Skip to main content

The First Father

March 2023
1min read

A Bully Father: Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children

essay and notes by Joan Paterson Kerr, Random House, 288 pages .

That Theodore Roosevelt displayed even more boyish vitality as a father than as our youngest President comes splendidl) clear in his letters to his children, for whon he was confidant, reporter, and often co-conspirator. He and the First Lady returned to the White House after being away in 1903, and he wrote his son Kermit, “Mother … was met [upstairs] by Archie and Quentin, each loaded with pillows and whispering not to let me know that they were in ambush; then as I marched up to the top they assailed me with shrieks and chuckles of delight and then the pillow fight raged up and down the hall.” Many such passages bear out the fond remark of a friend quoted in David McCullough’s foreword: “You must remember that the President is about six.”

Roosevelt was an inexhaustible troop leader around the house, but his more fatherly letters—weighing a military versus a civilian career or cautioning against homesickness—offer definite, clearly reasoned advice any worried child would want to hear. And, of course, even for his children TR was a vivid writer, as in his dispatches home from Panama: “The huge steam-shovels are hard at it; scooping huge masses of rock and gravel and dirt previously loosened by the drillers and dynamite blasters, loading it on trains.… They are eating steadily into the mountain, cutting it down and down.”

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "November 1995"

Authored by: The Editors

A Bully Father: Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children

Authored by: The Editors

Memoir of the Bookie’s Son

Authored by: The Editors

The Boston Irish: A Political
History

Authored by: The Editors

Traffic in Souls

Authored by: The Editors

Miles Davis: The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel, 1965

Authored by: Max Holland

Seen in its proper historical context—amid the height of the Cold War—the investigation into Kennedy’s assassination looks much more impressive and its shortcomings much more understandable

Authored by: James Callaghan

Most of them were American soldiers who fought with skill, discipline, and high courage against a U.S. Army that numbered Ulysses Grant in its ranks. The year was 1847.

Authored by: John Steele Gordon

And how it grew, and grew, and grew…

Authored by: Richard Reinhardt

Sexy and melancholy, festive and forlorn, the island has always heated the Yankee imagination. The author visits there in the late afternoon of a straitened era and looks back on four centuries of passionate misunderstandings.

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.