Ivanka Trump has nothing on the country’s most interesting first daughter
This week’s entry: Alice Roosevelt
What it’s about: We can debate whether Jackie or Michelle was a more glamorous first lady, but it’s unlikely we’ll find a more captivating first daughter than Alice Roosevelt. Teddy’s only daughter from his first marriage entered the spotlight at age 17, when the assassination of William McKinley unexpectedly made her father president. The younger Roosevelt instantly became a fashion icon, gossip magnet, and polarizing figure for her outspokenness in an era when young women were expected to be demure. And her wild life continued long after she left the White House.
Biggest controversy: There were many. Alice was a partier, a gambler, a smoker, and an all-around rule-breaker. Her father once said, “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.” An overseas trip in 1905 turned scandalous. She co-led a diplomatic mission to four Pacific Rim countries and the recently acquired territory of Hawaii as an equal to then-Secretary Of War William Howard Taft. (No first daughter would be given that much authority until first daughter/real first lady/shadow president Ivanka Trump 112 years later.) While at sea, Alice jumped into the ship’s pool with her clothes on, inviting Congressman Nicholas Longworth to join her. (They latter married.) She later told Robert Kennedy she only would have considered it scandalous if she had taken off her clothes first.
Strangest fact: The Roosevelts weren’t out of the White House long before Alice was banned from returning to the residence. Just before her father’s term expired, she buried a voodoo doll of incoming first lady Nellie Taft in the White House lawn. The Taft administration banned her from the grounds (whether for this or some other infraction isn’t made clear on Wikipedia). The Wilson administration did the same in 1916 for “a bawdy joke at Wilson’s expense.” Alice retaliated by campaigning against the League Of Nations, President Wilson’s pet project.
Thing we were happiest to learn: Roosevelt was bipartisan—though this probably had less to do with political goodwill and more with her unwillingness to hold back on attacking someone she disliked. She endorsed Herbert Hoover against her distant cousin Franklin (both Alice and her father were more closely related to Eleanor Roosevelt than Franklin, who was also his wife’s distant cousin), but when Wendell Willkie ran against FDR in 1936, Alice suggested Willkie’s grassroots support came from “the grass roots of 10,000 country clubs.” When FDR broke precedent and ran yet again, she announced she’d “rather vote for Hitler than vote for Franklin for a third term.” But in Roosevelt’s fourth run for the White House, she described his opponent, Thomas Dewey (of “Dewey Defeats Truman” fame), as “the bridegroom on the wedding cake.”