As Roosevelt once wrote, “Every now and then suddenly one comes across a sentence which exactly phrases a thought which there has long seemed to be need of formulating, but as to which the words to express it have been lacking.”

We felt this way when we came across the quotation we selected for today’s #WednesdayWisdom. It comes from a 1906 letter to William Dean Howells in which Roosevelt discusses the simplified spelling movement.

In his reply to Howells, who had sent Roosevelt a congratulatory letter with effusive praise for the president and his reforms, Roosevelt expressed appreciation for Howells’s letter before reflecting on reform in contrast to revolution.

Roosevelt then expressed his wish that the last portion of his second term would not only continue to regulate corporations but also lead to the enactment of an inheritance tax and an income tax—both of which he added the handwritten addition of “progressive” to describe them.

But Roosevelt believed that even if that didn’t happen, “I feel at any rate I have laid the foundations for right action along those lines . . .”

Although we think today’s #WednesdayWisdom is particularly pithy, it wasn’t the first time Roosevelt expressed such sentiments.

Six years before in an article for The Churchman entitled “The Best and the Good,” later published in Roosevelt’s The Strenuous Life, he wrote, “These men need, above all, to realize that healthy growth cannot normally come through revolution. A revolution is sometimes necessary, but if revolutions become habitual the country in which they take place is going downhill.”

For Roosevelt, healthy growth didn’t come from revolution; it came from slow, steady progress making consistent and incremental changes in politics. Read Roosevelt’s full letter here in the digital library.

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Each day had a common rhythm: talks in the auditorium in the morning gave way to guided activities in the afternoon to Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the Elkhorn unit, and through the museum with experts. In the evening, we returned to the auditorium for talks and entertainment, separated by dinner alongside the rammed earth walls in the Library’s lobby.

Each element of the program stood out around the theme “Looking Back, Moving Forward.” #TeddyCon was a collaborative event between the Theodore Roosevelt Association and the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University highlighting the strong partnership between the two organizations.

“The Theodore Roosevelt Association extends its sincere gratitude to our partners at the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University and the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, as well as everyone who helped make this historic gathering possible,” said Chris Cosentino, Executive Director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association.

“#TeddyCon exceeded my expectations,” said Dr. Michael Cullinane, “The weekend brought together many great parts of the TR universe and celebrated in style. I cannot thank our partners enough for turning out and making the convention a rollicking triumph.”

The authors’ panel on Friday brought world-famous biographers together to discuss motives, perspectives, and interpretations in the history books. Moderated by Craig Blumenshine, the panel included Dr. Kathleen Dalton, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, and Dr. Stacy Cordery. The fact that all these writers are women was not lost on the audience.

Questions about the growing body of scholarship produced by female biographers mixed with questions about whether women have a unique perspective when writing about men. Dr. Dalton and Dr. Cordery have written extensively about Theodore Roosevelt, which allowed the conversation to delve into his reception among authors. Dr. Chervinsky provided a broader context as the biographer of early American presidents. All the participants weighed into debates on presidential scholarship and how the traditions of the executive branch resonate in contemporary debates.

Lunch each day was taken in the breezeway – a covered space between the east and west wings of the Library – where a gentle wind enhanced the revelry. We could not have wished for better weather. October in North Dakota is unpredictable. It could have as easily dipped below freezing, but fate smiled on the attendees. Temperatures hit 85 degrees on Friday and 80 degrees on Saturday. Sunday dipped into the 50s, suggesting that we squeezed the last of the summer warmth from the Badlands.

After lunch attendees could take in the popular exhibition space featuring fifteen stellar exhibitors and sponsors. Alternatively, visitors could opt to take a bus tour of the nearby TR National Park with Valerie Naylor, the park’s former superintendent. Or they could tour the Library with Michael Cullinane and Susan Sarna, Senior Curator of Collections at the Library. Or they could drive to the Elkhorn Ranch for a tour with Dr. William Hansard of the TR Center. Short of these fantastic tours, a visitor could take in Medora and all it has to offer.

Friday’s keynote session featured journalist and politician John Avlon in conversation with Dr. Cullinane. The topic was Roosevelt’s most famous speech: Citizenship in a Republic, better known as the “Man in the Arena” speech. Delivered in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910, the speech has taken on a contemporary relevance. Sports stars, celebrities, and politicians invoke it regularly. Avlon explained when it became popular (in the 1950s) and how the internet age has increased its popularity. The discussion covered much more, and the recordings of all the sessions will soon be made available.

We closed Friday with a showcase of White House Princess, featuring several songs in the production. Written by Maureen Clare and Charlotte Daniels, the musical explores the life of Alice Roosevelt and her relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, who were cousins and defining characters of their generation. Songs about “lavender love” and Roosevelt’s relationship with both women combined with the piano recitals of the writers and made for an exciting end to the first day.

During the showcase, they highlighted their extensive research, drawing on years of work at Harvard University’s Houghton Library with Christine Jacobson and at Sagamore Hill as well as personal conversations with Alice Roosevelt’s granddaughter, Joanna Sturm. Special thanks to performers Isa Pena (Alice), Emma Rogers (Eleanor), and Mack Webb (Theodore Roosevelt).

Saturday began in the same fashion: a video message from Congressman French Hill, a State of the Field address from Dr. Cullinane, a fun TR-Trivia Contest hosted by reprisor Joe Wiegand, and another panel of experts. This session focused on the Badlands and featured historian Duane Jundt, former mayor of Medora Doug Ellison, and local scholar Rolf Sletten. Moderated by Joe Wiegand, who lives in Medora, the session gave the audience a deep insight into the town and the wider region. The panelists talked about the birds that Roosevelt saw in the Badlands, the friends Roosevelt made, and the interesting episodes of the 1880s and beyond.

Like Friday, lunch and guided tours followed the morning panel. Then, in the evening, the attendees returned for a keynote lecture and conversation with Karl Rove. As President George W. Bush’s senior White House advisor, Rove has a unique insight into the way the presidency operates. He also authored a book about the election of 1896 and McKinley’s administration, which was the basis of his lecture. For thirty minutes, Rove spoke about Roosevelt as a political animal that resuscitated his career by gaining the trust of McKinley. After the lecture, Talmage Boston, a friend of Rove’s and a Dallas lawyer, discussed the finer points of the era.

After dinner, the group returned for the TRA Awards Ceremony which featured a powerful message from Scott Cooper, SVP Government Affairs at the charity With Honor, which was #TeddyCon’s generous Legacy Sponsor. The Awards Ceremony continued with the Executive Director of the National War College Alumni Association, Michael Prosser, who bestowed the Theodore Roosevelt Award on Foreign Service Officer Rob McCutcheon, who also provided an inspiring address to attendees.

VADM David Architzel closed the Awards Ceremony with a rousing address discussing the relationship between the Theodore Roosevelt Association and the currently deployed USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71). VADM Architzel introduced a video from aboard “The Big Stick” that featured Captain William Mathis and the TRA’s 2026 Junior Officer of the Year, LT Jonathan Cipoletta.

Following the awards ceremony, attendees were treated to a special performance by singer-songwriter and American Idol alumnus Mason Via. Via’s masterful fretwork filled the auditorium with notes of bluegrass, blues, and Appalachian folk music. He finished his set with the 2026 hit single “See It While You Can (National Parks Song),” a tribute to public lands and national parks that mentions “Mr. Roosevelt” as the progenitor of the conservation movement. The performance featured a rendition of Woody Guthrie’s iconic “This Land Is Your Land,” inspiring the audience to sing along and culminating in a standing ovation. Via was also joined by acclaimed harmonica player Corey Flick, who accompanied him on two songs, adding another dynamic element to the memorable performance.

The hardcore attendees had the added benefit of Sunday and the live podcast of Talk About Teddy with its hosts Larry Marple and Kurt Skinner. Michael Cullinane and Susan Sarna joined the hosts for a ninety-minute conversation about how the exhibits at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library came into existence. What was left on the drawing room floor provided an insight into how the museum took shape.

Before the party ended midday on Sunday, and the exhibitors packed up, the hosts took a moment to thank the crowd and each other. The TRA and the TR Center did something remarkable in Medora. They had a blowout party for Theodore Roosevelt and his new library. Those who made it are unlikely to forget it for some time.

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During this summer, one of our interns ran across this wild letter below and asked our digital collections cataloger and archivist Ally Hecht about it.

In turn, Ally shared the letter with all of the TRC staff members—it was too good not to share—and digital collections cataloger Gemma mentioned that she thought she cataloged the first letter Teddy Roosevelt Kitten wrote. As Gemma recalled, the kitten was asking Roosevelt to help his less fortunate kitten brethren by donating to or advocating their cause.

And Gemma was right. The original letter from Teddy Roosevelt Kitten to Roosevelt, who had just become vice president a week before, was four pages long . In it, Mira King Wagner, the owner of the kitten, requested on his behalf a “little token” from Roosevelt and asked for the vice president’s assistance in speaking out about vivisection.

Who Was Mira King Wagner?

If you’re wondering who Mira King Wagner was, she was unsurprisingly a cat enthusiast. In 1901, she had twenty-eight cats, what one newspaper called “magnificent specimens of the feline race.”

We found countless newspaper articles about cats that came from her Sandusky Cat Kennels—called a “cattery” by some newspapers—and her financial support to help establishment a cat hospital in Chicago in late 1900.

We wonder if Wagner wrote to Roosevelt with the Chicago Cat refuge in mind. But before we delve into that topic and the anti-vivisection movement, we wanted to highlight some of the especially entertaining lines from Teddy Roosevelt Kitten’s letter.

“I write in [sic] behalf of the little chap in the picture, who has the presumption to be named for yourself.”

Well, not quite since the little chap’s owner consistently used “Ted” or “Teddy” to refer to the kitten. Roosevelt himself didn’t prefer the nicknames Ted or Teddy, although as we noted in a previous Substack post, he did occasionally use Teddy (as well as Ted or even Tedo).

Moreover, the picture Wagner included of Teddy Roosevelt kitten (see above) was pretty dark. We tried to lighten it up, but it still isn’t a great picture of him. However, we did discover another photograph of him (see below) in the November 1902 issue of The Cat Journal: A Magazine for Cat Lovers. We don’t know what others think, but to us, it looks like a different cat. Perhaps there were two Teddy Roosevelt kittens?

“[H]e ventures to ask if his great name-sake will send him a little token in the shape of a monogram and perhaps his picture to wear round his neck. This wee Ted is not the only name-sake but perhaps the only one who has had the temerity [excessive confidence] to ask recognition, and sincerely hopes he will not be ignored.”

Teddy Roosevelt Kitten’s owner was correct in that he wasn’t the only namesake. You can discover some of Roosevelt’s other namesakes—to which he did reply—in the digital library here.

“[He] begs that you will read his poor little appeal personally and not allow it to be consigned to the waste-paper-basket, or file it away for future reference.”

Since we have the letter today, we know it wasn’t thrown away, but it could very well have been filed away!

And perhaps the craziest section of the letter:

“Ted is not a church member, so does not pray to God to alleviate this terrible inquisition against cats and other small animals but prays to you, because, altho he has never seen you he is practically sertain [sic] of your existence in the tangible form, and that his prayers will be answered in a tangible and practical manner.”

We can’t imagine Roosevelt, who held religious convictions, would have condoned the kitten praying to him. Perhaps that was the last straw, as it were.

Unfortunately, there isn’t any record in the digital library of Roosevelt replying to Wagner and, by proxy, Teddy Roosevelt Kitten. So we have no idea what Roosevelt thought about the kitten’s letter.

