Alice Roosevelt Longworth in Her Own Words

Checking the Quotes

Alice knew she had a quotation problem. In her 1933 memoir, Crowded Hours, she described how a line she had only repeated, and carefully credited to someone else, was soon "attributed to me."

So this page works like a fact-check. Each line shows where it first appears in print, when, and what was going on. Where the trail leads to someone else, the page says so. Some of her most famous lines have the shakiest paper trail.

On Washington

"Harding was not a bad man. He was just a slob."

Source: Crowded Hours (1933). Writing about the scandals of the Harding years, Alice argued that the coming disclosures had worn down the President's health.

"If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me."

Source: the earliest printing found is Jean vanden Heuvel's profile "The Sharpest Wit in Washington," Saturday Evening Post, December 4, 1965. The words were embroidered on a pillow in Alice's upstairs sitting room. The New York Times printed the same wording in November 1966. Later books give looser versions ("If you haven't got anything good to say about anyone, come and sit by me"). The 1965 wording is the one with a paper trail. Nobody knows who first stitched the joke, but Alice made it famous.

What She Didn't Say (or Didn't Say First)

"He looks as if he'd been weaned on a pickle." Newspapers were quoting Alice on Calvin Coolidge by August 1924, and she clearly enjoyed repeating the line. In Crowded Hours, though, she gave credit to another patient of her doctor, who had passed it along to her. Later retellings say her dentist. "Weaned on a pickle" had been a put-down for sour people since at least the 1860s.

"The bridegroom on a wedding cake." In 1944 Time reported that Alice was giving this jab at Thomas Dewey wide circulation. She later credited the actress Ethel Barrymore, and in a letter William Safire printed in his 1972 book, The New Language of Politics, she said she had first heard it from her friend Grace Hodgson Flandrau. Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms had used the phrase about Dewey weeks earlier.

"The bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral." The line is widely credited to Alice. But a 1910 item in the San Francisco Call credits it to Ted Jr., and William Roscoe Thayer's 1919 biography of T.R. credits "one of his boys": "Father never likes to go to a wedding or a funeral, because he can't be the bride at the wedding or the corpse at the funeral." Which child said it first is unknown.

"One-third mush and two-thirds Eleanor." This dig at Franklin is usually credited to Alice. But the wording varies from book to book, at least one biography credits her stepmother, Edith Roosevelt, instead, and no primary source has been found. Treat it as unsettled.