Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt
Edith was born on August 6,1861 - Dies at age 87 - 55 days after her 87th birthday. She was a tough mother. One time she told Kermit’s wife Belle Willard that at no time would she hesitate to chop up all of the children into pieces for their father.
Edith Age 7
Edith was born with the Puritan ethic of being watchful and thrifty. It was a good trait to have especially in those days TR was making his living by his pen.
It was only when he became governor that Edith began to fell financially comfortable. When TR considering a run for Vice President, he was earning $12,000 a year as New York State Governor, $2,000 more than the Vice President earned and the state paid the expenses of the Governor’s mansion.
On March 10, 1899, Edith and her sister Emily sailed to Cuba to take a look at that hill TR charged. When she was out of the country TR said yes to running for VP to the Republican Party. When TR was campaigning for VP Edith lost a lot of weight. You could see her neck bones.
In February 1900 TR left for a 7-week hunting trip in the Rockies. Edith was home and treated Ted for asthma and bronchitis. Quentin went in the hospital to have his adenoids removed.
There were times life could be hectic. In 1900 the family went to the Buffalo Exposition. At Sagamore Hill Archie came down with chicken pox, Quentin stuck a moth ball up his nose. TR went on a 7-week hunting trip to Colorado and came home suffering from bronchichitins and Quentin had an earache. Alice visited friends and came home with an abscess in her jaw and loose front teeth. Edith thought she had been kicked in her jaw at a dance. Edith rushed Alice to Roosevelt Hospital. They wanted to remove the teeth. Edith in insisted they stay. She didn’t want Alice to make her debut with dentures. Quentin then followed Alice into the hospital with an infected ear.
TR left in August to go on a speaking tour and Edith took the kids to a rented house in the Adirondacks.
On his way back he planned to swing by and meet Edith on September 7th. He had to cancel after McKinley had been shot. TR avoided visiting Buffalo after McKinley had been shot. The initial diagnosis was hopeful, and his appearance may have been taken to indicate the President was in greater danger than reported. Instead, he climbed Mt. Marcy, the highest point in NYS. It’s where the Hudson begins.
When he got the news Mckinely had died, he was found on Mt. Marcy and taken by carriage to North Creek where he boarded a train to Saratoga Springs and then to Buffalo.
At the same time Archie was suffering with Tonsillitis and then TR came back from hunting in Colorado suffering from bronchitis and Quentin had an earache.
TR never remembered Edith’s birthday, but he always remembered their wedding anniversary Thursday December 2nd. Cecil Springs Rice was his best man. Rice died on Valentine’s Day 34 years after Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt died.
Edith always insisted on paying personal expenses even when TR was on public business. That earned TR the accolade of being “the only president who ever insisted on paying a doctor bill.”
Edith hired Isabella (Belle) Hagner as her personal Secretary. She was the 1st First Lady to have a personal Secretary. Hagner's first assignment was to plan Alice”s societal debut in 1902. Edith soon began to rely on Hagner and authorized her to release photos of the first family in hopes of avoiding the press from using unauthorized pictures. Hagner was said to have an excellent knowledge of politics that was useful to the family. She stayed on into the Taft and Wilson administrations.
Edith also redesigned the interior of the mansion, working with the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, & White. She described the interior as “late General Grant and early Pullman.”
Edith Roosevelt seldom gets credit for her qualities as a “single mother” for a huge portion of the kids' lives. It fell to Edith to shuttle the family back and forth between Washington and Oyster Bay, along with all the pets and hundreds of books.
Edith was an avid reader and loved to take a book or two out to a rose arbor she had built near her home. It was her hide-a-way whenever she needed a quick break from her responsibilities.
The Nest, a small wooden gazebo in Smith’s Field about 100 yards from the house. It had upright cedar posts and a shingled roof. It had terrific views of Oyster Bay and the shore of Connecticut.
In 1961, a year before the house was gifted to the National Park Service, the TRA sold the property, and it no longer exists.
When TR went to Kenya Edith took Ethel, Archie, and Quentin on an extended tour of Europe. Edith was not an advocate of TR’s third-party presidential run in 1912 but supported him fully when it was formally underway. She tended to him after the assassination attempt, consoled him when he lost the election.
She accompanied him to Brazil to see him off as he explored the River of Doubt.
TR and Edith contributed to home-front activities during World War I. Edith’s grief at the deaths of Quentin and her husband were profound.
Her last decades were full of travel: to Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. Between 1909 and 1948 Edith traveled to over thirty countries. She wrote about her travels in Cleared for Strange Ports,
She urged Republican women to vote after the 19th Amendment passed.
She wrote about her family ancestry in American Backlogs. To protect her privacy, she destroyed her lifetime’s worth of love letters from Theodore Roosevelt.
She made two requests at her death. She didn’t want to be embalmed and to be buried wearing her wedding ring.
Death Bed