 Now let's get right to it. You've had a chance to meet Betty Boyd Caroli already today. She was speaking briefly on behalf of Ethel. She splits her time between New York and Italy. She lives, in fact, she just told me within a few blocks of Theodore Roosevelt's birthplace in Manhattan. She's written a number of books. Three of them are listed in your program. The one that matters most to us in this context is the Roosevelt Women. 1999, we've asked her to reflect and give a new look at the Roosevelt Women. Betty Boyd Caroli. Thank you very much. It's certainly a pleasure for me to be here. Boyd, these lights are bright. Are they always this? Well, anyway. I've called this talk a new look at the Roosevelt Women. I write about, for some reason, and I didn't want it to be this way, but I got dragged into writing about women who became famous because of the men they married. And often they're dismissed with a single adjective. You think about it for a minute. Could we have the next slide, please? Next. You think about, and you see who this is, Sarah Delano Roosevelt, the mother of Franklin Roosevelt, and more infamous as the mother-in-law of Eleanor Roosevelt. No matter in my book, I really try to redo the view of Sarah Delano Roosevelt, because most times you mention that name and people just laugh. I mean, Eleanor Roosevelt's mother-in-law, everybody knows that she bossed around Eleanor, that she built a house next door to theirs so that you could just enter on any floor, that she spoiled her grandchildren and would say terrible things to them, like don't pay any attention to your mother, she just bore you, I'm your real center and so forth. So I really tried in the book to look beyond that picture. I interviewed, for example, her great-granddaughter who said, you know, that's not the picture I have at all of Sarah Delano Roosevelt. She was a woman of her time and of her class, but she was really a very wonderful grandmother to us, great-grandmother to us. She had an interesting life, and so this led me to look at her letters. She grew up in China, she went to school in Europe, she got interested in settlement houses long before Eleanor ever set foot in a settlement house. So I thought, this is the case where we really need to redo our view of Sarah Delano Roosevelt, but you know what's almost impossible to do. I mean, I wrote this chapter about her and I think still most people, you say Sarah Delano Roosevelt, and they laugh. Next slide, please. This is another woman that I think deserves more than one adjective, and here I think we're gonna get into a discussion about how some of us who look at the same letters, I know Kathleen looked at the same letters I did at Harvard, between Middy and Theodore. We look at the same letters and we walk out with different conclusions. You heard last night, I think a weaker Middy being described because that's really the typical picture that here, Middy Roosevelt, the mother of TR, was little. Well, she was little, she was less than five feet tall. She had tiny hands and feet. She was a fragile type person. But there's really I think another side to her because she was political on both her mother and her father's side. I always say that the Roosevelt's made money in New York, but they really didn't amount to a whole lot politically until TR's father married Middy Bullock from Georgia. Next slide, please. This is her as an older woman. You see she died before she ever hit 50. You know the comments made about her was that she, one comment was that she was fanatic about hygiene, that she always wore white, that she took two tubs to bathe, one to wash and one to rinse, really crazy. And yet I always say that she wasn't cleaning up because she died of typhoid, which is the dirty water disease. She had a very short life. Next slide, please. This is her mother. When I said she came from this political family, and I should have a slide, thank you. Can you hear me? Yell if you can, because I can't see you. I should have a slide to show the, how the family gets complicated, but I think I can explain it. No, not that one. Go back, please. Back slide. This is Middy's mother. Middy grew up, we'll see a slide in a minute in Georgia. We're a little handicapped here for this slide, so bear with us. Her mother, Martha Stewart, Elliot Bullock, grew up in Georgia and everybody thought that she was going to marry the boy next door, whose name was Bullock. But when it came time to marry, she didn't marry him. She married a much older man who was a United States senator. Next slide, please. This is not a very good picture, but we're talking about somebody who died a very long time ago. Okay, so she married a United States senator and her former boyfriend, Bullock, married the senator's daughter. And she had children with the senator and Bullock had children with the senator's wife and then the senator died, the senator's daughter died. Did I just say that wrong, Senator? The senator's daughter died and guess what? Bullock and Martha got back together. So that, next slide, please. So the other side of the family, Bullock's side, is also extremely political. I mean, it's not just that Mitty's mother had been the wife of a United States senator in D.C. Her father was descended from an extremely famous family in Georgia. This is Archibald Bullock, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of the Continental Congress, first governor of the state of Georgia. He is so famous, that next slide, please, you can actually buy a t-shirt in Georgia with his picture on the front. So, next slide, please. This is the house that Mitty, that is TR's mother, grew up in, in Roswell, Georgia. Maybe some of you have been there. The TRA has met there a couple of times and it's not a huge plantation house, but it's pretty impressive. They were slave owners and she actually met, you're going to say, well how did somebody like TR's father from New York, son of a wealthy merchant, meet this plantation daughter from Georgia? And the answer is in that extended family that I just talked about, you know, his, the senator's kids, the other kids, and they all, everybody said they were all treated alike without any regard to who was whose child and so on. Some of them married and moved to Philadelphia. TR's