When the first Roosevelts lived in the White House, not even the most delicately carved period chair was safe during leapfrog sessions. A dappled pony clumped through the children's bedrooms, and was forever being backed in & out of the White House elevator by one or all of Teddy's four sons and two daughters. The youngsters roller skated on the shiny hardwood floors, burrowed through attics and ceilings, wobbled all over the White House on stilts. This was the era of the Strenuous Life, and the Roosevelt children lived it.
World War I changed strenuous living from pranks to patriotism. Quentin, the ex-President's youngest son, was killed at the age of 20 in an air battle with two German planes, and took his place with Joyce Kilmer, Lord Kitchener and Rupert Brooke as one of the most widely publicized casualties of the war. Kermit came through unhurt; Archie was badly wounded; Theodore Jr., the oldest, was gassed once, wounded twice and decorated 15 times.
All three surviving brothers joined up again in World War II. Kermit died, at 53, on active duty in Alaska in June 1943. Archie, wounded last month, at 50 is a lieutenant colonel, fighting on Biak Island. "Young Teddy" saw action in Tunisia, Sicily, Italy and Normandy, was thrice wounded.
In the Shadow. "Young Teddy" spent the first half of his life overshadowed by his father, and most of the last half overshadowed by his fifth cousin, Franklin. Like his father, he had been sickly and nearsighted as a boy, and had rough & tumbled to strengthen himself. Like his father, he hunted big game and captured big headlines on spectacular safaris; he shot tapirs and jaguars in Brazil's Matto Grosso, became the first American to bag a panda, hunted timarau in the Philippines, spotted blue sheep and golden monkeys in Asia. Like his father and Cousin Franklin, he had started up the Roosevelt golden ladder: Harvard, the New York State Legislature, Assistant Secretary of the Navy. But unlike his father or his Cousin Franklin, he never became Governor.
Democrat Al Smith beat him unmercifully in 1924. He lost the governorship by 109,000 votes, though Calvin Coolidge carried New York State by 870,000. From then on, Young Teddy never won an office. His two big political posts—Governor of Puerto Rico and Governor General of the Philippines—came to him by Presidential appointments. Later, the jest was that the Oyster Bay Roosevelts were out of season. He lived quietly in a $90,000 home he built in 1938 at Oyster Bay, served successively as board chairman of American Express and vice president of Doubleday, Doran & Co.
In the 1936 campaign, Teddy called Franklin Roosevelt "my fifth cousin about-to-be-removed." Yet after Pearl Harbor, he briskly admonished an interviewer: "Remember, it's our country, our war, and our President."