Teddy Roosevelt’s Christmas Cards

The Daughters of Charity have had histories with many United States Presidents, but perhaps no stranger one is reflected in the Archives than the one with President Teddy Roosevelt.

Theodore Roosevelt first became acquainted with the Daughters at Montauk Point Camp on Long Island.  Colonel Roosevelt, a New Yorker from the New York City-Long Island area, passed through on his way to the Spanish-American War, with the Daughters nursing at stateside camps in 1898. 

In 1902, President Roosevelt was visiting Indianapolis, when he suffered from an abscess in his leg.  Sister Regina Purtell, then director of St. Vincent’s Hospital, met the President and would serve as his private nurse.

In the several years afterward that he occupied the White House, President Roosevelt seems to have recognized Sister Regina’s fellow Daughters of Charity at Providence Hospital.  During his second term, from 1905-1908, the Daughters and the President exchanged Christmas cards every year, with the President sending a nice thank you for their prayers and their work.  Although they are not handwritten, they are all unique, which indicates that they were not a form letter but dictated by the President to a secretary.  He did then personally sign the letters on official White House stationery. 

His primary point-of-contact seems to have been Sister Regis Biller, another veteran of Montauk Point. 

Some of the letters do have the unfortunate mar of some out-of-date archival practice, when a stamp by the holding institution was used to show ownership of an item and prove authenticity.  While none of the stamps obscure the text, they tend to take the reader out of the moment with an intrusion of later 20^th century practices.