The King and the Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and Edward VII, the Secret Partners by David Fromkin

Author:David Fromkin [Fromkin, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, Presidents & Heads of State, 20th Century, United States, Royalty, Biography & Autobiography, History, Great Britain
ISBN: 9780143116189
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2008-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

17

TEEDIE IN LOVE

TEEDIE’SHOME VALUES remained with him always. They formed a strict code. He believed in marriage, family, and monogamy. By temperament as well as by belief he was faithful. He was loyal to friends and to family members. He was a gentleman, not merely where women were concerned, but where anyone was concerned.

Historians have remained all the more puzzled by the curious turn that his relationship took with his childhood sweetheart. She was Edith Kermit Carow, a playmate of the Roosevelt children. (TR was the second of four children.) When Teedie and his siblings were taken by their father on a Grand Tour of Europe—Teedie was about eleven years old at the time—it was Edith who symbolized for him what he was leaving behind; he wrote, “Her face stired [sic] up in me homesickness and longings for the past which will come again never, alack never.”1

Edith’s father, born to the same social set as Teedie’s father, failed in business and disintegrated in bouts of alcoholism. Edith took school lessons with the Roosevelt children and joined in their group. Corinne, one of Teedie’s sisters, became her best friend; but, Kathleen Dalton tells us, it was Teedie with whom she shared books and dreams. Dalton, his sensitive and most recent biographer, quotes Roosevelt as saying that he “greatly liked the girls’ stories” that he and Edith read together, though it apparently disturbed him that this taste of his was “at the cost of being deemed effeminate.”

Roosevelt Senior was pushing Teedie to overcome his asthmatic invalidism and to become more manly; while Edith’s mother was looking ahead to the time when one of the young men Edith knew might be eligible to secure her future. But for the moment at least, Edith did not care for these others. She adored Teedie. Dalton tells us that Edith kept a lock of Theodore’s hair in her jewelry box.2

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