But, as we mentioned in a previous Substack post, we do know that Roosevelt disliked “nature faker” stories, which misrepresented actual animal behavior unlike the animals depicted in books like Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows or Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories. Thus, we have a feeling since Teddy Roosevelt Kitten was a real cat, Roosevelt would have disliked that Wagner anthropomorphized her cat.

Vivisection

Although Wagner’s letter to Roosevelt was over-the-top, the cause she championed—anti-vivisection—was quite relevant at the turn of the century. Although people had experimented on live animals since the Greeks, vivisection became a major issue in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Some people felt that experimenting on living animals was necessary for science while others, including many women, advocated for more regulations and argued against cruelty toward animals.

Wagner through Teddy Roosevelt Kitten expressed a similar sentiment in her letter, writing, “[H]e begs leave to appeal to you in [sic] behalf of his more unfortunate brothers and sisters, who fall victims to the horrible practice, which is prevelent [sic] in public schools, throug-out [sic] the states it is called vivisection, and goes under, the term of science, but in reality—only teaches children to be cruel and unmerciful if you would take the trouble to read some of the things done and the result.”

We do know from other correspondence that Roosevelt supported and “steadfastly endeavored to secure proper regulation of vivisection,” but he felt during his presidency that he could not publicly state his views because then he should have to “endorse countless others for other good purposes,” as he wrote in a 1902 letter to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, an antivivisectionist.

Roosevelt similarly wrote in 1905 when Ward inquired if she could show Governor Curtis Guild letters from Roosevelt: “You can tell him for me that the more experience I have had in matters of vivisection, the more convinced I am that it should be rigorously regulated; and even the best doctors go entirely askew in their oppositions to this regulation. It is curious how very merciful men, who themselves do only what is necessary, will oppose legislation which is absolutely needed to restrain brutal and callous men.”

Roosevelt’s opinion about vivisection is best summarized by the final sentence in an October 1902 letter to Ward, “[I]f I can prevent it I do not intend to have wanton suffering inflicted on any creatures.”

So although we’re not aware of a reply to Teddy Roosevelt Kitten, we do know that Roosevelt agreed with the conviction that the cat and his owner expressed. And on a more light-hearted note, although Teddy Roosevelt Kitten is one of the more interesting records related to cats in the digital library, it isn’t the only one. You can check out all the records related to cats here.

Finally, Mira King Wagner wasn’t the only cat enthusiast who wrote to Theodore Roosevelt. If you’re a paid subscriber or become one, you can read the story of Lulu Grover and her Angora cats here. It’s another wild cat story!

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In honor of Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday this week, we thought a #WednesdayWisdom quotation about the Navy would be particularly fitting since his first major work was, of course, The Naval War of 1812.

We stumbled upon this May 1, 1897 letter to Henry John Elwes, a British botanist and world-traveler, in which Roosevelt covers several topics, including an article in Science, his new Winchester rifle, and his new position of assistant secretary of the Navy, which he had held since April 19, 1897.

Amid discussing his transition to the Department of the Navy, Roosevelt includes a great line about the Navy: “I am a great believer in the Navy (for your nation as well as for mine), and am glad to take part in doing all I can for it. I am very fond of Washington, and the work is thoroughly congenial to me.”

Roosevelt’s letter to Elwes was hardly the only one he sent discussing his appreciation of the Navy, although we think he stated it most eloquently to Elwes. He also wrote similar sentiments to Livingston Hunt (on Roosevelt’s first day in office!), John Winfield Scott, and Richard Rush.

As we know, Roosevelt quickly got down to work, taking full advantage of an April 21, 1897 letter to Roosevelt from Secretary of the Navy John Davis Long communicating that when Long was absent from the Department, Roosevelt could sign all orders and other papers “appertaining to such duties.”

Although Roosevelt is more well-known for advancing preparedness during World War I, it was a cause he championed throughout his political career. Even before he became assistant secretary of the Navy, he wrote several letters in 1896 to his sister Anna (“Bamie”) saying that the Navy should be increased.

And he continued to champion that sentiment in his new position. In fact, he even confessed to Edwin Lawrence Godkin in a late July 1897 letter that he had “always wished to be Ass’t Secr’y, so as to try to put into practice some of [his] pet theories about it, so far as I have power.”

What we find perhaps most interesting is that by September 1897 Roosevelt was connecting naval preparedness to patriotism. As he wrote in a letter to James Montgomery, “I feel that as an American I ought to do everything I can to try to build up the Navy.”

For those who are local or who are planning a trip out to western North Dakota in the near future, we invite you to visit our exhibit, Theodore Roosevelt and the Navy, which examines Roosevelt’s background in naval history, his crusade to build up the US Navy, and how the modern navy understands and celebrates his work today.

And you can read Roosevelt’s entire letter to Elwes here.

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Tomorrow is Theodore Roosevelt’s 168th birthday, so we decided to devote this Monday post to celebrating all things Theodore Roosevelt. We’ve been collecting material for almost a year so we’re excited to share all the cool things about Roosevelt that we found in the digital library in the past year.

Strenuous Life Aphorisms

Although Roosevelt’s line of “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose” is perhaps one of his more recognizable lines about the strenuous life and his concept of manliness, we came across several other great lines this year that we’re calling “Strenuous Life Aphorisms.”

A brief aside. The 1912 election wasn’t the first time Roosevelt referred to himself as a bull moose. We know that he did several times in the 1890s, including in 1894, 1895, and 1898, all in correspondence with his friend, Henry Cabot Lodge.

• “Tough as a pine knot”: When Roosevelt wrote to his sister Corinne after capturing the three boat thieves in 1886, he told her that he had taken the prisoners alone overland while William “Bill” Sewall and Wilmot Dow took care of the boats. Roosevelt was glad when he finally handed them over to the sheriff. As Roosevelt said, “I was pretty well done out with the work, the lack of sleep and the strain of constant watchfulness, but I am as brown and as tough of a pine knot and feel equal to anything.”

• “Violent exercise, with danger”: In a 1902 letter, William Sturgis Bigelow informed Roosevelt that Henry Cabot Lodge told him that Roosevelt liked “violent exercise, with danger.” As such, he recommended fishing for New England flounder off Tuckernuck Island. Bigelow said it was good exercise, “and, as for danger, I need not tell you of the N.E. Flounder, whose teeth take off a man’s leg as you cut a straw with scissors, and a blow of whose tail shatters a boat to kindling wood . . . . You are a naturalist yourself.”

• “Cool and unmanly revenge”: Le Baron Russell Briggs sent Roosevelt a copy of his book that contains a collection of his papers on college matters. In turn, Roosevelt sent Briggs a copy of his book, writing, “I am taking a cool and unmanly revenge upon you by sending you a copy of my book, The Strenuous Life.”

• “My final burst”: In 1911, Roosevelt wrote to Endicott Peabody, who was head of Groton School and who Roosevelt affectionately called “Cotty,” and explained that he would gladly visit in the fall of 1911 but feared that he was not up to as much athletic activity as he once was. As Roosevelt wrote, “The African trip was my final burst, so to speak.”

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Birthday Wishes

As you can imagine, Roosevelt regularly received birthday wishes from family and friends and beyond, particularly during the presidential years. But several birthday wishes stood out to us especially, which we’re sharing below.

• 1907: The Washington Post published an editorial on Roosevelt the day after his forty-ninth birthday on October 27, 1907, and Roosevelt sent a hearty thank you to the publisher, John R. McLean, and requested that McLean also convey it to the writer. (We believe this may be the editorial in question.)

• 1908: When Roosevelt thanked his elder daughter Alice for her birthday wishes (and yes, he did write “Alice” as the salutation) on his fiftieth birthday, he wrote, “I would have entirely forgotten my own birthday if other people had not remembered it. I celebrated it by taking Roswell out in the afternoon and jumping him all over the hurdles.”

• 1917: On October 30, 1917, Roosevelt responded to a letter from Kermit, writing, “Today your cable about my birthday came, and I am afraid I almost broke down, to think of you, at the front, in danger, doing the great work, and yet thinking of my utterly unimportant birthday. Well, it was just like you, old boy.”

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Birthday Presents

Roosevelt received a variety of presents throughout his life on his birthday, frequently books, as is probably no surprise. But he also got some more surprising presents too. We’ve included some of our favorites below.

• Red wine: In 1907, Marcus Braun sent Roosevelt some red wine, which he wrote, “goes very well with bear meat.” Another unique component about this letter is that there is a handwritten question at the top, which could be in Roosevelt’s writing: “Has it come?” with a handwritten answer in different handwriting: “yes.”

• A book about yoga: As we mentioned in a previous Substack post, we were shocked to discover that Admiral Dewey’s wife, Mildred, sent Roosevelt a book of yoga. Since Roosevelt received the book as a birthday gift, we don’t know if he actually read it. But even if he didn’t read it, the fact that Mildred sent it to Roosevelt as a gift suggests that it was something she thought he’d be interested in reading.

• Homemade elderberry wine: In 1911, Adolph F. Groebl sent Roosevelt some homemade elderberry wine for his birthday, explaining, “Some time ago I said you must try some of my own made Elder-berry wine, and today being your birth-day is a good oppertunity [sic].” According to Roosevelt in his reply to Groebl, “That elder-berry wine was excellent. We each of us took a glass and drank your health.”

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Our Most Startling Discovery

We had to save the best for last. We were shocked to discover that Roosevelt wrote a January 1887 letter to his sister Anna “Bamie” shortly after he married Edith Kermit Carow in December 1886, explaining that he and Edith were considering moving to his ranch for a year or two.

“My financial affairs for the past year made such a bad showing that Edith and I think very seriously of closing Sagamore Hill and going to the ranch for a year or two; but if possible I wish to avoid this.”

It wasn’t Roosevelt’s top choice, but he thought it might be necessary for financial reasons. As Roosevelt concluded his letter to Bamie, “I must live well within my income and begin paying off my debt this year, at no matter what cost, even to the shutting up or renting of Sagamore Hill, [bitterly] as I should hate such an alternative.”

Of course, as we know, this wasn’t necessary, and instead of moving out to North Dakota for a year or two, the Roosevelts welcomed their first son, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. “Ted” in September 1887 at Sagamore Hill. But it’s fun to think about Roosevelt and Edith out in the Badlands for a year or two!

With that, we’ll conclude this celebratory post to Theodore Roosevelt. How do you plan to celebrate Roosevelt’s birthday? What’s your favorite Roosevelt story? Let us know in the comments below!

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As we come to the end of National Archives Month, the Theodore Roosevelt Center staff would like to highlight the work of our 2026 summer interns, specifically Jessica Yu. Over the course of the internship, our interns were asked to complete digital humanities projects for the TRC.

Three of our interns chose to write much-needed encyclopedia articles for our website, filling in the gaps on Quentin Roosevelt, William H. Taft, and Roosevelt Christmas traditions. One intern created a Storymap about several of the National Forests Roosevelt protected during his presidency. (Be looking for these projects in upcoming Substack posts!)

Three others decided to undertake data normalization projects. Data normalization is the process in which metadata is analyzed and reworked to eliminate redundancies, make information more clear, and ensure usability and accessibility over a long period of time.

As an example, one of our 2026 interns, Emily Benson, undertook data normalization of Archibald B. Roosevelt’s name. As most people refer to Roosevelt’s son as “Archie,” Emily worked to get his nickname added to descriptions in any record in which he is mentioned, authored, or received.

