Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt was born on October 27, 1858, in a brownstone at 28 East 20th Street in New York City, the second of four children of Theodore Roosevelt Sr., a glass merchant and philanthropist, and Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, a Georgia-born mother from a slaveholding Southern family ^[1]. Any account of who was Theodore Roosevelt has to begin with his health. The boy suffered from severe asthma that left him gasping through the night, and his family often traveled or rearranged its life around his attacks ^[2].

His father urged him to remake his body to match his mind, and young Theodore took the advice literally. He lifted weights, boxed, hiked, and rowed until the frail child became a strong young man. He also developed an obsessive interest in natural history, collecting specimens, teaching himself taxidermy, and keeping detailed notebooks on birds and mammals, a habit he carried for the rest of his life ^[1].

Educated at home by tutors and enriched by family trips to Europe and Egypt, Roosevelt entered Harvard College in 1876. He studied natural history, rowed and boxed, and began writing what became The Naval War of 1812, a serious work of military history published in 1882, when he was 23 ^[3]. He graduated in 1880 and briefly attended Columbia Law School before deciding that politics interested him more than the law.

Roosevelt won election to the New York State Assembly in 1881 at age 23, becoming its youngest member, and quickly earned a reputation as a reform-minded Republican willing to fight corruption in both parties ^[1]. Then came the catastrophe that reshaped his life. On February 14, 1884, his mother Martha died of typhoid fever and his young wife Alice Hathaway Lee died of kidney disease, in the same house, on the same day, two days after the birth of his first child ^[2].

Grief drove him west. Roosevelt bought cattle ranches in the Dakota Territory's Badlands, where he spent much of the next two years riding, hunting, and working alongside cowboys. The frontier interlude toughened him further and supplied material for books such as Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. The brutal winter of 1886 to 1887 destroyed much of his herd and most of his investment, and he returned east for good ^[4].

Back in public life, he served as a U.S. Civil Service Commissioner from 1889 to 1895, then as president of the New York City Police Board, where he walked night beats to catch officers sleeping on duty. In 1897 President William McKinley named him Assistant Secretary of the Navy. When war with Spain broke out in 1898, Roosevelt resigned, helped organize the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, known as the Rough Riders, and led them in the fighting near Santiago, Cuba, including the famous charge at Kettle Hill on July 1, 1898 ^[5]. He came home a national hero, won the governorship of New York that fall, and in 1900 was placed on the Republican ticket as McKinley's running mate, partly by party bosses eager to remove a troublesome reformer from Albany ^[1].

An assassin's bullet changed everything. McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901, and died eight days later. Roosevelt took the oath of office on September 14, 1901, at age 42, the youngest person ever to serve as president ^[1].

He called his domestic program the Square Deal, promising fairness for workers, consumers, and business alike. In 1902 his administration sued the Northern Securities Company, a giant railroad holding company assembled by J. P. Morgan and others, and the Supreme Court ordered it dissolved in 1904. Dozens of antitrust suits followed, earning Roosevelt the nickname trust buster, though he insisted he wanted to regulate big business rather than destroy it ^[3]. That same year he intervened in the anthracite coal strike, pressing mine owners and the union toward arbitration rather than sending troops to break the walkout, a striking departure from earlier presidential practice ^[1].

Roosevelt won a full term in his own right in 1904 by a wide margin. In 1906 he signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act after journalist Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle exposed conditions in Chicago packinghouses ^[3]. Abroad, he pursued an assertive foreign policy summed up in the proverb he liked to quote about speaking softly and carrying a big stick. He secured American control of the Panama Canal Zone in 1903 after supporting Panama's separation from Colombia, and construction of the canal began under his watch. In 1905 he mediated the end of the Russo-Japanese War at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, work that earned him the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize, the first awarded to any American ^[6]. In 1907 he sent the Great White Fleet, sixteen battleships painted white, on a voyage around the world to advertise American naval power.

Among all Theodore Roosevelt achievements, conservation may have left the deepest mark on the American landscape. Working closely with forester Gifford Pinchot, he used the presidency to place roughly 230 million acres of public land under federal protection ^[7]. He established the United States Forest Service in 1905, created or enlarged some 150 national forests, and signed the Antiquities Act of 1906, which let presidents proclaim national monuments by executive order.

