In the wake of the recent inauguration, where the President’s daughters behaved with their characteristic adorableness, the subject of today’s blog is another First Daughter, Alice Roosevelt. While distinctly less adorable than Sasha and Malia, Alice was no less a source of fascination for the public. 
Alice Roosevelt (February 12, 1884 – February 20, 1980) was the only daughter born to Teddy Roosevelt and his first wife, Alice Lee. Her famously-beautiful mother died two days after giving birth to her, in 1884. Here’s a picture of Roosevelt and his first wife:
Roosevelt was so distraught at his wife’s death that he forbade anyone from mentioning his wife’s name in his presence. He called his daughter Baby Lee rather than Alice.
Roosevelt left for Dakota territory, leaving his newborn baby in his unmarried sister’s care while he went off to nurse his sorrows and hunt Big Game. Two years later he returned, remarried, and had five more children with his second wife, Edith. Have a look at the expression on Alice’s face (she’s the one standing in the back). You can get a real sense of her personality. And if you flit back and forth quickly from the picture of Alice’s mother (above) to Alice (below), you really see a startling resemblance.
Alice was seventeen when her father took office in 1901 after the assassination of President McKinley. Outspoken and witty, she became notorious for doing outrageous things, during a time when women were not supposed to do outrageous things—like, say, vote. She was known as a great beauty like her mother. She smoked in public, rode in cars with men, rode up debts playing poker and buying clothes, and brought her pet snake—which she named Emily Spinach—to parties.
Alice married Nicholas Longworth, a Republican member of the House of Representatives. The marriage was somewhat shaky, perhaps not helped by the fact that Alice campaigned against her husband when he ran for office, and that he, in turn, campaigned against her father for re-election, in favor of William Howard Taft. When the Roosevelts left the White House, she buried a voodoo doll of Nellie Taft, the incoming First Lady, in the back yard of the White House, and was subsequently banned from the next three administrations for various misbehaviors and off-color jokes.
She sure looks like she’s brimming with personality, doesn’t she? No wonder she became known as “The Other Washington Monument.”