Options Menu   Watch Program   Program Details   Classroom Guide   Search the Video   Print Transcript Video Search:

Dr. BETTY BOYD CAROLI (Author, "The Roosevelt Women"): Well, of
course, Alice Longworth has her reputation already made. But since I
know more about her, I would probably choose Bamie, Theodore
Roosevelt's older sister. She was supposedly so magnetic, had such a
personality, that no matter how many beautiful young women were in the
room, everybody gravitated to her, even when she was an aged,
crippled, deaf woman. So she intrigues me.

LAMB: How old is she in that picture?

Dr. CAROLI: She's in her 30s in that picture. She always looked
old. She's one of those people who, even as an 18-year-old--there's a
picture in the book when she's about 15 and she already looks old.

LAMB: What d--what was she like?

Dr. CAROLI: She was--well, her life was complicated, I think we
should say, by the fact that she was born--or very soon after,
developed some physical problem so that she had a curvature of the
spine that kind of crippled her. So for the--for the first five years
of her life or so she was kept in these heavy braces, had to be
carried from room to room. Maybe that helped her develop this very
sharp tongue. I mean, somebody told me that the Roosevelt women had
tongues that could take paint off barns, and I think she's a perfect
example of that. She had the ability to--to catch the--the absolutely
crucial element to somebody that made them ridiculous or funny or
special. So she had a--she had a keen mind. Many people said that if
she'd been a man, she would have been president instead of Theodore.
So she had a lot going for her. She had bad health going against her.

LAMB: Where'd she get the name `Bamie'?

Dr. CAROLI: Her real name was Anna, and in that family, as I say in
the book, there are a few names that appear so often, like Anna and
Corine and Theodore and James. So everybody had nicknames, and I had
to use the nicknames to keep the people straight, one from another.
It comes from the Italian word `bambina,' little girl. She was also
called Bye, I should say, as in bye-bye because she was always on the
go. Evidently she had so much energy that she was just never still.
Theodore wrote her a letter when he was at Harvard, and he said, `Oh,
energy, thy name is Bye.' In other words, it was another word for
energy. So Bye or Bamie, but her real name was Anna.

LAMB: Here's a picture of her with--at the bottom.

Dr. CAROLI: At the bottom, that's her family. That's a very rare
picture. You know, there were very few pictures taken of Bamie with
her husband on the right, their one son in the middle. She didn't
marry until she was about 41, had one son when she was in her 40s.
And this picture was given to me by a great-great-grandson who now
lives in the family home in Connecticut. But he admitted that there
are very few around, and he had to do some scrambling to come up with
that one.

LAMB: How did she meet her husband?

Dr. CAROLI: Well, she met him in London. She had gone to London to
help as a hostess in the American Embassy where her cousin, James
"Rosie" Roosevelt, was serving. His wife had died and so she had gone
over. People say she went over with the idea of marrying him, but I
think that's completely wrong. And if you read her letters, she had
no intention of marrying him; she had her eye on somebody back here.

But, anyway, she got there, and she always says that--or in her
letters she said many times that it took the solitude of a London
season to give her time to get engaged. So she met Will Cowles, who
was there as a Naval attache, and something took between the two of
them, and they married. Th--the marriage ran into a lot of problems
before it took place because he had been divorced, and the divorce
was, everybody said, granted on flimsy grounds. And so there was a
lot of--there was a big flurry of telegrams back and forth between
London and Theodore in New York to get lawyers to say that the divorce
was--was OK and she could go ahead and marry him. So she did marry
him in 1895.

LAMB: Is the Cowles name the C-O-W-L-E-S, the same Cowles that was
involved in publishing in this country?

Dr. CAROLI: It would be distant. There are many variations of the
spelling, but it's not a direct close connection, as far as I know.

LAMB: You tell a story about what happened to him in the Navy after
they were married, the accident on the Missouri.

Dr. CAROLI: Yes. You know, Bamie rarely asked for a favor. I mean,
she had people she could ask favors of. Her brother was president of
the United States. She was a good friend of Henry Cabot Lodge. She
knew a lot of important people in London and in the United States.
And she rarely asked for favors for herself or for her husband. But
she seems to have intervened to get Will a commander job on a ship,
and there was a very bad accident for which he was blamed. It's too
distant and perhaps not our job here to say how much fault he had in
that, but she claimed that because he was the brother-in-law of the
president of the United States, he would be particularly blamed and
she would be blamed. And it was not a good time for them.

LAMB: There was a house that you kept mentioning in the book at 1733
N Street here in Washington, and it seemed to have a lot of activity
over a lot of years. That--the house still there?

Dr. CAROLI: No, the house is gone. It was a house that--when Bamie
came back from London with her husband, they settled in Washington. I
think everybody thought that she'd be happier in Washington. She
loved to be in the center of politics, and I think she was happy here
for--although, they always had the family place in Connecticut. So
her house was there. She lived in it with her husband and son. That
was the place that Theodore Roosevelt, when he was president--when he
became president--remember, it was Mrs. M--McKinley hadn't gotten out
of the White House all too quickly, and so he had his first
Cabin--Theodore had his first Cabinet meetings at the Cowles' house,
and over the years he went there many times.

I mean, Eleanor said that she thought her uncle never made an
important decision without talking it over with his sister, Bamie.
Later, the house was rented by Eleanor and Franklin when they came
down for Franklin to be assistant secretary of the Navy in 1913. And
they lived in it until they outgrew it. So the house does figure in
the book quite a lot.

LAMB: Y--you have a lot of pictures on the cover. Why don't we just
go around, and you can quickly identify them. I'm starting up
here--see if I can get it--right--this one.

Dr. CAROLI: OK. That's a picture of Theodore's wife, Edith, and
their only daughter, Ethel. Of course, he'd had a daughter with his
first wife, Alice, but this is the only picture. Then we have the
three--let's see, we have Corine and Bamie, who are Theodore's two
sisters, and his wife.

LAMB: How about right in the middle?

Dr. CAROLI: Right in the middle's Alice, a great picture of Alice.
Doesn't she look glamorous?

LAMB: Down to the right of that.

Dr. CAROLI: Down to my right of that is--is another picture of
Edith. Now is that your right?

LAMB: And then below that.

Dr. CAROLI: And the very bottom picture is Franklin, of course, and
his mother, Sara Delano. One thing I try to do in the book is give
a--a new view of Sara Delano Roosevelt. And then we have there on
the--in the corner, a very famous picture of Eleanor. I guess
everybody recognizes that.

LAMB: Yeah, right.

Dr. CAROLI: And right above, Eleanor on her honeymoon in Venice, in
a gondola in 1905.

