Roosevelt, Kermit, 1889-1943

Kermit Roosevelt (1889-1943), explorer, army officer, and shipping official, was born at Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York, the second son and second of the five children of President Theodore Roosevelt and Edith Kermit (Carow) Roosevelt. Kermit was a quiet, dreamy, rather detached child for that bustling family. Politics would never appeal to him, but his romantic nature responded to other parental interests. Under careful tutelage at home and at the Groton School (1902 to 1908), he found pleasure in language and literature. On Western outings with his father''s friends he discovered delight also in hunting and rough adventure. In 1909, while at Harvard, he accompanied his father on an expedition to East Africa, serving as photographer. The ten-month journey fulfilled all his schoolboy imaginings, and inclined him further away from any routine career. Though he returned to Harvard and received the A.B. degree in 1912, he spent the summer of 1911 in Arizona hunting mountain sheep. Upon graduation from Harvard, he passed up an opening in New York to go into engineering with the Brazil Railroad Company. There, late in 1913, he joined his father on an expedition into the Brazilian wilderness to trace the uncharted River of Doubt, a harrowing exploration that almost cost his father''s life. On June 11, 1914, in Madrid, Kermit married Belle Wyatt Willard, daughter of the United States ambassador to Spain. The Roosevelts settled in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Roosevelt assumed the position of assistant manager in the newly opened branch of the National City Bank. America''s entry into war in 1917 found him as eager as his three brothers to get into combat. Aided by his father, who recognized that "Kermit''s whole training fits him for work in the open, in such a campaign as that in Mesopotamia" (Letters, VIII, 1202), he quickly obtained an honorary commission with the British forces opposing the Turks in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. For his gallant actions in light-armored Rolls Royces, recounted modestly in his first book, War in the Garden of Eden (1919), he was awarded the British Military Cross in June 1918. He was then transferred to the 1st Division of the American army as a field artillery captain on the Western Front. Returning to the United States in 1919, Kermit finally found his business career in shipping. He began as an executive of the Kerr Line and in 1920 formed the Roosevelt Steamship Company to operate the American-Indian line for the United States Shipping Board. When his firm was merged into the International Mercantile Marine Company in 1931, Roosevelt became vice-president of the parent concern. But even so glamorous a pursuit could not satisfy his longing for high adventure in faraway places. In 1922-23 he hunted tigers in Korea and India. In 1925 he and his brother Theodore organized, for Chicago''s Field Museum, an expedition to collect animals and birds in Eastern Turkestan. On that epic journey, recorded in their East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1926), they bagged the legendary Ovis poli, a rare mountain sheep, and an ibex with horns of record size. A second expedition for the museum in 1928 and 1929 took them into Yünnan and Szechuan provinces of China, from which they brought back the first golden snub-nosed monkey and giant panda to be seen in America. When the German threat again emerged, Roosevelt resigned his shipping post in 1938 and in September 1939 sailed for England. Becoming a British citizen, he was commissioned a major with the Middlesex regiment. He saw action in Norway, at Narvik in 1940, but persistent illness following a dysentery attack while serving in Egypt brought him back to America for treatment the next year. By April 1942 he had sufficiently recovered to enlist in the United States Army as a major. Assigned to intelligence duty in Alaska, he died there at the age of fifty-three. He was buried in the military cemetery at Fort Richardson, Anchorage.

From the description of Roosevelt, Kermit, 1889-1943 (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration). naId: 10677605

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