July 14, 1918—Lt. Quentin Roosevelt, an impish boy grown into a daredevil pilot, was killed in action while facing off against a Germany squadron, plunging his father, former President Theodore Roosevelt, into a grief from which he never recovered.
Many visitors to Roosevelt Field Mall, that palace of consumer spending on Long Island, likely know that it is named after Roosevelt Field, the former airport and military airfield from which Charles Lindbergh set forth on his epic nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic. If they think of the field name’s derivation, they’re likely to trace it to Franklin (or even Eleanor) Roosevelt, or maybe that favorite Long Island son and squire of Oyster Bay’s Sagamore Hill, Theodore.
But actually, the name came from none of these famous people. Instead, it came from Quentin, Theodore’s youngest child, and a war hero in his own right.
Few Presidential children have captured the affection of the American public like little Quentin Roosevelt did. Around 35 years ago, in my early teens, I explored the collected works of T.R., but few of his books gave me a better sense of the President as a person than Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children. If pressed, T.R. would admit that his favorite child—and, with his asthma, his love of reading, his large head, and his astonishing energy, the one most like himself—was Quentin.
Setting a precedent (as he often did), the President sent Quentin to a D.C. public school in an admirable attempt to make the youngster realize that he could not get through life by trading on the name of his powerful father.
Many visitors to Roosevelt Field Mall, that palace of consumer spending on Long Island, likely know that it is named after Roosevelt Field, the former airport and military airfield from which Charles Lindbergh set forth on his epic nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic. If they think of the field name’s derivation, they’re likely to trace it to Franklin (or even Eleanor) Roosevelt, or maybe that favorite Long Island son and squire of Oyster Bay’s Sagamore Hill, Theodore.
But actually, the name came from none of these famous people. Instead, it came from Quentin, Theodore’s youngest child, and a war hero in his own right.
Few Presidential children have captured the affection of the American public like little Quentin Roosevelt did. Around 35 years ago, in my early teens, I explored the collected works of T.R., but few of his books gave me a better sense of the President as a person than Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children. If pressed, T.R. would admit that his favorite child—and, with his asthma, his love of reading, his large head, and his astonishing energy, the one most like himself—was Quentin.
Setting a precedent (as he often did), the President sent Quentin to a D.C. public school in an admirable attempt to make the youngster realize that he could not get through life by trading on the name of his powerful father.
An unexpected repercussion, however, was that Quentin joined forces with another Terror of Tiny Town, Charles Taft, son of the Secretary of War and hand-picked successor to the President, as leading members of the “White House Gang.” Charlie played Huck Finn to Quentin’s scheme-devising Tom Sawyer. (All the devilry was exorcised out of Charlie early, as he went on to become mayor of Cincinnati and a founder of the World Council of Churches.)
The White House Gang—and especially ringleader Quentin—gave the D.C. press corps reams of copy, T.R. endless belly laughs, and Quentin’s sensible, beleaguered mother, Edith, considerable heart palpitations with the following exploits:
* nearly toppling a 350-lb. bust of Martin Van Buren (maybe it was the one thing bigger in the city than Charlie’s dad?);
* running a wagon over a full-length portrait of a figure beloved by the temperance movement, former First Lady “Lemonade Lucy” Hayes;
* throwing spitballs at a White House portrait of Andrew Jackson, with three on his forehead (“like an Arabian dancer,” explained Quentin) and one on each earlobe;
* reenacting the battle of San Juan Hill, with Quentin, on one memorable (and frightening) occasion using his father’s actual sword—one he’d been warned to go nowhere near—to take Charlie “prisoner,” accidentally nicking his friend in the cheek;
* walking on stilts in a White House flower garden
* taking a pony into the White House elevator up to the second floor, where older brother Theodore Jr. was sick (the mere sight of the animal would make his sibling better, the boy reasoned); and
* lying with a pair of chairs for the head and feet, with nothing between but books from which peaked long knitting needles (the person who dared to lay on this—Quentin, of course, because nobody else would think to try it—automatically became leader of the gang).