Because of her work, researchers do not have to use “Archibald B. Roosevelt” in our digital library. Searching “Archie” will now give a more complete picture of Archie records currently digitized, making records about Archibald “Archie” B. Roosevelt more easily findable on our website for future users!

In a different vein, intern Alice Fracchiolla began undertaking fixing mentions of The Outlook in record descriptions, ensuring both “The” and “Outlook” were capitalized and italicized and checked that the company’s Authorized Subject Headings were consistent and accurate in the Creator and Recipient categories in records.

Data normalization is not a simple undertaking, especially for an almost twenty-year-old collection of over 140,000 digitized records. Many individuals have done cataloging work in our digital library, and while the TRC staff, interns, and volunteers follow specific guidelines for this cataloging work, archival standards and users’ needs change over time.

Normalizing metadata in our digital library is simultaneously necessary for the continued usability of our collections and time consuming for a team of less than five full-time TRC employees.

In addition to the public side of the digital library, data normalization is also constantly occurring on the back-end, specifically in our “Known Persons List,” or KPL for short. This document currently holds the names and biographical information of over 72,000 individuals, companies, and social clubs who wrote to or were mentioned in any record in the TRC collections.

While not public at this time, the KPL aids TRC staff, interns, and volunteers in research efforts and genealogical research queries from patrons. (If you’ve ever wondered “Did my ancestor write to Theodore Roosevelt?”, ask us and we can check!)

This summer, intern Jessica Yu tackled a digital normalization project rooted in the KPL: locating women who had previously been unnamed in our records. Jessica was able to locate twenty-eight previously unnamed women, among them a California postmistress, a suspected New Mexico murder victim, and a newspaper correspondent living in Texas.

While these women are not famous, their stories still deserve to be heard and help to give a more complete insight into what life was like during Theodore Roosevelt’s lifetime. Thanks to Jessica’s work, these twenty-eight women can now be found. Below is Jessica’s description of her project.

As part of my internship with the Theodore Roosevelt Center this summer, I conducted a data normalization project focused on fixing women’s names in the digital library. In particular, I was interested in researching and identifying women who went by their husbands’ names. It was a common practice in Roosevelt’s time for married women to be referred to as “Mrs. [Husband’s Full Name].”

For example, Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt might have been referred to as “Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt,” rather than by her own name. The use of this naming convention not only erases an important part of a women’s identity, but it also makes it harder for researchers looking into these women to retrieve relevant materials.

Since this project was a huge undertaking that would certainly not be completed by one intern with limited time, I first had to figure out the best way to approach it. My overall plan was to (1) find out how many unnamed women were in the digital library, (2) choose a subset of those to focus on, and then (3) research these women using resources such as Ancestry, Find a Grave, and Newspapers.com to try to identify them. While the plan seemed straightforward, I ended up encountering several setbacks before finding an effective approach.

Approach #1: Known Persons List

My first approach was to start from the Known Persons List, a spreadsheet maintained by TRC staff containing over 72,000 names that appear in the digital library. As collection items are cataloged and their creators, recipients, and subjects are researched, authorized headings and biographical details are added to the Known Persons List.

As of mid-July when I started this project, the list had over 29,800 names with authorized headings, signifying that the names had been researched and the individuals had been identified. Additionally, there were close to 1,300 names in the list that included “Mrs.,” over 1,100 of which had not yet been researched. Of the names that had been researched, there were sixty-two headings that included “Mrs.,” of which twenty-four headings were from the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF).

While one possible method to complete this project could have involved identifying women that had not yet been researched, my plan was to revisit records that had already been cataloged but the women had not been identified, either because there was not enough information available at the time to do so, or perhaps because the original catalogers did not put in the time or effort needed to properly identify them.

Thus, the first subset of women I decided to focus on was the thirty-eight “Mrs.” names with authorized headings that were not from the LCNAF. I started my research with the four names that were added the earliest to the Known Persons List in 2019, but I was unable to identify anyone new. Looking back, I realized that the Known Persons List was not the best place to start for my purposes because names that were added to the list had probably already been extensively researched.

Approach #2: Eforge

For my next approach, I went to TRC’s content management system, Eforge. I conducted several different searches on Eforge to break down the fields that “Mrs.” names were showing up in, and the workflow steps these records were in. The results of my searches are shown in the table below.

For this approach, I decided to focus on women who created letters that had already been cataloged, meaning they were in the Metadata Entry and Metadata Review workflow steps. Besides the fact that these lists had the fewest, most manageable number of letters, I also figured that I might be able to glean more details about the woman from the letters they wrote to help me identify them.

I started with the twenty-one letters in Metadata Entry, but I quickly realized that this was also not an effective approach because letters in the Metadata Entry workflow step were cataloged recently, mostly in 2025. Therefore, there was little new information available online that the original catalogers did not have access to.

Of the twenty-one names, I researched six of them that included first names rather than initials or last names only, and I was only able to identify one woman that had not been previously identified.

Given my dismal success rate for the first two approaches, I was getting ready to give up and pivot to a different project, but I decided to take a stab at the eighty letters in the Metadata Review workflow step.

This approach turned out to be more successful because there were many records in Metadata Review that were cataloged over ten years ago when there were fewer resources uploaded on Ancestry and other websites than there are now.

I researched thirty-six creators from these records and was able to identify seventeen of them. While I still did not have a very high success rate, it was much improved on the previous approaches.

Results

As part of this project, I identified and created headings for twenty-two individuals, including sixteen previously unidentified women creators, two previously unidentified male co-creators, and four previously unidentified subjects. I also updated the headings of two previously identified women with additional information, and updated names and copyright information for twenty-eight records in Eforge.

Challenges

During the course of researching women for this project, I often encountered the following challenges that made identifying them difficult.

Lack of full names and personal information: Many letters were signed with first and middle initials, e.g., “Mrs. J. A. Smith,” rather than with full names. When other personal information was included in the letter, such as names of family members or addresses that matched records on Ancestry, this may have been enough to identify them, but most of the time, lack of full names made research difficult.

Widows: My starting point for researching most unnamed women was to first identify the husband by searching Ancestry for the husband’s name, including the year of the letter and the city from which the letter was written in the search criteria. However, this go-to strategy was often not effective when the woman who wrote the letter was a widow since I could no longer rely on the letter’s year and city to provide indications of when and where the husband lived.

Remarriages: If John Smith had multiple wives in his lifetime, there are multiple possibilities for who “Mrs. John Smith” was. Thus, identifying a woman who went by the name of a husband who remarried required the additional step of finding out who the husband was married to at the time the letter was written.

Ambiguity about whose name the woman used: Women that used the “Mrs.” title did not always follow it with their husbands’ names. Sometimes, they signed their own names with the “Mrs.” title, and occasionally I encountered some ambiguity as to whose name I was actually researching.

The examples below introduce a few of the memorable women that I identified, along with the challenges they presented.

Frances “Frank” Pease Church (1836-1916)

This letter was written in 1904 to the Republican National Committee Chairman George B. Cortelyou and signed by Mrs. Frank P. Church. Naturally, I thought that Frank must be her husband’s name, but after some confusion while I was researching her, I found out that her name was Frances Pease Church, and she went by Frank. Her husband died young, so she was a widow for most of her life, and she was a postmaster in San Leandro, CA.

Christine May Mitchell Major (1868-1912)

This letter to Theodore Roosevelt from 1901 was signed by Mrs. H. H. Major. With only her husband’s first and middle initials, I did not have high hopes of identifying her when I started the search.

However, it turned out that Alamogordo, New Mexico, where they lived, was small enough that there was only one H. H. Major living there in the year the letter was written. This was Hal H. Major, an attorney, who was married to Christine May Mitchell Major at the time.

I was not able to find out much about her life, but from searching Newspapers.com articles, I did find out a little bit about her death. It turns out that after her death, her husband was accused of killing their daughter Eudora with arsenic and attempting to poison his second wife Isabel, and he was suspected of having caused Christine’s death as well. He ended up being acquitted of the charges.

Florence E. B. Shaffer Fitze (1849-)

The last example is a 1906 article from the Houston Daily Post written by Mrs. Charles G. Fitze. It took me a while to identify her as Florence E. B. Shaffer Fitze, partly because she was Charles G. Fitze’s third wife, whom he married late in life. She was twenty years younger than he was, he was her second husband, and they were only married for five years before getting divorced.

This one was especially memorable to me because often, even if I was able to identify a woman, I would not have much to add to her biography other than the name of her husband. Florence, however, was a newspaper correspondent who contributed to the Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle, and there was an entire article about her from 1907 in the Houston Post, which I believe she wrote herself.

The article highlights her scholarly accomplishments and discusses the importance of education and lifelong learning. She said she had facts posted on her kitchen wall and lessons pinned to her working gown so that she could continue to study while doing household chores. She wrote in the article about how having fed her mind with “powerful thought,” she saw “deeper and loftier loveliness” in duties inside and outside the home.

While I was only able to identify women in twenty-eight collection items for this project making only a small dent in the large number of women that remain unnamed, I hope that future TRC interns will be inspired to use my project as a starting point to continue the important work of researching and identifying unnamed women in the digital library.

To hear more about the digital humanities projects completed by the 2026 interns, please watch the 2026 Intern Symposium on the TRC YouTube channel.

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The Theodore Roosevelt Center’s digital library contains correspondence between Theodore Roosevelt and many others, including his children. And if you’re wondering which child has the most correspondence with Roosevelt in the digital library, it’s Kermit.

• Alice: 30 records

• Ted: 141 records

• Kermit: 521 records

• Ethel: 79 records

• Archie: 134 records

• Quentin: 53 records

In addition to writing Kermit more often, Roosevelt also seems to be more candid with him than with others, which gives us clear insights into Roosevelt’s thinking and character.

And today’s #WednesdayWisdom comes from a March 15, 1908 letter to Kermit in which Roosevelt discusses his eldest son Ted, who was a junior at Harvard University. Thanks to a letter from the dean, Roosevelt learned that Ted has skipped thirty-eight lectures “without sufficient excuse” since January 1 and has been put on probation.

Roosevelt finds such behavior completely unacceptable and is out of patience with Ted for being “such an utter goose,” comparing Ted to the title character in William Thackeray’s novel Pendennis.

You can hear the exasperation in Roosevelt’s writing when you read, “He is over 20; he is a junior, and hopes to graduate this year; and I can not treat him as if he were Quentin [who was then ten years old].”

While expressing his frustration, Roosevelt also philosophizes about the situation, lamenting Ted’s inability to “understand the folly” of simply not trying. After noting that many challenges are out of our control—what he calls “a sufficient number of defeats”—he pens today’s #WednesdayWisdom.

Roosevelt hopes that Ted will start to adopt such an attitude, expressing frustration and worry “as to how Ted will do in after life” and hoped that he would put “boyish things” aside and “show the character that he showed during the year before he went to college.”

We wanted to share this quotation as today’s Wednesday Wisdom because not only does it show Roosevelt’s care for his eldest son even as he expresses his fears but also it reveals Roosevelt’s way of approaching the world.

While the world will sometimes do its best to defeat people, individuals can do all they can to avoid poor decisions, exercising prudence, forethought, skill, and resolution, and they will come out ahead.

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Our researcher Rachel experienced a miscarriage, and when she learned of Edith’s miscarriages, it was a topic she personally wanted to share to shed light on a more hidden pain Theodore and Edith Roosevelt and countless other mothers and fathers experience today.

