Nation marks hundred years since the marriage that shocked the country.
As we reach June 30th 2005 historians, politicians, and activists all struggle to find meaning in the tumultuous events that day unleashed. It was on June 30th 1905 that first daughter Alice Roosevelt married Harvard football coach and assistant US attorney William H Lewis. The reaction was swift. The president publicly disowned his daughter and disavowed her actions but the scandal left Roosevelt politically dead for the rest of his administration. The 1908 election would see the Republican nominee Fairbanks defeated in a landslide by the Democratic ticket of Benjamin Tillman and George Grey.
And then there are the parts we don’t like to talk about. The number of men, women, and children killed between the announcement of the marriage and the end of the Tillman administration’s carte blanche policy on lynching cannot be accurately counted (low estimates are at the 10s of thousands) there are reasons why names like “Omaha, “Harlem”, and “Tulsa” conjure up horrible images of violence to this day.
The couple themselves would only escape this violence by fleeing overseas to France weeks after the ceremony. While they were by all accounts happy in Paris and more or less accepted in certain segments of French society neither would return to the United States until 1921 to visit the dying former President where the three managed a “sort of reconciliation” before the pair returned to France.
The Roosevelt-Lewis’s life in Paris is often romanticized for its pseudo-bohemian lifestyle and of course their actions (and William’s death) under the Nazi occupation did much to repair her reputation in America, none more so then the award of the Médaille de la Résistance to the entire family( Alice, William (posthumously), Paulina, and Thaddeus)
It wasn’t until 1952 and the anti-segregation policies of President Warren that the Roosevelt-Lewis family would return to the United States permanently.
While much progress has been made since 1905 and especially since the dark days of the 1910s there is still much to be done.
After all, it was only in 1992 that Mississippi began to comply with the Supreme Court’s strike-down of miscegenation laws nationally and even today there are sailors deployed on the USS Benjamin Tillman in the Persian Gulf. The Navy still refuses to change the name of the Halsey-class supercarrier, claiming that “whatever his faults in his treatment of certain segments of the population, President Tillman was always a supporter of a strong navy”. And just last year the appointment of Colin Powell as Secretary of Defense by President Gore as the first ever negro cabinet member was only confirmed by a single vote.
Gore gave opening remarks at the first ever family reunion of the Roosevelt’s and Lewis’s yesterday, introducing Alice and William’s grandson Theodore and bringing up the hope that “if a family can reconcile and come together then hopefully this nation can as well”.