After his White House years, Quentin seemed ready to follow the traditional family path of male Roosevelts—an education at Harvard, where he showed, like his father, an enthusiasm for writing—when World War I intervened. Theodore’s plea to Woodrow Wilson to lead troops in battle was a nonstarter, because of the former President’s age, his physical condition (worsened markedly by his near-fatal expedition down the “River of Doubt” in Brazil in 1914) and the boost it would give the former President if he launched yet another run for the White House in 1920.
But the Roosevelt sons joined. It took the greatest effort for Quentin to enter the armed forces, because another trait he shared with his father—poor eyesight—required that he memorize the eye chart at his physical examination. Unlike his brothers, Quentin joined an entirely new arm of the military—the Army Air Corps—figuring that his mechanical skills (once, he presented a friend with a gift of a motorcycle he had completely rebuilt himself) would come in handy there.
Instead, he was set to work as a flight instructor, a position in which the young man simultaneously demonstrated his skill and his puckish sense of humor. Having dispatched his students into the sky, he would fly up silently behind them, observe their maneuvers, and descend, his critique all ready, before they could land.
As the boy had grown older, the former President feared that his youngest might have been a trifle soft (something having to do with bunching up pillows to ward off blows from his bigger brothers doing pillow fights), and the three senior Roosevelt boys evidently gave a few hints about why he wasn’t with them at the front lines. Before long, he—and they—had gotten their wish—and they were soon sorry that they had.
Even during his baptism by fire on July 5, young Roosevelt narrowly escaped death. When his engine malfunctioned, he came so close to a German fighter that he could see the red stripes around the fuselage. Miraculously, the German plane ignored him. Later the same day, his gun jammed, but his squadron mates shot down a German plane. He merely laughed off pleas from fellow pilots and commanding officers—even from his normally risk-taking father—to be more careful.
On July 10, Quentin’s squadron returned to its base with him nowhere in view—until suddenly, his plane came out of the sky and they saw the young man grinning broadly, having claimed his first German hit. At home, hearing the news, the hero of San Juan Hill crowed that “the last of the lion’s brood had been blooded.”
Four days later—Bastille Day in France—Quentin’s luck ran out. He and his squadron faced off against seven German Fokkers led by Hermann Goering, the future leader of the Luftwaffe in WWII. Suddenly, three more German planes zeroed in on the Americans from behind. Quentin immediately turned around and engaged them alone. The maneuver saved the rest of his squadron, but proved fatal to the President’s son, whose plane spiraled to earth.
It has been claimed that the German pilots identified the body as that of the President’s son through a love letter from his fiancée, Flora Payne Whitney, granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt. They marked the spot of the crash with the wheels and propellers of his plane, along with a sign reading, “Lieutenant Roosevelt, buried by the Germans.”
His father was sitting on his front porch at Sagamore Hill when reporters arrived to break the news. The ex-President begged their pardon as he went in to break the news to his wife.
For weeks thereafter, Theodore Roosevelt would take long woods in the woods, only to emerge puffy-eyed from weeping. Like writer Rudyard Kipling, another figure whose visually challenged son had died in the service of a cause the father had backed strenuously, T.R. was haunted by his child’s death. He wrote a friend that “to feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death has a pretty serious side for a father.”
The White House Gang—and especially ringleader Quentin—gave the D.C. press corps reams of copy, T.R. endless belly laughs, and Quentin’s sensible, beleaguered mother, Edith, considerable heart palpitations with the following exploits:
* nearly toppling a 350-lb. bust of Martin Van Buren (maybe it was the one thing bigger in the city than Charlie’s dad?);
* running a wagon over a full-length portrait of a figure beloved by the temperance movement, former First Lady “Lemonade Lucy” Hayes;
* throwing spitballs at a White House portrait of Andrew Jackson, with three on his forehead (“like an Arabian dancer,” explained Quentin) and one on each earlobe;
* reenacting the battle of San Juan Hill, with Quentin, on one memorable (and frightening) occasion using his father’s actual sword—one he’d been warned to go nowhere near—to take Charlie “prisoner,” accidentally nicking his friend in the cheek;
* walking on stilts in a White House flower garden
* taking a pony into the White House elevator up to the second floor, where older brother Theodore Jr. was sick (the mere sight of the animal would make his sibling better, the boy reasoned); and
* lying with a pair of chairs for the head and feet, with nothing between but books from which peaked long knitting needles (the person who dared to lay on this—Quentin, of course, because nobody else would think to try it—automatically became leader of the gang).