As you likely know, Theodore and Edith Roosevelt had five children together as well as Alice from Roosevelt’s first marriage. But Edith wasn’t pregnant just five times. In fact, she was pregnant at least eight times. This is the story of the pregnancies she didn’t carry to term.

1888

On July 15, 1888, Roosevelt wrote to his sister Anna “Bye” that Edith was pregnant again, and they expected the baby to arrive in January, meaning that Edith was likely five or six months pregnant.

“Now for a bit of private information. Alice’s wish for ‘another brother or sister’, will, I rather regret to say, probably be gratified about the end of next January.”

Sadly, less than a month later on August 8, 1888, just two days after Edith turned twenty-seven years old, Roosevelt updated Bye to let her know that Edith had miscarried.

He blamed Edith’s miscarriage on the stress that his fall in a recent polo match had caused her. Roosevelt said the fall had looked worse than it actually was, writing, “though I was all right in an hour, the mischief had been done to Edith, though we did not know it for over a week.”

In the late 1800s, doctors had an extensive list of what caused miscarriage, which historian Shannon Withycombe included in Lost: Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America.

As you’ll notice, Roosevelt’s determination about what caused the miscarriage is included in this list. After informing Bye of the sad news, he told her he intended to delay—or perhaps even cancel—his trip out west due to Edith’s miscarriage.

When Edith was feeling better four days later, Roosevelt decided to keep the trip as planned, writing to Bye, “As you can see from the enclosed letter Edie is feeling pretty brightly, and I think will be up next Thursday. So a week from Monday. I shall start west, taking West [Roosevelt] with me.”

Edith had been bedridden for several weeks after miscarrying but was finally out and about by Monday, August 20. One day later on Tuesday, August 21, 1888, Roosevelt started off west.

1902

As Lewis Gould reported in his biography of Edith, she decided in the early years of Roosevelt’s presidency that she wanted to add another child to the family. In May 1902, newspapers started to report on the stork coming to the White House in October 1902.

By mid-June 1902, the newspapers were more somber: “Stork Leaves the White House.” Although the press was correct that Edith had miscarried, it had occurred back on May 9, according to historian Stacy A. Cordery, and she was bedridden for two weeks.

We tried to see if we could find anything that might mention this miscarriage in the digital library, but we came up empty even after searching through all of Roosevelt’s correspondence in May and a few months before and after.

The only thing we found was a February 1902 letter from Roosevelt to his brother-in-law Douglas Robinson, “Edith is just starting. We do not know particulars.”

The language is ambiguous enough that perhaps it could have been referring to the fact that she was pregnant, especially if the newspapers were correct that the stork was coming to the White House in October, but it’s hard to know for sure what Roosevelt meant.

1903

Gould notes that Edith was pregnant again in the spring of 1903, but we found nothing in the digital library or even in newspapers of the time suggesting that she was pregnant. This may be because the family worked harder to conceal her pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage after how much was mentioned in the newspapers in 1902.

1905

Of all the years Edith was believed to have miscarried, we are the least confident about 1905 although speculation that the stork was visiting the White House appeared in newspapers in May 1905 (see image above for one example).

According to The Oregon Daily Journal, Edith wasn’t doing any spring entertaining, which suggested to the newspaper that she was pregnant. If Edith had indeed been pregnant, she would have been quite an advanced age indeed at forty-four years old.

We couldn’t find any mention of Edith being ill or pregnant around this time in Roosevelt’s correspondence in the digital library, so this may have just been political satire about population growth given Roosevelt’s comments around that time about encouraging families to have more children. Indeed, some newspapers even wondered that themselves (see below).

In Remembrance

We want to conclude this post with an illustration (see below) that we found shortly after reading about Edith’s miscarriage in 1888, which made us wonder more about the incorrect number of shoes. (For those who like a behind-the-scenes look, we came across it when researching for the Substack post about Roosevelt’s clothing.)

It’s a puzzling image because there are nine shoes, rather than eight (Theodore, Edith, and six kids). And some of the shoes don’t make sense because there are two baby booties. Even Roosevelt’s youngest son Quentin should have been out of baby booties by the time he became president. Even more challenging is that we don’t know when it’s dated during the presidency.

Could the illustration be a nod to one of Edith’s pregnancies and later miscarriages in the White House? We wish we knew, but it’s hard to make any assessments without tracking down the date in which it was published.

If any of our readers happen to know, please let us know in the comments below.

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On June 1, 1907 with a typed note just below the header that read, “On the train,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote his second son Kermit a newsy letter about his trip out west and related traveling through Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Michigan.

At the end of his eight-page letter, Roosevelt included a brief paragraph about upcoming hunting trips, including the locations he originally proposed for his trip after leaving the presidency—the topic for this month’s Voter’s Choice post selected by our paid subscribers.

“When you come back I will go over with you the whole hunting trip question. I strongly advise a new double-barreled shotgun. My impression would be that if the time is ripe this would be a first class year to try for the chicken shooting; then I will late be able to arrange some regular big game hunting for you. Perhaps when I get thru being President we will be able to take a trip together to New Foundland or south of the Yellowstone if the elk hunting is good.”

Unfortunately, Kermit’s reply isn’t in the digital library, so we aren’t sure how he responded to his father’s idea of a post-presidential hunting trip. But he did seem to have taken his father’s advice about going chicken shooting, reporting in a letter to family friends, Robert Harry Munro Ferguson and Isabella Ferguson, of his summer hunting plans—what he called “promising plans.”

As he told the Fergusons, he would hunt with Marvin Hughitt Jr., the son of Marvin Hughitt, the president of the Chicago and North Western Railway, for prairie chickens and duck throughout Minnesota and the Dakotas.

As Kermit told them, “The shooting will be good, but it will be too luxurious, for we will spend almost every night in his private car, but the walking during the day twice will be good hard exercise.”

Moreover, we know that Kermit’s hunt was successful. On September 6, 1907, Roosevelt congratulated his son on bagging a chicken, writing, “Evidently you had a delightful time on the cavalry march and your shoot has opened well too. I congratulate you upon killing a chicken with your very first shot.”

Finalizing the Location

We couldn’t find more about Roosevelt’s initial thoughts of a post-presidential hunting trip after his letter to Kermit in 1907. However, we do know that by March 1908, Roosevelt had turned his attention to Africa, writing letters to three men who had hunted in Africa, all on March 20, 1908: J. H. Patterson, Frederick C. Selous, and Leigh Hunt.

Each letter was written slightly differently but inquired about each man’s thoughts on a trip to Africa. As Roosevelt wrote to Hunt, “Perhaps a year hence circumstances will be such that I can take a hunt in Africa.” And they all asked a similar question: “Would you be willing to give me some advice about it?” as Roosevelt phrased it in his letter to Patterson.

We especially enjoyed Roosevelt’s aside in his letter to Patterson: “I shall be fifty years old, and for ten years I have led a busy, sedentary life, and so it is unnecessary to say that I shall be in no trim for the hardest kind of explorers’ work.”

Less than a month later, Roosevelt was writing to Kermit about the trip: “I have begun my correspondence about the African trip, altho it is not possible yet to say whether or not I can make it. Mr. Selous thinks we ought to go in by Mombasa, because the Uganda-Nile regions are not healthy . . .”

As the pronoun “we” suggests, it seems like Roosevelt had intended to bring Kermit on the trip with him, but the correspondence between the two of them confirms this implication.

Kermit replied on April 19, 1908 expressing his excitement about the trip: “I hope you can get off [to] Africa. It would be just too wonderful for anything. However, I am being very careful not to look forward to it too much in case it doesn’t come off. I have always dreamed of someday when my ship came in crossing Africa but now it looks as if the ship would [. . .] have to come in first!” (If you’re wondering, the idiom “when my ship came in” means having a major stroke of good fortune after a long wait.)

In Roosevelt’s April 23, 1908 reply to his son, he told him not to worry: “You blessed fellow, I do not think you will have to wait until your ship comes in. If all goes well I intend to make it soon after I leave the Presidency, and unless there is a very real reason to the contrary, you will go with me.”

But Roosevelt emphasized that Kermit had to take the trip seriously: “I should want you to make up your mind fully and deliberately that you would treat it just as you would a college course; enjoy it to the full; count it as so much to the good, and then when it was over turn in and buckle down to hard work; for without the hard work you certainly can not make a success of life.”

Based on Roosevelt’s correspondence with friends, it’s clear that he had finalized Africa as the destination for his post-presidential hunting trip by the end of April 1908. As Edward North Buxton wrote him on April 28, 1908, “I am so glad to notice that you begin to enjoy the pleasures of anticipation.”

Finalizing the Schedule

But although Roosevelt had selected the location we now associate with his post-presidential expedition by April 1908, he initially planned for the trip to occur at a slightly different time than it eventually did.

And Buxton agreed with Roosevelt’s initial suggestion, writing in his April 1908 letter, “July, August, and September are excellent months in British East Africa, the climate being very exhilarating at that time.” (commas added)

Roosevelt confirmed in his next letter to Kermit on May 1, 1908 that he was thinking of leaving for Africa several months after exiting the presidency, not almost immediately after.

“I have written them both [Selous and Buxton] that my hope is to leave the United States about the 1st of July of next year with the expectation of reaching Mombasa, or wherever it is we go in from the east coast of Africa, by the 1st of August. Then we would have five or six months in hunting up thru the Mt. Kenia country and Uganda until we struck the Nile; and I should hope to do three or four months’ hunting on the Nile and leave by Cairo some time early in May.”

Roosevelt believed that making the plans so far in advance would help make the trip more successful. As he wrote later in the letter to Kermit, “I believe we can take the trip. At any rate, if I ever do go to Africa, I shall take you with me.”

While the exact details of the trip had not been finalized by May 1908, Roosevelt had begun to tell people of his plans to go hunting in Africa. On May 18, 1908, he wrote Charles Robert Eustace Radclyffe, who invited him to go hunting in England, “When I get thru the Presidency I shall visit Africa, if I am able to.”

Spreading the News

When people began to learn of the African expedition, Roosevelt received a lot of letters. Austrian Emperor Franz Josef I, upon learning about Roosevelt’s plan to hunt big game in Africa, said, “What a sensible thing for a true sportsman and a great man to do—I almost envy him.”

And unsurprisingly, publishing companies were interested in soliciting articles from Roosevelt about the trip. In fact, Roosevelt mentioned Scribner’s reaching out to him back in the fall of 1907 requesting articles from him for a book if he decided to go on a hunt after the presidency in a June 7, 1908 letter to Robert Bridges.

As Roosevelt told Bridges, “My expectation is to go to Africa a year hence and stay there perhaps ten months . . .” In the correspondence that followed, the two men discussed Roosevelt’s writing arrangement.

When they neared the end of the negotiations, Roosevelt wrote Bridges on July 2, 1908, “My present intention is not to go around the world or do anything excepting these African articles on hunting and natural history . . . but of course it is possible, however improbable, that I should decide in addition to go elsewhere on a different kind of a trip . . .”

As we know, of course, Roosevelt added on several lectures in the fall of 1908, including what would become his most well-known speech, “Citizenship in a Republic,” better known as the “Man in the Arena.”

Others wrote Roosevelt suggesting different places he could hunt, but for Roosevelt, his destination of Africa was set. As Roosevelt told Ben Lilly of Texas, “I am going to Africa next spring, but do let me know if you find a good hunting place in Mexico. We might use it in the future.”

Roosevelt likewise wrote to John Willis on January 23, 1909, “I ought to have a pretty good time in Africa; but I do wish I could be with you in some of your wolf and coyote hunting.”

