Second only to her father, Theodore Roosevelt, of this time period, no one represented Washington D.C. and the White House more than Alice. It was her antics that caused the exasperated TR to opine “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both,” and it was her high-spirits and unconventionality that won her the hearts of America and garnered the nickname “Princess Alice.” Her trip to Asia created headlines, particularly when she jumped into a pool fully-clothed, and was given so many costly items, the press dubbed the government sponsored trip “Alice in Plunder Land.” She inspired songs and colors, and millions of American girls, all on the cusp of the “new woman” movement, emulated everything she said and did.

Doug Weald named Alice’s 1906 marriage to Rep. Nicholas Longworth as the “grandest White House wedding of all” and “the greatest most spectacular social event probably in all of American History.” The decorations at the wedding were along a value sufficient for a king’s ransom. The ceremony took place in the East Room, in front of one of the windows which was draped with cloth of gold rimmed with curtains, the whole being ornamented with ropes of smilax and Easter lilies. Presents included curios and fine perfumes from the Empress of China; a 25,000 dollar Gobelin tapestry from the President of France; a Florentine mosaic from the King of Italy; two Sevres vases from former President Loubet of France; antique jewelry from the King of Spain; and a pearl necklace, worth 25,000 dollars from the people of Cuba, in “appreciation for services rendered to their country by Americans, and by Mr. Roosevelt, who himself fought for Cuban liberty.” The most startling party of the wedding ceremony was when Alice, irritated with the knife used to cut the cake, borrowed an officer’s saber and “brandished it aloft and began slashing the cake with it…the slices fell right and left, and great was the scramble among her friends for it.”

You can imagine my fascination with Alice when I first stumbled upon her a few years ago, and luckily, I’ve been able to conduct an interview with Dr. Stacy Cordery, author of Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker (2007), and professor of History at Monmouth College, in Monmouth, Illinois.

Alice has been the subject of two other well-received biographies and a conversational autobiography. What inspired you to take up the subject once more? Why do you think the story of Alice Roosevelt Longworth is so timeless (a children’s book was even released last year!)?

The book grew out of a graduate class I took at the University of Texas where I earned my Ph.D. in History. The course was about Theodore Roosevelt and his era and was taught by the Dr. Lewis L. Gould. He wisely suggested Alice as a topic. The book really got going when I was given full access to thousands and thousands of documents belonging to Alice Longworth’s granddaughter. No historian knew these documents existed, and they included a wealth of correspondence from politicians, artists, writers, foreign dignitaries, Supreme Court justices–not to mention family and other friends. There were drafts of her newspaper column and speeches, doodlings, social calendars, the book listing her wedding presents, and lots more–it was a treasure trove.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s story is timeless in some archetypal ways: she overcame the tragedy of her mother dying as she was born. She felt like the outsider in her family, but didn’t let that interfere with her developing her own style and interests. And of course, Alice Longworth was glamorous and famous. When she was First Daughter crowds of hundreds and thousands used to appear to see her. People named babies after her, named a color for her, wrote music for her, asked for her autograph. She could hardly shop for a trousseau because of the spectators. Her fame never abated throughout her 96 years. She held sway in an earlier Washington where politics and socializing were intimately connected–and her drawing room was ground zero for that era’s networking. She was a model of the independent woman, doing, for the most part, exactly what she wanted, when she wanted, with whom she wanted. When I give talk about her, someone always comes up afterward to tell me how Alice Roosevelt Longworth had been an important “bad-girl” model! There’s that certainly, but in the book, I wanted to explain why Alice led a life so gloriously unconcerned with other people’s judgments about her.

Alice’s relationship with her father was conflicting. On one hand, he ignored the topic of her mother and closed the door to a true emotional relationship, yet on the other, he turned to her for advice and she was his biggest advocate. Did your research help you understand Alice–and in the process, T.R.–or was she even more of an enigma?

