The Great Walla Walla Dental Scandal: Did the President Have False Teeth?
A local political feud erupts when the Ankeny organ accuses President Roosevelt of sporting dentures during a private dinner at Senator Ankeny's home.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Just think of it, fellow citizens! This dirty fling at our beloved president was made by Mr. Ankeny's paper the next morning after President Roosevelt had dined at the Ankeny home. It seems that Mr. Ankeny's editor took advantage of his being allowed to attend the function in his official capacity to observe the president's teeth as he ate and talked. But who has publishing to the world remarks upon their teeth,—whether they were natural or false, long or short, regular or irregular, dirty or clean? But it remained for the Ankeny organ to start this new fad in society, and we presume it will now become quite the thing as just brought from the national capital by people who are supposed to be up to date.
While the Union editor was about, why did he not give the public some information regarding the teeth of the other guests at the Ankeny dinner? How about Governor McBride? Did he show his teeth as he looked across the table at his host? Had any of the guests have to remove their store teeth at any time during the courses in order to rest their weary gums? Why did the Ankeny organ single out the president as the only guest whose molar peculiarities should be paraded before the world?
The editor of the Union should remember the homely old adage about people living in glass houses. One of the stones thrown for him now comes back. In the words prepared for the Ankeny weekly poll parrot organ by one of the attaches of the machine: 'The above seems to be the throwing down by the Union of the last vestige of its self-respect. Heretofore there has been a point of decency which it hesitated at passing, but now the bars have been thrown down and we may expect from this on to see a campaign of abuse and vilification such only as a paper can indulge in which knows that it has lost everything and can by no possibility lose anything more, no matter what it does. This indecent, unmanly, ungrateful, insulting, yea, traitorous fling at a great man who enjoys the almost universal respect of his countrymen, is like the last rantings of a criminal who stands on the scaffold with a rope around his neck and in the bitterness of his heart curses God and man.'
This 1903 feud over Theodore Roosevelt's dental hygiene highlights how personal attacks have long been a staple of political journalism. While today we might focus on policy or scandals, early 20th-century editors were just as willing to weaponize physical oddities—like dentures—to undermine a president's dignity and frame him as an outsider.
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