Teddy Bear Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt had filled pages of his diary by writing about the love of his life, his first wife, nearly as often as he thought about her. He noted the simplest expressions, the smallest acts of recognition, the quietest smiles, the loudest silences, and every action that resulted in a memory that they could replay again-and-again in the future that they had planned together. In his ever-present pocket diary on February 14, 1884, after she died from complications of childbirth, Theodore Roosevelt simply wrote an “X” above one striking sentence: “The light has gone out of my life.”

Theodore Roosevelt recovered and made history, but the pain that he felt probably never dissipated. It was also never again mentioned. Two days after the funeral, he wrote a short biography of Alice in his diary, ending “For joy or sorrow, my life has now been lived out.” Roosevelt’s biographer, Edmund Morris, wrote that “Like a lion obsessively trying to drag a spear from its flank, Roosevelt set about dislodging Alice Lee from his soul. Nostalgia, a weakness to which he was abnormally vulnerable, could be indulged if it was pleasant, but if painful it must be suppressed, “until the memory is too dead to throb.” Alice Hathaway Lee’s existence may have crossed his mind or remained in his heart, but her name never again passed through his lips. Their daughter — Alice’s namesake — entered adulthood without ever hearing her father speak of her mother. It was simply too painful for this, probably the bravest of Presidents. Following his Presidency, Roosevelt wrote his Autobiography, which was detailed and thorough, but he didn’t mention his first wife even once. Letters were destroyed, photographs were were burned, and Roosevelt’s only method of coping with her absence was pretending that she was never there in the first place. He once wrote of Alice that “I did not think I could win her, and I went nearly crazy at the mere thought of losing her.” Once he did lose her, he certainly lost a part of himself.

Immediately following Alice’s death, Theodore told a friend that he was “beyond healing and time will never change me in that respect”. Roosevelt remarried in 1886 and had five more children, but his silence about Alice’s impact on his life is just as striking as the words he wrote about her while she was alive. In August 1974, President Richard Nixon — one of Roosevelt’s successors and biggest admirers — resigned from the Presidency and in his final speech as President, to White House staff gathered in the East Room, quoted from one of only two references that Roosevelt made to Alice following her death:

“She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; As a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died. Her life had been always in the sunshine; there had never come to her a single sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for the bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness. Fair, pure, and joyous as a maiden; loving , tender, and happy. As a young wife; when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her—then, by a strange and terrible fate, death came to her. And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.”

Theodore Roosevelt went on to achieve his ambitions and realize great success, but his tribute to Alice bears witness to his pain and gives extra symbolism to the lion’s last words before his heart gave out in 1919: “Please put out the light.”