LAMB: From all of the nine that you write about, who would you least
like to spend a lot of time with?

Dr. CAROLI: Well, I'll tell you, I become very attached to each one
of them. Least like to spend time with? Hmm, maybe Edith, Theodore's
second wife. She was one tough individual. And I'm afraid I would
just as soon not spend an evening with Edith.

LAMB: When did he meet her?

Dr. CAROLI: Well, probably he wouldn't know when he met her. They
grew up together. You know, her family--Edith Carow's family wa--her
father was in shipping. Her father had gone to Europe with Theodore's
father in the 1850s, at least they came back together. And so they
knew each other from the time they were born. Edith Carow was a very
good friend of Theodore's younger sister, Corine. They had school
together. They played together. There's a picture in the book of
them in a--in a group called The Paradise of Ravenous Eaters. So they
were really childhood friends. There's a very famous picture of her
as a child looking out of the Roosevelt window on Union Square for
Abraham Lincoln's funeral. So they probably wouldn't know when they
first met. They were--they were toddlers, you know.

LAMB: What made her tough?

Dr. CAROLI: I think she probably became tough because of her
family's situation. I mean, it's hard to know. Her father--unlike
Sara Delano's father, who was also in shipping, her father lost his
fortune. And th--th--she, Edith, and her younger sister and their
mother had to kind of stay around with relatives and live off--live
off the others. And I think it made her--it made her very s--in a
way, secretive about her feelings. It made her unwilling to expose
her feelings to other people. And I think she thought she had to be
tough to cover up.

She tells some stories about how--course, because she was born into
wealth, a lot of her friends were still wealthy, and she talks about
when she would have them over, she would--as a child, she would be
ashamed of some of her more shabby toys and try to put them away
and--and her mother would say, `Well, maybe those would be just the
toys your friends would enjoy.' So she gives a hint that--that it was
that kind of--well, it was a great discomfort to her, really, to
be--to go down in status.

LAMB: How much money was there in the entire Roosevelt family?

Dr. CAROLI: Well, that's difficult to pin down. When Theodore's
father--when President Theodore's father, who's also Theodore, died,
he supposedly left his sons each $1 million, which would be worth a
lot more than that today.

LAMB: You said somewhere it'd be worth $13 million today.

Dr. CAROLI: Well, you know, there are different ways of figuring it,
and--but it's $10 million to $13 million, in that--you know, which is
a sizeable fortune. The problem is if you look at the family money,
then, later, it doesn't quite add up. For example, Bamie's income
later is not what it should have been considering how much she
inherited from her father. They were wealthy. They were certainly
among the wealthiest New Yorkers. But they never viewed themselves
as--you know, the letters--and I read a lot of letters that they
wrote. Corine, Theodore's younger sister, when she had to go around
to people like the Astors and ask for money, she said, `Oh, I had to
go to those rich people and ask, and it just scared me to death. And
they're so difficult to deal with.' So it's funny, although they were
wealthy, they never put themselves in the wealthy bracket. They--they
considered themselves outside it somehow.

LAMB: What about on the F--Franklin side?

Dr. CAROLI: Franklin side also--Franklin's father died when he was
at--at Harvard and left a--a huge fortune in land and money. There're
some letters that I quote in--in the book, Sara saying, `Franklin,'
you know, we--`the income was this last year or that, so we're doing
pretty well.' So it was a--it was significant.

LAMB: Any of the nine women that you write about work?

Dr. CAROLI: If you mean work for money outside the home at a regular
job, the answer would be no, but they became good speakers and they
earned money. They liked to earn money for their speeches. You know,
lots of people realize that Eleanor said that the money she earned
herself from her writing of articles and from giving speeches, that
was the best money. She had money from her family she inherited
because, after all, her father was Theodore Roosevelt's younger
brother. So she inherited from her mother and her father. She had
money from Franklin. But the money she earned from her speeches and
advertisements was the best money, and she didn't come upon that
attitude from nowhere.

Her Aunt Corine became a very popular speaker in the--in the teens,
one of the most-requested speakers in the Republican Party, traveled
all over the United States and also spoke to high school groups. And
I have letters that she wrote to her daughter saying, you know, `I
could make my living from this if I wanted to.' So here, again, a
wealthy woman who made money. It was a sense of worth, I think, that
she was capable and confident enough to go in front of thousands of
people. The same woman, Corine Robinson, Theodore's younger sister,
was the first woman to speak at a major party convention in 1920. She
gave a nominating speech, a seconding speech, really, at the
Republican Convention in front of 14,000 people. Well, 1920, that was
pretty gutsy thing to do.

LAMB: Franklin and Theodore were related how?

Dr. CAROLI: Franklin and Theodore were related because they all come
from the same clause--Roosenveldt, really, the Dutch immigrant in the
1640s. There's a diagram in the front of the book that shows. And
about two generations later, two--Johannas and Jacobas, and it's those
lines that become the Theodore Roosevelts of Long Island. That's the
Johannas side over here. And the Jacobas side becomes the--the Hyde
Park branch over here. So it happens way back in about 1700.

But I should say that they become--they stay very close. They see a
lot of each other. In many ways, they're almost siblings, those
two--you know, people who were cousins saw so much of each other that
it's difficult to see them as two different branches. They all lived
in New York. They visited back and forth. They traveled together.
Bamie, for example, Theodore's older sister, introduced Sara Delano to
James Roosevelt, Franklin's father. In other words, Bamie brought
together Franklin's parents. And they visited back and forth all the
time, sent gifts. Now, of course, they split up later. I mean, the
two branches split when Franklin's star rises and the Theodores don't
have anybody to match him.

LAMB: Any of the people you write about grow up without servants?

Dr. CAROLI: Did any of the people grow up without servants? No.
There's a lot of--I--I talk a lot in the book about how--how they had
to cut back on servants. You know, if money got tight, you had to cut
back on one of the upstairs maids. But, no, one of the things I talk
about in the book is that none of the women ever cooked. I mean,
there's a line in there, some--one of Theodore's sisters goes to a
lunch and writes her daughter about how amazed she was that she went
to this lunch and the hostess actually cooked the meal in front of
them. She had some kind of chafing dish and she did some sort of
asparagus and fondu. And the reaction was it was like a miracle, you
know, and she could really cook.

Theodore's wife, Edith, I don't--never went in a kitchen or--there's
a--a letter she writes when they bought the cabin outside Washington
here while he was president, and would go there--she would go with
Theodore for a weekend or a little--a little sojourn, and they went
without servants. But you know who did the cooking? The president of
the United States and his wife washed up. She--they really did
not--cooking was not high on their list.

