01/06/2024
OTD..."The Lion", Theodore Roosevelt, slips out with an Irish Good Bye! Leaving his beloved country with simple grace! 🇺🇸✝️🇺🇸
100 years ago today, Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill after a blood clot had detached from a vein and traveled to his lungs. He was 60 years old. Upon receiving word of his death, his son Archibald telegraphed his siblings: "The old lion is dead." Woodrow Wilson's vice president, Thomas R. Marshall, said that "Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight."
An astute reader asked us recently why TR did not have a state funeral. State funerals were less common at that time, although they certainly existed. TR had a small, private funeral in Oyster Bay in accordance with his family's wishes. TR was conflicted about memorialization in life; in 1916, he wrote that it was important to build a memorial "not to a man himself, but to what he typified." Those beliefs also led Congress and the TRA to determine that TR Island in Washington, DC - a living memorial celebrating nature - would be a more fitting national memorial to TR than a statue.
Following a private farewell prayer service in the North Room at Sagamore Hill, a simple funeral was held at Christ Episcopal Church in Oyster Bay. Roosevelt’s funeral, held two days after his death, on January 8th, was a small, quiet affair. Only 500 people were allowed to attend, and there was no music or eulogy. Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, Charles Evans Hughes, Warren Harding, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Howard Taft were among the mourners. The mourners then followed the casket to the cemetery, where he was interred after the firing of three volleys and the playing of taps. The snow-covered procession route to Youngs Memorial Cemetery was lined with spectators and a squad of mounted policemen who had ridden from New York City. Roosevelt was buried on a hillside overlooking Oyster Bay.
TR's wife Edith attended neither the funeral nor the burial, instead mourning at home. Two of Roosevelt’s sons, Kermit and Ted, were also absent, as they were still serving overseas in the military. Though very few were allowed to attend his funeral, people honored TR in other ways. President Wilson ordered the White House flag be flown at half-mast. Newspapers reported that stock exchanges would close and that Congress had adjourned early. The Boy Scouts planted trees in his honor, New York held a minute of silence, trains temporarily stopped running in Illinois as did streetcars in Chicago, some small businesses closed, and towns held their own memorial services. Interestingly, the official Washington funeral service for President Theodore Roosevelt was held under the auspices of the YMCA. There were no Cathedral services.