After his White House years, Quentin seemed ready to follow the traditional family path of male Roosevelts—an education at Harvard, where he showed, like his father, an enthusiasm for writing—when World War I intervened. Theodore’s plea to Woodrow Wilson to lead troops in battle was a nonstarter, because of the former President’s age, his physical condition (worsened markedly by his near-fatal expedition down the “River of Doubt” in Brazil in 1914) and the boost it would give the former President if he launched yet another run for the White House in 1920.
But the Roosevelt sons joined. It took the greatest effort for Quentin to enter the armed forces, because another trait he shared with his father—poor eyesight—required that he memorize the eye chart at his physical examination. Unlike his brothers, Quentin joined an entirely new arm of the military—the Army Air Corps—figuring that his mechanical skills (once, he presented a friend with a gift of a motorcycle he had completely rebuilt himself) would come in handy there.
Instead, he was set to work as a flight instructor, a position in which the young man simultaneously demonstrated his skill and his puckish sense of humor. Having dispatched his students into the sky, he would fly up silently behind them, observe their maneuvers, and descend, his critique all ready, before they could land.
As the boy had grown older, the former President feared that his youngest might have been a trifle soft (something having to do with bunching up pillows to ward off blows from his bigger brothers doing pillow fights), and the three senior Roosevelt boys evidently gave a few hints about why he wasn’t with them at the front lines. Before long, he—and they—had gotten their wish—and they were soon sorry that they had.
Even during his baptism by fire on July 5, young Roosevelt narrowly escaped death. When his engine malfunctioned, he came so close to a German fighter that he could see the red stripes around the fuselage. Miraculously, the German plane ignored him. Later the same day, his gun jammed, but his squadron mates shot down a German plane. He merely laughed off pleas from fellow pilots and commanding officers—even from his normally risk-taking father—to be more careful.
On July 10, Quentin’s squadron returned to its base with him nowhere in view—until suddenly, his plane came out of the sky and they saw the young man grinning broadly, having claimed his first German hit. At home, hearing the news, the hero of San Juan Hill crowed that “the last of the lion’s brood had been blooded.”
Four days later—Bastille Day in France—Quentin’s luck ran out. He and his squadron faced off against seven German Fokkers led by Hermann Goering, the future leader of the Luftwaffe in WWII. Suddenly, three more German planes zeroed in on the Americans from behind. Quentin immediately turned around and engaged them alone. The maneuver saved the rest of his squadron, but proved fatal to the President’s son, whose plane spiraled to earth.
It has been claimed that the German pilots identified the body as that of the President’s son through a love letter from his fiancée, Flora Payne Whitney, granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt. They marked the spot of the crash with the wheels and propellers of his plane, along with a sign reading, “Lieutenant Roosevelt, buried by the Germans.”
His father was sitting on his front porch at Sagamore Hill when reporters arrived to break the news. The ex-President begged their pardon as he went in to break the news to his wife.
For weeks thereafter, Theodore Roosevelt would take long woods in the woods, only to emerge puffy-eyed from weeping. Like writer Rudyard Kipling, another figure whose visually challenged son had died in the service of a cause the father had backed strenuously, T.R. was haunted by his child’s death. He wrote a friend that “to feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death has a pretty serious side for a father.”
"You must always remember that the President is about six," British ambassador Cecil Spring-Rice said about T.R. Keep that in mind when you re-read the President’s comment to his friend and observe, in particular, the somber tone. Most people agree that some spark went out of the old political and military warrior after his youngest son’s death. His own passing came no more than six months later.
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