father happened to be visiting in Philadelphia, got really interested in this exciting Bullock family that lived in Georgia, went down there and he met this 14-year-old Mitty that he found extremely charming. The problem was she was only 14 so he went off on his long European trip and while he was there, he said, he decided he'd look her up again. He even got the names mixed up because Stuart, Elliot, Bullock, and so on. But anyway, he came back, went to Georgia and decided to marry her and he married her down there in this house when she was only 18. Next slide please. He brought her to live. Now this is December of 1853, of course the wedding went to 1854 because you know that those days they started a wedding and 10 days later they finished it, dancing every night, skating parties and so forth. He brought her to live in New York, not immediately in this house, but it's on 20th Street. First she had to live, he was talking about a daughter of a slave-owning family, going to live with her in-laws who were extremely anti-slavery. It must have been extremely difficult and she had this southern accent that you couldn't miss and so forth. The in-laws who were, as we know very well, some of you have probably been to that house on 20th Street, you can visit it, it's part of the Park Service and so forth. Within a year of moving in with her in-laws, the in-laws did what they did for all their sons. They built a brownstone for TR's father and his mother and they moved in. And within the next 10 years, she gave birth to four children. Four children before she turned 27. It was an extremely difficult time for a southern woman to be in New York and I think that's where you get this view of her that she was fragile, that she was weak, that she couldn't manage things. I get a different view. Many historians agree with the view, for example, Doris Faber who wrote about President's mother said that Mitty was slightly neurotic. Edmund Morris, most of you have read his book, he calls her Langwood and Lazy. Nathan Miller, who did a biography of Theodore, says that she was so stupid that she draped the furniture with white sheets. Well, actually, that's what most people did when they went away. Kathleen Dalton gave a more nuanced picture last night, but I think she also used the word frail, often had headaches and so forth. Now, when I looked at the letters, I saw something else. For example, when Mitty was writing to, I guess we're going to call him V, TR's father in the courtship, her writing is really quite large. It only gets smaller later when she becomes this, I think, kind of scared civil war resident of New York City. She's very definite in her letters when he's arranging to get to Georgia for the marriage. She says, you'll come on this day and not a day sooner. And I want it done like this and not like that. When she got to New York, it's true that her mother came and lived with her for a few years, but many people in New York commented that she was an extremely good household manager. Remember, she had to move her entire household that meant servants, kids, four kids, pretty close together. From this house, every summer to their summer place, and then they had to move back again, she had to manage a really big social schedule. And several people pointed that she did it extremely well. When they took the kids to Europe, four kids to Europe, she wrote home some very funny letters, but later she enrolled the three younger kids to study German in Dresden. And her husband had gone back to New York to oversee the building of the other house that they were going to move to when they left this one up on 57th Street. And a cholera outbreak in Dresden where her three kids were studying, she had to decide what to do. Now, if she were a fragile, incompetent, nothing sort of person, I think she would have just wrung her hands and said, I don't know what to do. But she took the kids out of Dresden and she wrote to her husband back in New York. I didn't want to disrupt their studies. They were doing so well, but I feared cholera more. She's often mentioned as spending too much money. Look, she was married to one of the richest men in New York. It'd be like saying, you know, Trump's wife shouldn't be buying at burgdorfs or something. She could spend about any amount she wanted. But even with that in mind, her letters show that she tried to be economical. She would write things like, if you don't think we can afford that carpet, then I'll buy something else. Or if you don't want me to invite these friends to visit at our expense, I'll put it off. Her letters home, as I said, have a lot of really, I found remarkable phrases. She just, as you heard, I live in Venice half the year and I made my notes when she got to Venice and described what Venice was like. I said, if I ever need a description of Venice, go to this letter because it was wonderful. She described the carpet on the ship going over as so full of organic matter that you could make anchovy paste just by squeezing it. You know, she described the steward that served the soup as so naughty that you could, you know, bumpy and so forth that you could put a plate on different parts of his body. But I think most of what we miss when we give Mitty just one adjective is that she was a lot of fun. Her granddaughter said that the Roosevelt men were good and they were strong and they were solid. But the Bullock women really knew how to have fun and they passed that on to the next generation. And when you hear stories about TR in the White House, you know, wrestling or acting like a child, that all comes, I think, from Mitty's side. What was it one of his friends said about TR? You must remember, he's about six years old. And in many ways, Mitty acted all her life like this six year old or 18 year old is one of the historians' culture. She never got much beyond that. And I think it's that girlishness, that frailty that gives a wrong picture, that she was really a much more interesting person than she's been portrayed. Next slide. This is inside the Theodore Roosevelt birthplace, the place where she had her four children. Next slide. This is her first daughter, Bami, as we've heard about a couple of times. Her real name was Anna, but when you're working on the Roosevelt's, I