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ROOSEVELT, Theodore
(1858–1919), 26th president of the U.S. (1901–9).
The first president to exploit the public dimensions of his office
in an age of mass communications, he was a reform leader at home
and a skilled diplomat abroad. In his lifetime Roosevelt became
a personal model, particularly for the country’s youth,
in a way that no public figure has matched. He was one of the most
popular presidents in American history.
The son of a wealthy, socially prominent merchant, Roosevelt
was born in New York City on Oct. 27, 1858. He was educated by private
tutors and studied at Harvard University, graduating in 1880 as
a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the most prestigious social clubs.
Ill health marred his boyhood, and he suffered poor eyesight, attacks
of asthma, and nervous digestion, before teenage body-building efforts
transformed him into a strong, vigorous young man. After his father’s
sudden death in 1878, Roosevelt forsook scientific ambitions, developed
political interests, and became engaged to Alice Lee (1861–84)
of Boston, whom he married in 1880. Alice Roosevelt died in 1884,
just after the birth of their only child. Their daughter, also named
Alice, as Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884–1980) became
a well-known Washington personality in later years. In 1886 Roosevelt
married Edith Carow (1861–1948) of New York, who became
his most valued adviser. They had a daughter and four sons, the
oldest of whom, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (1887–1944), was
a decorated hero in the two world wars.
After graduation from college, Roosevelt entered politics
and abandoned the study of law when, as a Republican, he was elected
to the New York State Assembly in 1881. He attracted immediate attention
in the press with his upper-class background, colorful personality,
and bold independence. In 1884, after serving three years in the
Assembly, he left politics briefly, both from grief at the death
of his wife and because he had alienated the reform wing of his
party that year by supporting James G. Blaine for the presidency.
Roosevelt spent the next two years ranching and hunting in the Dakota
Territory, which began his identification with the Wild West. He
continued to write histories, biographies, and magazine articles,
producing more than a dozen books between 1880 and 1900. Back in
politics in 1886, he ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City,
campaigned for the national Republican ticket in 1888, and served
as Civil Service commissioner in Washington, D.C., from 1889 to
1895. From 1895 to 1897, Roosevelt renewed political ties and enhanced
his fame with his energetic, reform-minded service as New York City’s police
commissioner. After campaigning for his party’s national
ticket again in 1896, he became assistant secretary of the navy
and worked to expand and modernize the navy and get the U.S. into
war with Spain over Cuba.
The Spanish-American War made Roosevelt a nationally known
figure. His volunteer cavalry regiment, which included both cowboys
and aristocrats like himself, was dubbed the Rough Riders and received
extensive press coverage. Their charge at the Battle of San Juan
Hill in Cuba (July 1898) was the most celebrated exploit of the
war. Roosevelt became a popular hero overnight, and his favorite
nickname for the rest of his life was the Colonel. He reaped a swift
political reward when his party’s New York boss, Senator
Thomas C. Platt (1833–1910), chose him to run for governor
in the face of scandals that threatened a Republican defeat. Enormous
crowds greeted the candidate wherever he appeared in the 1898 campaign,
and he carried his ticket to a narrow victory. Those crowds and
similar outpourings when Roosevelt traveled west to a Rough Riders’ reunion
in 1899 propelled him toward the Republican vice-presidential nomination
as William McKinley’s running mate in 1900. Also favoring
his nomination was Senator Platt’s desire to get him out
of New York. Roosevelt was an activist, independent governor, who
did not submit to the Republican organization; he responded to popular
disquiet over big business and showed his own concern over conservation
of natural resources. Gracefully although unwillingly submitting
to the vice-presidential draft, Roosevelt demonstrated his energy
and popularity again in the 1900 campaign, as he made whirlwind
tours appealing to patriotic memories of the war. He had little
to do as vice-president, but his inactivity ended with McKinley’s
assassination in September 1901, when Roosevelt became the youngest president
in U.S. history.
Roosevelt’s entry into the White House changed politics
more in mood than in substance. With his vivid personality, ceaseless
activity, young family, and social glamour, he became a popular
idol, a position he cultivated by careful attention to the press
and a flair for the dramatic. On domestic issues he moved cautiously,
probably going little further in his first term than McKinley would have
done. Well-publicized prosecutions of big businesses earned him
acclaim as a trustbuster, and his public mediation of the anthracite
coal strike in 1902 showed sympathies for labor and consumers. One
issue on which he did move boldly was conservation, both by publicizing
it long before any other leader and by using his presidential powers,
often high-handedly, to set aside 125 million acres (about 51 million
ha) of western land as national forests.
