” As in: the original document. The actual real thing - the deed of sale maybe? It was elaborate and colorful and trimmed in gold gilt. The paper rarely if ever sees the light of day, carefully preserved in vaults. But that day, Mike pulled out a manila folder with this note in the upper right hand corner, written in pencil: “Louisiana Purchase.” And let me open up the folder myself and stare at the original document.

Just another day at the office.

How can you top any of these? You can’t. But an afternoon with Celeste Walker and Peter Drummey at the Massachusetts Historical Society comes pretty close. When advancing the production of two American Presidents live shows on Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, I got to take an astonishing dive into their Adams collection. (They have a lot there, not just Adams family originals - Peter pulled out a Thomas Jefferson home inventory, the one where Jefferson lists - in his careful handwriting that also produced the Declaration of Independence - Sally Hemings and his own children as his enslaved personal property.) One of the privileges of my life was when Celeste and Peter handed me John Adams’s original letters to Abigail, and Abigail’s original letters to John. I fought back serious tears to read Abigail’s words describing inoculating their children against smallpox, or reminding John at the Continental Congress to “Remember the Ladies” in a letter on March 31, 1776, while he worked on that Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia with Jefferson. Or their many expressions of love to one another, in letter after letter, each beginning “Dear Friend.” A few weeks after my live show on John in Quincy with David McCullough, I returned to Boston, to the MHS, to produce one on John Quincy. We wanted to do that show on Patriots Day in Boston, but the MHS building is on the route of the Boston Marathon, and we couldn’t get parking permits for our production vehicles, and the MHS didn’t want to be open that day anyway. So we moved it up a day, and Celeste pulled volumes of John Quincy’s original diary. His father wrote his diary in a tiny, cramped hand, but John Quincy’s handwriting was large and curvaceous. Maybe the first John Adams didn’t know if he’d have paper the next day, and sought to preserve whatever paper he had to write on, and the second was part of a more settled country, and lived in a moment of less privation, so he used up paper with less care. Celeste and Peter probably knew the real story, but I can’t remember now what they told me.

I started this Hinkypunk with the story of Theodore Roosevelt’s terrible Valentines Day in 1884, and the diary entry he made that day. This is what I wrote to Lou in Massachusetts, who sent me Richardson’s Substack on TR’s diary entry.

The post-script is what Theodore did with baby Alice after that terrible day. Richardson is right: he wanted to bury his heartbreak and blot out the memory of his wife Alice’s untimely death. The baby girl that Alice had just given birth to, named for her mother, reminded him of his personal pain. He gave the baby to his sister Bamie to care for and raise, while he went west to Dakota Territory and tried to forget he was a father at all. Bamie was 30 years old that year and considered a hopeless spinster - though she did marry 10 or 12 years later.

Maybe one of the reasons Alice Roosevelt was so headstrong and wild was because she didn’t have her father’s attention at all as a child. He returned from the Dakotas and married his boyhood neighbor and had, what, five or six more children, and they were all handfuls, larger then life personalities always getting into trouble, and Alice had an even harder time getting her father to notice she was alive.

Alice was unusual. As a young unmarried woman, she would greet guests at formal White House receptions with a live snake around her neck and tell them, “You know, of course, that the President beats his children.” I worked on one of my 1999 American Presidents shows - in Cincinnati on William Howard Taft - with a biographer who interviewed Alice extensively when she was elderly. He said she had an embroidered pillow on her Dupont Circle sofa that read, “If you can’t say anything nice about someone, come sit here by me.” She was obsessed with a scandalous Warren Harding biography called The Shadow of Blooming Grove, which argued that Harding was secretly Black. It also provided lurid, graphic details of Harding’s sexual affairs (which we now know were true). Alice had an unredacted copy of The Shadow of Blooming Grove, according to this author, which she kept open on her coffee table, and she purposefully took a “phone call” in another room, then spied on her visitor to see if he would pick up the copy of the book and leaf through it.

Perhaps marked by the tragic circumstances of her birth, ultimately Alice did not enjoy married love with Nicholas Longworth, the powerful Congressman who became Speaker of the House in the 1920s. But her wedding was held in the White House in 1906, which reminds me of her oft-repeated quote that her father liked to be “the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”