EXHIBITION

The President's Wife and the Librarian
April 2, 2009 to December 31, 2009

Edith Roosevelt and Marion King at Sagamore Hill, 1930 The New York Society Library

Edith Roosevelt in 1901 Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library

Introduction
MARK BARTLETT, HEAD LIBRARIAN

Mrs. King's friendship with Mrs. Roosevelt was a quintessential example of the relationship that exists today between staff and members. The President's Wife and the Librarian is a story about the Society Library, but it is also a story of New York City in a time now thought of with nostalgia. It is a piece of the reading history of America, seen through the bookish life of the President's wife.

Charles Carow, New York Society Library shareholder, at the time of his marriage to Gertrude Tyler in 1859. Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, National Park Service

Charles Carow with his baby daughter, Edith. Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, National Park Service

Edith Kermit Roosevelt: A Biographical Essay
SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS

British-born biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris is the author of Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady and Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce.

"She is not only cultured but scholarly," TR once said proudly of Edith Kermit Roosevelt. Acknowledging her astuteness, he said that he ignored her advice at his peril. "The person who had the long head in politics was mother," their daughter Ethel remarked. A White House valet observed that the First Lady was a shrewder judge of people than her husband. Mark Sullivan, the editor of Collier’s Weekly, wrote that in the opinion of many, Mrs. Roosevelt was "greater among women than her husband among men."

The Roosevelt family in 1895. From left, TR, Archie, Ted, Alice, Kermit, Edith and Ethel. National Park Service, Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, National Historic Site

Memories of such compliments did little to mitigate Edith’s loneliness in widowhood. After her youngest son died in World War I and her other children married, she looked increasingly to books for intellectual sustenance. A New Yorker bred, if not born, and an omnivorous reader, she found her New York Society Library membership helped to fill a diminished life.

An envelope addressed to Marion King by Edith Roosevelt. John and Rita DePasquale

Letters at an Exhibtion
HARRIET SHAPIRO

Harriet Shapiro, an editor and translator, is Head of Exhibitions at the New York Society Library.

On March 4, 1909 after eight years in the White House, the Theodore Roosevelts returned to Sagamore Hill, their house in Oyster Bay. Edith Kermit Roosevelt now had time to resume her visits to the New York Society Library where she had long been a member. Watching her arrival at 109 University Place was the young staff member Marion Morrison King. She recalled that Mrs. Roosevelt climbed the stairs to the main hall with baskets of flowers in her arms for the staff and left a few minutes later with the same baskets now filled with books. Writing of that moment nearly fifty years later in her memoir, Books and People, Marion Morrison King could still hear the sound of "her high heels clicking down the long stairs."

In time the president's wife and the librarian would begin a correspondence that lasted from 1920 to 1947. Five hundred and eighty-eight letters preserved in the Houghton Library at Harvard University document their literary friendship. Mrs. King saved Mrs. Roosevelt's letters. Mrs. Roosevelt destroyed much of her private correspondence, including nearly all of Mrs. King's letters. A passion for books, a code of behavior imposed by shared values of upbringing and class and a strong sense of social discretion created a unique bond between the two, broken only by Mrs. Roosevelt's death in 1948. "Hers was an accomplished mind," Mrs. King wrote of her friend, "and her discriminating judgment made her pronouncements on books of great value to us through all the years of her long life."

Marion Morrison in 1909, two years before her marriage to Frederick Gore King. John and Rita DePasquale

An excerpt from Books and People
MARION MORRISON KING

Marion Morrison King joined the New York Society Library as a desk assistant in 1907. She retired in 1954.

I had come to know Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt in our little exchanges over books, and the discovery of distant in-laws in common had been another step in our acquaintance. That September [of 1920] she asked me to come down to Sagamore Hill for lunch, bringing my little daughter. From that pleasant beginning grew one of the long, rewarding friendships of my life, a delight that lasted through twenty-seven years, until the period of her final illness.

Books are a great bond, and Mrs. Roosevelt, to whom they were the very staff of life, enjoyed the talk that circles around their centers of supply. I soon began going down for weekends several times a year, intervals of infinite refreshment and stimulation. To arrive at Sagamore on a hot, late Friday afternoon, tired, and sprinkled with the black soot featured by that Oyster Bay train, to find her framed in the doorway, or in the earlier years waiting in the car at the station; to be drawn into the dim coolness of the spacious old house and steep in its quiet welcome until Monday morning, time and again was very heaven.

