I'm learning some amazing things about Teddy, Franklin, and Eleanor

[Shampoobra]

(First, a disclaimer. I'm getting all this from the Roosevelts' Wikipedia pages, meaning I'm certainly no historian, and some of this could be inaccurate.)

Contrary to what I had previously believed, Teddy Roosevelt was not FDR's uncle. Teddy was Eleanor's uncle. Roosevelt was her maiden name and her married name. She was born Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, and married Teddy's fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

FDR's New Deal was born of a Republican's ideology. Republican Teddy Roosevelt introduced the "Square Deal" in a speech he gave a little more than a year after leaving office. He didn't live to see the New Deal.

[IMG][/IMG]

Teddy's mother and his first wife both died of separate causes on Valentine's Day, when he was just 25 years old. (Typhiod fever took his mother, and kidney failure took his wife. Her pregnancy had masked her condition, and she died two days after giving birth. The baby girl went to live with Teddy's sister until she was three, at which point he took custody of her.)

Teddy's second wife, Edith (who served as First Lady during his presidency) campaigned for Herbert Hoover in his 1932 reelection bid. Hoover's challenger was FDR.

[Sanity Claws]

1. Teddy gave Eleanor away at her wedding.

The wedding occurred on March 17th, 1905. A St. Patrick's Day wedding!

[Shampoobra]

2. Thanks. That led me off in another direction...

where I learned that actress Kyra Sedgwick (The Closer; Secondhand Lions; Singles; married to Kevin Bacon) is the great-granddaughter of Endicott Peabody, who officiated at the Roosevelts' wedding.

[Blue_In_AK]

3. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon.

[Shampoobra]

4. I've been meaning to play that, so I just did and here are some results:

Teddy Roosevelt has a Bacon number of 3.

Theodore Roosevelt was in Womanhood, the Glory of the Nation (1917) with Walter McGrail was in Dick Tracy vs. Crime Inc. (1941) with Wally Rose was in Murder in the First (1995) with Kevin Bacon.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt has a Bacon number of 3.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was in Valley of the Tennessee (1944) with Fredric March was in An Act of Murder (1948) with Eda Reiss Merin was in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1983) with Kevin Bacon.

Eleanor Roosevelt has a Bacon number of 3.

Eleanor Roosevelt was in Pastor Hall (1940) with Bernard Miles was in Doctor at Large (1957) with Donald Sinden was in Balto (1995) with Kevin Bacon.

http://oracleofbacon.org/movielinks.php

[MrScorpio]

5. Yep, keeping it the family, so to speak...

That's what Teddy mentioned to Franklin, I've heard.

[kickysnana]

6. Teddy Roosevelt partially won the election campaining on cleaning up the food industry.

My great grandfather Scott enlisted from Iowa in the Spanish American War. They were waiting to ship out in Florida when they were all poisoned by canned Bully Beef. His military papers contain his autopsy that detailed the destruction of his digestive system that finally killed him in 1911. His newspaper obituary talks of the men who died at the time of the poisoning being more loses than the casualties on the battle field and named the ones from that unit who had survived but had died since.

His widow, my great grandmother married an acquaintance Will in 1912* and when she died in 1918 Will married another woman Maude, with children. One of her grandchildren referred to as a shirttail cousin clued me into the story and the fact that the industry was finally cleaned up by federal law because of what happened to these soldiers.

With the struggle to get GMO food labeled now I see what a monumental feat that was then.

*Her widows pension was held indefinitely, as it turned out, up when the pension folks lost her documents, a repeat of her mother's dealings with the pension folks after her Civil War husbands deaths. Some things never change.