mean they all have the same name Anna Theodore, if you picked just three or four names, you've got it right there, you can write the whole book. She was named after her mother's sister, who was Anna. So of course they needed a nickname and they called her Bami for Bambina, the Italian word for a little girl. It's so ironic because she was never a little girl. I've never seen a picture of her as a child. And everybody said that she skipped childhood entirely. And most people say this is because she was born or had very soon after she was born some sort of illness that left her crippled. It had to be very early. I think Stacey, I think says Poth's disease. People say polio. Some people say she was dropped by a nurse. I think that's what she sometimes said. But from a very, I found when she was just a few months old and her grandmother was trying to get her to stand. She said there's something wrong with this child. There's something wrong with her spine. So she had a curved spine. She couldn't really walk very well. And the treatment then for a child was to put them in a very heavy brace. So heavy that she had to be carried from room to room. So she always stuck with the old people, the adults. And the three younger children were a family to themselves. She had enormous energy though because her other nickname was Bi, as in Bi Bi. And in fact, the younger generation, Alice's generation generally called her Auntie Bi. Theodore from Harvard wrote, oh, energy, thy name is Bi. Nobody could think faster, move faster intellectually than Bi. Everybody who knew the Roosevelt's, I think, when the kids were young growing up thought that of all four of them, Bami was the sharpest and the brightest. Her cousin, Nicholas Roosevelt, who wrote a book about the family said, if she had been a man in 17th century Europe, it would be easy to imagine her as a successful and highly capable minister of state or perhaps a cardinal, unquenchable in zeal and effective in guile. She was the one who kept the family together. That's what Alice said. In every family, there's one person who's central, who keeps them united. And in this family, it was Bami. Next slide. These are the other three children of Mitty. You have Theodore on the left. Elliot, who became, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt's father and dive young and alcoholic. And then you have the younger daughter, Corrine, and Edith Carroll, who became Theodore's second wife. Next picture. This is Bami, which I think we've seen this two or three times, so we know it by heart now, but it's one of the nicer pictures of Bami when T.R.'s first wife, Alice, died in 1884, as everybody, as we've been told this morning and maybe last night, too. He entrusted the care of his daughter, Alice, to his sister, Bami. And she immediately sold the family house up there on 57th Street and bought herself a brownstone over on Madison Avenue. And that's where she took little Alice to live. It was at that time, of course, as we all know, T.R. was out here at the ranch a lot. He was riding back wherever he went home. He always went to her house on Madison Avenue and stayed there. She always said, I never thought we lived together because I knew eventually he would leave. And I always said he just stayed at my place. She really wanted to come out here to the ranch, but he kept putting her off. And so she took other trips. Remember, little Alice would go up to Boston during the summer and spend time with her rich Lee relatives. So Bami had the summers off and she would travel. And she took one of these long railroad trips with James and Sarah Delano Roosevelt because remember, the Roosevelt's were related back in the 1700s. Then you have the two branches coming down, the Hyde Park Franklins and the Oyster Bay Theodores. But they keep mixing so. Somebody said that Roosevelt's generally married other Roosevelt's because they rarely met anybody else. And Bami went on this long rail trip with the parents of FDR, really. They left him at home. He was just a baby. She went on this long rail trip. And it was when she came back from that trip, she really thought that she knew just about everything that her brother, TR, was thinking out here. They corresponded so often. He would ask her about articles. He would ask her about advice. She really thought she knew what was in his mind. And when she came back, she saw that famous newspaper article that we've all heard about rumoring that he was going to marry Edith. And of course, she said, that's just hogwash. That's not going to happen. And Theodore, TR, from here, then had to correct her and say, I've been meaning to tell you, I just didn't find the right time that I am really going to marry Edith in London in December. So Bami went over for the wedding. And it was not until three years after that wedding, or three years later in 1889, that finally Bami got the chance to come out here to the Dakota territory, as it was called then, and see the ranch. And she loved it. She and Corinne, her younger sister, who was by now married, and Corinne came with her husband. And they took the train out here. And as they came across the countryside, they said they knew why TR had fallen in love with this beautiful part of the world. They stayed. Now, here's a family. Remember Bami was used to a large number of servants. She always had her personal maid. She always had the cook. She always had the butler. She had somebody to drive her around. And she was staying in a two-floor cabin on the ground floor with a couple other young single men. I mean, they were just camping out. And the two married couples, Edith and TR, got the upstairs along with Sister Corinne and her husband. But Bami, you know what she loved the most? She loved how accurately people could spit tobacco juice. She had never seen anything like that. And she loved the characters. And she loved the wildness of it. Here she was, you know, always very crippled from the arthritis. Because even though she was moved from this heavy brace before she was too old, they switched to a lighter brace. And then eventually, she walked with no brace at all. She had terrible arthritis. And she had extreme joint pain and so forth. But she made the 38-mile trip, at least that's what I have in my notes that