Well, every biographer treds with trepidation on that question of “understanding” one’s subject because the historical record is incomplete. I would like to think that between her voluminous writings (her diaries and letters), the letters from family and friends about her, her own memoir, the interviews I conducted, and the contemporary sources, I had a pretty good understanding of her. I hope the book provides a nuanced sense of the relationship between TR and Alice. Sometimes, though, the sources aren’t there. When he died, she did not comment–in public or in private. I did not have the evidence to assess the depth of her grief. I could read only the silence–and it was a silence remarkably like TR’s silence at the death of his first wife, Alice’s mother. Yet I remain convinced that TR is the key to understanding Alice. Their relationship was conflicted, and for many complicated reasons, not the least of which is that she was so very much like him, especially when she was young.

Considering the era in which she was born and reared, do you find Alice’s unconventionality natural and ahead of her time, or did she behave outwardly outrageous for attention, but remained inwardly conventional?

I find Alice’s unconventionality natural for her and ahead of her time. In some ways she did behave outrageously for attention’s sake. She almost never had the undivided attention of her father or her step-mother, and she acted out in ways that forced them to notice her. Luckily for her, Alice Roosevelt came of age both in the public crucible of the White House and at a time when the country was fascinated with the glowing potential for change in the new century. TR assumed the presidency in 1901 and Alice personified all the breathtaking possibilities for young women at the dawn of the twentieth century–or more precisely, she created possibilities for women, like driving a car, smoking in public, betting on the horses, playing poker. These were trespasses on socially defined men’s territory. Once she was no longer First Daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth continued to shatter conventions: she wore slacks in public, she stopped the convention of calling, she eschewed traditional women’s war work, she had an extramarital affair and gave birth to a baby at age 41–the result of that affair.

Though Alice’s memory and prestige has faded considerably in the general public, when she is mentioned, people either love her or detest her. What were your initial impressions of Alice? What do you think of Alice after having written her biography?

Initially I was fascinated with Alice Roosevelt as a celebrity First Daughter. Then I wrestled for years with the body of evidence left by people who, as you suggest, detested her. At that point, someone who knew her well, Kristie Miller, asked me to think about how it could be simultaneously true that so many people hated her, yet everyone from tourists to presidents wanted to have tea with her. I learned from others who knew her, like Robert Hellman and Stephen Benn and James K. Galbraith that she never made fun of the vulnerable or those whom she thought could not handle it. She would never, as she put it “hit a blind lamb on the nose.” And everyone attested to her charm. Mrs. Longworth was brilliant, witty, and politically engaged to a degree that we have forgotten. She could be malicious, but I think her malice was directed chiefly at Democrats (particularly her cousins, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt) during the New Deal years when she felt that everything was on the line: the economy had tanked, fascism was on the rise. The world was a scary place and at that stage of her life she was bitterly partisan.

Why do you think Alice remained content to take swipes behind the scenes, but to never take a stand politically? If Nick ran for President, would she have been a good First Lady?

Alice remained beind the scenes only in that she did not run for elected office, and her political stands were well-known. She worked hard–and successfully–to defeat the League of Nations. She was a board member of America First. She wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column for a short while, and she did campaign occasionally. She was told to sit out the 1912 election for fear of helping her husband and hurting her father, or vice versa, as they were in two different political parties that year. She was asked to take Nick’s House seat after he died, but she had a horror, as she said, of women “using their husband’s coffins as springboards” to office. Despite the fact that she was acknowledged the smartest of TR’s children, and the important fact that she knew just about everybody in Washington, Alice Longworth never ran for political office because she was shy. She was also not extremely wealthy. She did not control her money, but the trust fund from her mother was doled out to her.

As she got older, her politics became less partisan. She referred to herself in later years not as a Republican, but as a Bull Moose. She crossed party lines to vote for Lydon Johnson and she was great friends with the Kennedys, whom she admired.

Would she have been a good First Lady? She would have been an extremely unconventional First Lady for her time. She–and this is what-if history, now–would have cared passionately about the legislation and the politics, like Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosalynn Carter, and Hillary Clinton. She would have been much less interested in the formal entertainments. That would not have gone down particularly well in the 1920s, when a woman’s role was much more circumscribed.

