Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt

A Childhood Bond on Union Square

Edith Kermit Carow and Theodore Roosevelt grew up as neighbors near Union Square in Manhattan in the 1860s. They were close from early childhood. As Corinne later put it, she and Edith were “pledged friends from the time of their birth,” and Edith shared Theodore's love of books.

Edith's father, Charles Carow, struggled with business failures and drinking, and the family's fortunes fell. Through her mother, Gertrude Tyler Carow, Edith descended from the theologian Jonathan Edwards.

When the Roosevelts sailed for Europe on May 12, 1869, ten-year-old Theodore wrote in his diary, "It was verry hard parting from our friend." Biographers read the friend as Edith. In Paris that November he wrote:

"In the evening mama showed me the portrait of Eidieth Carow and her face stired up in me homesickness and longings for the past which will come again never, alack never."

— Theodore Roosevelt, diary, Paris, November 1869

He told Edith she was his "most faithful correspondent."

At Harvard, Theodore met Alice Hathaway Lee, known as "Sunshine," and married her.

Grief, Exile, and the Return

Alice Lee Roosevelt died on February 14, 1884, two days after giving birth to their daughter. The diary entry for that day, under a large X, reads simply: "The light has gone out of my life." He left baby Alice in the care of his eldest sister, Bamie, and in June 1884 went west to the Dakota Badlands.

In the autumn of 1885 Edith and Theodore met again by chance at Bamie's house. On November 17, 1885, less than two years after Alice's death, he proposed. Edith said yes, and they kept the engagement secret.

A Marriage of Discretion and Depth

They were married on December 2, 1886, in London, in a small, quiet ceremony at St. George's, Hanover Square. The full story of the courtship, the leaked engagement and the London wedding is on Edith Roosevelt: Courtship, Marriage and Sagamore Hill.

Edith brought nearly three-year-old Alice into the household and raised her alongside her own five children. Their relationship was often complicated.

The First Lady and the 1902 Renovation

When Theodore Roosevelt became President in September 1901, after McKinley's assassination, Edith was 40.

In 1902 Edith Roosevelt asked architect Charles F. McKim, of McKim, Mead & White, how to make the cramped family quarters livable. His answer was a full renovation, paid for by Congress and approved by the President: the offices moved to a new executive office building (today's West Wing), and the family's living space roughly doubled. Edith worked closely with McKim on the interiors. She approved every fabric and piece of furniture, and saved antiques McKim would have sent away. She had cabinets built to display the presidential china and tracked down pieces of earlier sets. She also began the tradition of hanging First Ladies' portraits on the Ground Floor.

She ran the social side of the house just as closely. She hired Belle Hagner as the first White House social secretary, organized state dinners with ceremonial precision, and each week met with the wives of the Cabinet. She made musicales a regular part of White House life, with performers such as cellist Pablo Casals and pianist Ignacy Paderewski.

She was also an informal political adviser. She and Theodore usually spent an hour alone each morning talking over affairs of state. Twice she served as a diplomatic go-between: Cecil Spring Rice wrote to her from St. Petersburg so his reports would not pass through official channels, and Ambassador Whitelaw Reid sent her long letters on British politics. In public she kept her distance, and her standard reply to petitioners was that she took no part in government affairs.

The Protector and the Household Manager

Newspapers wanted every detail of the Roosevelt children's lives. Edith kept reporters at a distance and supplied the press with posed family portraits instead, many taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston.

At home she was mother to six children, including her teenage stepdaughter, Alice. She oversaw the schooling of her five children, managed a staff of servants and secretaries, and managed the family finances.

The Later Years: Matriarch and Widow

After the presidency, Edith carried on as the family's matriarch. Theodore died on January 6, 1919, at Sagamore Hill, in Oyster Bay, Long Island. Edith was 57.

Her widowhood was anything but quiet. She traveled to Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, wrote two books, Cleared for Strange Ports (1927) and American Backlogs (1928), and campaigned for Herbert Hoover in 1932. In 1927 she also bought Mortlake Manor. She guarded Theodore's legacy and helped see his writings into print. She also destroyed her love letters from him, to keep their private life private.

She outlived him by 29 years and died in 1948, at 87.