LAMB: When you would find the family with the most servants--butlers,
cooks, chauffeurs and all that--which one would it be and when?

Dr. CAROLI: Oh, that's a difficult question to answer because it
changes over time. Certainly, the Cowles family always had lots of
servants. Bamie always--it was said that Bamie had--ran the--the
best--she had the best kitchen. You know, Alice Longworth, who was
always very attached to her Aunt Bamie because she was raised--in the
beginning, before her father remarried and she had a stepmother, Alice
was raised by Bamie and was always very attached to her, and she
always talked about the style that Bamie entertained. And she
evidently had learned in London how to slice bread, you know, butter
it on the top and slice it across like this. And so Alice always did
that and served her tea from, you know, the same tea that Bamie served
and so forth. And Alice said that Bamie had always the best kitchen
in the family, and she--she ran a pretty luxurious household.

LAMB: Now if you're going to have that dinner, by the way, and you
had to pick one of the men, Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Theodore
Roosevelt, who--which one would you pick?

Dr. CAROLI: Oh, dear, I can't have them both at the same dinner?

LAMB: Gotta pick one.

Dr. CAROLI: You know, I guess I've been influenced a little bit by
the Theodore view of Franklin that--and, certainly, in his early years
he was not so witty or so sharp or so interesting as Theodore.
Theodore had a--was a--was good with quips, was--was, I think, better
read, and I guess I'd go with Theodore.

LAMB: By the way, you have--in the last picture here in the book, of
all the pictures you've got, you have the woman that l--lived the
longest--or lived to the--most recent death was in 1980, Alice
Longworth--Roosevelt Longworth, right there on the left, and then
there's the columnist Joe Alsop and then Don Graham, who runs The
Washington Post.

Dr. CAROLI: This was a dinner party at his mother's, yes.

LAMB: How did they all hook up there? What's the d--what's the
setting there?

Dr. CAROLI: Well, you mean what's the relationship between Joe Alsop
and--well, let's see now. Alice Longworth is a cousin of Joe Alsop's
mother. In other words, Theodore Roosevelt's mother, Mittie--I really
center the book on Theodore Roosevelt's mother Mittie and her female
descendants. So she had--this woman from Georgia, Mittie, who comes
to New York--I mean, how this 18-year-old from a slave-holding family
in Georgia gets--manages to live in New York as a young bride with
this Roosevelt family, that had to be pretty--pretty difficult to be
around because--you know, the--the senior Roosevelts wanted all their
sons--they had five--they wanted them all living close by, and they
built houses for them so they would.

Well, here she gets to New York as this--from a slave-holding family
in the 1850s, when you can imagine what the discussion was in many
Northern households. So Mittie--I built the book around Mittie and
her two daughters, Bamie and Corine, whom we've talked about: Bamie,
the--the magnetic one; and Corine, the great speaker, the writer, the
one who wrote several books of poetry and a biography of Theodore.

And then in the next generation, Mittie had four granddaughters. So
there's Alice and Eleanor and Corine Alsop, who became the mother of
Joe Alsop and Stewart Alsop, the columnists, and then Ethel Derby. So
that's how they figure, if you can see. Ethel and--Ethel was the
youngest, but Alice, who was her half-sister--Alice's cousin, Corine
Alsop, had a son, Joe Alsop, the columnist, and that's why they're at
the party together. By the way, they were very fond of each other,
spent a lot of time together and, of course, both lived in Washington
and so they get invited to a party.

LAMB: Alice Roosevelt Longworth married who?

Dr. CAROLI: Alice Roosevelt married Nicholas Longworth, the
congressman--a Republican congressman from Ohio, in February of 1906.
And that--that postcard on the righ--well, it's the picture with
the--the two of them, I think it's an interesting one. I got it from
a woman who collects postcards. It was really sent in February of
1906, the same--just about a week with the--of the marriage. And I
think it shows why Alice was called Princess Alice. Because there she
is with her bridegroom, and if you can read--you probably can't read
what the person has written on there, but the person who sent that
postcard wrote something like, `Friend, are you the next in line?'

So I think it shows that, at the time Alice married Nick, she was
considered, really, Princess--Princess Alice. You know, she was--she
was doing amazingly daring things. Remember, that was a time when few
women drove vehicles, and she didn't drive an electric--you know, the
electric was a car that most--before 1905, real ladies drove an
electric because it wasn't noisy, it didn't go too fast, it wasn't
dirty. Of course, you could only drive it on very smooth roads. You
couldn't drive it on--on gravel roads. But Alice drove a machine--in
other words, a gasoline-powered vehicle, and she drove it.

She and her friend made headlines when they drove from Providence,
Rhode Island, to Boston, without stopping, something that young ladies
were not supposed to do, you know? It was really out of--there are so
many stories about her in the early 1900s. She said--by the way, you
know, this was right after her trip to the Orient, when she and Nick
were kind of thrown together because they were in a group of people
away for several weeks--and she said that it was really time. She
knew that she had to get married because if you weren't married by age
20, you were considered an old maid. And so it was one way to get out
of the house. Of course, it was--the marriage had many problems.

LAMB: Alice Roosevelt Longworth was the daughter of?

Dr. CAROLI: Of Theodore--Alice Roosevelt was the daughter of
Theodore Roosevelt, the president, and his first wife Alice Lee.
Remember, he had grown up with Edith, as we said earlier, and
everybody thought that they were a couple. I mean, I've seen family
letters, you know, that they were pairing off when they were in their
early teens. But ju...

LAMB: You mean his second wife?

Dr. CAROLI: Yes, he and his second wife were a pair--were a couple.
You know, people really thought that they would get married, I think.
But then something happened just before he went off to Harvard. He
said they had a--a--a falling out. She was not so clear what
happened. But anyway, he went off to Harvard and met Alice Lee, a
Massachusetts family, and married her as soon as he graduated. And
then when she died four years later, just after giving birth to her
baby, Alice, who became Alice Longworth, Theodore went off to the
badlands for a while, and then he came back and eventually he went to
London where Edith had moved. She and her mother being--and her
sister being without funds really, they moved to London to--to live
more cheaply. So he went over there and married her in December of
1886.

LAMB: What was the impact on Theodore Roosevelt that his mother and
his...

Dr. CAROLI: His wife died the same day.

LAMB: ...first--first wife died on the same day?

Dr. CAROLI: Well, it must have been--I mean, he said it--you know,
there are all those things that he wrote that it was the end of his
life and all that. I was surprised, in doing the research, to find
that there were letters--you know, within three months he was going to
political conventions again and writing his sister about what he
thought of the candidates. I mean, he must have been--I don't mean to
say that he wasn't grief-stricken, but it wasn't as though he simply
closed up and didn't do anything for the--for the next two or three
years.

