Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker

by Stacy A. Cordery

Our royalty is our presidential families, and the eldest daughter of Theodore Roosevelt was even referred to in the press of the time as Princess Alice. "Larger than life" is a clichéd description, but Alice Roosevelt Longworth was qualified to wear it. This absorbing, magnificently complete biography, the first to be based on Alice's own papers, presents her as the first female celebrity of the twentieth century. What that meant in terms of how she viewed herself and how she was viewed by her famous father and an adoring public is explored in Cordery's impressively astute psychological understanding of this quite complex personality. Alice's mother died giving birth to her, her father was famously distant, and her stepmother, First Lady Edith, hadn't a clue about how to handle an intelligent, willful—and world-famous—stepdaughter who seemed bent on acting in the most dramatic fashion. Alice's tumultuous marriage to Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth is sensitively appraised, and the true father of Alice's one child is identified. Always the political animal, Alice remained a force in Washington, D.C., politics as well as society throughout her long life, a life she plotted for herself unbound by tradition.

Original Air-Date: 1.3.2009