We also found this letter interesting because Roosevelt expressed his desire to be left behind instead of Kermit, a sentiment he would also later express in the Amazon, “Somehow I believe that if anyone is not to come back from Africa, it had better be me than either Kermit or you!”

Finally, still others had complaints about the expedition party, encouraging Roosevelt to leave Kermit at home, which Roosevelt related in a January 5, 1909 letter to Edward North Buxton, but Roosevelt disagreed.

“Lots of people have told me that I ought not to take Kermit, who will not be twenty when we reach East Africa; but I understand that the East African climate itself is reasonably healthy; and on the ground I will find out what the chances are for Uganda and the Nile and will send him back before I go to Uganda if there is any real risk.”

Even when other people’s names were proposed, Roosevelt insisted, “[U]nder no circumstances do I believe that more than two rifles can hunt together; and my son Kermit and I must be those two rifles.”

Although the planning for Roosevelt’s post-presidential hunting trip took some twists and turns, it finally became the iteration we know it as today: the Smithsonian-Roosevelt Expedition.

Read more about Roosevelt’s expedition in our digital encyclopedia article here. Where do you think Theodore Roosevelt should have gone for his post-presidential hunting trip and scientific expedition? Let us know in the comments below!

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One hundred and fourteen years ago today, Theodore Roosevelt was shot on Monday, October 14, 1912 just outside the Hotel Gilpatrick in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at 8:10 p.m. as Roosevelt was standing up in the car that was going to take him to the Milwaukee Auditorium where he was going to speak.

Last year, we devoted a whole post to the assassination attempt written by our own public historian, Dr. William J. Hansard.

This year, since the anniversary of Roosevelt’s attempted assassination falls on a Wednesday, we thought it would be fitting to share a sentence Roosevelt wrote to his son Kermit just five days after reflecting on the attempted assassination as our #WednesdayWisdom.

We also wanted to note that the photograph we selected to accompany the quotation is significant as well, as it was taken of him on October 14 speaking from the car before he was shot.

While Roosevelt’s whole letter to Kermit is worth reading to get a feel for what Roosevelt was thinking and feeling at the time, there is one particularly long sentence that stood out to us since it encapsulates Roosevelt’s character and his plans should he ever be on the receiving end of a bullet.

“As you know, I am a great hand to think possible contingencies out in advance, and I had always determined that if I was shot when I was about to make a speech or anything of the kind I should go on with the speech or whatever I was doing, because two or three hours always elapse before a man is so incapacitated by a wound as to make it physically impossible for him to do his work.”

As Roosevelt relayed later in the letter, he wanted to give the speech since he believed it would be the “last real speech [he] could make in the campaign,” given that the assassination attempt occurred just three weeks before election day.

In addition to an entertaining start to the letter where Roosevelt said, “Well, this campaign proved as exciting and as dangerous as any of our African hunts!” Roosevelt also reflected on his would-be killer, John Flammang Schrank, in his letter to Kermit.

Although some people like Roosevelt’s opponent Woodrow Wilson believed that Schrank was a lunatic, Roosevelt disagreed: “His choice of a gun [a .38 shot from a .44 frame] showed me that he was an experienced man-killer.”

Roosevelt also mused about his chances in the election, suggesting that he thought Wilson might win. Just three days before the assassination attempt, Roosevelt had written something very similar to Kermit reflecting on the enthusiastic supporters who thought Roosevelt was going to win.

“Looking at it coolly I hardly think this comes within the boundaries of possibility. I think I will beat Taft, that he will carry half a dozen small states, and I a dozen larger ones. But the odds in Wilson’s favor are so enormous that I do not see how they can be overcome.”

As it turned out, Roosevelt was even generous in his estimate. Taft carried two states (Vermont and Utah), and Roosevelt carried six (California, Oregon, South Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania).

But, returning to Roosevelt’s October 19 letter to Kermit, he believed that the attempted assassination at least demonstrated his own willingness to “spend and be spent.” As he told Kermit, “[W]e were not considering the welfare of any one of us but were battling a cause in which we earnestly and zealously believed.”

Something unique—but not unsurprising—about the letter is it wasn’t signed by Roosevelt. Rather, it was Edith, which Roosevelt himself mentioned at the beginning: “I am dictating this in bed and Mother will sign it.” Edith also added her own note at the bottom, which we don’t know if Roosevelt read or not “He gains strength every day. No complications.”

After three days in the hospital, Roosevelt headed home for Sagamore Hill and took his first walk outside on October 26, the day before his fifty-fourth birthday.

Although Roosevelt feared October 14 would be the last time he could give a campaign speech, he was wrong. He gave three additional speeches, including one at Madison Square Garden in New York to 16,000 people where 30,000 people were turned away.

Roosevelt of course ultimately lost the election, but he was alive. And, as he had noted in two short lines on the final page of his letter to Kermit: “The doctors do not think it worth while to attempt to remove the bullet. One rib is broken but seems to be healing satisfactorily.” Roosevelt would carry the bullet in his chest the rest of his life.

Read Roosevelt’s entire letter to Kermit here in the digital library.

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Two days ago on October 10 marked the 137^th birthday of Theodore and Edith Roosevelt’s second son, Kermit, so we wanted to devote a Substack post to Kermit to celebrate his birthday.

It’s especially fitting that our celebratory post to Kermit falls on a Monday because it’s also #MandolinMonday, a hashtag used by mandolin players across the world on Mondays to highlight their work, and Kermit himself was a mandolin player.

When thinking about how we wanted to approach this post, we decided to share some interesting stories and anecdotes about Kermit that we’ve found in Roosevelt’s correspondence that give a behind-the-scenes look at Kermit and his father’s opinion of him.

If you want to learn more about the chronology of Kermit’s life, you can check out our digital encyclopedia article about him here.

Bad Shot, but Good Hunter, Explorer, and Writer

When we came across this September 1911 letter from Roosevelt to his eldest son Ted, we were quite frankly a bit shocked to read what Roosevelt had to say about Kermit, the son who accompanied him on the Smithsonian-Roosevelt Scientific Expedition to Africa and who would descend the River of Doubt with him less than three years later in 1914.

After updating Ted on other family members and cautioning him about speaking out against President William Howard Taft, Roosevelt concluded the letter telling Ted he was passing along Kermit’s account of the sheep hunt and made the following note.

“Kermit is not a good shot, but he is a very good hunter and explorer in wild and somewhat dangerous country; I believe he will have the gift of writing.”

But even though we were surprised by Roosevelt’s directness about Kermit’s shooting abilities, we enjoyed reading his hunch about Kermit’s writing, which turned out to be correct.

While Kermit didn’t write as many books as his father, who authored over 40 books, he did write six books listed below as well as authored many articles, a list of which is available on our website.

• War in the Garden of Eden (1919): his memoir detailing service with the British Army in Mesopotamia during World War I

• The Happy Hunting-Grounds (1920): a collection of essays and reminiscences, largely about his father and hunting

• The Long Trail (1921): a reprint of the chapter about Theodore Roosevelt from The Happy Hunting-Grounds with some additional information about his father

• East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1926): co-authored with his brother Ted alternating chapters to comprise the book

• Trailing the Giant Panda (1929): co-authored with his brother Ted alternating chapters to comprise the book

He also edited Quentin Roosevelt: A Sketch with Letters (1921), a collection of letters written by Quentin to his family and friends, as well as photographs and stories about his life.

Interestingly, Kermit himself agreed with his father about being not a good shot, writing in The Happy Hunting-Grounds, “Father shot on a par with Cuninghame, and a good deal better than I, though not as well as Tarleton.”

Cold Weather Hater

We happened to come across something we never knew before while reading through some of Roosevelt’s letters to Kermit, namely that he hated the cold. At first, Roosevelt reflected about his love of the winter at Sagamore Hill in a January 1916 letter to Kermit: “But I love this place in winter, and so does mother . . .”

But then he quickly added, “I am afraid we have grown rather to sympathize with your views of the cold; altho I wish you, and darling Belle especially, were at this moment where the climate is colder.” At the time, Kermit and his wife Belle were in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Roosevelt had written something similar to Kermit in a letter the year before: “Mother and I had a delightful trip of three weeks’ duration. We saw the wonderful scenery along the Canadian Pacific Railway and the desert scenery of South-west California, Nevada and Utah; and I like the desert as much as you do.” The desert and the heat were where Kermit was happiest.

Mandolin Player

As we hinted above, Kermit played the mandolin. We don’t know exactly when he started playing, but he mentioned playing the mandolin with Ethel on the piano in a June 21, 1908 diary entry.

However, Kermit’s mandolin became more noticeable when he brought it with him on the Smithsonian-Roosevelt African expedition. As the New York Times reported on March 24, 1909, “[Kermit] carried a mandolin inclosed [sic] in a leather case. Both [Kermit and Roosevelt] had gray slouch hats.”

Aboard the ship headed to Africa, Roosevelt wrote to Ethel of Kermit visiting him and sitting and talking or strumming away on his mandolin. During the expedition, Kermit played the mandolin in the evenings, a fact Roosevelt included in his published version of their expedition, African Game Trails.

“In the evenings the camp-fires blazed in front of the tents, and after supper we gathered round them, talking or sitting silently, or listening to Kermit strumming on his mandolin.”

Roosevelt was quite proud of his playing. As he stated in a June 1909 letter to Ethel, “I much like to hear him play his mandolin, by the way. Altogether this is a ‘great adventure.’”

Roosevelt remembered Kermit’s playing years after the expedition, writing in an October 11, 1912 letter composed just three days before an attempt on Roosevelt’s life, “I wish I had money enough to let the Bwana Medego [Swahili for young man] continue to do the things he did so well in Africa. I can see him running hard after game or solemnly playing on his mandolin in the evening or sitting beside me in the glorious African moonlight.”

We unfortunately weren’t able to find a photograph of Kermit playing the mandolin or even holding it, but we did find an illustration of it, included in a depiction of the “Great Departure” of Roosevelt and his “hunting party” headed to Africa in 1909 below!

There’s plenty more that we could say about Kermit, but we’ll stop there for now. We’d love if you told us your favorite story about Kermit or what you especially admire about the third Roosevelt child and second son in the comments below.

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A couple months ago, we wrote a Substack post about Theodore Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch. In that post, we focused on the establishment of the Elkhorn Ranch, a few visits Roosevelt made there, and what happened to the Elkhorn Ranch after Roosevelt left.

Just three days ago (October 6) was the 142nd anniversary of William “Bill” Sewall and Wilmot Dow first beginning to hew wood for the ranch house at the Elkhorn, so we thought it was only fitting to dedicate a second post to the actual life at the Elkhorn Ranch—not just for Roosevelt but also for others who lived there, most notably Sewall, Dow, and their families.

Sewall and Dow Alone

As Sewall mentioned in Bill Sewall’s Story of T.R. (1919), Roosevelt first wrote to him and Dow about the idea that they come to North Dakota to help him on his ranch in March 1884, shortly after the deaths of his wife Alice and mother Mittie.

Sewall went to New York to talk with Roosevelt about the idea, and they agreed upon it. But it wasn’t until early July that they received further details. Sewall and Dow left on July 28 for the Badlands and arrived at the Chimney Butte Ranch on August 1, 1884.

Roosevelt was delighted that they were joining him in the Badlands and referred to them as his “two backwoods babies” in an August 1884 letter to his sister. Although Roosevelt specifically told them not to come out if they thought they would make a fortune in a year or two, Sewall’s goal from the beginning was to earn some money so that he could return to Maine.

