TR Out The Window
By Richard Cashman
It's been widely accepted a young Theodore Roosevelt witnessed Lincoln’s Funeral Procession from a window in his grandfather's house. Where did that start? It all began once upon a time with this photograph.
The image was discovered in the New York Public Library by photojournalist Stefan Lorant. It was taken during Lincoln’s NYC Cortege and shows the back of TR’s grandfather’s house.
At first glance it doesn’t seem like much, but if you look carefully you can see someone peering out the second floor window. Here’s where the plot thickens. Lorant thought what if that was Theodore Roosevelt looking down on Lincoln’s casket.
However, when you enlarged the image it didn’t look anything like Roosevelt. For all anyone knew it could be a chambermaid with a bun in her hair, or any one of TR’s nieces and nephews.
At the time of the funeral TR’s grandfather was a widower sharing his house with his son James, his wife Elizabeth and their four children. Considering all the possibilities there’s no reason to think it had to be TR just because it was his grandfather’s house.
Above all TR never said he saw Lincoln's Funeral Procession. It’s not in the Roosevelt Papers at the Library of Congress. It doesn’t appear in any of his childhood diaries, or over 150,000 letters. You won’t read it in any of his speeches and you won’t find it in the Roosevelt Collection at Harvard.
So where did it come from? It came from one person and one person only. It came from TR's second wife Edith who on the day of the funeral was a preschooler a little over 3 ½ years old. This is a photograph of Edith at age 3.
Edith first saw the photo in 1945 when she was 84 and not at her best. She’d been on morphine since the 1930s to ease the pain she suffered from a heart condition. The chronic use of Morphine has been linked to dementia in older adults. She had difficulty balancing her checkbook. Her diary entries became confused. She struggled to write grammatically correct sentences. When her son Kermit committed suicide on June 4, 1943 the family worried Edith was too frail to be told he had taken his own life. Instead they told her he had died of a heart attack. In 1944 she mistook her grandson Quentin II for the son she lost shot down over France in WWI. She told him “you are the first of my babies to die.” It was apparent to her doctors and family Edith’s cognitive impairment had gone beyond normal aging. It was affecting her judgement and visual perception.
In September 1945 Jessica Kraft was hired to watch over Edith, help manage the house and pay the bills. A few weeks later Lorant met Edith and handed her the photograph. He then asked her if it was her husband looking out the window?
“Yes, I think that is my husband and next to him his brother. That horrible man. I was a little girl then and my governess took me to Grandfather Roosevelt’s house on Broadway so I could watch the funeral procession. But as I looked down from the window and saw all the black draping, I became frightened and started to cry. Theodore and Elliott were both there. They didn’t like my crying. They took me and locked me in a back room. I never did see Lincoln’s funeral.”
It’s a remarkable recollection of an event that took place 81 years earlier when Edith was 3 ½ learning shapes and colors. It’s even more remarkable knowing Edith had difficulty balancing her checkbook.
In a speech to the Woman’s Roosevelt Memorial Association, March 15, 1933 a much younger Edith told the audience she was four when she first met TR. Since she was born August 6, 1861 if she was 4 that would have been months after the NYC funeral procession and the story ends there.
If you ignore the timeline, the blurry image and the fact TR never said a word he saw Lincoln’s Funeral, all that's left is the unquestioning acceptance of Edith’s unbelievable 81 year old recollection.
She remembered she began to cry looking down at the mourning ribbon and rather than find an adult TR locked her in a back room. Where did he get the key? Back rooms are locked from the outside to keep what’s inside safe. Its unlikely 6 ½ year old TR had a key of his own and just as unlikely his grandfather gave him one without asking, “why?”
Even Inspector Clouseau could figure this one out. Edith only told the story once. She never told it again. She didn’t say a word in the seven years everyone was watching her husband’s image being carved next to Abraham Lincoln on Mt. Rushmore. Who said history isn't fun. Unless someone finds a note in TR’s own hand saying he witnessed Lincoln’s Funeral Procession from a rear window in his grandfather’s house, it's a story best left to your once upon a time imagination.