Marion King’s daughter Alice, sitting on the porch railing at Sagamore Hill, August 4, 1929. John and Rita DePasquale

Alice Gore King with her first puppy. John and Rita DePasquale

Letters to my Mother
ALICE GORE KING

From an article by Alice Gore King, the daughter of New York Society Librarian Marion Morrison King, published in the summer 1981, Vol. VII, no. 3, 1981 Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal.

The letters show humor, compassion, concern for her friends, affection for her family. She felt personal loss deeply but always rose to it. The letters are a social history. They discuss changes in the Administration, the two World Wars, diplomatic life, neighborhood news, and then her declining years, her dislike of the aging process - but always, her reading.

They are the story of a friendship between two intellectual, sensitive people. Formal for years, beginning: “Dear Mrs. King” (it was ten years before Mrs. Roosevelt addressed my mother by her first name), ending with her name in full or just initials. Affection was expressed simply through a message from Shady, her dog, sending "love to Alice."

A Note on Edith Roosevelt's Papers at Harvard University
WALLACE FINLEY DAILEY

Wallace Finley Dailey is the Curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College.

Let me begin by saying that in case anyone wonders whether two persons both devoted to detail (or at least in my case, I may say obsessed with detail) can get along, I must tell you that they can, and we did, famously so far as I am concerned. I'm very grateful to Harriet for letting me share in this.

The scene is a century and a quarter ago, thirty blocks south of here, though thirty-five blocks north of this library's location at the time.

Fifty years later one of your illustrious members recalls his family's next-door neighbors:

Mr. Robinson's wife was a dignified but lively young lady who had been Miss Corinne Roosevelt. She knew how to write poetry, turn cartwheels and stand on her head. Not that we ever saw her do any of these, though I longed to. She was the sister of a youth named Theodore Roosevelt who was getting to be active in politics, and who talked too much, Father said. Later, he became President. Distinguished visitors often went up and down the steps of 422 [Madison Avenue].*

Thus Clarence Day, Jr. on Clarence Day, Sr. At least as portrayed by William Powell in the film version of Life with Father, could he be confused with Theodore Roosevelt himself? (Each had four sons, emphatically held opinions, a fondness for horseback riding, the habit of reading old history and mid-Victorian novels, and, in later years, an aversion to Woodrow Wilson.) But there were definite differences in their parenting styles, which I do not have time even to summarize. Suffice it to say that each man also had a devoted and enabling spouse. On the one hand, however, Vinnie Day tricked Father into putting up her relatives as overnight guests: "One of the things Father especially detested about [them] was the suddenness with which they arrived. ... The reason Mother never told him in advance was that he'd then have had two explosions--one when he was forbidding their coming, and one when they came."** On the other hand, Edith Roosevelt was creating a quiet place for Theodore to study and write, and managed the family finances.

More crucially for us, after his death Edith managed her husband's legacy. As I sketch in the catalogue for this exhibition, she carried through the transfer of his papers to the Library of Congress, he who had during his administration initiated the library's housing of a succession of presidential papers, and she loaned papers that fell outside the scope of this gift to the Roosevelt Memorial Association, which opened a library at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace in 1923--sixty blocks south of here-- which twenty years later came to Harvard. But her own papers and a good deal of Theodore's personal correspondence, notably his letters to his sister Anna Cowles, did not become available until another association transfer to Harvard in 1968. And it was only after the death of Theodore and Edith's daughter Ethel Derby, that the rest of Edith's papers arrived there. Her reputation for privacy was borne out; she had burned most of the letters she exchanged with Theodore (except for a batch that she wrote in the 1890s), lest they be published as the Brownings' courtship correspondence had been, she said; of the rest, her pocket diaries and exchanges with daughter Ethel and sister Emily Carow, plus a sizeable but still fractional set of letters to sister-in-law Anna, were the only substantial files left, either of letters received, or, at least as so far unearthed, letters sent, except for the ones we celebrate today.

