Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln in the same photo (2010)

Comments

Comment by GCA10 19 hours ago

The timeline doesn't match up here. We're told that historian Stefan Lorant was doing his research in the 1950s. Then we're told that he checked with Teddy Roosevelt's wife and got her confirmation that one of the children in the window was Teddy Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was married twice, and his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, died in 1884, so it's not her. But his second wife, Edith Carow, died in 1948, at age 87. So unless Lorant interviewed her posthumously, via seance, it can't be her, either.

Our best hope of rescuing this anecdote is to assume that Lorant's research happened earlier (1940s?) while Edith Carow Roosevelt was still alive. But she would have been just three years old at the time of Lincoln's funeral, and while her family and the Roosevelt's family socialized together, even her quoted reminiscence is less than definitive about whether that's actually TR.

Possible? Sure. Probable? Maybe. 100% verified? No way.

From what's presented to us, this sounds like a cool legend

Comment by Mordisquitos 18 hours ago

The blog article links Stefan Lorant's own recollection of the event, but the link is broken (fair enough, the blog entry is from 2010). Fortunately though, the link is archived on the Wayback Machine [0], where we can see it is an article from American Heritage, June 1955.

In the linked article Lorent does not specify when exactly he interviewed Edith Carrow Roosevelt, but I think it is fair to assume that the reference to "in the 1950s" is an assumption made by the author of the blog based on when the article was published, and does not cast any doubt on the timeline.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20060507100625/http://www.americ...

Comment by hyperpape 14 hours ago

His book appears to have been published in 1942 or earlier: https://time.com/archive/6786636/books-biography-in-pictures....

Comment by qingcharles 13 hours ago

I uploaded the book here, I can't find that quote or the photo in it, though:

https://transfer.it/t/wCLoeh9XEZrZ

Comment by dylan604 18 hours ago

> But she would have been just three years old at the time of Lincoln's funeral, and while her family and the Roosevelt's family socialized together, even her quoted reminiscence is less than definitive about whether that's actually TR.

While she might not have direct memory of the event, it would not be unheard of for older relatives to explain the picture to her when she was older. Just because she doesn't remember it directly does not automatically make the story of the picture untrue.

Comment by saalweachter 14 hours ago

So her recollection is that she was in the house to view Lincoln's funeral procession. She didn't, because she was three and got scared, but it was still an event she was a part of.

Even if she didn't remember whether Teddy was standing at that window at that time, she probably knew that she at Teddy and his brother were at the mansion for the event.

So we have the Roosevelt mansion, knowledge that not many boys would have been allowed to be in that window, and confirmation that Teddy Roosevelt was there watching at that time.

Comment by rayiner 6 hours ago

> While she might not have direct memory of the event, it would not be unheard of for older relatives to explain the picture to her when she was older. Just because she doesn't remember it directly does not automatically make the story of the picture untrue.

I have a memory of having a tantrum at the Taj Mahal which can't be a real memory because I would have been 3 at the time. But it definitely h appened. It's a reconstructed memory from having seen a photo my dad took from the trip and my dad telling me about it.

Comment by WalterBright 13 hours ago

I have a few vague memories of being 3. I expect if something dramatic had happened, I'd remember that.

Comment by lostlogin 5 hours ago

I can guarantee that something dramatic happened, based on observing a few 3 year olds.

Comment by rootusrootus 18 hours ago

This came up in a Reddit discussion a while back. Snopes has an article about it, in which they quote a source which says that the actual interview happened in 1948.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/roosevelt-lincoln-funeral/

Comment by UncleSlacky 18 hours ago

Here's the link mentioned in the article:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090107061334/http://www.americ...

Apparently she was 4 at the time and lived next door:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Roosevelt#Childhood

Comment by haroldp 14 hours ago

In one of TR's books (perhaps Rough Riders?), he mentions watching Lincoln's funeral precession as a child, from his family home in New York.

Comment by lubujackson 11 hours ago

For some reason, this reminded me of spotting a very young Mick Jagger at the first televised performance of Hey Jude by the Beatles.

Also, a young Bill Clinton shaking JFK's hand. These sort of baton-passing moments are interesting to see from all sides.

Comment by Markoff 6 hours ago

is there any photo of jagger there? I can't find anything, Clinton is no problem to find

Comment by Rebelgecko 18 hours ago

Who is she referring to as "that horrible man"?

Comment by cdot2 18 hours ago

The grandfather who's house they were in.

Comment by Rebelgecko 16 hours ago

Gotcha, I couldn't tell if it was Grandpa or one of the bros who locked her in the closet

Comment by UncleSlacky 18 hours ago

Presumably Cornelius Roosevelt.

Comment by m463 14 hours ago

Along not-that-similar lines, I used to have a lincoln kennedy penny.

It came with a card full of abe lincoln vs john f kennedy coincidences.

(I wonder if I still have it somewhere?)

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lincoln+kennedy+penny+card&iar=ima...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Kennedy_coinci...

Comment by ramesh31 18 hours ago

The past is so much closer than you think. We are only three human lifetimes away from the American Revolution. The last living children of American slaves were around into the 2010s. Back to Teddy, the last living person who could have met him was still around in the 2000s as well, meaning in your lifetime you could have talked to someone who knew someone who saw Abe Lincoln alive.