she wrote in her letter, from town to the ranch in a rickety carriage so she could count along the way the prairie dogs and watch for rattlesnakes. And somebody told me last night that you can still see the rattlesnakes along there. So she thought it was just really great. After seeing the ranch, Bami and the others in this group, they went on west. They went to Yellowstone. They slept in tents. She rode a horse. She said that had never been ridden by ladies before. So that was an eye-opener for her, I think. But as soon as they got back to New York or very soon after that, Bami had to step in again. This time it was Elliot, her younger brother, Elliot, who from an early age was something wrong with him. I don't know anything about alcoholism, really. But he was having strange headaches very soon, even as a teenager, he was not bound for college. The family knew that he couldn't go to college, so they sent him out to work on a Texas ranch and so forth. He married. He ended up marrying. And as we know, by this time he had two children. He had Eleanor, who was about six, and her brother about four. But the family knew they had to do something to deal with his alcoholism. So the decision was made to send him to Europe, who was going to go with him to make sure that everything went all right, Bami. So she didn't want to go, but she did. She took the whole family, Elliot's whole family over. She found a treatment center in Austria. She got him enrolled in that. And then she's had, against all the rules, she got herself a room in the attic and signed up for German lessons. Because it was extremely inappropriate for a single woman to have a German tutor come in the attic, but she did it. And she saw Elliot through the treatment program. She then took his wife, who was expecting their third child, back to Paris, and got the child delivered by a doctor who insisted he wouldn't go there to deliver the child. But at that point, Bami gave up on the whole family and said, I've had it. I'm going back to New York. And that's really where Elliot's family sort of broke up. As you know, Elliot's wife died soon after that. And before long, he also died. So we've got Bami, the smart one in the family, the shrewd one in the family. But she's really kind of the caretaker. I mean, she's the one who keeps the house on Madison Avenue for people to stay in if they want to come to New York. She's the one who takes alcoholic brother for treatment. And then, when she really didn't want to leave New York again, she gets word that cousin, Rosie Roosevelt in London, needs her over there. Because his wife was actually, she died before Bami could get over there. And so Bami packs up everything and goes to London. She immediately turns the whole household around. People say that she acted like she'd always lived in London and knew how to manage a house like that. And something happened that really changed her life. She met a young naval, young, scratch young. She met a naval attaché, Will Coles, from the United States. And she fell in love. He was 49 years old. She was 10 years younger. And they wanted to get married. So she wrote the family back in New York. Now, you would think that people would be happy that Spinster Bami, who'd been helping everybody out for years, finally is going to have a home of her own. You should see the telegrams that went back and forth. First of all, a TR said, well, there was the small problem that Will had been married before. And he'd gotten a divorce years earlier on what was called flimsy grounds. And so TR was convinced that if Bami went ahead and married him, that if she ever decided to live in this country, she could be called a bigamus. Any children born to them might become belabeled illegitimate. And I think probably he had his own political future and how any kind of scandal might touch him if his sister married somebody who was already married to somebody else. Besides, he really didn't want her to come back to New York. He wrote that he really thought she should stay in London because she was really enjoying herself so much. And he would like to continue to use the Madison Avenue house, but at a reduced price because he wouldn't be using it year round. And he hoped that she wouldn't mind. Well, Bami went ahead and married Will. They did stay in London for a couple of years. And then they came back to New York. She gave birth to a son, only one son. And then, very cleverly, in 1899, they bought a house in Washington, DC. They moved to Washington. It was there that TR, when he became president, was able to hold meetings. It's just a short walk from the White House. Eleanor said that she didn't think TR ever made an important decision without talking it over with Bami, that he valued her opinion so very much. Next slide, please. This is Alice, of course, the mother of the child we just saw. Next slide. This is Elliot, the alcoholic father of the three children. That's Eleanor to his left and the two little boys, one of whom survives and one doesn't. Next slide. And this is the Cole's family. I got this from the grandchildren. This is the Cole's family in Connecticut. That's Bami, in old age, they're on the left. This is taken about, well, the son was born in 1898, so he looks about, what, 22 there. So this was taken not too long before Will died. And they lived out their lives then in Connecticut. She died in 1931. Of all the Roosevelt women, I found her the hardest to catch because she was the most vibrant. She had terrible health, all her life, poor eyesight. She couldn't hear at all for the last 20 years of her life. She had circulatory problems. She was crippled. She was confined to a wheelchair. But everybody said if she was in the room, all the young people would go to her because she was the sharpest. She was the wittiest. She was the most interesting. Somebody said after she died, I always had the feeling that she was like a battleship that might be going down, but every flag was flying and the band was playing. So how can you put all that in one adjective? Bami, a sister pie. The next sister is Corinne. How many Corinne's here? But I will try to keep them all straight for you. This is Alice, the first wife of TR on the left, Bami on the right, and Corinne, little sister. That's