Nicknamed “Princess Alice” during her stint as a First Daughter, was the political/diplomatic climate easier or more difficult than today for a president’s child to be treated rather in the manner of royalty?

Theodore Roosevelt was a Progressive Republican who loathed the idea of his family turning into some sort of antithesis of democracy. He kept putting the brakes on Alice as First Daughter being treated as a princess. She was the first First Daughter to serve as a goodwill ambassador for her father when she toured Asia in 1905. There, it was very difficult to keep the royal treatment at bay, especially because TR was half a world away in Washington. You would have to ask Chelsea Clinton or the Bush daughters, but my sense is that everything is more difficult now because we have 24/7 news coverage, cell phones that take photographs and can be flashed around the world in seconds, and citizens with an easier time communicating their concerns to the White House. While Americans knew much of what happened in Alice Roosevelt’s life while she was First Daughter, they did not know everything–and so she could get away with some royal treatment. Also, at the turn of the century, the United States was in a much different place in relationship to the rest of the world. Americans then took great pride in the fact that their First Daughter was being treated as an equal by Japanese princesses and the Empress Dowager of China. For the most part, Americans reveled in the antics of the irrepressible First Daughter and found in her a mirror of their own aspirations. Young women copied her dress, her actions. Young men wrote for her photograph.

Alice’s relationships with her family were filled with conflict; however, based on the letters between she and William Borah, Alice seemed somewhat free of emotional turmoil. Do you subscribe to the idea that they were a perfect match? Would Alice have been happier and fulfilled had she been free to wed Bill Borah?

Bill Borah was the Senate’s best orator, the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the handsome “Lion of Idaho,” a self-made man full of the romance of the West. He could quote reams of poetry and political philosophy just like Alice could. While I wrote in the book–and I think it’s true that–that Senator Borah was the love of Alice’s life, I don’t actually think that they were a perfect match. I think she was a frustrated Lady MacBeth to Borah. It was notoriously difficult to get Borah to see a bill through to its passage, for example, and the same seemed to be true of the attempts he made at securing a presidential nomination from the Republican Party. He didn’t commit to much, long-term. I think they had many important things in common, and they probably were really in love, but I suspect, in my biographer’s heart, that the relationship would not have lasted because he was not as ambitious for himself as she was for him, nor was he as politically astute as she was.

Finally, did you ever find it ironic that Alice outlived her entire immediate family?

Ironic, no. A bit sad, perhaps. But it is extremely important to realize that at the end of her life, Alice had good and loyal friends and more importantly, she had her granddaughter, Joanna Sturm. The relationship between grandmother and granddaughter sustained them both, from everything I’ve been told, and provided great happiness to them both.

Further Reading:
Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker by Stacy A. Cordery
Princess Alice: The Life and Times of Alice Roosevelt Longworth by Carol Felsenthal
Crowded Hours by Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Mrs. L: Talks with Alice Roosevelt Longworth by Michael Teague
Alice: The Life and Times of Alice Roosevelt Longworth by Howard Teichmann

For more information and photographs: AliceRoosevelt.com

As “First Family,” the President, his wife and children, and any other dependents, had their needs and cares were catered to by a bevy of secretaries, secret service agents, and most important of all, domestic servants!

According to Helen Taft, “the management of the White House is a larger task than many women are ever called upon to perform.” During the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, the White House staff consisted of more than forty men and women, including the clerical force in the executive office, Mrs. Roosevelt’s social secretary and three maids, the steward, two butlers, the President’s family cook, the house cook and assistant, one pantry man, four cleaners, the gardener and his assistants, laundresses, firemen, watchmen, janitors, plumbers and electricians. All of these positions were paid for by the Government, with the exception of the family cook and the white maids–as most of the domestic staff (for most D.C. and Southern households) at this time were black. White House standbys included the Paymaster, the Doorkeepers, the Assistant Secretary, and the Telegrapher and “Chief Intelligence Officer.”