Within three months he was attending political conventions, making
comments about people running for office. And I think Bamie, with
whom he was very close at that point, still hoped that he would get
back into politics. You know, he'd been a state legislator in Ohio,
and I think the whole family wanted him to get himself together. And,
of course, he did run for--for mayor in 1886 in New York. Course, he
didn't win, but it--he got himself together pretty fast consid--but it
must have been devastating.

LAMB: Can you find any evidence that he ever mentioned his first
wife, Alice Lee, anywhere after she died?

Dr. CAROLI: Oh, yes. He definitely meant--I think there's a
misunderstanding. Alice, his daughter, said that he never discussed
her mother with her. In other words--and I have that m--people told
me that and I've seen it in letters. In other words, Alice told
people and they told me. So I think he didn't discuss, but there are
certainly letters where he talks about Alice and he mentions the name
`Alice' and so forth. So I think it's a misunderstanding that there
was no mention. There was never a discussion with his daughter, and
that must have hurt a lot. I think that's what she was objecting to.

LAMB: When Alice Roosevelt Longworth died, she was how old?

Dr. CAROLI: When Alive Roosevelt Longworth died, she was about 96,
wasn't she? She died in 18--in 1980 and she was born in 1884.

LAMB: And when she met Nicholas Longworth, what was he doing?

Dr. CAROLI: When Alice met Nicholas Longworth, he was a congr--an
up-and-coming Republican congressman from Cincinnati, Ohio, a wealthy
family with their own vineyards and a mother who was a--a social rock
in Cincinnati and two sisters who were very accomplished, one of them
very politically active and one who had written several books. So
Alice was marrying into a family of achieving women and strong-minded
women, and, of course, that made for a lot of problems. They didn't
think too much of Princess Alice.

LAMB: As you know, there are three major House office buildings:
Rayburn, Longworth and Cannon. What did Nicholas Longworth do to get
a n--building named after him?

Dr. CAROLI: Spe--Nicholas Longworth went ahead and served--I think
he was re-elected every time, except he lost one election--and Alice
had some comments about that--in 1912. It was a bad--remember, her
father was running on the Progressive ticket for re-elect--for--as a
third-party ticket, and that turned a lot of people. Nicholas lost
that by a very close--in a very close vote. But otherwise, he served
continuously in the House of Representatives, until his death. And he
was speaker of the House for part of that time in the 1920s. So
speaker of the House--I suppose everybody you mentioned is a
speaker--was a speaker of the House, right?

LAMB: And how old was he when he died, and what did he die of?

Dr. CAROLI: He died in 1931 and--of a heart attack while he was
vacationing in South Carolina, as I recall.

LAMB: And so she lived 49 years longer?

Dr. CAROLI: She lived a long time af--1931--well, you can do the
math. It's--she lived a long time. I think most of us think of her
in those--you know, she really established her reputation as the other
Washington Monument in those years after--I mean, her famou--her--her
quips about people and--and her--her house becoming really a--a
pilgrimage for--all presidents went over there, I think, to her house
and visited her. H--there's she's shown with the--the Kennedys at a
horse show in 1962. She was--I guess she was like the Dolly Madison,
you know, of the--of the 1900s.

LAMB: Did she have children?

Dr. CAROLI: Alice and Nick Longworth had one daughter, Paulina, who
died in the--at a very young age and way--in a way that's--many people
thought it wa--she died of a--she had taken a combination of alcohol
and medicine and she died. Her daughter told me she thought her
mother was an alcoholic. In any case, it was a very sad time. The
daughter was only 10 years old, and Alice Longworth then took in her
granddaughter and raised her after that. So, yes, they did have one
daughter, who died at a very young age, and then Alice raised the one
daughter from that.

LAMB: What was her relationship with her daughter, Paulina?

Dr. CAROLI: It must have been very difficult. I talk in the
book--one of the things I tried to do in the book was not to just
s--repeat th--I mean, it could never be a biography of Alice
Longworth--there've already been several--or of Eleanor Roosevelt, but
to talk about the family relationships. And Paulina, the daughter who
was born very late in that marriage, after, I think, about 18 years of
marriage, six--more or less 18 years of marriage, so very late into
the marriage. Her father was absolutely devoted to her, and she
turned out to be a person really quite different from her mother. Her
mother with the sharp tongue, brilliant wit, social animal, had a
daughter who, by all accounts, was not comfortable in the s--that
setting. She was not very social. She was not very confident. Maybe
that's the way daughters of confident, brilliant women turn out. But
anyway, it was a very uneasy relationship, I think.

LAMB: Who is the--who's the father...

Dr. CAROLI: Of the d--of P--of Paulina?

LAMB: ...of Paulina? Yeah.

Dr. CAROLI: Well, of course, in the d--book I talk about the--there
was a lot of discussion that it might have been one of Alice's other
men friends. Certainly, the marriage on both sides--and Nicholas
Longworth--there are all the stories about his womanizing,
repeated--many--everyb--everybody has a story, and Alice had a few
stories about which window he jumped out when he wanted to go visit a
particular woman. She had a--a very close relationship with Senator
Borah, and there is speculation that he was the--the father of the
daughter.

There's a funny family letter that I talk about how when Alice gave
birth to her only daughter, she went to Chicago. There was evidently
a famous obstetrician there, and so she went there to give birth. And
the letters came back about the discussion over how the daughter would
be named. And one of the suggestions that the family was glad to see
put aside was that she would be called Deborah (pronounced Deb-ra),
which as you see, would be Deborah, (pronounced Dee-bor-ah), if--for
people who were--who were gossiping about who might possibly be the
father of the child.

LAMB: Was she ever seen in public with William Borah...

Dr. CAROLI: Was she ever seen in public with William Borah?

LAMB: ...the senator? I mean, was that a relationship that people...

Dr. CAROLI: People knew about it, yes. I don't have a picture of
them.

LAMB: Was it written--was it written about back in those days?

Dr. CAROLI: I would doubt that it was written about in a place that
you and I would read about it because, in doing my work on first
ladies, I realized that people--journalists or write--people didn't
write about those things until, really, the 1960s. I mean, even
Franklin's relationship with Lucy Mercer, you won't find that written
about. The family letters are full of it, but you won't find it
written about in books that you and I would read, or newspapers, or
magazines until after both Franklin and Eleanor were dead. And I
would suspect that's the same thing. I've never seen a--a--a
reference to it earlier.

LAMB: Did you talk with Alice Longworth's daughter--granddaughter?

