Notwithstanding the self-conscious nature of his letters, compounded by the solipsism of his writings, biographers have not found TR’s life—particularly his family life—offputtingly enigmatic. Distinguished historian McCullough’s National Book Award-winning Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt limns TR’s formative first twenty-eight years prior to marrying Edith Kermit Carow, his second wife. Tragically, both his mother, Martha Stewart “Mittie” née Bulloch Roosevelt, and his young first wife, Alice Hathaway née Lee Roosevelt, had died within eleven hours of each other in the same house on St. Valentine’s Day, 1884. The former died from typhoid fever and the latter from Bright’s disease. TR never spoke of his first wife, who just two days before had given birth to their rebellious namesake daughter. Known derisively as “Princess Alice” (Felsenthal’s Princess Alice: The Life and Times of Alice Roosevelt Longworth), her rebelliousness would later provoke an exasperated TR to expostulate: “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.”
The literature is chockablock with other contemporaneous reminiscences by family and friends, such as the fetishized paean of younger sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson (My Brother Theodore Roosevelt). Soon after his death, his circle of friends, including political confidante Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Lewis Einstein, William Roscoe Thayer, Lord Charnwood, Harold Howland, William Draper Lewis, et al., transcribed early nostalgic tributes. Frederick S. Wood’s Roosevelt as We Knew Him: The Personal Recollections of One Hundred and Fifty of His Friends and Associates anthologizes many anecdotal testimonials. Two notable examples are Roosevelt, the Story of a Friendship, 1880–1919, by Owen Wister, TR’s Harvard classmate and the celebrated author of the prototypical western novel The Virginian; and Maine guide and co-adventurer, Bill Sewall’s very early homage to their ongoing relationship (Bill Sewall’s Story of T.R.). Andrew Vietze enlarges on Sewall in his Becoming Teddy Roosevelt: How a Maine Guide Inspired America’s 26th President. Similarly, friend and social intimate, biographer, and first TRA director Hermann Hagedorn recounts (The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill) TR’s family-oriented environment in Oyster Bay, New York. Historian Bill Bleyer (Sagamore Hill: Theodore Roosevelt’s Summer White House) gives this subject more recent treatment and includes previously unpublished photographs. When TR died at Sagamore Hill in 1919, son Archie wrote remorsefully that “the old lion is dead.” By then, however, as Renehan’s The Lion’s Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War insightfully recounts, all five children had “manned up” to serve in WWI (even daughter Ethel at the American Ambulance Hospital); two were wounded and the youngest, 95th Aero Squadron Second Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt (Eric Burns’s The Golden Lad: The Haunting Story of Quentin and Theodore Roosevelt), died in France at the age twenty. More fine-grained than any previous account of the bellicose old lion’s cognitive dissonance over the events of WWI, historian J. Lee Thompson (Never Call Retreat: Theodore Roosevelt and the Great War) regales readers with “an engaging, well-researched, and thoroughly documented narrative history.”
In 1931, the first debunking retrospective, Henry Pringle’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography, attempted to square the circle of TR’s causal, self-motivating psychologies: in his “Henry Pringle’s Theodore Roosevelt: A Study in Historical Revisionism,” Collin avers that “this single book changed the public image of Theodore Roosevelt from an Olympian near-god to an adolescent neurotic.” Of Pringle’s non-hagiography, the TRA waspishly harrumphs “[it] was for many years the most influential book about Roosevelt. Pringle’s scholarship has been supplanted by Harbaugh, Morris, and others, but the book is still useful as a negative view of TR’s career.”