The most important position was the White House Steward. A virtual autocrat of the official table and cuisine at the President’s house, almost every question governing the State dinners was within their control. Receiving an annual salary of $1800, the steward supervised and accounted for every detail of the household; no piece of broken glass or china could be destroyed except upon the order of the Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds. Even the First Lady had little say in the culinary department of household affairs–though Mrs Taft promptly hired a housekeeper in lieu of a steward from the beginning of her husband’s presidency most likely in response to this lack of control.

For protection, the First Family was guarded by the Secret Service, and in addition, the White House itself had its guards in the form of policemen from the regular Washington Police Force. The actual number of Secret Service guards in attendance upon the President was never made public, but it was certain that at all receptions, a number of such guards were on duty within the house, while several more were stationed outside. The President never stepped outside the White House, never traveled even the shortest distance, without being followed by one or more Secret Service officers.

During dinners and other receptions hosted by the President, secret service men and police officers dotted the White House. When entering the White House, every person was closely scrutinized, particularly since Congressmen were in the habit of giving cards of admission to anyone who asked for the favor. The most important rule was to keep one’s hands in plain sight. It was the most rigid rule of the White House, and if a person happened to rest a hand in their pocket, or under their coat-tails, a low whisper immediately told them to take it out. Also in attendance upon the President, at all receptions and on all State occasions, were military and naval aids. Their duties were purely social, yet prestigious.

Despite the tumult of incoming and outgoing Presidents of different political persuasions, the cogs that kept the White House running always ran smoothly. Many White House staffers ended up working in there for many, many years, and cherished their time spent in the President’s House.

For more information:
Workers in the White House

From the end of Reconstruction until the Great War, Washington was the center of the black aristocracy. Nowhere else in the United States possessed such a concentration of “old families,” not merely from the District and nearby Maryland and Virginia, but from throughout the country, whose emphasis on family background, good breeding, occupation, respectability, and color bound them into an exclusive, elite group. Upper-class blacks from Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans and other places gravitated to Washington D.C. in sizable numbers due to its educational and cultural opportunities, the availability of jobs on par with their education, and the presence of a black social group that shared their values, tastes and self-perceptions.

The “black 400″ of Washington consisted of fewer than a hundred families out of a black population of 75,000 in 1900, and centered around the family of Blanche K. Bruce, an ex-slave and former Mississippi Senator who served in Congress from 1875 to 1881, who was also the first Black American to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate. Bruce was born in Virginia to a black woman and a white man, who may have been their master. Fortunately, his slave master took an interest in Bruce and he was permitted to share lessons with the master’s son. In later years, Bruce shared that his life as a slave in Virginia, and later in Mississippi and Missouri, was in fact no different from that of his white peers. In 1850, Bruce moved to Missouri after becoming a printer’s apprentice and from there he escaped to Kansas and declared his freedom. After the Union Army rejected his application to fight in the Civil War, Bruce taught school and attended Oberlin College in Ohio for two years and from there, he went to work as a steamboat porter on the Mississippi River. In 1864, he moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where he established a school for blacks.

During Reconstruction, Bruce became a wealthy landowner in the Mississippi Delta. He was appointed to the positions of Tallahatchie County registrar of voters and tax assessor before winning an election for sheriff in Bolivar County. He later was elected to other county positions, including tax collector and supervisor of education, while he also edited a local newspaper. He rose rapidly in Republican Party ranks and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1874. Bruce’s arrival in Washington aroused much comment: he was relatively young, cultured and handsome. Even those who resented his presence in Congress could not find fault with his innate dignity, elegant manners and shrewd political judgment. When he married Josephine Beall Willson of Philadelphia in 1878, they set Washington society–both black and white–ablaze, most noticeably because Josephine Bruce was very light-skinned, wealthy, very highly educated and beautiful. During Bruce’s residence in the District, he and Josephine entertained lavishly, taking as full a part in official Washington society as possible. The Bruce’s, along with other prominent black Washingtonians such as Hiram Rhodes Revels, P.B.S. Pinchback, Josiah Settle, Robert Harlan, Norris Wright Cuney, etc, directly challenged notions about black Americans during that period.