Dr. CAROLI: Yes, I did. Joanna Sturm lives here in Washington. She
was very kind. I found--really, all the people that I asked--the
Roosevelts must get tired of answering the same questions over and
over again, but she talked about her grandmother. She told me some
stories that--she talked about the very warm relationship. You know,
because Alice had such a difficult relationship with her daughter, I
think people thought she lacked all kindliness toward young people.
And the granddaughter, Joanna Sturm, talked about how they--Alice did
have her own routine. She was a late sleeper. She stayed up late at
night. Probably not the ideal setting for a--a girl of 10 to grow
up--you know, that's how old she was when she moved in. Probably not
the best place for a granddaughter to grow up.

But Joanna told me about how Alice would take her on these summer
trips to Wyoming, they'd take the train all the way across so that
Joanna could go horseback riding. They traveled in Asia. It was--she
said that, in many ways, she raised herself. You know, she had to get
up in the morning and make her breakfast, with the help of the--the
family maid. She didn't see her grandmother before 1:00 in the
afternoon--but that it was, really, a very warm relationship and I
think it's an important part of the Alice story.

I think, also, it's important to point out, you know, because Alice
somehow is treated as a--a--a character unto herself--to point out
that in the family letters, Alice is always--always viewed as very
reliable. For example, her half-sister, Ethel, would say, `You could
always count on Alice.' Somebody needed money, and for many years
Alice had lots of money and she could, you know, help out. Or if you
needed somebody to be there for a certain event, you could always
count on Alice. But the other side of Alice Longworth was that she
would make these outlandish statements about her father, or somebody
else, and the others in the family would just sort of tear their hair
and say, `Oh, what are we going to do about her?' So she's a
multifaceted figure.

LAMB: You quote Stewart Alsop, Joe Alsop's brother, as saying, `Alice
wasted her life being a spectator.'

Dr. CAROLI: Several people said something like that, and Stewart was
one. I think the feeling was that with her wit, her intelligence, her
connections, she could have run for office. She could have--she could
have done--I know her granddaughter told me the thing that she hated
most was do-gooders. You know, the idea of being a do-gooder did not
appeal to Alice Longworth. She preferred to make the outlandish
statement that people would--would quote. But I think a lot of people
thought that she had the--she had the ability to make a bigger
contribution, and somehow they couldn't just write that off.

I mean, certainly she'll go down in history as one of the most
interesting people of the 20th century, but what did she do? You
know, there's that famous comment by Stalin's daughter when she was at
a party, and everybody gathered around Alice Longworth. And
afterwards--after the party was over, Svetlana Stalin said to the
hostess, `Who was that woman?' And they said, `Well, we'll explain.
She was the daughter of the president of the United States.' And
Stetla--Svetlana said, `Well, what did she ever do?' you know.

And when you look at her record, what did--she made some wonderful
statements, she contributed a lot of style, but there's no do-good,
you know. And that way she and Eleanor--see, Eleanor and she were
born only about seven months apart, Alice being seven months older,
and there is--I mean, you couldn't find two women who took such
different paths. I--I think they--for Eleanor, it was very important
to make a contribution, to do good, to help other people. And for
Alice, it was not important.

LAMB: Is it true that Nicholas Longworth and Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's--in each case, their mother moved to Cambridge to live
there while they went to school?

Dr. CAROLI: Yes. I've begun to think that that was a--a pattern for
wealthy mothers, if they were widows. They have sons at college.
Here you had Sara Delano gets tired of Hyde Park, and while Franklin
is at--at Cambridge, Mass., she moves up and gets a place so she can
be there to have dinner with him as often as possible. And Nicholas
Longworth's mother did the same thing earlier--about five years
earlier did the same thing. So I guess we need a bigger sample to say
that it was a pattern, but if we look at those two cases, it does not
seem to be unusual.

LAMB: What's this picture?

Dr. CAROLI: On the left?

LAMB: Mm-hmm.

Dr. CAROLI: That's Sara Delano Roosevelt and Franklin, down in the
corner, and two of Franklin's children at Campobello. You know, Sara
Delano Roosevelt is supposed to have said to the children--to
Franklin's children, `Eleanor's not your mother. She just gave birth
to you. I really raised you.' She did spend a lot of time with them.
Comments like that must have annoyed Eleanor tremendously.

But one of the things I try to do in the book is show that there is
another side to Sara Delano Roosevelt. For one thing, she's a much
more interesting person than I had thought when I started the book. I
mean, she grew up in Ch--back and forth between China. She spent
years in Europe. She's--going to school, she spoke perfect French and
German. And her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren--I
interviewed her great-granddaughter, for example, who said that she
absolutely did not deserve the picture that she's been--been given.
She's been described as--as a kind of anti-politics, a shrew who
shouted at people and that, really, she was a loving--loving
grandmother.

Of course, she was a snob, and maybe most of us would not have liked
her for a--a mother-in-law, but she's far more interesting, I think,
and--and far more likable than she's been pictured in--in history.
Her granddaughter said that she thought--I should say her
great-granddaughter said that she thought Sara Delano got the bad
reputation as a result of the play "Sunrise at Campobello," where
she's depicted as somebody who's so against politics, who shouts at
people when she doesn't like them. And the great-granddaughter said,
`You know, she never shouted. She was a woman of her class and time,
but she never shouted. She was not a shrew. She didn't deserve to be
shown as that.'

LAMB: You point out in the book that her first place that she bought
was really Campobello and then later--I don't think it's in your book,
but that FDR's first place that he was able to buy was Warm Springs,
Georgia. Did they need to buy places because the original Hyde Park
wasn't--didn't belong to either one of them, really? It was in
the--the father had bought them?

Dr. CAROLI: Well, no, I don't think Sara Delano thought Hyde Park
didn't belong to her. He had lived there with his first wife, Rebecca
Howland, and that's one thing I was interested when I spent some time
up at Hyde Park. She moved in as a second wife, a lot younger than
he.

LAMB: Sara.

Dr. CAROLI: Sara. But she--she left the things of the first wife.
You know, when I was shown around Hyde Park a few years ago, when I
was working on the book, they said, `You know, this platter's from the
first Mrs. James, and these are s--these are some pieces of silver,'
and so forth. So, no, I think she--Sara Delano Roosevelt had so much
confidence that is--I think it was--she thought as soon as she walked
in a room, it was hers. I think Campobello was a retreat that served
a different purpose. You know, it was a getaway. In those days
before air conditioning, it must have been great to go up to that cold
little island and--and just really get away from everything. Warm
Springs, of course, was Franklin's hope for recovery after being
paralyzed.

LAMB: One of the things they suggest is that he went to Warm Springs
to get away from his mother because she only, supposedly, went there
once.

