Ethel Roosevelt Derby’s First World War

Theodore Roosevelt's younger daughter was the first of his children to reach the war. Long before the United States joined the fighting, Ethel Roosevelt Derby was in France, caring for wounded soldiers.

A Surgeon's Wife

In February 1913 Ethel told her parents she would marry Dr. Richard Derby. "Dick," a New York surgeon ten years older than Ethel, had been courting her for a long time.

They married on April 4, 1913, at Christ Church in Oyster Bay, the Roosevelts' parish church. Their son, Richard Derby Jr., was born in March 1914.

Five months later, Europe went to war.

Theodore Roosevelt in a dark overcoat standing among wedding guests under a covered porch, 1913

T.R. among the guests at Ethel’s wedding to Dr. Richard Derby at Oyster Bay, April 4, 1913. (Bain News Service / Library of Congress)

Three women in white caps and aprons at worktables in a tall-windowed room piled with rolled bandages and dressings.

Volunteers preparing surgical dressings at the American Ambulance Hospital in Neuilly, where Ethel nursed in 1914. The photograph was taken a little later, between 1915 and 1920. (American National Red Cross / Library of Congress)

Paris, Autumn 1914

The United States stayed neutral, but many Americans volunteered to help. In late September 1914 Dick Derby answered a call from Dr. Joseph Blake, the New York surgeon running the American Ambulance Hospital in Neuilly, on the western edge of Paris, for American surgeons to help with the wounded. Despite its name, it was a full hospital, with wards and operating rooms, run by Americans to treat Allied wounded.

Ethel went with him, to work as a nurse. She left her six-month-old son with her parents at Sagamore Hill.

It was hard work, and her father knew it. In a letter that November, T.R. told Ethel he knew she and Dick were having a difficult time and that he was proud of what they were doing.

Letters from Sagamore Hill

T.R.'s pride and worry ran side by side. He praised Ethel and Dick for taking their share of the work in a terrible war, and he admitted that the family at home worried about them a great deal.

Back home, the former President had a new companion. "I have completely succumbed to him," he wrote of his grandson. Each morning the baby smiled, cooed and reached to be picked up, and when T.R. tried to amuse him with a pocket watch, little Richard put it straight into his mouth.

On December 19 T.R. told an English friend that Ethel and Dick had been working at the American hospital in Paris for three months. Within days they were home. The liner Lusitania reached New York on December 23, 1914, in time for Christmas, and the New-York Tribune reported the next day that Dr. Derby and his wife had returned from hospital work in France.

Waiting at Home, 1917–1918

When the United States entered the war in April 1917, all four of Ethel's brothers went. Ted and Archie went to France with the Army. Kermit joined the British forces in Mesopotamia and later moved to American artillery. Quentin, the youngest, became a pilot and flew in France.

Dick Derby joined the Army Medical Corps and sailed for France on November 12, 1917. This time Ethel stayed home. A daughter, Edith, had been born that year, and Ethel stayed in Oyster Bay with her two small children, close to her parents.

In February 1918 her father was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital in New York, gravely ill, and Ethel was among the family members who gathered there.

The news from France came in pieces. Archie was badly wounded in March 1918. Dick himself was knocked down by an exploding shell. In July, when Ted was shot in the leg and made his way to Paris, it was his brother-in-law Dick who examined the wound and got him into surgery.

July 1918

On July 14, 1918, Quentin Roosevelt was killed in aerial combat over France. He was 20.

Every room at Sagamore Hill held a memory of him. Ethel asked her parents to come to her family's summer place at Dark Harbor, on Islesboro in Maine, and on July 25 they went. There, with their grandchildren around them, Theodore and Edith could grieve away from public attention.

The loss stayed with T.R. for the rest of his life. He died at Sagamore Hill on January 6, 1919.

Six Decades with the Red Cross

Service became the work of Ethel's life. She gave some six decades of volunteer service to the American Red Cross in Oyster Bay, and she worked for the Red Cross and the Nassau County Nursing Service across her home county.

Her family knew more grief. In October 1922 her son Richard, the grandson T.R. had adored, died suddenly at eight of blood poisoning. Ethel and Dick raised three daughters, Edith, Sarah and Judith, in Oyster Bay.

She also became a guardian of her father's memory. Ethel worked for years to help turn Sagamore Hill into a place the public could visit, and she lived to see it become a National Historic Site. She died in 1977 and is buried with her husband and parents in Youngs Cemetery in Oyster Bay.

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Primary Sources

From the Archives

Explore original photographs, documents, and illustrations in the Theodore Roosevelt Center Digital Library.

Recommended Reading

  • Sylvia Jukes Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980). ISBN 978-0-698-10994-0
  • Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). ISBN 978-0-679-44663-7
  • Edward J. Renehan Jr., The Lion's Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). ISBN 978-0-19-512719-5
  • Hermann Hagedorn, The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill (New York: Macmillan, 1954).