In addition to the Bruce’s, the colored aristocracy of the nation’s capital included the Cooks, Wormleys, Syphaxes, Shadds, Franciss, Grays, Terrells, Grimkés, Pinchbacks, Purvises, Cardozos, Menards, McKinlays, Douglasses, Murrays, and especially families associated with Howard University. Each family possessed “a background of accomplishment” and positions of considerable influence within the District power structure. With the economic resources of physicians, public-school teachers and administrators, attorneys, government employees, popular caterers and certain businessmen, Howard University faculty and others within the colored aristocracy, many possessed wealth beyond comprehension for the majority of black Americans at that time. According to an observer in 1895, the wealthiest blacks were John F. Cook ($200,000), Blanche K. Bruce ($150,000), W.A.A. Wormley ($115,000), P.B.S. Pinchback ($90,000) [right], John R. Lynch ($80,000), Charles B. Purvis ($75,000), Daniel Murray ($60,000), J.H. Meriwether ($60,000), George F.T. Cook ($50,000), Furman J. Shadd ($40,000), and John R. Francis ($35,000).

A few not only owned comfortable residences in the city, but also “country places” in Maryland and Virginia. Those who did own such places escaped the summer heat by taking cottages either in the vicinity of Harper’s Ferry, or at well-known resorts such as those at Cape May and Saratoga, which had sizable “colored colonies.” In the late 1880s, Charles Douglass, son of famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, purchased a tract of land on Chesapeake Bay, about five miles from the Naval Academy at Arundel-on-the-Bay, where he developed a vacation site for Washington’s black elite, and christened the place “Highland Beach.”

Despite the hardening of racial practices and the erosion of civil rights for blacks in post-Reconstruction America, the black elite held steadfast hope that blacks would achieve equality. However, this black “400″ was insulated against the hardships of Jim Crow, and many were accepted by white Washington society–several black families were listed in the 1888 issue of Elite List, a forerunner of the Social Register, a few attended white churches, and even after certain public places closed their door to blacks, they sometimes made exceptions in the case of “refined and genteel Negroes.” Because of their successes, the notion that Washington was “the colored man’s paradise” gained wide acceptance among blacks and whites anxious about the turning tide against integration and rehabilitation of the nation as Reconstruction began to die. Though the “colored aristocracy” was hampered with issues of color, refinement and social status, they did nonetheless see themselves as a “buffer” between whites and lower-class blacks; a buffer that would prove the equality and ability of black Americans in a post-Civil War society.

Further Reading:

Aristocrats of Color: 1880-1920 by Willard B. Gatewood
The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty by Lawrence Otis Graham
Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen by Philip Dray

The issue of “society” created much embarrassment in the formative years of the Government. America had been founded as a democracy, yet to operate smoothly, there existed social and official rankings between Americans and foreign diplomats. Having no cabinet to whom he could turn for advice, President Washington submitted the subject to VP John Adams, John Jay, General Alexander Hamilton and Rep. James Madison, whose prominence and expertise in official and social life rendered them competent advisers. The gentlemen then formed a basic coded of manners to govern the official and social surroundings of the Executive office. To the simplistic ideas of Washington’s impromptu “Cabinet,” Thomas Jefferson, fresh from Paris, added an aristocratic touch to social life, however James Madison and John Adams reverted to the more democratic “American” mode of etiquette and ranking, which has characterized social life in Washington throughout the history of the district.

The social world of the Capital was divided into three classes:

1. The Official Class, embracing all three branches of the Government, Presidential appointees to administrative departments, and includes officers of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps on duty permanently or temporary at the Capital, and civil officers of the Government whose places of employment are in the different states of the Union or officers of the Diplomatic or Consular services of the US and visiting the city.

2. The Quasi-Official Class, which embraces the Foreign Diplomatic and Consular Corps, Officers of Foreign Governments, and Officers of State or Municipal Governments in the US, in the city.

