06/20/2022
I might have to read more about Alice’s life!
This is 18-year-old Alice Roosevelt and her long-haired Chihuahua named Leo in 1902. She also had a pet snake named Emily Spinach who she would wrap around on one arm and take to parties.
Alice was extremely independent and unlike many women of her time, she was known to wear pants, drive cars, smoke ci******es, place bets with bookies, dance on rooftops, and party all night. In a span of 15 months, she managed to attend 300 parties, 350 balls and 407 dinners.
A friend of Alice’s stepmom once remarked that she was “like a young wild animal that had been put into good clothes.” Her stepmom went a step further and described her as a “guttersnipe” that went “uncontrolled with every boy in town.”
William Howard Taft banned her from the White House after Alice buried a voodoo doll (of Taft’s wife) in the front yard. Woodrow Wilson also banned her after she told a very dirty joke (sadly no record of the joke exists) about him in public.
Her father, Theodore Roosevelt famously said, “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.”
Alice once told President Lyndon B. Johnson that she specifically wore wide-brimmed hats around him so that he could not kiss her.
During an interview in 1974, Alice described herself as a “hedonist.”
She died in 1980 at the age of 96.