Dr. CAROLI: She didn't go there very often, and Eleanor didn't go
there very often, really. I mean, she went there some. But, no,
th--they--they didn't. There are many--you know, there are many
stories and many letters that I quote in the book about how scared
Franklin was of his mother. Somebody--one of the cousins, the Alsop
cousin, said that once Franklin had been out drinking very late and
came in and didn't think he could make it down for breakfast, and his
mother insisted that he show up--you know, here was a grown man with a
wife and children, and his mother insisted that he come down, no
matter what--how he felt, and be there for breakfast. So she--around
him, she was quite--quite firm.

LAMB: What do you make of--and you mention in the book that in the
big room up at Hyde Park there are two chairs around the fireplace;
one for FDR, one for his mother, no chair for Eleanor?

Dr. CAROLI: Well, when you go in the dining room and Franklin's at
one end, and his mother's at the other end, and Eleanor sits on the
side...

LAMB: And what about the bedrooms upstairs?

Dr. CAROLI: The bedrooms upstairs is Franklin's big room, and
there's Sara's big room, and then there's Eleanor's little narrow
room. Y--you do have to wonder why Eleanor put up with that, don't
you? Her cousin left a--a long kind of interview done in the 1950s
and said that, in the family, they could never really figure out why
Eleanor obeyed so much the mother-in-law. She didn't need to.
What--what made her not rebel against that? It's--of course, one of
the things I do in the book is talk about how very little Eleanor and
Franklin lived with Sara. You know, there's that impression that Sara
lived with them most of their married life, which isn't true because
when they married--first married, they had an apartment, while he
finished law school. Then they had a house in the '30s in Manhattan.
And then he got--well, she built them then the house on 65th Street
next door to hers, so there is that--but very soon after that, in
1910, he got elected to the state Legislature and they got a house in
Albany, Eleanor and Franklin. Then in 1913 they moved down to Bamie's
house, which they rented, in Washington. And then, of course, after
he gets polio in 1921, there is that period when they pretty much
lived with Sara, while he tries to--to get back his strength and his
ability to walk. But very soon after that, Eleanor builds her own
place at Hyde Park, Val-Kill, where she moves with her friends.

So, you do--if you added up the months, it wouldn't be very long,
really, that Sara and Eleanor and Franklin lived side by side. She
never really lived with them. It was always--I mean, they might have
spent time with her at Hyde Park. In that sense, they lived there,
but the houses on 65th Street were separate houses. Of course, they
had connecting doors.

LAMB: Where did you get the idea to write a book about the nine
Roosevelt women?

Dr. CAROLI: Well, when I was working on my book on first ladies in
the '80s, I came across a statement from Eleanor saying that her Uncle
Theodore never made an important decision without talking it over with
his sister. And I thought, `That's pretty interesting,' but I didn't
have time to follow up on it, and so, it was always kind of in the
back of my mind. And so I decided--about 1990, I think, I did the
first--started through the first letters.

You know, when you think about it, there are very few American
political dynasties. There's the Adams, there--well, the Kennedy, and
what other--so we've had a--one book on the Adams women. We've had a
couple books on the Kennedy women. We've even had a book on the
Rockefeller women, but we never had a book on the Roosevelt women.
And I think the reason may be that they left so many letters. They
must have been the most letter-writing family you can think of. I
mean, thousands of letters. And it shows, I think, the very tight
relationship in the family. I mean, there's one mother and
daughter--Theodore's younger daughter, Ethel, lived on Long Island.
Her daughter lived--her married daughter lived in Seattle. Every
Sunday Ethel would sit down at her desk in Long Island and write a
letter. The daughter got it on Tuesday--I guess the mail worked
better then. And she would answer it on Wednesday, and the mother
would get it on Saturday. And that correspondence goes on for about
35 years.

It's like--except when they'd--were together, when they vacationed
together, spent time together. It's like a soap opera. You know, you
read--those letters were all given--the mother's letters were all
given to Harvard, and I can sit there and read them one after another.
The correspondence between Corine Robinson and her daughter, Corme
Alsop, it's just something you read--you know, in--in the archives you
read one side. You read one set of letters, and then you read the
other set. And you--and it's--it's really like a soap opera. You--I
think we--we become--we feel like we're one of the family.

LAMB: Would the Tafts of Ohio, or the Harrisons of Ohio, qualify as
dynasties?

Dr. CAROLI: Well, the Taft women would make an interesting book, I
guess. I don't know what we--you know, the Rockefeller women--I mean,
Rockefellers never had a--they never had a president, so in a way they
are not a political dynasty, although perhaps a--a wealthy dynasty in
the sense of wealth. No, I--the Tafts, or the Har...

LAMB: William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison. There were lots
of Harrisons.

Dr. CAROLI: Yeah, well, that--that would be because you have a
grandfather and a grandson both presidents of the United States.
Maybe that's a good idea to look at that.

LAMB: Y--if we were to follow you around during this period that you
were doing your studying and reading, where would--where did you go to
get your grasp of the Roosevelt family?

Dr. CAROLI: Well, most of the letters--and I really tried to--to get
as much as I could from the letters. You know, letters tell a lot.
They may sometimes mislead us, but when you're sitting there with the
real thing, and you see the words that have been crossed out and--and,
things that are written in the margin, and things that have been
underlined, I mean, you--you form a strong impression of--of what's
going on, why the person is writing what the person is writing.

So I spent--the biggest collection is at Harvard, the manuscript
collection at Harvard. Most of the Theodore papers are there. That
is, Theodore's and his two wives, and some of Alice's papers are
there, and Bamie's papers, and Corine's and so--there. Some are here
at the Library of Congress. Some more of Alice's papers are here, and
some of Theodore's son's picture--letters and the daughters-in-law are
here. Some are at Hyde Park. I spent some time there. Then I spent
a--a week in Tucson, Arizona, looking at the correspondence between
Bamie--you know, there was a--a--a fashion among wealthy women to have
very young men who were--they were very fond of, and they spent a lot
of time with them. And Bamie was very friendly with a young man named
Robert Ferguson. And the letters are very touching, and I don't know
exactly what the relationship was, but it was very close. And those
letters from Bamie to Robert Ferguson are in Tucson, so I used those.

LAMB: Have they ever been written about before?

Dr. CAROLI: Not that I know of, no. And that's where Bamie says
that--she talks about how she felt when she had to give up Alice, when
Alice was taken from her, when Theodore remarried and his second wife
wanted to raise Alice, it--it--the letters are--and, also, I got the
impression that Bob Ferguson was one of the most important people in
Bamie's life ever. She didn't marry him. She married somebody else,
and he married somebody else, and the relationship changes. But you
think about Eleanor's relationship with Joe Lash, and people talk
about--you know, it's not a mother-son, but it's the older woman,
younger man, very close relationship. I think there's a pattern for
that in that family.

