Bamie Roosevelt - Later Life

Later Life

When her niece Eleanor Roosevelt campaigned against Eleanor's first cousin and Bamie's nephew Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., she publicly broke with her niece after the ordeal. In a letter to her son, Bamie wrote of Eleanor:

"I just hate to see Eleanor let herself look as she does. Though never handsome, she always had to me a charming effect. Alas and alack, ever since politics have become her choiciest interest, all her charm has disappeared!"

Bamie's niece and TR's daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, also broke with Eleanor over this highly distasteful (to Theodore's family) political activity that included Eleanor riding up to Ted, Jr's speaking engagements with a teapot on her car to remind voters of Ted's supposed (but later disproved) connections to the Teapot Dome Scandal. Eleanor dismissed Bamie's criticisms by referring to her as an "aged woman." Despite all these intra-family discords, long after Bamie's death, Alice and Eleanor would later reconcile after Eleanor wrote Alice a comforting letter upon the death of Alice's daughter, Paulina Sturm.