Roosevelt went further after his triumphant election in 1904.
Having consolidated his position among Republicans, he won the nomination
without any opposition and ran on his record, which he called the Square
Deal, to win an enormous victory over his colorless Democratic opponent,
Alton B. Parker (1852–1926). Roosevelt’s second
term brought two legislative milestones—passage of the
Hepburn Act of 1906, which strengthened the powers of the Interstate
Commerce Commission, and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which
established the Food and Drug Administration. He later advocated
further measures to deal with big business and social problems,
but conservative opponents in his own party blocked those proposals. Roosevelt
wielded his political power at home for the last time in 1908 by
picking his friend, Secretary of War William Howard Taft, as his
successor, engineering Taft’s nomination and aiding his
election to the presidency.
Roosevelt pursued an activist foreign policy from the beginning
of his presidency, in keeping with his longtime motto “Speak
softly and carry a big stick.” Sometimes he moved quietly
and delicately behind the scenes, as when he fended off possible
German intervention in Venezuela in 1902 and when he worked to preserve
the European balance of power in a series of crises between 1904 and
1906. At other times he acted loudly and bluntly, as when he abetted
the 1903 revolution in Panama that led to U.S. acquisition of territory
for the Panama Canal, and when he proclaimed that the U.S. had “police power” over
Latin America in the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
(1904). He used both public and private channels in his mediation
of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905—which won him the Nobel
Peace Prize, the first to go to an American—and when he
sent a delegation to the Algeciras Conference of 1906 to help settle
a conflict between Germany and France over the control of Morocco.
Throughout his presidency Roosevelt labored to strengthen
and modernize the armed forces. His secretaries of war, Elihu Root
and Taft, introduced the general staff system to the army and streamlined
reserve methods. The navy remained a special concern with Roosevelt,
and he harried Congress, with partial success, to build more battleships
and cruisers. In 1907 he sent America’s battle fleet on
a voyage around the world, both to impress Japan during a controversy
over exclusion of Oriental immigrants and to display the nation’s new
naval prowess. At the same time, he dispatched Taft to negotiate
agreements that appeased Japanese interests in Manchuria and helped
defuse the dispute over immigration. Roosevelt left a record of
strong diplomacy usually tempered by sensitivity and restraint,
and he made his last public appearance as president in February
1909, when he reviewed the fleet returning from its world cruise.
Stepping down from office at the age of 50, younger than most other
presidents have been when first elected, Roosevelt went abroad for
more than a year, first on a hunting and nature-study safari to
Africa and then on a spectacular tour of the European capitals.
On his return home in the summer of 1910 he quickly became embroiled
in factional fights among Republicans and slowly but steadily became
estranged from his successor. Roosevelt finally broke with Taft
both because he could not abide the new president’s inept
handling of the split between progressive and conservative Republicans
and because he resented his own loss of power. Assuming command
of the progressives and advocating farther-reaching economic and
social reforms, Roosevelt contested the 1912 Republican presidential
nomination, winning most of the primaries but losing at the convention
to the same presidential party control he had earlier used to nominate
Taft. Charging that he had been cheated of the nomination, Roosevelt
bolted to run as the candidate of the hastily formed Progressive
party. When he was wounded in an assassination attempt in Milwaukee,
Wis. (October 1912), he made light of it, saying, “It takes
more than that to kill a bull moose.” Thereafter, the Progressives
were nicknamed the Bull Moose party. Roosevelt outpolled Taft—a
tribute to his abiding popularity—but his hopes of winning
and establishing a new major party were thwarted. The Democratic
nominee, Woodrow Wilson, who also appealed to progressives, carried
the election.
After his 1912 defeat, Roosevelt spent the last six years
of his life in mounting frustration, first over Wilson’s
enactment of much of his reform program, then over American neutrality
after the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and finally over his
own failure to be allowed to raise a division to fight in France
after the U.S. entered the war in 1917. Although he continued to
advocate domestic reforms, he increasingly devoted himself to calling
for a strong pro-Allied foreign policy and greater military preparedness.
Roosevelt was gradually reconciled with his former party opponents,
including Taft. He disbanded the Progressives in 1916 to back the
Republican nominee against Wilson, and it seemed certain that he
would be the party’s candidate in 1920. His four sons all
fought in World War I, and the death of the youngest, Quentin (b.
1897), in combat as an aviator in August 1918, was a heavy blow.
Roosevelt’s health deteriorated during the final years
of his life, partly as a result of tropical fevers contracted on
an expedition to the Amazon region of Brazil in 1914. He died at
his home in Oyster Bay, N.Y., on Jan. 6, 1919.