Meantime she restricted access to and quotation from her husband's papers in Washington (biographer Henry Pringle could only see those dating through the end of the presidency), delegating this task to librarian John Franklin Jameson, who in 1932 wrote to a degree candidate at Columbia: "I content myself with requesting that you shall not print anything of that variety (i.e., injurious references to persons now living), and that in general you shall be distinctly cautious as to printing anything which it seems likely that Mrs. Roosevelt would not like to have you print."*** Her control could take a more direct form: the Harvard collection contains several examples of endearments blotted out from the few letters exchanged with Theodore that do survive, and when I prepared a facsimile edition of Theodore's Spanish War diary in 1998, I concluded that it was Edith who had inked out (using the same system of sworls) uncomplimentary references to her husband's military superiors, before presenting the diary to the Roosevelt Memorial Association. I had the temerity to resurrect as many (there were not actually that many) as I could in my transcript of the diary.

Of course the rules of the game have changed. During Edith's lifetime such control as she exercised over Theodore's unpublished writings was, under common law, considered a right in perpetuity. Under current copyright law, his manuscripts have by now entered the public domain.

So we are confronted with this surprising survivor of her campaign for privacy. How had Marion King not been included in what appears to have been a dragnet sweep of Edith's correspondents' holdings? Perhaps because the letters were after all not primarily about human relationships, but about books and ideas, they were spared.

Marion King's daughter, Alice, first contacted me in 1973, three years before her mother's death, offering to Harvard some scrapbooks of clippings relating to the Roosevelt children. The letters themselves came in 1980, a decision encouraged by Ethel Derby's daughter Edith Williams, and as recently as 1995, Alice Gore King sent several association books, notably a copy of Edith Roosevelt's own Cleared for Strange Ports, interleaved by Marion King with photographs and clippings. At that time Alice King wrote: "I confess to an occasional twinge of guilt at letting out of my hands the Roosevelt letters--knowing of Mrs. Roosevelt's intense sense of privacy, and my mother's understanding of it. However, as you know, my loyalty to history prevailed and I have done what they would not have liked. Your interest helps salve my conscience."

As a visitor myself, I hope I am not being presumptuous in saying that those of us involved in this exhibition hope that your interest will help salve our consciences.

*Clarence Day. Life with Mother
(New York: Knopf, 1937), 159.
Quoted by permission of Random House, Inc.

**Clarence Day. Life with Father
(New York: Knopf, 1935), 228-229.
Quoted by permission of Random House, Inc.

***John Franklin Jameson and the Development of Humanistic Scholarship in America
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993-2001), 3:297.
Quoted by permission of the publisher.

Edith Roosevelt and child near the family pet cemetery and arbor, Sagamore Hill, circa 1901. Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, National Park Service

Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt Chronology
COMPILED BY SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS & HARRIET SHAPIRO

1860-1869

• August 6, 1861
  Edith Kermit Carow born in Norwich, Connecticut. Spends her early years in lower Manhattan, New York City. As a young girl, she often visits the New York Society Library with her father Charles Carow.

• April 25, 1865
  Edith Carow and Theodore Roosevelt (born October 27, 1858) watch Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession from the house of TR's grandfather at Union Square. They remain close friends through adolescence.

The "goddess" photo taken in 1900 was TR's favorite portrait of his wife. Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library

1880-1889

• October 27, 1880
  TR marries Alice Hathaway Lee, whom he meets while studying at Harvard.

• February 12, 1884
  Their only child Alice Lee Roosevelt born.

• February 14, 1884
  Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, TR's mother, dies of typhoid fever. Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt dies later the same day from Bright's disease.

• December 2, 1886
  Edith Kermit Carow marries Theodore Roosevelt in London. After a 3-month European honeymoon, they return to Sagamore Hill, TR's Oyster Bay estate in Long Island.

• September 13, 1887
  Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. born at Sagamore Hill.

• May 1889–April 1895
  TR serves as U.S. Civil Service Commissioner in Washington, D.C.

• October 10, 1889
  Kermit Roosevelt born at Sagamore Hill.

The Roosevelt family returning from a hike at Sagamore Hill, June 25, 1914. Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, National Park Service

1890-1899

• August 13, 1891
  Ethel Carow Roosevelt born at Sagamore Hill.

• April 9, 1894
  Archibald Bulloch Roosevelt born in Washington, D.C.