what you always hear, little sister, adoring little sister. I didn't find in their early letters that the sisters adored their brother all that much until he became famous. I mean, in the early years, they really liked Elliot. They thought he was good looking and they had a lot of charm and so forth. I think it develops later that. But anyway, she's always called the baby sister, even though she's only about six years younger, they're all very close together. So I think Elliot is 18 months older than Corinne and Theodore is only about three years. They're all really very close together. But my dear little sister and my baby sister, and she has a very daredevil streak. I mean, you don't get the idea when you read the family accounts that she hung back at all. There's a story that's often told that her father brought home a pony, an unbroken pony one day, and said to the three kids, obviously Bami wouldn't be involved in this, but the three younger children. The first one of you to get on the pony gets the pony. TR held back, Elliot held back, but Corinne jumped on the pony. Her children said that she, you've heard, I think it was Kathleen last night talked about this family slogan. You must confront every obstacle. And in Corinne's case, the phrase was, you can go over or under, but never around. And her children swore that one day they were out hiking and they came to a big barn. And instead of going around it, she crawled up on the roof and down on the other side. Just to prove her point that you come up against, no matter what obstacle you confront her. As I said this morning, she was educated almost entirely at home as her sister was, but she had enormous faith in her ability to confer with anybody. She became a very good friend of Henry Cabot Lodge. She published books on poetry. She published articles on art. She wrote the biography of her brother. Unfortunately, she was married to a very boring man. The family tried to fix her up when she was still, I think she was like 18, 19 years old. Those courtship letters are just unbelievable. You can see she doesn't want to marry him. And they keep saying, oh, he'd be good for you know, he was a Scotsman making money in the real estate business. They thought it would be a good marriage. Her mother said that she thought she should marry him. She said, I think you will be able to stand him. He's very, very plain, but it's not a bad plainness. It's like quinine. It's a clean plainness. So she had four children, and that's very much a Roosevelt women pattern. I asked one of them how they, or the descendant of one of them, how they all managed, you know, Mitty had four, Corinne had four. You'll see the next Corinne had four, how they managed that. And they do it all in, you know, relatively short time, like 10 years, and then that's the end of that. And after all, we're talking about a time when the contraception is not that reliable. And the son of, be the grandson of this Corinne, said, separate bedrooms, you know, they had the children, and then they moved into separate bedrooms. Corinne certainly kept a lot of very powerful male friends, some of whom would call on her or kids said, and you know, she would disappear with him into the library, and they were not to be interrupted. She certainly kept a lot of male friends. She also, I think, kept that spirit, that adventuresome. The story is told that when she went to the White House, when TR was president, she was greeting people in the reception line, and one of the ranchers who had met her out here in that trip in 1889, came through the line and he looked at her and he said, I'll never forget how you rassled that calf to the ground. She was a very spirited person. She had a sad life in that just before her brother's presidency ended, her favorite child, her son Stuart, died in a very bad way. He was attending Harvard and on an early Sunday morning, he either fell or was pushed or jumped from his Harvard dormitory and he died. And she was absolutely distraught. She did what the Roosevelt women generally did when they were in grief. She took a trip around the world. She traveled with her husband and her one alcoholic son and they went west. Then she came back to New Jersey and lived there. She also, next slide please. I'm not sure what the next slide is. This is Karen as a mature woman. Next slide please. This is Karen as a speaker and I'm gonna talk about that. Next slide please. This is Henderson House which is the Scottish castle that she ran in Upstate New York. The whole family would gather there. I think Eleanor Franklin's wife, that's where she learned how to swim. So she ran homes in New York, New Jersey, Upstate. She started getting into public speaking. She loved to go around New York giving speeches to schools or clubs on divorce or on politics or on good government. And she was such a good speaker that in 1920 the Republican Party asked her to nominate at their nominating convention. It was the first time a woman ever gave a nominating speech at a major party convention. And I know Jane Addams spoke for TR in 1912 but that was not one of the major parties. She, Karen nominated. In fact, one of the things that you can do on internet now, this wasn't true when I was doing my book. You can actually type in Google, Karen Roosevelt Robinson and you can hear that speech part of it. 1920 she was speaking to 14,000 people in a hot Chicago building and she was evidently very effective. Henry Cabot Lodge said it was the one nominating speech that he ever heard that might have changed minds. She sounds just like Eleanor got some. And the Democratic Party is the party. Just a lot like Eleanor's sound later. There's a new book out on Eleanor and Franklin arguing that Eleanor learned public speaking from Howe, Louis Howe, who was of course a close friend and advisor. And it doesn't say one word about Aunt Karen because remember, Karen was Eleanor Roosevelt's aunt. Okay, she gave the nominating speech. Of course, her candidate was not nominated. The Republicans nominated Warren Harding and he won the presidency. And on the other ticket, the Democratic ticket that year, you had FDR running as vice president. He lost and went back to New York state, got polio, dropped out of politics for a while and then emerged