Theodore Roosevelt

President of the United States (1901–09)

• Born: October 27, 1858
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: January 6, 1919
• Place of death: Oyster Bay, New York

As twenty-sixth president of the United States, Roosevelt energetically led America into the twentieth century. Popular and effective, he promoted major domestic reforms and a larger role for the United States in world affairs. In so doing, he added power to the presidential office.

Early Life

Theodore Roosevelt was born into a moderately wealthy New York City mercantile family in New York City. His father, Theodore, Sr., was of mostly Dutch ancestry; his mother, Martha Bulloch of Georgia, came from a slaveholding family of Scots and Huguenot French. (During his political career, Roosevelt would claim an ethnic relationship with practically every White voter he met; among his nicknames besides TR and Teddy was Old Fifty-Seven Varieties.) He was educated at home by tutors and traveled with his parents to the Middle East and Europe.

As a child, Roosevelt was small, asthmatic, and unable to see much of the world until he was fitted with thick eyeglasses at the age of thirteen. He grew determined to “make” a powerful body, and by strenuous exercise and force of will, Roosevelt gradually overcame most of his physical shortcomings. Shyness and fear were other areas of his being that he addressed. “There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first,” he later admitted in his Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (1913). “But by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.” Insecurity, however, was one trait that he was never able to overcome.

While becoming athletic and assertive, Roosevelt retained his wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. At Harvard University, from which he was graduated in 1880, his absorption with both sports and books made him something of an oddity. Yet career plans remained uncertain. Dull science classes dimmed his earlier interest in becoming a naturalist. A year at Columbia University Law School from 1880–81 did not stimulate an interest in a legal career. While attending Columbia, he married Boston socialite Alice Hathaway Lee in 1880; completed his first book The Naval War of 1812 , which was published in 1882; and entered politics in the autumn of 1881 by election to the New York legislature as a Republican representative from Manhattan. For the remainder of his life, except for brief military glory in the Spanish-American War, writing and politics would absorb most of his overflowing energy.

Life’s Work

At the age of twenty-three, Roosevelt, the youngest member of New York’s legislature, attracted attention because of his anticorruption stance and his flair for the dramatic. He instinctively knew how to make his doings interesting to the press and the public. Personality flaws were obvious from the beginning of his political career (egotism, impulsiveness, a narrow-minded outlook, and occasional ruthlessness), yet Roosevelt’s virtues were equally apparent and won for him far more admirers than enemies: extraordinary vitality and intelligence, courage, sincerity, conviviality, and, usually, a willingness to make reasonable compromises.

In February 1884, Alice gave birth to a baby girl, who the couple named Alice Lee Roosevelt. Within two days, however, Alice died from what is believed to have been undiagnosed kidney failure or postpartum preeclampsia. Distraught over his young wife's death, Roosevelt sent the newborn to live with her aunt, Roosevelt’s older sister, Anna "Bamie" Roosevelt and regained custody of her when she was three years old.

Following the death of Alice, Roosevelt temporarily retired from politics and for the next two years operated cattle ranches that he owned in the Badlands of the Dakota Territory, where he found time to write Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885), the first of a trilogy of books on his Western activities and observations. Ranching proved financially unprofitable, but outdoor life made Roosevelt physically more robust and helped ease the pain of Alice’s death. In 1886, he returned to New York and married Edith Kermit Carow, who raised young Alice alongside the couple's four sons and a daughter.

Also in 1884, Roosevelt was the unsuccessful Republican nominee for mayor of New York City and he began work on a six-volume history of America’s Western expansion, The Winning of the West (1889–96).

Roosevelt did not seek another elected office until he won the governorship of New York in 1898, but in the meantime, he served in three appointed positions: member of the United States Civil Service Commission (1889–95), president of New York City’s Board of Police Commissioners (1895–97), and assistant secretary of the Navy (1897–98). He resigned the latter post when war with Spain broke out in 1898. Eager for combat, he organized a volunteer cavalry regiment known as the Rough Riders. Most of the land fighting between the United States and Spain occurred in Cuba, and the image of Colonel Roosevelt leading a charge up San Juan Hill (in actuality, Kettle Hill) became a public symbol of this brief, victorious war with “Teddy” as a national hero. In November of 1898, he was elected governor of New York and quickly published a new book, The Rough Riders (1899), which a humorous critic said should have been titled “Alone in Cuba.”

As governor of New York (1899–1900), Roosevelt pursued a vigorous program of political reform. The Republican state machine who wanted him out of New York promoted his nomination for vice president on the national ticket in 1900. With reluctance, thinking that office might be a dead end, Roosevelt was finally persuaded to accept the nomination, thus becoming President William McKinley’s running mate in 1900.