Anyway, to continue your question about other places I went, I got
very interesting papers from John Alsop, who's the son of Corine
Alsop, the younger brother of the columnists Stewart and Joe Alsop,
the man who invented the term `egghead,' as you recall, in the 1952
election. He's the only one of those four children still alive. He
lives in Connecticut. And when I walked in to interview him, I
said--because I'd been looking for his mother's autobiography. I'd
heard that his mother had left a--an autobiography, never published,
but--but typed out, you know. And so I walked in and I said, `Do you
have any idea of where your mother's autobiography is?' And he said,
`It's here, and you can take it home with you.'

So he gave me that and some other--her diary, something she had
written for Stewart Alsop. It's a--it's a wonderful source talking
about what it was like in the early teens. She married in 1908 and
lived in Connecticut. Her husband was a--a legislator and a tobacco
farmer.

LAMB: And her name was?

Dr. CAROLI: Corine Alsop.

LAMB: Married name?

Dr. CAROLI: Her--her married name was Corine Alsop, yeah.

LAMB: And her other--Corine Roosevelt...

Dr. CAROLI: Her--Corine Robinson. Yeah. In other words, her mother
was Corine--yeah, all these Corines. That's what--so in the book I
call her Corinine. Her mother was Theodore Roosevelt's younger
sister, Corine, the one who spoke at the Republican Convention, and so
forth. She married Joe Alsop--not the columnist, but by the same...

LAMB: That was Joe Alsop. The columnist was their son.

Dr. CAROLI: Right, th--their first son. And--and went to live in
this--on this tobacco farm in--outside Farmington, Connecticut, Avon.

LAMB: Did you go there?

Dr. CAROLI: Yes. I didn't actually--I mean, I saw the farm. I
didn't actually go in the house.

LAMB: Did you go to Oyster Bay and Sagamore Hill?

Dr. CAROLI: Oh, yes. But they're--I didn't use the papers there. I
mean, I've been--you know, I walked through the house to get a feeling
of it and describe the rooms and so forth, but there aren't many
papers there.

LAMB: Where else? Did you go to Campobello?

Dr. CAROLI: I've--yes, I was at Campobello.

LAMB: And did you get a sense--of all of the places that the
Roosevelts had, which one was the--the most interesting. Most--you
know, the--Hyde Park?

Dr. CAROLI: You know, the thing I would...

LAMB: Who lived the best?

Dr. CAROLI: Yeah, but I think--I came up with the idea that there's
not a great deal of luxury in the way the Roosevelts lived. I mean,
the house at Oyster Bay is kind of an unattractive house. You know,
sort of added on here and added on there. It's certainly big, and
there's certainly all the conveniences, but it's not as though it's
this--I mean, it's not J.P. Morgan gold faucets, you know.

LAMB: How do you think the Roosevelts have done in history, as far as
the public relations of history?

Dr. CAROLI: Well, I think most people would agree that they are
responsible for two of the most outstanding presidents of the 20th
century, if that's what you mean. S...

LAMB: But you--but you studied it. Has there been revisionism over
the years about the Roosevelt women, or are you--are you changing the
image of some of these women from what you saw? A--and--well, let
me--I wrote down something. I--that's what I wanted to ask you,
because how do you know what's right and wrong? You quote two
well-known historians in here talking about Mattie...

Dr. CAROLI: Mittie, uh-huh.

LAMB: I'm sorry, Mittie...

Dr. CAROLI: Mittie, mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...who's the mother of...

Dr. CAROLI: Theodore, the president, mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...Theodore Roosevelt. Mittie, M-I-T-T-I-E.

Dr. CAROLI: Right.

LAMB: Edmund Morris--you quote him as saying, "She was small, vague
and feminine to the point of caricature."

Dr. CAROLI: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: And then you point--quote David McCullough as saying, "She's
the most fascinating of them all."

Dr. CAROLI: Mm-hmm. And I would side with McCullough on that. And
the reason I would do that is, I would look at the letter--I looked at
the letters. As far as I know, nobody had really used her
handwriting. Her early letters, before she married, are very
definite. I mean, when she writes her husband-to-be in New York, she
says, `I want you to arrive on this day and not a day sooner. And the
marriage will take place here, and this is how it's going to be'--very
definitely woman. It doesn't sound vague, and feminine and
incompetent to me.

In her later years, just--though she didn't live, you know, to be 50,
so when we say later years we're not talking--we're talking about her
in her 40s. But her letters from Europe--when her husband was in New
York and they were building a new house, the letters were also very
definite, very--very confident: `We'll do it this way. I want this
kind of carpet for my room.' People talk about her being extravagant.
Well, her husband was one of the richest men in New York. She didn't
really have to hold back. David McCullough says, for example, that
she was arranging, I don't know, dozens of dinner parties, receptions
for hundreds. She was moving her household twice a year, you know,
because they had a winter house and a summer house. I mean, she
doesn't sound too incompetent to me.

It's funny how things like this get into print and then somebody
repeats them. Edmund Morris and--and somebody else picked it up,
said, `Mittie wrote in a very delicate Italian hand.' I've seen lots
of Italian handwriting, and there's nothing Italian about Mittie's
handwriting. And I wouldn't even describe it as delicate. As a young
person, it was fairly small, but it gets more definite as she gets
older. So I--there is--I think in each case I've offered some
revision. I hope, in Mittie, I--well, that's the--my stand on Mittie.

Certainly, Sara Delano I think I cover in a more--I--I show another
side to her. I first got interested in her when I was doing work on
another book on a settlement house leader in New York, and I realized
that Sara Delano was giving money to that settlement house in 1902
when Eleanor didn't know what a settlement house was, you know. And
that interested me, and I thought, `Well, she's not--you know, she's
not the Sara Delano that I--that I thought I knew.' So over the
next--until she lived--as long as she lived, Sara Delano was a big
contributor to Greenwich House, a settlement to help immigrants in New
York. So I hope I've revised a little bit her--Edith, I think I've
seen a nastier Edith. When I wrote my book on first ladies, I--I
described Edith as the perfect first lady, so organized, you know, a
good PR job, but within the family--well, Alice's granddaughter said
that she was mean as a snake to her own children, so I think there is
some--some revision in each of the chapters.

LAMB: Talking about an Italian hand, the name Caroli is--where did
you get the name?

Dr. CAROLI: From my marriage to my husband, Levio Caroli. And as I
mentioned to you, it's only Caroli in the United States. In--in
Italy, I have to say Caroli (Italian pronunciation) or they don't know
who I am.

