As an ex-president, Theodore Roosevelt wrote an anonymous monthly column for one of America’s biggest magazines, Ladies’ Home Journal, under the recurring column title “Men.”

His authorship wasn’t revealed until 1920, after Roosevelt’s death, by the 30-year editor of Ladies’ Home Journal Edward Bok in his autobiography The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After. The next year, the book would win the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

As this book excerpt which ran in the New York Times Magazine told:

It was natural that the appearance of a department devoted to men in a woman’s magazine should attract immediate attention. The department took up the various interests of a man’s life, such as real efficiency; his duties as an employer and his usefulness to his employes [sic]; the employe’s attitude toward his employer; the relations of men and women; a father’s relation to his sons and daughters; a man’s duty to his community; the public school system; a man’s relation to his church, and kindred topics.

Reader speculation regarding the author’s identity centered on either popular minister Lyman Abbott or former 40-year Harvard President Charles William Eliot. According to Bok, “In not a single instance was his [Roosevelt’s] name connected.”

Roosevelt once said of Bok, “[He] is the only man I ever heard of who changed, for the better, the architecture of an entire nation.”

Now if only we could find out who wrote the anonymous New York Times op-ed “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”

The Anonymous Roosevelt

Published: Sunday, September 26, 1920