Roosevelt used that new power immediately, protecting Devils Tower in Wyoming as the first national monument and later shielding the Grand Canyon before Congress was willing to make it a national park. During his presidency he also established five national parks, 51 federal bird reservations, and four national game preserves ^[7]. A 1903 camping trip through Yosemite with the naturalist John Muir helped push him toward stronger protection of that valley.

His reasoning was practical as well as romantic. Roosevelt argued that forests, rivers, and wildlife were national assets that one generation held in trust for the next, and that unchecked private exploitation was robbing future Americans. The doctrine of managed public resources he and Pinchot championed became the foundation of federal land policy in the twentieth century ^[4].

Roosevelt married twice. His first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee of Massachusetts, whom he wed in 1880, died in 1884 shortly after giving birth to their daughter Alice. In 1886 he married Edith Kermit Carow, a childhood friend from New York, in London. Together they raised six children, Alice from the first marriage plus Theodore Jr., Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin, at Sagamore Hill, the family home he built near Oyster Bay on Long Island ^[2].

The household was famously boisterous. Roosevelt boxed, wrestled, played tennis, and led children and visiting dignitaries alike on point-to-point hikes in which obstacles had to be gone over or through, never around. He read voraciously, often a book a day, and wrote constantly. Over his lifetime he published roughly 35 to 40 books on history, ranching, hunting, and politics, along with an estimated 150,000 letters ^[3].

His vigor came at a cost. Boxing in the White House left him blind in one eye. In October 1912, while campaigning in Milwaukee, a would-be assassin shot him in the chest. The bullet passed through his folded speech and eyeglass case, and Roosevelt, judging the wound survivable because he was not coughing blood, delivered his scheduled address for well over an hour before seeking treatment ^[5].

Roosevelt declined to run in 1908 and handed the Republican nomination to his friend William Howard Taft, who won easily. Then he vanished into Africa. From 1909 to 1910 he led a Smithsonian-sponsored expedition through British East Africa and the Sudan that collected more than 11,000 animal specimens for the national museum, followed by a triumphant tour of European capitals ^[4].

He came home disillusioned with Taft's leadership. After failing to take the Republican nomination from the incumbent in 1912, Roosevelt bolted and ran as the candidate of the new Progressive Party, popularly called the Bull Moose Party, on a platform of women's suffrage, an eight-hour workday, and social insurance. He outpolled Taft, one of the few times a third-party candidate has beaten a major-party nominee, but the split Republican vote handed the presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson ^[1].

In 1913 and 1914 he joined a Brazilian expedition co-led by Candido Rondon to descend an unmapped Amazon tributary then called the River of Doubt. Roosevelt nearly died of infection and fever on the journey, and the river was later renamed the Rio Roosevelt in his honor ^[4]. He spent the World War years demanding American preparedness and, after 1917, seeking a combat command that Wilson refused him. His youngest son Quentin, a pilot, was killed over France in July 1918, a blow from which friends said he never recovered. Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep of a pulmonary embolism at Sagamore Hill on January 6, 1919, at age 60 ^[2].

Any honest Theodore Roosevelt biography must reckon with a large and complicated inheritance. He expanded the presidency itself, treating the office as a bully pulpit for shaping public opinion and asserting that a president could do anything the Constitution did not expressly forbid. Later presidents of both parties inherited that stronger executive ^[3].

His face is carved sixty feet high on Mount Rushmore beside Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, and his name survives in Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, the naval carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, and the teddy bear, which toy makers named after a 1902 hunting trip on which he refused to shoot a captive bear ^[7]. Historians consistently rank him among the top five American presidents.

Modern assessments are more mixed than the monuments suggest. Scholars credit his conservation record, his consumer protections, and his mediation diplomacy, while criticizing his belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, his enthusiasm for empire in the Philippines and the Caribbean, and his handling of the Brownsville affair of 1906, in which he summarily discharged 167 Black soldiers on disputed evidence ^[1]. Among the most repeated Theodore Roosevelt facts is that he remains the only president awarded both the Nobel Peace Prize and, posthumously in 2001, the Medal of Honor for his actions in Cuba ^[5]. The combination of soldier, scholar, naturalist, and reformer in one restless figure has had no real successor in American politics.