Born in New York City on February 12, 1884, Alice Lee Roosevelt was the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, then a New York assemblyman. Her mother died two days after her birth, and during her father╒s long absence in Dakota Territory she was reared by an aunt. After her father╒s marriage in December 1886 to Edith Kermit Carow and the establishment of the family seat at Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, Long Island, she grew up in a home of wealth, tradition, and politics. The family followed Theodore Roosevelt to Washington, D.C., back to New York City, to Albany, and in 1901 again to Washington.
His accession to the presidency in September of that year thrust young Alice into the national spotlight. Headstrong and rebellious and with a pronounced taste for the society of aristocrats and the Gilded Age wealthy, she was a favorite topic for the mass circulation yellow press, which slavishly recorded the comings and goings, the defiance of conventions, and the acid comments on contemporaries of ╥Princess Alice.╙ Her reported favorite color, a shade of blue-gray, became widely popular as ╥Alice blue╙ and later inspired the song ╥In My Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown╙ (Joseph McCarthy, Harry Tierney), introduced in the musical Irene, 1919. Asked if he could not keep her in line, the President was quoted as saying ╥I can do one of two things. I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.╙
In February 1906 she and Ohio Representative Nicholas Longworth were married in the East Room of the White House. After her marriage Alice Longworth devoted less time to the social scene and more to politics. The Longworth house became a center of Republican conviviality, especially during Nicholas Longworth╒s speakership of the House of Representatives from 1925 to 1931. After his death in the latter year Alice Longworth maintained her Washington home and her position near the center of national politics and Capitol social life. She campaigned against her fifth cousin, once removed, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and her scathing imitation of her first cousin Eleanor was a favorite entertainment in Republican social circles during the long New Deal period. In 1934 she published a volume of memoirs entitled Crowded Hours, and she collaborated with Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. on The Desk Drawer Anthology: Poems for the American People, published in 1937. After a period of relative eclipse her celebrity reappeared again during the Eisenhower years, when her acerbic wit and gossip were frequently the best newspaper copy in Washington. She remained thereafter a fixture of the Washington scene, earning the nickname, ╥Washington's other monument.╙ She served on the America First Committee in 1940 and was the Ohio delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1936, 1940 and 1944. She died at her home in Washington, D.C., on February 20, 1980.
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