• May 1895–April 1897
  TR serves as president of the Board of Police Commissioners in New York City.

• April 19, 1897
  TR appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy in Washington, D.C

• November 19, 1897
  Quentin Roosevelt born in Washington, D.C.

• June–September 1898
  TR serves as Lieutenant-Colonel of the “Rough Riders” volunteer regiment in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

• August 15, 1898
  TR returns from Cuba.

• September 17, 1898
  TR nominated as Republican candidate for Governor of New York State.

• November 8, 1898
  TR elected Governor. He and EKR take up residence in Albany, N.Y.

Edith and Ethel in 1900. Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, National Park Service

1900-1909

• November 6, 1900
  TR elected Vice President on the Republican ticket.

• September 6, 1901
  President William McKinley is shot by an anarchist in Buffalo, N.Y. and dies a week later.

• September 14, 1901
  TR sworn in as the 26th President of the United States; EKR becomes First Lady.

• 1902
  EKR plays a major role in the renovation and reorganization of the White House; creates First Ladies' portrait gallery.

• November 8, 1904
  TR elected President in his own right.

• February 17, 1906
  Alice Lee Roosevelt marries Ohio Congressman Nicholas Longworth in the White House.

• November 1906
  TR, the first president to travel abroad while in office, inspects the Panama Canal Zone with EKR.

• March 4, 1909
  William Howard Taft becomes President. The Roosevelts return to Sagamore Hill.

• March 23, 1909
  TR leaves for British East Africa on a specimen-collecting expedition for the Smithsonian Institution.

• Spring–Early Summer 1909
  After eight years in Washington, D.C., EKR resumes her visits to the New York Society Library.

• July–November, 1909
  EKR tours Europe with three of her children.

Edith Roosevelt on a camel in Khartoum, March 1910. Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, National Park Service

1910-1919

• March 14, 1910
  EKR meets TR in Khartoum, Egypt and begins a 3-month tour of Europe.

• June 18, 1910
  The Roosevelts arrive New York Harbor to a tumultuous reception.

• December 2, 1911
  The Roosevelts celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

• October 14, 1912
  TR is shot in Milwaukee by a deranged bartender while campaigning as Progressive Party presidential candidate.

• November 5, 1912
  TR and Taft are defeated by the Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the national election.

• October 4, 1913
  TR and EKR sail for South America. EKR returns two months later to New York City.

• February–April 1914
  TR explores the River of Doubt in Brazil and almost dies of dysentery and fever. The river is subsequently renamed after him.

• May 19, 1914
  TR arrives in New York City in permanently weakened state.

• August 4, 1914
  World War I begins in Europe.

• April 6, 1917
  U.S. enters the war. Four days later President Wilson turns down TR's request to lead a division to fight in Europe.

• July 14, 1918
  Quentin Roosevelt, age 20, killed in air combat over France.

• January 6, 1919
  TR dies at Sagamore Hill of a coronary embolism

1920-1929

• 1920
  EKR writes first letter to Marion King.

• 1921-1927
  EKR travels extensively around the world.

• 1923
  EKR approves the reconstructed Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace in New York City.

• 1927
  EKR buys Mortlake, her maternal ancestral home in Brooklyn, Connecticut, as a summer retreat. She publishes Cleared for Strange Ports, a book about her family's travels.

• 1928
  EKR publishes American Backlogs, a history of her Tyler and Carow ancestors

• October 1929
  New York stock market crash.

Edith Roosevelt, circa 1935. Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, National Park Service

1930-1939

• 1932
  The Democrats nominate Franklin Delano Roosevelt for president; EKR supports the Republican nominee, Herbert Hoover.

• November 12, 1935
  EKR breaks hip in fall at Sagamore; remains in hospital for five months.

1940-1949

• December 1941
  U.S. enters World War II.

• June 4, 1943
  Major Kermit Roosevelt commits suicide in the Aleutian Islands after a long struggle with alcoholism.

• July 11, 1944
  Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. dies of heart failure after the D-Day landings in northern France.

• August 6, 1945
  EKR's eighty-fourth birthday. U.S. drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

• February 10, 1947
  EKR writes her last letter to Marion King.

• September 30, 1948
  EKR dies at Sagamore Hill.

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