Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln in the same photo (2010) | Hacker News Reader

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

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154 pointsbryanrasmussen49 comments

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

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/

> 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.

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.

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

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

Well, at one point I was separated from my mom in downtown London. I wandered aimlessly around until the cops picked me up and took me to the station. They asked me my mom's name - "Mama", and my dad's name "Daddy". Then they asked me where I lived - "in a big house". Eventually my mom showed up at the station and the cops lifted me over the counter back to her.

It was a bit of an adventure for me, but I imagine it was a terrible experience for my mom. I don't recall the interrogation part, but my dad would laugh uproariously when he'd recount how useless the interrogation was.

I've had a soft spot for the bobbies ever since.

> 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.

Can't be a real memory? That's a bit of a stretch... We do often re-encode our memories: part of us remembers, and part remembers remembering. But certainly when you were 4 you could remember something from when you were 3, and when you are 6 you can probably remember plenty of important things from when you were 4. It's just a question of a particular memory surviving generations of recall, and a question of how each recall helps incrementally re-encode world-truth into our-truth

Possibly, but doesn’t have to be. I grew up in a home that was built as a duplex, one apartment per floor. So the stairs were 17 unpadded wooden steps that were straight down - no landing or turn.

I slipped and fell down them when I was 4. I clearly recall this. But that made me remember that I had done the same thing a year or even two before (which was worse, because at age 4 I was large enough to stop myself before I hit the bottom - not so much at 2-3).

I wouldn’t remember the first incident without the second, but because of it, I do.

The stairs got carpeting shortly after that.

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...

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

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

https://transfer.it/t/wCLoeh9XEZrZ

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

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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...

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

The last Civil War soldier died in 1956.

Last Civil War died in 2020:

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

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

My fault, I meant to type widow and fumbled it and now I can't edit it.

These wives were not alive in 1865.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The grandfather who's house they were in.

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

Presumably Cornelius Roosevelt.

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...

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.

too soon?

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!

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

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?

It dates to 2010. It's not any part LLM hallucination.

> Is this entire article an LLM hallucination?

An article at the National Archives written in 2010? That would be remarkable.

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