Theodore Roosevelt Says Wilson Is the Worst President Ever, and Ridicules Him For Marrying So Soon After His First Wife’s Death

This very letter is cited in Wilson’s biography and numerous other publications

Looking back to the early part of the 20th century, we can see two presidential titans, great leaders who set the course for the United States for 100 years – Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. And our admiration for one does not exclude admiration for the other. However, lacking our perspective, things appeared very different at the time. Wilson saw Roosevelt as a blowhard, a narcissist, undisciplined, dangerous, and out of control. TR considered Wilson weak, cowardly and deceptive, a joyless prig and rigid academic still in his ivory tower. He also faulted Wilson for marrying again so soon after his first wife’s death. Ellen Wilson died in August, 1914, and by the spring of 1915 Wilson had fallen in love with Edith Bolling Galt. In December of that year they were married. This was a span of 16 months. Roosevelt had also lost his first wife Alice in February 1884, and married his second wife Edith in December 1886, a span of two years ten months.

Typed Letter Signed, on his letterhead, Oyster Bay, February 4, 1916, to Charles C. Bull, Superintendent of Yosemite National Park, making some startlingly harsh judgments on Wilson the President and Wilson the man. “I am very glad to get your letter. I do not think that anything would wake Wilson up. He is exactly in the attitude of Artemus Ward’s hero, who would be willing to see all his wife’s relatives sacrificed on the alter of his country. Thank Heaven that for a year and a half I have been hammering him and his policies at a time when I was pretty lonely in so doing. In marital affairs, by the way, the worthy gentleman’s motto seems to be ‘My wife is dead! Long live my wife!’ His conduct in Mexico, his conduct in the face of Germany, and his conduct in the face of the hyphenated Americans at home, stamps him as being, on the whole, the most wretched creature we have had in the Presidential chair, and we have had some pretty weak sitters there.”

This letter’s phrase “‘My wife is dead! Long live my wife!”, a parody on the English motto on the death of a monarch, “The King is dead. Long live the King,” was sufficiently memorable to be quoted (and referred to as a sneer) in Louis Auchincloss’s fine biography, “Woodrow Wilson”. It is true that Wilson’s wedding was somewhat speedy, but Roosevelt’s attitude was not entirely fair, as he himself might be accused of the same thing. The Auchincloss book also claims that Wilson’s early remarriage was one of the things Henry Cabot Lodge, TR’s friend and Wilson’s nemesis, most held against him. Lodge’s wife had just died and he could not understand how a man could turn his back on his past and take up with a different woman that way. Roosevelt’s characterization of Wilson as the most “wretched” president in the country’s history is certainly deeply significant, but examination of his examples shows that Wilson was dealing with difficult issues. The situation in Mexico was confused at best, with that nation in turmoil, and it is doubtful that any U.S. president would have found an easy solution. Wilson’s struggle to maintain American neutrality in World War I was not a sign that he feared Germany, but a difficult and ultimately unavailing attempt to avoid war (a policy which was ratified by the American people when Wilson won reelection in 1916). As for hyphenated Americans (a not-so-veiled reference to German-Americans and Irish-Americans) who may have tried to influence U.S. policy to resist entering the war, that was their right. Intimidating them into silence would not have been helpful. All in all, this is one of the most important letters TR wrote from the end of the Bull Moose campaign until his death.