Comment by rootusrootus 18 hours ago

Indeed this is one of the things I most enjoyed when I first visited DC, the realization of just how recent these historical events really were. Standing on a battlefield in Gettysburg and thinking "This all happened in the 1860s, barely more than 100 years before I was born. I have relatives who lived in this area at that time, and only a few generations back."

When I talk to young people today, and realize how little they know about people and events that were major news when I was young, I understand how it happens. Even for me WW2 is just something from the history books, and yet it concluded just ~30 years before I was born. 30 years before today was 1996.

Our descendants are going to enjoy an enormous wealth of imagery and videos for events that will to them otherwise be just something from a history book. Just imagine what it would be like today if we could see videos of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, etc. Might knock the mythology down a peg or two, though.

Comment by lukan 14 hours ago

"Our descendants are going to enjoy an enormous wealth of imagery and videos for events that will to them otherwise be just something from a history book. "

The question will be at some point, will they be able to tell it apart from AI generated fake ones? (and will they care?)

Already now youtube recommends me some obvious AI generated garbage as WW2 documentations. And that was just garbage generated for attention (ad money). Once big actors with money want to rewrite history and flood the web with fake images to spread certain narratives, then new challenges will arise.

I hope enough people still care about facts and guard them.

Comment by rootusrootus 13 hours ago

That's a good point. When I wrote my comment only my optimistic side was engaged ;-). The pessimistic side shares your concerns. I hope that we develop some technologically diffult-to-overcome solutions for preserving the integrity of media. Like methods for cryptographically signing raw content from a digital camera that guarantees it was produced by that hardware. Not a panacea, but a step in the right direction I think.

Comment by cucumber3732842 14 hours ago

It's the "if you think the news is all lies, bullshit and agendas you should see the history books" meme.

Lord knows what falsehoods of today will become the official record of tomorrow never mind what lies of the past we just repeat because they're what got written down.

Comment by cindyllm 13 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by ButlerianJihad 13 hours ago

Digital Data https://m.xkcd.com/1683/

Comment by lostlogin 5 hours ago

There is an anecdote a regarding Napoleon and Bertrand Russell. One lifespan can be relatively close to two events that an are seemingly far apart.

Bertrand Russell was raised by his grandparents. His grandfather met Napoleon when Napoleon was imprisoned in Elba, and talked about this with Bertrand.

Bertrand was alive to watch the moon landing on TV.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4OXtO92x5KA

Comment by lastofthemojito 14 hours ago

Jason Kottke occasionally uses the term The Great Span over at his blog on similar musings: https://kottke.org/tag/The%20Great%20Span

I think his post that really got me was the 2021 headline, The Last Documented Widow of a Civil War Veteran Has Died: https://kottke.org/21/01/the-last-documented-widow-of-a-civi...

Comment by bmitc 12 hours ago

That's a pretty extreme case that shifts the data by 70 years.

Comment by Xcelerate 15 hours ago

Weird thought: someone born in the 1800s was (most likely) alive when the first transformer model ran.

Emma Morano died April 15, 2017, the NIPS submission deadline for "Attention Is All You Need" was May 19, and a Wired article indicates they were testing models for quite a few weeks before then.

Comment by WalterBright 13 hours ago

The last Civil War soldier died in 1956.

Comment by jzl 5 hours ago

Yep, my mom (still alive) remembers seeing many interviews with Civil War vets when she was a kid in the 40's.

Comment by qingcharles 13 hours ago

Last Civil War died in 2020:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_...

Comment by WalterBright 10 hours ago

These wives were not alive in 1865.

Comment by stavros 10 hours ago

Where are you seeing 2020? Also, this list is widows, not veterans.

Comment by fortran77 12 hours ago

"Last Witness to President Abraham Lincoln Assassination on 'I've Got A Secret' Television Show"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4

Comment by fortran77 12 hours ago

I've had conversations with people born in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries!

Comment by alanbernstein 16 hours ago

And yet, anything beyond one lifetime is entirely out of reach...

Comment by bena 17 hours ago

Lincoln died in 1865. If you were born in the 50s, there’s a chance. But most people don’t live to 90.

For me, that person would be 115 when I was born for our lives to overlap.

Yes, history is closer than we think, but it still moves on

Comment by totalmarkdown 11 hours ago

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Comment by xrd 19 hours ago

When I hear the name Lincoln now, I can't help but think of the fake Letterboxd review of Melania: "the worst experience I've had at a theatre." By Abraham Lincoln.

Comment by WalterBright 13 hours ago

too soon?

Comment by 18 hours ago

Comment by MORPHOICES 19 hours ago

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Comment by triceratops 19 hours ago

Tl;dr a picture in which a historian spotted 7-year old Teddy Roosevelt watching Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession from the window of his grandfather's house in New York. Very cool story!

Comment by jej_FundAlign 16 hours ago

OK, thats enough proof for me that we are in a simulation. LOL

Comment by anigbrowl 15 hours ago

This image shows a close-up of the second story window (Courtesy the New York Times)

A 'close up' that is smaller and lower resolution than the main photo on the article, which is courtesy of the NY public library. NY Times isn't mentioned in the text at all. Is this entire article an LLM hallucination?