Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Alice Roosevelt Longworth (born February 12, 1884, New York, New York, U.S.—died February 20, 1980, Washington, D.C.) was an American socialite and daughter of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, who was known for her wit and her political influence.

At the time of Alice Roosevelt’s birth, her father was 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.

When her father became U.S. president in 1901, Alice Roosevelt became the center of national attention. 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 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” (by Joseph McCarthy and Harry Tierney), introduced in the musical Irene (1919). In February 1906 she married Ohio Rep. Nicholas Longworth.

(Read Eleanor Roosevelt’s Britannica essay on Franklin Roosevelt.)

After her marriage she 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 capital 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. Longworth had a pillow in her home embroidered with the legend “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.” It was a sentiment that she practiced. In 1934 she published a volume of memoirs entitled Crowded Hours. After a period of relative eclipse her celebrity reappeared during the Eisenhower years, when her acerbic wit and gossip were frequently recorded. She remained thereafter a fixture of the Washington scene, earning the nickname “Washington’s other monument.”