Word: rooseveltism
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...Whip smart and witty, eccentric and strikingly beautiful, had she been born in another age, Alice Roosevelt Longworth might have ended up a scientist, a writer or a particularly brutal judge on American Idol. Instead, she is remembered as one of the capital's most successful hostesses, a gifted gossip whose decades of sharing filet of beef and sly one-liners with statesmen and their wives led her to call herself "an ambulatory Washington monument...
...Probably the defining moment in Alice's life came when her mother, Alice Lee Roosevelt, died two days after giving birth to her in 1884. Later that same day, in the same house, T.R.'s mother died. A devastated Teddy retreated to the Dakota Territory to grieve. During her first three years, Alice was cared for by Teddy's sister Bamie on Long Island. After T.R. remarried, this time to his childhood sweetheart Edith Carow, Alice went to live with the couple and was eventually joined by five siblings. Teddy never mentioned Alice's deceased mother, a behavior Alice grew...
...Theodore Roosevelt once lamented, "there is not any more puzzling problem in this country than the problem of color." More puzzling to us now are his conflicted views on race. On the one hand, he could write that "the only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man." But as was common among whites at the time, his opinion of blacks as a group was rather dim. "As a race, and in the mass," he wrote in a letter in 1906, "they...
...incidents of Roosevelt's presidency represent his disappointing legacy on race. The first was his invitation to black educator Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House-an act of political courage at the time. Washington, a former slave and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, was, in Roosevelt's view, "the most useful, as well as the most distinguished, member of his race in the world." On the first day of his presidency, Roosevelt sent a note to Washington inviting him to the White House to discuss suitable candidates for patronage appointments in the South...
...Roosevelt privately expressed his "melancholy" over the South's "violent chronic hysteria," blacks looked upon Roosevelt as a savior and anointed Washington as their hero. The President vowed to invite Washington to dine "just as often as I please." But although Roosevelt consulted Washington throughout his presidency, neither the Tuskegee chief, nor any other black person, ever supped at the White House with Roosevelt again...