3. The Unofficial Class, which includes residents from other localities, sojourners or visitors to the city who are entitled by social status at home to recognition in good society, and permanent residents of independent means or engaged in professional or mercantile affairs.

The social and domestic routine of Washington is regulated and controlled entirely by official duties. The day was divided into two parts, socially speaking; all that portion before the dinner hour which is after the close of official hours, being regarded as morning [3-5 PM, no later than 6 PM], and that portion of time thereafter as evening [8-9 PM]. Hence, in afternoon receptions, it was generally customary to say good morning, although it was really afternoon (applied only in conversation. In notes and invitations, the usual divisions of time were used). Informal calls between friends and acquaintances, or those doing business, were generally held between 10 AM and 12 PM.

The strictest piece of etiquette it was fatal to fail was that of paying calls. The routine was rather different from that of society in other cities, and could put a newcomer into quite a tangle! For example, everyone in official life was required to call upon the President and his wife, but they never returned them unless the caller was a Sovereign, Ruler, or fellow President. A stranger of distinction visiting the Capital was required to make their first call upon a resident official of equal rank, while a newly appointed official, of whatever rank, made the first call of office to the branch of the service or department to which the official belonged. For the stranger arriving in Washington, a simple call–that is, leaving cards for people one wished to know, or tell you were in the city–was sufficient. Amusingly, unlike any other city in America–perhaps even the world–men called on one another more than women were required to!

The Official, or Fashionable Season at the Capital began with the general receptions at the Executive Mansion and by the Cabinet Ministers on New Year’s Day, and it terminated with the beginning of Lent. During Lent, as a rule, there were no important public dinners, though quiet dinners and less conspicuous social gatherings were indulged in by some. The Congressional Season, when entertainments and amusements peaked, began regularly on the first Monday in December, and usually ended with the session, or earlier, when the session protracted into the summer. From June to September, owing to the heat of summer, prominent members of the Government and residents generally left the city on their vacations.

The formal social demands led to the creation of Receptions. As a rule, these began and ended with the Season, and comprised of two classes, and certain days were set apart for the “At Homes” of the female relations of Washington’s officials. The first class was the Afternoon Receptions, or Drawing Rooms. These required no invitations and were held between three and five P.M., to which all persons of reputable character and becoming dress were admitted. Excluding the President’s Levee, Evening Receptions required an invitation, unless otherwise announced in the newspapers. As a rule, these were given by the Vice-President, Senators, the Speaker, Representatives and Members of the Cabinet who entertained, and sometimes were hosted by distinguished private citizens. An evening reception lasted three hours, from eight to eleven P.M., and the gentleman of the house was always present, and received with his wife (or designated hostess) and any other whom she invited to assist her.

Due to the transient nature of Washington D.C., it was a natural battleground for social climbers to receive the social recognition denied them by their hometowns. Rather akin to popping over to Europe to mingle with the aristocracy, nouveaux riche could meet the titled and well-born without leaving the States–and a few international matches were made in Washington D.C., the most well-known being that of Belle Wilson (of the “Marrying Wilsons”) and Sir Michael Herbert (“Mungo”), while famous residents who moved to the Capital after being snubbed in their cities included Mary Leiter of Chicago, who married George Curzon and became Vicereine of India, and Evalyn Walsh McLean (left) of Colorado, the last private owner of the unlucky Hope Diamond.

Since next year brings a new interest in Washington D.C. and the inner workings of the American government, I thought it best to deviate from my emphasis on Edwardian Britain and swing the focus to Washington D.C. of the 1880s to 1910s. Regardless of personal views on the outgoing President, or the President-Elect, not only do I believe that no one can possibly be immune to the excitement and emotional charge of witnessing yet another process of America’s democracy. Stay tuned for posts about the White House, our past Presidents, famous Congressmen, social and etiquette proceedings, D.C. society, and so on!

Check out Scandalous Women for witty and erudite musings on those women, famous and infamous, who have characterized the history of Washington D.C.