In an August 17, 1884 letter to his brother Samuel, Sewall told his brother he intended to leave the Badlands once he had made some money as he wanted to be back where there was “clear water and trees in sight.” But even though Sewall was eager to return to Maine, that didn’t stop him from signing his letter “Your Cow puncher.”

As noted above, Sewall and Dow began hewing wood for the ranch house in early October. Just a few weeks after they started hewing logs for the ranch house, Sewall continued to express his desire to leave the Badlands whenever he could, writing “[I] shall never live here longer than I am obliged.”

Roosevelt himself mentioned Sewall and Dow hewing logs in his diary entry on November 18, 1884, and less than a week later reported in a letter to his sister that they had finished hewing.

By mid-December 1884, as Sewall wrote to his brother Samuel, the timber was finally ready to be built into a house: “working on the house. have got the timber all hauled and would have had the walls up but have been off after Horses.” [periods added]

By February 18, 1885, Sewall wrote another update for his brother: “the weather is so cold we cant do much on the house. have got it shingled and the under floor layed [sic]. had a few days that were not so cold. then it got cold as usual. it is all you can do to keep from freezing if you ride.” [periods added]

Finally, in the spring of 1885, Sewall and Dow completed the ranch house, and it was a sight to behold. As The Bad Lands Cow Boy noted on August 20, 1885, “This ranch is probably the best one on the river, being 20x60 and built very substantially.”

With the ranch house complete, Roosevelt, Dow, and one of the ranch hands all left around June 1, and Sewall discovered himself quite alone. But, as he wrote in his book, “I had plenty to keep me from being lonesome, though I saw very few people for a month.”

Sewall and Dow with their Families

Wilmot Dow left for a specific reason—to return home to Island Falls, Maine, to marry his sweetheart, Lizzie Edwards. They married on July 13, 1885 but didn’t stay in Maine long as Dow, his new wife Lizzie, his aunt Mary Sewall (Sewall’s wife), and the Sewall’s daughter, Kittie, were all headed to North Dakota.

On August 8, 1885, they arrived in Medora, North Dakota. As the Bad Lands Cow Boy wrote of the four a few days later, “They are now at home at the Elkhorn ranch.”

Sewall also wrote his brother a letter on August 16, 1885 and updated him, “Will and trio [Mary, Lizzie, and Kittie] arrived at Medora Sat a week yesterday. they were well. had stood the journey well. you may suppose I was not sorry to see them. we came down here the next day. thare [sic] is no sunday at town.” [periods added]

We also know that less than two weeks after they arrived, the Sewalls and the Dows welcomed guests. As the August 20, 1885 issue of the Bad Lands Cow Boy mentioned, “Mrs. Sewall and Mrs. Dow are strangers to the Bad Lands, only having arrived lately, but they and their husbands fully understand the art of hospitality and [the visitors were] made to feel at home immediately.”

Sewall, Dow, their families, and Roosevelt began a peaceful life at the Elkhorn. As Sewall stated in his book, “People roundabout used to say, ‘no house is big enough to hold two women,’ but there was never any harsh word spoken at Elkhorn Ranch, and I have an idea that those were the most peaceful years of Roosevelt’s life. He spent most of the time with us, going East very little.”

In addition to building the ranch house, Sewall and Dow also built various ranch buildings. As Sewall wrote in a December 1885 letter to his brother, “[W]e have been working on our Stable. we hew the logs on three sides and are putting up two stables 16 x 20 ft with a twelve foot space between like a woods hovel and hay shed.” [periods added]

While many of Sewall’s letters to his brother prior to the family’s arrival focused on hunting, building, and taking care of the cattle, he included some more personal anecdotes after his family came to the Elkhorn.

For example, Sewall talked about his daughter Kittie in a February 28, 1886 letter to Samuel, which we will include in its entirety below to give a picture of the dynamic at the Elkhorn Ranch.

“You spoke of seeing Kittie. she is a very healthy looking child. now is 34 inches tall and weighes [sic] about 30 lbs. is a great climber. it is hard to get anything out of her reach and she is as full of mischief as possible and the most tireless child I ever saw. some days she gets up by daylight and dont go to sleep till eight or nine in the evening. she is never still and never seems tired and the rougher and harder she can play the better it suits her. I dont know what she is made of. something tough anyway. every night after supper she makes me lay down on the floor and she makes a race course of me my toes and nose are considered as parts of the course and are duly raced over but as it is about the only way I can amuse her while her Mother is doing the evening work I stand it though it is often a severe trial to my supper.” [periods added]

On April 21, 1886, Sewall wrote yet another letter to his brother, what Sewall called “the longest letter I ever wrote and I guess the longest I ever shall write and probably nobody will ever want me to write another like it.” But this time it wasn’t about Kittie using him as a race course!

Rather, Sewall went into great detail about the boat thieves trip, starting the letter with one of the best summations of the whole ordeal: “we have a boat which Mr. R bought in St. Paul and is the best one on the River and that is what the fuss came from.”

Although not Sewall’s longest letter, we think that one of Sewall’s most interesting letters describing life at the Elkhorn Ranch was his letter on June 27, 1886. In it, Sewall began, “I have been holding the Fort with the women for the passed [sic] week. the rest are all off on the Roundups.” [periods added]

Then he detailed all the work he was doing in the garden: “[W]e have half an acre of Potatoes also corn squashes &c. dont know how it will do but it all looks pretty well now. I have got quite a lot of peas and string beans started. have to put them all in by hand so it is quite a job but I got it all in all right had to do it about all myself . . .” [periods added]

While most of the letters in the digital library are from Bill Sewall, we do have one letter written by his wife, Mary, to her sister Annie dated June 13, 1886—around the same time as our favorite Sewall letter.

Mary also mentioned the garden before discussing more about ranch life: “The men in this country all think a good deal of milk. It is something every ranch does not have so we gave [the twenty-six cowboys participating in the roundup] all the milk they wanted cream and all and bread and butter, cake and cookies and coffee if they wanted.”

By August 1, the garden was mostly gone, as Sewall told his brother: “[A]ll gardens are about gone up. I had half an acre of potatoes and lots of Peas beans and corn. we will get a very few potatoes though most of them have dried up. the Peas and beans were gone long ago. the corn stands it. best guess we may get a little and a few cucumbers. have watered them. all the small stuff went up long ago.” [periods added]

At that point in time, Sewall, Dow, and their families had been in the Badlands for just shy of one year, but they didn’t expect it to be their permanent home. Sewall mentioned several times in letters to his brother over the summer of 1886, including the August 1 letter, that he expected to leave the Badlands within two years.

“[T]ime does go quick no mistake. it has been more than two years now since I left home and I hope to be back inside of the next two. we are all well and doing as well as we can.” [periods added]

And the Sewalls and Dows would leave within two years—much less than two years, in fact—but not before both families welcomed a “Badlands baby” in August 1886. Fred Sewall was born on August 5, 1886, and Wilmot Edwards Dow was born a week later on August 12, 1886.

As Sewall wrote his brother on August 7, 1886, “[O]n the morning of the 5th Mary and I had a Son born. he came like the Irishmans Elephant but did not strike hard enough to knock his brains out and we hope he has shifted ends. he seems well and all right now. weighs seven lbs.” [periods added]

Sewall recalled in his book that Roosevelt met the babies when they were less than a month old: “Theodore, when he came back to the ranch, about three days after the babies were born, found me making a cradle large enough to hold both babies. He thought I was making too much noise; thought I ought to be more quiet about my work. I told him the noise would be good for them. He laughed about that and told that story as long as he lived.”

When Roosevelt wrote to his sister about meeting Sewall and Dow’s sons in an August 20, 1886, he was quite lighthearted: “Seawall [sic] and Dow have both got wee sons; so the population of my ranch is increasing in a rather alarming manner.”

But the Badlands babies wouldn’t stay Badlands babies for long. When the cattle didn’t sell well in Chicago in the fall of 1886, Dow and Sewall decided it was best if they left so that Roosevelt didn’t lose more money. They talked with Roosevelt and all agreed for Sewall and Dow to take their families back to Maine.

On October 14, 1886, the Sun-Journal of Lewiston, Maine reported, “[Sewall and Dow] have closed up their business there and are coming back to Island Falls with their [f]amilies[.] They have never liked Dakota.”

Even though Sewall, Dow, and Roosevelt all ultimately left the Badlands, it was a place they remembered their entire lives. A little over a year after they left, Roosevelt wrote to Sewall for Christmas and inquired about the “bad lands babies.”

And three years later, Roosevelt asked Sewall in November 1890 letter, “Do Mrs. Sewall and Mrs. Dow ever think of the old ranch house?” Sewall’s reply isn’t in the digital library, but he answered the question years later in his book: “I guess we have all thought all our lives since that it was the happiest time that any of us have known.”

Read more about Bill Sewall and his time in the North Dakota Badlands in our digital encyclopedia article here, and we’d love if you shared your favorite story from Sewall, Dow, and Roosevelt’s time in the Badlands in the comments below.

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Many of Theodore Roosevelt’s most recognized quotations deal with the individual—or at least are used to refer to the individual—so we’re always excited when we find a particularly quotable line that emphasizes community and what Roosevelt would sometimes call “fellow-feeling.”

The quotation we selected for today’s #WednesdayWisdom comes from an August 27, 1902 speech that Roosevelt delivered at the fairgrounds in Bangor, Maine. Roosevelt begins the speech by discussing farming in Maine before transitioning to mentioning the commonality of all Americans from the East to the West.

“Any effort is to be welcomed that brings people closer together, so as to secure a better understanding among those whose walks of life are in ordinary circumstances far apart.”

What’s especially unique about this speech is that the digital library has not only the full text of the speech Roosevelt’s reading copy but also his handwritten edits on the second half of the speech, which gives us an idea of how he wordsmithed his language.

For example, how today’s WednesdayWisdom was originally written before Roosevelt edited it was as follows: “Any kind of serious work should be welcomed that brings people closer together so as to secure a better understanding between one another among those whose ordinary walks of life are in ordinary circumstances far apart.”

As you can see, Roosevelt’s unedited version is longer and more rambling. We find it especially interesting how Roosevelt changed the beginning of the sentence from “serious work” to “effort.”

In addition to these two versions, the digital library also has a letter from Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, an average American, writing about the speech, who compared the speech to a sermon, although in a positive, not a negative, sense.

As she wrote, “A chiliad [a group of a thousand things] of sermons from the pulpit would not hit so many to convince them as that very straight forward talk at the fair-grounds on morals and good citizenship.”

Read Roosevelt’s “very straight forward talk” in the digital library—reading copy or edited version. And if you’re interested in learning more about Roosevelt’s two-day visit to Maine on August 26-27, 1902, visit friend of the TRC Phil Morse’s Narcissus 1912 blog.

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There are many ways to celebrate a birthday. The U.S. Navy marks TR’s birthday as Navy Day. Margaret Foxx Day – an admirer of TR’s – sent him this postcard poem in 1897. Check out the digital library for similar postcard birthday wishes. President Ronald Reagan commemorated TR’s 125^th birthday by naming October 27 a day of national celebration. We will celebrate TR’s birthday with the first every #TeddyCon – a three-day convention hosted by the Center and our friends at the Theodore Roosevelt Association from October 9 – 11. #TeddyCon takes place at the newly minted Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.