Within a year, McKinley died by an assassin’s bullet, and Theodore Roosevelt, at age forty-two, was sworn in as the youngest chief executive in the nation’s history. Physically, the new president had an aura of strength despite his average height, spectacles, small hands and feet, and high-pitched voice. His wide, square face; prominent, firm teeth; and massive chest overrode any hint of weakness.

The presidency, Roosevelt once observed, was a “bully pulpit,” and he wasted no time in exhorting America toward new horizons in both domestic and foreign policy. Yet Roosevelt was painfully aware that he had become president by mishap. Not until his overwhelming election to a full term in 1904 did he believe that the office was truly his.

Within the nation, President Roosevelt called for a Square Deal for both capital and labor. He saw himself as chief arbiter of conflicts between economic groups; government, he believed, should represent everyone equitably. Believing in capitalism yet convinced that big corporations were too powerful and arrogant, he began a policy of “trust busting.” Roosevelt’s administration was the first to use successfully the Sherman Antitrust Act (passed in 1890) to break up business monopolies. Actually, Roosevelt believed more in regulation than in “busting,” but he hoped to frighten big business into accepting regulation. Privately, he was convinced that, for modern America, industrial and financial combinations were inevitable; he desired to subordinate both big business and labor unions to a stronger central government, which he viewed as the proper instrument for protecting the general interest.

The Hepburn Act, which for the first time gave the Interstate Commerce Commission regulatory power over railroads, was a significant accomplishment of Roosevelt’s presidency as were the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, all passed in 1906. Conservation of natural resources was another Roosevelt goal. Over both Democratic and Republican opposition, he cajoled Congress into limiting private exploitation of the nation’s wilderness, mineral, and water resources and withdrew the Grand Canyon from mining claims. His administration doubled the number of national parks and tripled the acreage of national forests. Fifty-one wildlife refuges were established. Conservation was probably Roosevelt’s most passionate cause and one of his most enduring legacies. In 1947 over 110 square miles in North Dakota were preserved and named the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

In foreign policy, Roosevelt is remembered by the proverb he once used: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” In practice, however, he bifurcated that approach; he spoke softly toward nations whose power he respected, while saving the big stick for small or weak countries. High-handedly, he “took Panama,” to use his own words, away from the nation of Colombia in 1903 so as to build an isthmian canal; the next year, he proclaimed a protectorate over all of Latin America the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. As for the Far East, Roosevelt worried over but respected the rising power of Japan. He wanted the Japanese to thwart Russian expansionism but not to dominate Asia. He assumed that Great Britain and the United States would draw closer in worldwide interests; he viewed Germany, Japan, and Russia as probable enemies of a future Anglo-American alliance.

Roosevelt did not run for reelection. He had pledged after his 1904 triumph that he would not seek or accept another nomination. It was a promise he later regretted. The Republican Party in 1908 chose Roosevelt’s close personal friend William Howard Taft who, with Roosevelt’s blessing, easily won the presidency. Yet Taft’s troubled term (1909–13) split the Republicans into Progressive and Old Guard wings, and by 1910, Roosevelt angrily decided that Taft had capitulated to the Old Guard. Consequently, Roosevelt attempted to regain the White House in 1912. After losing a bitter contest to Taft for the Republican nomination, Roosevelt burst into the general election as a third party (Progressive, or Bull Moose Party) candidate, thus virtually guaranteeing victory for Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt’s personal popularity allowed him to finish second in the 1912 presidential election, but without a viable national organization, he lost heavily to Wilson in the electoral count. Taft ran third.

Roosevelt spent most of the remainder of his life writing books, exploring Brazil’s backcountry, and criticizing President Wilson, whom he hated. He wanted to fight in World War I but was refused a commission. With his health weakened by infections contracted in Brazil, Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep on January 6, 1919, at the age of sixty.

Significance

“The Republican Roosevelt,” as one historian termed him, is usually ranked among the best American presidents. An inspirational leader and superb administrator, he revitalized the presidency. His career seemed to defy the adage that power corrupts. In mental prowess, he had few equals in American political history; indeed, Roosevelt ranks among the rarest of human types: an intellectual who was also a man of action.

Ideologically, Roosevelt defies simple definition. Whether he was an “enlightened” conservative or a “Progressive” liberal remains in dispute. Roosevelt himself refused to accept labels. He viewed himself as a moral leader who combined practicality and idealism for the purpose of unifying the nation’s opposing economic and social interests into a mutually beneficial synthesis.

Coming to the presidency at the dawn of the twentieth century, Roosevelt understood that America was fast becoming a complex urban and industrialized nation and that a new balance was needed between individualism and the collective good. In foreign policy, Roosevelt acted on his conviction that the old isolationism was no longer possible and that the United States, because of its growing strength, was destined to be a world power.

Bibliography

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Morris, Edmund. Theodore Rex. New York: Random, 2001. Print.

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