LAMB: Where did you meet him?

Dr. CAROLI: I met him in Venice.

LAMB: When?

Dr. CAROLI: A long time ago. More than 30 years ago.

LAMB: But wh--what were you doing in Venice?

Dr. CAROLI: I was there as a tourist and I was riding on the
vaporetti in the Grand Canal. And I didn't speak mu--much Italian,
but I do now.

LAMB: What was he doing?

Dr. CAROLI: He's a musician, and he lived in Venice.

LAMB: Well, what kind of an instrument or...

Dr. CAROLI: He plays oboe...

LAMB: And...

Dr. CAROLI: ...with the New York City Opera and the American Ballet
Theatre.

LAMB: And did he move--did you marry over there, or did you...

Dr. CAROLI: In 1965, we came to New York and were married in New
York, yes. And t--we've lived in New York since then.

LAMB: And what have you done in New York over these last so many
years?

Dr. CAROLI: So it's more than 30 years, right. Well, he is a
musician, obviously, and I've written and I got my PhD. Actually, we
came to New York thinking that I would get my PhD and we would go back
to live in Italy, but I got my PhD and we did not go back to live in
Italy, although we go back twice a year to--to see people and do
things, we--we've basically stayed in New York. And I've taught. I
taught City University women's history and immigration history for a
long time. And I've quit that now, and I'm writing full-time. But
I've written on both immigration and women's history.

And I consider this book women's history because even though, in many
ways, it's a wealthy family and I think--I--one of my friends said she
didn't want to read the book because she was tired of reading about
wealthy women. In many ways, their problems were just the same as
everybody else's, and I do talk about some patterns that were
different. Certainly class, in many ways, defines that family. I
mean, their education; the women were educated in a--at home. None of
them went to college until World War II, which I found really--I kept
saying, `Why didn't they go to college?' And they said, `Well, th--you
know, they didn't have to.' I even talk about class being important in
explaining why Eleanor's teeth were never straightened.

You know, it's always been a--a sort of a mystery. She should have
had braces, and she should have had them when she was about 11 years
old. And the question's always been why her grandmother, who had
plenty of money, did not arrange for that. And so I interviewed a
couple of professors of orthodontics at Columbia, and they explained
that there was a class bias in the early 1900s and that wealthy people
thought that it was somehow low class to put braces on your teeth,
because--it was OK to put braces on your legs. You know, your ankle,
if you had a--an ankle that turned in, or--that was all right because
you had to have strong...

LAMB: Or your whole--the spine problem.

Dr. CAROLI: Spine. I mean, the--the Roosevelts were big on braces
everywhere else. Theodore's kids, seemed to me--A--Alice wore braces
for a while, one of the sons wore braces for a while--maybe two on
them. So they're big on braces for the legs and the rest of the body,
but not on the teeth. And the explanation was that if you had to put
braces on your teeth, it was--maybe you were trying to be a showgirl
or an actress. You know, it was low class.

LAMB: Where did you personally grow up?

Dr. CAROLI: I grew up in Ohio in...

LAMB: Where?

Dr. CAROLI: In the middle of Ohio right--Mt. Vernon, Ohio.

LAMB: Where'd you go to school--to college?

Dr. CAROLI: Oberlin. I went to school in northern Ohio at Oberlin
College.

LAMB: Studying...

Dr. CAROLI: Majored in government. And then I went to Penn,
University of Pennsylvania, and got a master's com--in mass
communications. And then I did some--I studied in Europe, in Italy
and in Austria, and then I came back and got a PhD in American
civilization.

LAMB: And this is what book for you?

Dr. CAROLI: I think it's my eighth.

LAMB: Got another one in the works?

Dr. CAROLI: Oh, there'll be another one, but I'm not sure exactly
what it's going to be. There's several women in there that were
candidates, or the next generation. You know, one of the criticisms
of the book has been that there's not enough on the--the next
generation, as though the book--What is it, 486 pages or
something?--is not big enough. And I would have liked to have done
something with the following generations. Remember--there are some
very interesting ones around: journalists, Susan Weld, the--the wife
of a former governor of Massachusetts. I interviewed her for this
book, and...

LAMB: She's a Roosevelt.

Dr. CAROLI: She's a Roosevelt, right. I would--I would really like
to do something with those next generations, but the--I don't know how
soon I'll get to it. And, besides, they get to be so many. You know,
it's hard to--to find a focus.

LAMB: Whose idea was it for the cover?

Dr. CAROLI: That was my publisher's cover, but I like it a lot.
It's a very nice cover, I think. They chose the pictures, too. My
only regret is there's not a picture of Corine Alsop on there, and
she's a major character in the book, you know. So if I had been
asked, I would have liked to get a picture of Corine Alsop.

LAMB: Did you have one of her?

Dr. CAROLI: They didn't ask me. No, there--there are some inside,
yes, but they didn't come across one to put--that they thought would
make a good jacket.

LAMB: Very little time left, but how much tragedy in all these
families? And you write about a lot of it.

Dr. CAROLI: Enormous tragedy. I mean, people who think the
Roosevelts had it easy don't know--alcoholism. Somebody said if you
look at the index under `alcoholism'--remember that both Eleanor
Roosevelt and her--her cousin, Corine Alsop--they were first cousins,
not too far apart in age--all their lives dealt with alcoholic
brothers that they--they were always bailing them out. Eleanor was
always trying to get her--her--the families that her younger brother
started, she was always trying to get them to gather and to see him.
You know, he'd start a family and then he'd just go off and leave.
And Corine Alsop had so much trouble with her alcoholic brother.
Alcoholism was certainly a big problem.

Also, health problems. I mean, Bamie's arthritis, and she was
crippled for the last 10 years of her life. She had to be carried
from room to room. Health was not--you know, Bamie wrote, in fact, to
Corine--Corine had--her sister Corine, Corine Ro--Robinson, had
something, like, 16 eye operations in the 1920s, always trying
to--to--to improve her sight. And they s--Cor--Bamie wrote to Corine
once and said, `What did we do to deserve this very, very bad
health?'--in spite of this, what we think of as energy and vitality
that characterized the family.

LAMB: Once again, looking at the cover, our guest has been Betty Boyd
Caroli. The book is "The Roosevelt Women." Thank you very much.

Dr. CAROLI: Thank you.

return to the top of the document

Copyright © National Cable Satellite Corporation 1999.
Personal, non-commercial use of this transcript is permitted. No commercial, political or other use may be made of this transcript without the express written permission of National Cable Satellite Corporation.

The Roosevelt Women