The convention will have everything a TR Center annual symposium has and more! More than 15 exhibitors from around the world will be showing off their connections to Roosevelt, including adventure tourism companies from Brazil and Kenya, heritage sites like Pine Knot and the Maine Heritage Trail. The event is sponsored by With Honor, a charity that aims to push beyond partisan politics, Marathon Oil, an industry leading energy company dedicated to sustainability, and more. The convention will have traditional speakers’ panels with prominent authors like Kathleen Dalton, Lindsay Chervinsky, Stacy Cordery, Duane Jundt, Doug Ellison, and Rolf Sletten. Tours to the TR National Park, the Elkhorn Ranch, and the exhibits of the TR Presidential Library will also be available. And it would not be a symposium without entertainment. Folk singer Mason Via will play his song about national parks, a staging of a new play Princess Alice will take place, and the podcasters Larry Marple and Kurt Skinner will present.

Keynote presentations will come from Karl Rove and John Avlon. Rove will speak about Roosevelt’s 1896 political transition from a failed candidate and tired police commissioner into one of the leading lights of the Republican Party. Avlon will discuss his latest book TR’s Guide to Life and his remarkable research on the famous Sorbonne speech best known as the “Man in the Arena” speech.

We hope to see many of our Substack subscribers in Medora for this incredible weekend.

Speaking of partners and visitors, we’ve had plenty of cooperation within the Theodore Roosevelt Center’s operations as well! Earlier in September we were pleased to welcome the TRC’s inaugural visiting fellow—Dr. Ryan Swanson—to the Center as he took the time to speak to center staff, groups around campus and help us determine how we can shape a fellowship program for the future. Dr. Swanson is a friend of the Center and a member of our Advisory Board and was wonderful to have visit our physical site. He plans to return later in the year to deliver some of his thoughts, and once again take advantage of our quiet atmosphere to work on a book project.

We’ve also been able to welcome several student workers back to our offices on the campus of DSU. From returning students to new first-years, we’ve got several workers back in our offices helping us on a number of projects in both the digital library and our physical archives as we continue to arrange and describe our collections.

Work has also begun on preparing materials for next year’s intern season. We typically like to give our interns items from a cohesive period of time to allow them to become familiar with the people and topics being discussed. The first step—where we are now—is the process of connecting images of letters and documents to the empty records we start with, and ensuring that items that don’t already have records are created for inclusion in the cataloging total. This next season we plan to pick up work from where our previous intern season left off and continue work in the early months of 1912. This preparatory work also includes cropping any images that need it (often the case when multiple pages of a letter are included on the same physical piece of paper), so we’re frequently able to enlist our student workers for this step.

Our steadfast volunteers also continue their work, and we continue to welcome new people who are interested in lending a hand. Volunteers do the important work of creating preliminary metadata—confirming dates and typing out names, among other things—that help us to make items available and searchable earlier than they otherwise would be. At present we have roughly 70 volunteers giving us their minutes and hours, and we hugely appreciate their help. If you’d like to lend a hand sometime, please reach out to dsu.trcenter@dickinsonstate.edu, and we’ll get you set up!

We also continue to frequently welcome guests into the TR Center with above-average attendance these past several months. Our current exhibit, Theodore Roosevelt and the Navy, will remain in place for several more months, but we have already begun to brainstorm what our next exhibit will look like. If all goes according to plan, we hope to be able to bring that to you within the year, so if you haven’t made it out to see our current display, try to pencil a visit in to your calendar!

In all aspects, both at TeddyCon and in our day-to-day work, it’s a month of cooperation and collaboration; as always, the work of the TRC couldn’t happen without all the people working together to make it a success!

Since Theodore Roosevelt was such an avid reader, we felt we would be remiss if we didn’t devote a Substack post to Roosevelt and books in October for National Book Month. In case you missed them, we’ve previously looked at Roosevelt’s love of ghost stories, his appreciation for fairy tales, and, most recently, his marginalia.

Before we delve into Roosevelt’s reading habits during the 1904 election, we wanted to briefly mention how he read, which he explained with a reference to a character in a book, of course!

Roosevelt the Reader

In a February 22, 1915 letter to John W. Rhoads, Roosevelt compares his reading skills to the vain Kangaroo—also called Old Man Kangaroo—from Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories who acquired a long tail and powerful legs after being chased by a dingo: “I can only say that my ability to read rapidly has come from incessant practice entered into under duress - in other words, like old man Kangaroo, it was because I had to!”

With that in mind, let’s delve into Roosevelt’s reading habits. It’s well-known what Roosevelt was reading during some of the bigger moments of his life like when he brought the pigskin library with him during the Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition and Anna Karenina during his capture of the boat thieves in 1886 in the Dakota Badlands.

We also love this letter in the digital library in which Roosevelt apologizes to Welles Cone about being unable to locate the book he inquired about, noting that he had received thousands of books and couldn’t keep up with them.

Although Roosevelt couldn’t keep up with the books sent to him (many of which he didn’t have a chance to read), he was able to keep up with what he did reading, including what he read during the 1904 election. As Roosevelt noted in a November 1904 letter to Sir George Otto Trevelyan, “In my hours of leisure I did a good deal of reading.”

But Roosevelt didn’t stop there. He also told Trevelyan what he had read. And a lot of the books were re-reads. Roosevelt specifically listed Trevelyan’s The American Revolution (three volumes in 1904), The Life and Letters of Macaulay, and The Early History of Charles James Fox; Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England; James Ford Rhodes’s History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (four volumes with a fifth volume published in November 1904); and “a good deal of Dickens.”

Since Roosevelt didn’t list out what Dickens books he read, we can’t get a completely accurate page count. But of those specifically named, our best guess is that Roosevelt read at least eight thousand pages during the 1904 election.

But of those eight thousand pages, Roosevelt really only discussed two of the books in greater detail, which we have highlighted below.

Roosevelt on Macaulay’s History of England

Roosevelt devoted the majority of a page to his reflections on Macaulay’s history, which focused on England in the late seventeenth century. He found it quite applicable to the times he faced in the early twentieth century in the United States. And he noted to Trevelyan that he discovered a greater appreciation for Macaulay during this re-read.

Roosevelt also added: “It is a pretty good test of an author to have a President, who is also a candidate for the Presidency, read it in the midst of a campaign with the keenest appreciation of its wisdom, of its knowledge of the motives and acts of men who were engaged in the difficult task of self-government, and with at the same time a great sense of relaxation and pure enjoyment.”

In other words, Roosevelt learned a few things but also enjoyed the reading for its own sake too!

Roosevelt on Charles Dickens

In addition to history books, Roosevelt also devoured the literature of Charles Dickens, an author Roosevelt enjoyed his entire life. His appreciation of Dickens is demonstrated clearly by the fact that two of the fifty-nine books originally included in the pigskin library were written by Dickens: Mutual Friend and Pickwick Papers.

Likewise, his friend Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote to TR in 1906, “Among your better traits in a highly diversified character you possess a proper love of Dickens.”

Roosevelt himself wrote in a 1908 letter to his son Kermit, “I am very fond of [Dickens]. There are innumerable characters that he has created which symbolize vices, virtues, follies and the like almost as well as characters in [John] Bunyan . . .” (Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress was one of Roosevelt’s favorite books.)

So it’s not a surprise that Roosevelt turned to Dickens during the 1904 presidential election campaign. And while we don’t know exactly what he read, in his letter to Trevelyan, he focused in particular on Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit.

Although Roosevelt believed Dickens made a “mistake” in believing that he represented all Americans in the characters he created in the book, Roosevelt still thought Martin Chuzzlewit should be “studied as a tract in America.”

Four years later in 1908, Roosevelt would have stronger words for Dickens in a letter to Kermit: “Naturally [Dickens] would condemn all America because he had not the soul to see what America was really doing. But he was in his element in describing [various American characters in the book] that have always made me enjoy Martin Chuzzlewit.”

If you want to know what Roosevelt really thought of the politicians of his day, you can see which of his contemporaries he compares to characters in Martin Chuzzlewit in both the 1904 letter to Trevelyan and in the 1908 letter to Kermit.

As an example, South Carolina Senator Benjamin Tillman and William Randolph Hearst received Roosevelt’s ire in both letters. As he wrote to Kermit, “Most of those characters we still have with us. . . . We need to war against them now just as much as ever.”

With that, we’ll conclude this brief look at Roosevelt’s reading during the 1904 election and invite you to peruse the nearly 4,500 records in the digital library related to books and reading.

We’d also be dee-lighted if you let us know in the comments below what books you particularly enjoy. What’s your Martin Chuzzlewit or Macaulay’s History of England? To provide a peek behind the curtain, we even surveyed all the TRC staff members to get their picks too, which we’ve listed below.

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In a short October 13, 1904 letter to John St. Loe Strachey written just before election day in November 1904, Theodore Roosevelt briefly reflected on several aspects of politics, including political parties and what he believed his chances were in the presidential election.

We like what Roosevelt has to say about politics because he emphasizes political involvement within the political party system while also rejecting mere adherence to the party, so we selected it for today’s #WednesdayWisdom.

“The best work can only be done by adherence to the best party; but if adherence becomes changed into servility, the result is that that man had better not belong to any party at all, or indeed, take part in any politics.”

No matter what political party someone was a part of, Roosevelt believed good work could be done by involved citizens. It was what he considered “clean politics,” which we discussed in a previous Wednesday Wisdom post.

We also liked this letter in particular because it’s a rare opportunity to get Roosevelt’s own words about what he expected the outcome of the 1904 presidential election to be.

As Roosevelt wrote Strachey, “A candidate can never tell much about his own prospects.” Roosevelt thought the chances “slightly favored” him but also observed, “I may be utterly mistaken.”

Of course, he wasn’t mistaken, winning 56.4 percent of the popular vote and becoming the first accidental president (someone who became president upon the death of his predecessor) to win a term in his own right. (He also was the first non-midwestern Republican to be elected president.)

And we know that Roosevelt followed his own advice, changing parties in 1912 to avoid blind adherence to a Republican Party that he believed was too conservative and not progressive enough. In this way, Roosevelt demonstrated that trying to bring about the best work was more important than mere political affiliation.

Read the entire letter here.

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For this month’s Voter’s Choice post, we are dee-lighted to examine Theodore Roosevelt and coffee in honor of National Coffee Day tomorrow. And we promise it will be good to the last drop with new information about Roosevelt and coffee even if you think you’ve read it all!

Roosevelt’s Preferred Type of Coffee

We all know that Roosevelt loved coffee. As his son Ted wrote in his book, All in the Family, “Now Father was very fond of coffee and always had a special cup. It was so large it was more in the nature of a bathtub.”

His younger daughter Ethel likewise remembered her father’s cup, as she wrote in 1919: “The big flowered cup. No one else had such a large cup.” (We believe the big, flowered cup that Ethel mentions could be this one displayed at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site.)

But we’re guessing you don’t know Roosevelt’s preferred type of coffee. And we didn’t either until we ran across a June 13, 1906 letter from Edith to Ethel, who was at the family home of Sagamore Hill with her two younger brothers, Archie and Quentin: “I have likewise ordered the coffee which is also the kind we all use unless Father is at home, when I have Porto Rico coffee.”

And we discovered more confirmation in the digital library about Roosevelt’s preference for Puerto Rican coffee. In 1903, Roosevelt thanked William Henry Hunt, governor of Puerto Rico, for the coffee: “I write to tell you how much I have enjoyed the Porto Rican coffee. Our whole family have taken to it so now we use no other.”