as we all know in 1932 to run for president himself. And you heard this morning about the rivalry between the two families. How the theater side thought it was really their turn and instead they see this Franklin that they had always considered a little incompetent, a little backward, making it to the top where their side had not. And as I said this morning, Karen insists that she voted for Franklin in 1932 although she never made it to the inauguration because she died just before. Next slide please. This is, of course, her childhood friend, Edith Carroll, who still lived after Karen died. They were born the same year. They grew up there in that part of New York, that downtown part of New York. And I think everybody's made it pretty clear at this conference that TR's first wife, Alice, was a completely different model than Edith. I have to say that I changed my opinion of Edith between the two books. When I wrote First Ladies in 1987, I said she was the perfect wife because that's what the books were saying. In fact, I think I used the phrase, she never made a mistake. But then when I got into the Rose about Women book, I decided she made quite a few mistakes. She was one tough lady. She wrote terrible things about her kids. People say that she wasn't a good stepmother. I mean, the best thing she could say about her kids was that they were ordinary looking. She was always, she'd say a little Ethel, when Ethel was little, she didn't have much of a waistline and Edith would write to her sister in Europe and say, I don't know, I'm gonna dress that child. She's fat and you can't do anything to make her look like anything. She wrote terrible things about other people. When they were living in Washington, she said that one man who came to the party was deadly dull and two of them were dead heads and one man was oily like a cat and another used up all the hair dye in the state of Virginia. But she was organized and efficient. And I think she initiated really modern First Lady history. Why? Because she hired a social secretary. She was the first one to do that. And she was very clever at giving out information. I mean, she says that she'd wear the same dress but she'd tell the social secretary to say it was green one night and blue the next night. And then they didn't have any means. They weren't there with their cameras so they couldn't observe what was really going on. A lot of people insisted that she really managed Theodore very cleverly without his really being conscious of it. Alice always said that Edith considered her own side of the family superior and she thought the Roosevelt's were just uneducated Dutch peasants. Well, after T.R. died in 1919, Edith went on this, what's the word? I mean, she just traveled all over it. I think Sylvia Morris added up the thousands of miles. But first she went, I think within days of her husband's funeral, she was on a ship to France so she could see Quinten's burial place because remember the Roosevelt's had this phrase that the tree lies where it falls. In other words, if you die in France, you're buried in France. Kermit died in Alaska, he was buried in Alaska. So she wanted to go over there and see Quinten's grave. But then she comes back and she's all over South America. I mean, well in her 60s, she did something that I, I always wanted to do that trans-Siberian railroad that goes from China all the way across Siberia. But people who've done it, and I'm talking about recent, I even on the last 20 years, said that it's so very, very difficult because it's very cold. You're passing through wasteland where you don't see anything for a long time. And I got scared, I didn't want to do it. Edith did it in her 60s in 100 years, well, not 100 years ago, but 90 years ago, you know, she did in the 1920s. So this travel was the way she dealt with grief. She died, as we all know, in 1948. Okay, next slide please. This is Edith with the two young boys. Next picture. Next. Now we move to the next generation. In other words, I talked about Midi, who's TR's mother. Then I, she only had two daughters. Bami, Corrine, and I talked about their good friend, Edith. And then we move to the next generation. She only had four granddaughters and she never lived to see any of them. As we all know, she died the day, well, two days after her first granddaughter was born. This is probably the least known of all of Midi's granddaughters. And it, I always think it's unfair when people say that Eleanor was TR's favorite niece because they only had two and this was the other one. Her name was Corrine Robertson Alsup. Obviously she's the daughter of the Corrine we just talked about. And she, well, I think to be remembered on many grounds, she married young and had four children, as I said, just like the others, but her husband was a tobacco farmer in Connecticut and he was also into politics. So in the early part of the century, when Bami and the others were not very interested in women's suffrage, at least they weren't working for it, she was out organizing the voters in Avon, Connecticut. And then she ran for office herself. She's the only one of the rows about women that I talk about in the book, whoever ran for office and won. She served three terms in the Connecticut State Legislature and she produced three sons that all became famous. Two of them, Stuart Alsup and Joe Alsup, were big Washington columnists. And the third son was John Alsup, the governor of Connecticut, who's the one who originated that phrase, egghead, remember the 1950s for Adley Stevenson. She continued to give speeches just like her mother. Her son told me that just a few days before she died, she'd scheduled the speech and on the day she was to give it, she called him and said, I really don't feel up to it. Would you mind giving the speech? And he went out and gave it and came back, stopped on the way back to see how she was, realized how ill she was. A few days later, she was dead. So Corinne Robinson Alsup, there's a whole chapter in the book about her, how she learned to drive. Well, she didn't learn to drive, they just put her in a car and she said, I tried to learn as I went. Next slide, please. This is Ethel Roosevelt Derby and we can probably move quickly here because I don't think I have too much time and