“The light has gone out of my life,” Valentine’s Day 1884

By Michael F. Duggan

One hundred thirty eight years ago last Sunday, 25-year-old New York Assemblyman, Theodore Roosevelt, received a telegram at the Statehouse in Albany.  It said that his wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, had given birth to a baby girl the night before, and that both were doing well.  It was February 13, 1884.  A number of hours later another telegram arrived urging him home to his brownstone on 57th Street in Manhattan as soon as possible. 

As David McCullough writes, “There has been no sign of sun in days… The Times that morning called it suicide weather.  It covered most of the Northeast—rain, unending fog, rivers over their bank.  In New York, traffic barely moved on the rivers.”1  Roosevelt’s train took longer than usual to make the 140-odd miles between Albany and New York City.

Before he arrived, his sister Corinne and her husband, Douglas Robinson, Jr., had returned from Baltimore.  They were greeted at the door by her and Theodore’s brother, Elliott.  “There is a curse on this house,” he told them.  “Mother is dying and Alice is dying too.”  Martha “Mittie” Bulloch Roosevelt had typhoid fever; Alice was dying of Bright’s disease, a 19th century term for nephritis (kidney disease).  Theodore arrived about an hour later around 11:30 PM. 

McCullough continues, “Mittie died at three o’clock the morning of February 14, her four children at her bedside.  Alice lingered on another eleven hours.  Alice died at two that afternoon, Theodore still holding her.”  The child, also named Alice, would survive.

The events of that day nearly destroyed Roosevelt.  He marked his diary for February 14 with a large black X and the caption, “The light has gone out of my life.”2  Roosevelt finished out his term in the New York Assembly before going to the North Dakota Bad Lands to collect himself as a rancher.  His sister, Anna (“Bamie”) would take care of baby Alice. Roosevelt, the youngest assemblyman to ever sit in Albany, had already made a name for himself as a reformer. But there was still something of a dilettante about him. As historians have observed, the legendary Theodore Roosevelt that we all know is the transformed man who returns toughened by the Bad Lands.

Roosevelt is supposed to have never mentioned his first wife again, not even to his daughter.  His autobiography makes no mention of her.  He would marry again, this time to his childhood friend and sweetheart, Edith Kermit Carow.  Together they would have five children.  But his relationship with his oldest daughter would always be fraught.  “I can either run the country,” he said as president, “or control Alice, not both.”  She would become the headstrong and occasionally shocking first daughter—“Princess Alice”—and eventually the granddame and meanly quotable, holy terror of the Washington social scene (she famously quipped “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me”).  She would outlive all of her younger half-siblings.  Alice Roosevelt Longworth died on February 20, 1980, 96 years and six days after the death of her mother.

Notes

  1. David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981) 291.  All McCullough quotes are taken from pages 291-292.
  2. Edward P. Kohn, ed., A Most Glorious Ride, the Diaries of Theodore Roosevelt 1877-1886 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015) 228.