Three years later, Roosevelt wrote in a 1906 letter to Beekman Winthrop, the new governor of Puerto Rico, “For some years past we have used only Porto Rican coffee in the White House; we like it . . .” (At the time, it appears Roosevelt paid $2.50, or over $90.00, today for Puerto Rican coffee, but we don’t know how many pounds that was.)

Much like today, Puerto Rican coffee during Roosevelt’s time was known for its rich and aromatic flavor and comprised a small portion of the coffee production compared to other countries in the world. It was even reportedly the choice of “popes and kings.” In other words, Roosevelt liked a specialty coffee.

Just a few years before Roosevelt became president, a hurricane had devastated the coffee crops in Puerto Rico, and the country struggled to build up its coffee industry again. From 1901 (two years after the hurricane) until 1911, the number of pounds imported to the United States fluctuated.

In 1906, for example, Puerto Rico exported roughly two hundred thousand pounds of coffee to the United States—quite small compared to 1903 when it exported six million pounds of coffee!

As another comparison point, during the early 1910s before World War I, Puerto Rico was just a small sliver of the coffee production pie compared to Brazil which produced roughly two-thirds of the total coffee production in the world, according to a graph in All About Coffee (1922), which we’ve included below.

Roosevelt even spoke to Congress in 1906 after his visit to Puerto Rico about taking some measure to benefit the “excellent and high-grade Porto Rican coffee,” since the industry had not recovered from the devastation of the hurricane a few years before.

But even though Puerto Rican coffee was Roosevelt’s top choice, he also asked for preference to be given to Hawaiian coffee as well in a 1904 letter to the acting secretary of war.

How Roosevelt Liked His Coffee

While we might expect Roosevelt to drink his coffee black, he actually liked it sweet and used both sugar and saccharine. In 1911, Roosevelt wrote a letter to John F. Queeny, the president of Monsanto, which he’d founded in 1901 to produce saccharine, then only produced in Germany. Roosevelt had a disagreement with Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley about the health effects of saccharine, but told Queeny, “[I] have used it myself for many years as a substitute for sugar in tea and coffee without feeling the slightest bad effects.”

As for how he put the sugar or saccharine into his coffee, it was a whole process, which Roosevelt described in a January 1918 letter to his son-in-law Dick Derby, mentioning that Dick’s nearly four-year-old son Richard helped his grandfather.

“I took him in to the dining room where we went through the usual formalities; I got him a lump of sugar; he held the strainer in his chubby little hands while I poured the hot milk into the coffee, and he [superintended] with absorbed interest the disappearance of the butter in my egg cup.”

Ethel likewise remembers the strainer and saccharine, as she wrote in 1919: “The silver tea strainer held so carefully over. When all was ready dropping the saccharine which fizzed so pleasantly.”

The Roosevelts’ Coffeehouse

Although we’ve spent much of this Substack post discussing Roosevelt and coffee, we wanted to at least briefly mention the coffeehouse his children established after World War I.

Inspired by his time in South America, Roosevelt’s second son Kermit wanted to open a coffeehouse in New York City that served coffee the Brazilian way. Newspaper articles suggested a couple different origin stories from Kermit first having the idea while descending the River of Doubt in 1914 to the Roosevelt sons thinking about it while overseas in 1917 and 1918 fighting in World War I.

But according to Philip James Roosevelt, Kermit first had the idea in 1916 after regularly frequenting a coffeehouse in New York owned by Alfredo M. Salazar, a Brazilian whom Kermit initially met in Brazil in 1913.

Kermit, his brothers, and his cousin Philip had planned to open the coffeehouse in early 1917, but the entrance of the United States in the war hindered their plans. When they returned from France after the war had ended, they took up the proposal again. On November 13, 1919, the Brazilian Coffee House opened its doors.

The name changed in early 1921 to the Double-R Coffee House to avoid legal issues with the original name. One “R” stood for Roosevelt and the other for Robinson, the last name of the Roosevelts’ cousin, who was also associated with the business.

By June 1921, the coffeehouse had expanded to a second location on Lexington Avenue and would later expand to two other locations, the Colombian and the Amazon. The Roosevelts even considered expanding to other cities like Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, but that never came to fruition.

According to a newspaper article, their coffeehouse became “the gathering place for aspiring playwrights, actors, artists and musicians,” notably H.P. Lovecraft, who even wrote a poem about the Double-R.

But by the late 1920s, the Roosevelts had moved on to other interests and pursuits. In 1928, they sold the coffeehouse to Zivko and Aneta Magdich, who had first met there five years before.

Myths about Theodore Roosevelt and Coffee

Finally, a Substack post about Roosevelt and coffee wouldn’t be complete without briefly addressing two common myths that are cited regularly across the internet like him coining the Maxwell House saying, “Good to the last drop!” or even the idea of him drinking a gallon of coffee a day. We know the former is false - it was already a common advertising slogan before Roosevelt is supposed to have said it, and there’s no contemporary evidence that he did - and we personally haven’t been able to source the latter.

With that, we hope you’ve enjoyed the deep dive about Theodore Roosevelt and coffee, all while drinking a Theodore Roosevelt-sized cup of coffee, of course!

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We would be remiss in this Substack post about nicknames if we didn’t at least briefly discuss Roosevelt’s own nicknames. We get asked a lot about Roosevelt’s own use of the nickname “Teddy.”

And several years ago, we reviewed three hundred letters Roosevelt wrote between 1867 and 1885. The earliest items were signed formally, “Theodore Roosevelt,” probably showing the influence of the tutor or other adult teaching him how to write a letter. In 1871 the family nickname Tedie (variously spelled “T.D.” or “Teedie”) appears.

By 1875 the predominant signature becomes “Thee Jr.,” and in 1878, after the death of his father, “Jr.” is dropped. “Thee” is used in more than 100 letters, mostly to family, including Roosevelt’s first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee.

So how rare is the “Teddy” signature? Based on the three hundred letters we reviewed, Roosevelt signed “Teddy” only twelve times, including seven of which were addressed to his sister Corinne like those we mentioned in the post about Roosevelt and his father around the time of their father’s death. The last letter with a “Teddy” signature is dated July 1, 1883 (see below).

Alice (wife)

Roosevelt had many nicknames and pet names for his first wife Alice, and he used a lot for himself with Alice. Here’s just a sampling of the ways he addressed letters to Alice.

• “Darling Little Sunshine” (June 8, 1880)

• “Darling Queenie” (August 15, 1880)

• “My Dearest Love” (October 17, 1880)

• “Darling, best beloved, little Wife” (March 28, 1881)

• “Darling baby” (March 29, 1881)

• “Darling Little Wife” (April 6, 1881)

• “Blessed little heart’s-darling” (October 9, 1881)

• “Blessed Wifie” (October 14, 1881)

• “My purest and sweetest little wife” (November 5, 1881)

• “My Blessed Little Wifie” (December 31, 1882)

• And Roosevelt’s personal favorite: “Darling Wifie” (April 6, 1882, March 6, 1883, April 18, 1883, June 15, 1883, September 8, 1883, September 14, 1883, September 17, 1883, September 20, 1883, September 23, 1883, January 22, 1884, January 28, 1884, January 30, 1884, February 5, 1884, February 6, 1884, and February 7, 1884)

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Edith

Years before Roosevelt and his second wife Edith Kermit Carow married, they were childhood friends. And the nickname Roosevelt used for Edith his entire life was Edie—or “Eidie” as in the case of this January 1870 letter below.

Relatively few letters between Roosevelt and Edith after they became adults exist, and the ones that do offer insights not only into the pet names Roosevelt had for his second wife but also the relationship between the two of them. We’ve included them below:

• “My own darling true-love” (February 16, 1902)

• “Darling Edie” (November 14, 1903, October 10, 1907, and March 17, 1908)

• “Darling” (March 15, 1906)

• And our personal favorite: “Oh, sweetest of all sweet girls” (November 12, 1909)

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Alice (daughter)

In correspondence, Roosevelt very rarely used nicknames to refer to his elder daughter. As we mentioned in our previous post about Alice, he also very rarely used her given name when corresponding with other people—although you do see it occasionally.

In letters to Alice herself, Roosevelt seems to have addressed them to “Alice,” although on a few occasions he called her “Alicey” as in an 1897 letter (when she was thirteen) and in a 1908 letter (when she was twenty-four).

Rather, the preferred name for Alice was “Sister” followed by “Auntie Sister” when Roosevelt’s children grew up and had their own children. Although Roosevelt occasionally turned this into a nickname like “Sissy” or even “Sissy Wissy” in a 1906 letter to Ethel, he mostly used just “Sister.”

But one particularly endearing nickname for Alice appears in a September 1884 letter from Roosevelt to his sister Anna “Bye” when he was hunting out west. Roosevelt mentions how much he is looking forward to seeing his seven-month-old daughter and uses a special name for her. (This isn’t the only time Roosevelt appended “kins” to a name. See more below.)

“I shall be very, very glad to see you all again; I hope Mousiekins will be very cunning; I shall dearly love her.”

Ted

When Ted was very young, Roosevelt used a particularly fun name in a September 5, 1890 letter to his eldest son: “Ted-ped.” (We also like this letter because it’s written from North Dakota!)

But by the early 1900s, Roosevelt’s nickname of choice for Ted was “Blessed Ted,” which he used as the greeting in numerous letters to his eldest son. In one instance, Roosevelt even penciled out whatever word had been typed in front of Ted and handwrote “Blessed.”

As he got older, Roosevelt sometimes added “old,” making it “Blessed Old Ted,” as in this October 2, 1905 letter.

Kermit

As far as we’re aware, Roosevelt seems to have used nicknames the least for Kermit. You do occasionally find instances, as in this September 1897 letter and in this March 1903 letter where Roosevelt addressed him as “Blessed Kermit-boy.”

Ethel

Roosevelt’s three youngest children seemed to have more nicknames than the older three, which makes sense with them being the “babies” of the family. We came across several nicknames for his younger daughter Ethel, including the preferred “Ethely-bye,” which he used throughout her childhood—and even sometimes “Blessed, blessed Ethely-bye.”

This nickname even inspired the commemorative “Ethely-Bye” teddy bear (see below) from the early 2000s celebrating the 100^th anniversary of the teddy bear.

Other nicknames we came across were “Darling little Ethel”and “Blessed Ethley Bykins.” The latter he even used in 1909 and in 1910 when Ethel was eighteen years old and nineteen years old!

Archie

“Archie-kins” was Roosevelt’s preferred nickname for his third son. You can see examples throughout his correspondence either to Archie or to other family members using this name. And Archie seems to have been the Roosevelt child mostly likely to have “kins” in a nickname/pet name.

But Roosevelt also added “kins” to other children’s names to make nicknames, including kids who weren’t even his—as in the case of James A. Garfield, son of US Civil Service Commissioner James Rudolph Garfield, who later served in Roosevelt’s cabinet.

Quentin

Besides Ethel, the baby of the family, Quentin, probably received the greatest number of nicknames. He was called Quenty-Quee—both in letters to him and about him. Sometimes it was hyphenated, sometimes not. Quentin was also sometimes just “Quenty” as in a June 12, 1904 letter to Archie, which featured two nicknames: Archie-kins and Quenty.

As Quentin got older, Roosevelt began to address letters to Quentin by his given name or sometimes simply as “Q.” Quentin himself also occasionally used “Quent.”

We hope you enjoyed this brief glance into the Roosevelt family’s nicknames and pet names. Let us know about any nicknames we might have missed in the comments below—or just share your favorite! Personally, we’re partial to Quenty-quee ourselves.

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