I did talk about her this morning. She's, of course, TR's younger daughter, the only daughter he had by Eda. Next slide, please. This is, I think we saw this picture this morning, so move on. I said she was the perfect child in the White House. I think if the Obama daughters want to read about how to behave, they should read a biography of Ethel except there isn't one. This is her at the time of her marriage. She married a doctor, Dr. Richard Derby who was a friend of Kermits and as we said this morning, she and Kermit were always very close. And as we said this morning, she was the first of the Roosevelt's of either sex to get involved in World War I. She and her husband left their infant son behind and went to Paris to work in the hospital. They came back and had two more daughters and then a terrible thing happened in 1924. That son died and it threw the whole family into enormous grief and they spent the next, I'd say 15 years or more trying to deal with the depression that followed, the grief that followed that. They did a lot of traveling. They spent a lot of time in Europe. Next slide, please. This is a picture. They spent a lot of time in Florence. Now Ethel is in the middle, the woman in the middle. In other words, we start on this side. It's Sarah Alden, second daughter. Ethel is the next one over. Her husband, Richard Derby, then on the right is Edith Williams who used to go to the Roosevelt meetings a lot, the TRA meetings a lot, and then in front is a daughter that was born later to them, Judah, who died very tragically also. The daughter on the right, Edith Williams, married a man who, and lived on the West Coast, and it's those letters between mother and daughter that give me the best picture of what Ethel was really like because every week she wrote without, the mail must have worked better there because Ethel would, at that time, Ethel would sit down in New York on, I think Sunday morning, and write to her daughter in Washington. She would get it on Tuesday. She would answer on Wednesday, and by Saturday it would be back in New York. The daughter gave Ethel's letters to the Harvard Library and I was able to go through them and read them, and it's like a soap opera. You know, you read the ups and the downs. You read all the problems that Edith's kids were having growing up. They're all in those letters. When I was on book tour with The Rose About Women, this one man came up and introduced himself as one of Ethel's grandsons. So I'm thinking, you know, is this the one that stole the car, or is this the one that got kicked out of school? Because those stories become part of almost your own family history. Ethel in those letters could be very funny. One cousin of theirs had had four daughters, and she had named them Miranda, Melissa, Melanie, and Melinda. And when the fifth one was born, Ethel wrote to her daughter that she thought a good name for this one would be Mercy. But I don't think they named her Mercy. I often quote Ethel because she was such a wise person. You know, she seemed to have such a good take. For example, her daughters, and I interviewed both the one on the left and the one on the right who were the only ones living when I did my book. I asked them what the biggest difference between their lives and their mother's life was, and they said she always had a cook. And they had much more modest lives. You know, later in the century, they didn't have that kind of help. But she would write them these letters and say, if it comes to reading a book or cleaning the house, read the book. And you don't need to dust unless the dust rises up to meet you. I think that's a good doubt. She also, and I often think about this, she did not, there's a lot of jealousy in the, jealousy in V, among the cousins, I mean, that's for sure. But they weren't that enthusiastic about the name that Eleanor was making for herself. You know, Eleanor by, Eleanor's first lady, of course had become very famous. We heard a little bit about the rivalry between her and Alice this morning. I wouldn't say Ethel was jealous, but she did not feel deep love for Eleanor. And when Eleanor died in 1962, the funeral was in Hyde Park, which is only about 50, 60 miles from where Ethel was living. But she didn't go to the funeral. And she wrote her daughter, why not? And she said, you go to a funeral for one of three reasons. Either you love the person very much or you're very close to those who are left and you wanna show their, your support for them. Or you think no one else will be there. And in this case, she said, none of those apply. So she didn't go to the funeral. And as you remember, Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral was attended by, I don't know how many presidents, past, future and current. So this is Ethel Roosevelt Derby in Florence, Italy. Next slide please. I'm going to round this out by talking, just barely mentioning the other two of Middie's granddaughter. So we had Corinne and we had Ethel. And the two, of course, that were much more famous, Eleanor Roosevelt. This is her wedding picture. I just wanted to say briefly that everybody thinks of Eleanor as being unattractive. People always mention her teeth being bad. In the family letters, particularly when she was young, that was not, they viewed her as, it was too bad she was an orphan. But they didn't view her as ugly. She was tall. She had beautiful skin. She had beautiful eyes. And she was very skinny. Something that, next slide please. Oh no, this next one's going to be another Eleanor. This is Eleanor, the flying First Lady. Next slide please. This is Alice. And I know most of us see these slim pictures of Alice. But Alice in the letters that I found to her, the letters that her stepmother wrote about her, Alice would, you know, had a weight problem and her mother, her stepmother replied when Alice wrote that she'd finally lost 20 pounds. You know, nice, kind, gentle Edith said, you lost 20 pounds and do you well lose another 20 pounds. Eleanor never had that weight problem. And so the, here again I think the one adjective we attach to Eleanor is poor Eleanor, you know, with the bad teeth, ugly Eleanor and spelt sophisticated Alice. The story is really much more complicated than that. And I think those of us who get into the papers and all, I think we come out with different conclusions and different answers, but what we're all trying to do is the same thing, to see the complexity in the lives of women who as I said, the ones that I study are women who became famous because of the men they married. Thank you very much. I'll be glad to take questions if we have time. We have time for about five minutes of questions. Who has the first question? Did any of the women mentor future presidents? The children. Oh, you mean in terms of how it is to be the child of a president? Correct. It's interesting. No, I never did, but I wasn't probably looking for that. You know, I realize now I've just started a biography of Lady Bird Johnson and knew the papers there are enormous. And I realize that when you go through the archives, it's what you're looking for, you find. So it may be there, I just don't ever, I don't ever recall, other young children in the White House? Hmm, no, I don't recall that. Which of the rows about women do I think is most accomplished? Well, that's such a tough question. People sometimes say, who would you most like to have dinner with? And that's a clear one. What do you think I would answer? Bami, yeah, I think for sure. Most accomplished, if you looked at the record, I mean, leaving out Eleanor, I think we're gonna leave out Eleanor, right? Because if you add up the number of books that she turned out, and the columns, and the speeches, and the legislation, so I think we have to leave her out. I always say, since I'm starting this biography of Lady Bird Johnson, you know, in many ways, they're very similar. They really changed the whole job of President's wife. But I always say that Eleanor Roosevelt had more years. Remember, she had longer than anybody else in the job of First Lady. And she had it at a time of great depression and a great war. That doesn't take away from the fact that she was a pretty remarkable person, but it's also good to see something about, to look at the circumstances surrounding the accomplishments. I suppose if you pass Eleanor's publications, you'd go to Corinne Robinson, who turned out a lot of books, articles on art, which I'm sure her love of art came from her mother. You know, the famous story is that when Mitty took the kids to the Vatican Museum, she plumped down Corinne in front of a sculpture and she said, now I'm gonna leave you here. This is a very famous piece of sculpture. I'm going to leave you here for five minutes. And when I come back, I want you to tell me what you think of it. So she came back in five minutes and Corinne said, I think it's chumpy. So her brother's teased her forever about, you know, that's the only way she could describe sculpture. It was chumpy, but she turned out quite a lot of, she was pretty accomplished. One more, or two more? Rick? Eleanor writes her column, My Day, and how wide a circulation she has now? You know, I've looked that up many times because that's a question. She started it in, maybe somebody else can, she started it about 1936 and she did it right up to the end and she, My Day, it's been collected into. Alice's column was not nearly so successful. Alice, Alice had trouble writing. If you read her book, I think is, Stacey's here, would you agree? Yes, she had trouble writing. I don't think Eleanor is really, well, her writing is probably, I think she turned out things very fast. That's one thing about all of them. They didn't need any sleep, you know? They went on four hours. That's the reason they could turn out all those books and articles and do all that traveling. They just didn't. So it was very widely carried and it's frankly, it's not, Eleanor's columns, I had to go through and read. I don't know that I read all of them. I read a lot of them. A lot of them are about what to take on your camping trip. You know, they're not really very, very deep. There was another part of that question, though, right? About- The circulation was the other one you got. It was carried by a lot of papers, but I honestly don't know. You can, there's a woman who's written a lot about that. Her name is Maureen Beasley. She's a professor in Maryland and I'm sure in her book she talks about exactly that. The women I talked about today, it did not, but in one case, for example, Ethel's youngest daughter, the one, the little one in that picture had a terrible life. Often the alcoholism is blamed on Middie, Middie's side of the family. Blanche Cook, who has written a lot about Eleanor Roosevelt, insists that Middie's family were all alcoholics and that's where the drinking problems come from in that family. I always say, if that's true, Middie supposedly had excellent taste in wine and her husband never bought wine without having her taste it. So that was pretty cruel if she was an alcoholic. I never heard that she was an alcoholic. I've never seen anything in the letters that indicated that. But alcoholism does show up in the women as well. Let me ask you one more question because I just hate to say goodbye. This is the last chance we're gonna get to talk about the children in quite this way. And we spent so much time talking about Alice, Alice, Alice. Can you reflect just a little bit more about Ethel, but particularly on her relationship with her father, the Theodore-Ethel relationship? What else can we, what should we think about there? Well, I think of that mostly not in her young years, but more as an adult when she really was so important in establishing his reputation. And of course, his sisters were very important in getting that house on 20th Street in New York made into a place that we can all go and visit today. Of course, everybody knows that house is not the real house. The real house was torn down, some sort of other building was put up and they had to tear down the other building and then put up a house that looked like the one that they had grown up in. So she certainly, Ethel, was very protective of her father's reputation. I think they had a warm, I always thought they looked alike. They moved alike, I always thought. I mean, I never saw them, but in the sense that you have that they were, they solid Dutch people who knew who they were and nobody had to tell them. Betty Boyd-Caroli, thank you so much for your remarks. Thank you.