BIOGRAPHY OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Theodore Roosevelt, by names Teddy Roosevelt and TR, (born October 27,

1858, New York, New York, U.S.—died January 6, 1919, Oyster Bay, New York),
26th president of the United States (1901–1909) and a writer, naturalist, and
soldier. He expanded the powers of the presidency and of the federal
government in support of the public interest in conflicts between big business
and labour and steered the nation toward an active role in world politics,
particularly in Europe and Asia. He won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1906 for
mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), and he secured the
route and began construction of the Panama Canal (1904–14).
The early years
Roosevelt was the second of four children born into a socially prominent family
of Dutch and English ancestry; his father, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., was a noted
businessman and philanthropist, and his mother, Martha Bulloch of Georgia,
came from a wealthy, slave-owning plantation family. In frail health as a boy,
Roosevelt was educated by private tutors. From boyhood he displayed intense,
wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. He graduated from Harvard College, where
he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, in 1880. He then studied briefly at Columbia
Law School but soon turned to writing and politics as a career. In 1880 he
married Alice Hathaway Lee, by whom he had one daughter, Alice. After his
first wife’s death, in 1886 he married Edith Kermit Carow (Edith Roosevelt),
with whom he lived for the rest of his life at Sagamore Hill, an estate
near Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York. They had five children: Theodore, Jr.,
Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin.

As a child, Roosevelt had suffered from severe asthma, and weak eyesight

plagued him throughout his life. By dint of a program of physical exertion, he
developed a strong physique and a lifelong love of vigorous activity. He adopted
“the strenuous life,” as he entitled his 1901 book, as his ideal, both as an
outdoorsman and as a politician.
Elected as a Republican to the New York State Assembly at 23, Roosevelt
quickly made a name for himself as a foe of corrupt machine politics. In 1884,
overcome by grief by the deaths of both his mother and his wife on the same
day, he left politics to spend two years on his cattle ranch in the badlands of
the Dakota Territory, where he became increasingly concerned about
environmental damage to the West and its wildlife. Nonetheless, he did
participate as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1884. His
attempt to reenter public life in 1886 was unsuccessful; he was defeated in a
bid to become mayor of New York City. Roosevelt remained active in politics
and again battled corruption as a member of the U.S. Civil Service Commission
(1889–95) and as president of the New York City Board of Police
Commissioners. Appointed assistant secretary of the navy by President William
McKinley, he vociferously championed a bigger navy and agitated for war
with Spain. When war was declared in 1898, he organized the 1st Volunteer
Cavalry, known as the Rough Riders, who were sent to fight in Cuba. Roosevelt
was a brave and well-publicized military leader. The charge of the Rough Riders
(on foot) up Kettle Hill during the Battle of Santiago made him the biggest
national hero to come out of the Spanish-American War.
On his return, the Republican bosses in New York tapped Roosevelt to run for
governor, despite their doubts about his political loyalty. Elected in 1898, he
became an energetic reformer, removing corrupt officials and enacting
legislation to regulate corporations and the civil service. His actions irked the
party’s bosses so much that they conspired to get rid of him by drafting him for
the Republican vice presidential nomination in 1900, assuming that his would
be a largely ceremonial role.

Elected with McKinley, Roosevelt chafed at his powerless office until September
14, 1901, when McKinley died after being shot by an assassin and he became
president. Six weeks short of his 43rd birthday, Roosevelt was the youngest
person ever to enter the presidency. Although he promised continuity with
McKinley’s policies, he transformed the public image of the office at once. He
renamed the executive mansion the White House and threw open its doors to
entertain cowboys, prizefighters, explorers, writers, and artists. His refusal to
shoot a bear cub on a 1902 hunting trip inspired a toy maker to name a stuffed
bear after him, and the teddy bear fad soon swept the nation. His young
children romped on the White House lawn, and the marriage of his daughter
Alice in 1905 to Representative Nicholas Longworth of Ohio became the biggest
social event of the decade.

From what he called the presidency’s “bully pulpit,” Roosevelt gave speeches
aimed at raising public consciousness about the nation’s role in world politics,
the need to control the trusts that dominated the economy, the regulation of
railroads, and the impact of political corruption. He appointed young, college-
educated men to administrative positions. But active as he was, he was
cautious in his approach to domestic affairs. Roosevelt recognized that he had
become president by accident, and he wanted above all to be elected in 1904.
Likewise, as sensitive as he was to popular discontent about big business and
political machines, he knew that conservative Republicans who were bitterly
opposed to all reforms controlled both houses of Congress. Roosevelt focused
his activities on foreign affairs and used his executive power to address
problems of business and labour and the conservation of natural resources.

Above all, Roosevelt relished the power of the office and viewed the presidency
as an outlet for his unbounded energy. He was a proud and fervent nationalist
who willingly bucked the passive Jeffersonian tradition of fearing the rise of a
strong chief executive and a powerful central government. “I believe in a strong
executive; I believe in power,” he wrote to British historian Sir George Otto
Trevelyan. “While President, I have been President, emphatically; I have used
every ounce of power there was in the office.…I do not believe that any
President ever had as thoroughly good a time as I have had, or has ever
enjoyed himself as
much.”

The Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt

Despite his caution, Roosevelt managed to do enough in his first three years in
office to build a platform for election in his own right. In 1902 he resurrected
the nearly defunct Sherman Antitrust Act by bringing a lawsuit that led to the
breakup of a huge railroad conglomerate, the Northern Securities Company.
Roosevelt pursued this policy of “trust-busting” by initiating suits against 43
other major corporations during the next seven years. Early in his term, he
also sought the creation of an agency that would have the power to investigate
businesses engaged in interstate commerce (though without regulatory
powers); the Bureau of Corporations was formally established in 1903.

In 1902 Roosevelt intervened in the anthracite coal strike when it threatened to

cut off heating fuel for homes, schools, and hospitals. The president publicly
asked representatives of capital and labour to meet in the White House and
accept his mediation. He also talked about calling in the army to run the
mines, and he got Wall Street investment houses to threaten to withhold credit
to the coal companies and dump their stocks. The combination of tactics
worked to end the strike and gain a modest pay hike for the miners. This was
the first time that a president had publicly intervened in a labour dispute at
least implicitly on the side of workers. Roosevelt characterized his actions as
striving toward a “Square Deal” between capital and labour, and those words
became his campaign slogan in the 1904 election.
Once he won that election—overwhelmingly defeating the
Democratic contender Alton B. Parker by 336 to 140 electoral votes—Roosevelt
put teeth into his Square Deal programs. He pushed Congress to grant powers
to the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate interstate railroad rates.
The Hepburn Act of 1906 conveyed those powers and created the federal
government’s first true regulatory agency. Also in 1906, Roosevelt pressed
Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection acts, which
created agencies to assure protection to consumers. The “muckrakers,”
investigative journalists of the era, had exposed the squalid conditions of food-
processing industries.

Roosevelt’s boldest actions came in the area of natural resources. At his urging,
Congress created the Forest Service (1905) to manage government-owned forest
reserves, and he appointed a fellow conservationist, Gifford Pinchot, to head
the agency. Simultaneously, Roosevelt exercised existing presidential authority
to designate public lands as national forests in order to make them off-limits to
commercial exploitation of lumber, minerals, and waterpower. Roosevelt set
aside almost five times as much land as all of his predecessors combined, 194
million acres (78.5 million hectares). In commemoration of Roosevelt’s
dedication to conservation, Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North
Dakota and Theodore Roosevelt Island in Washington, D.C., a 91-acre (37-
hectare) wooded island in the Potomac River, were named in his honour.

Foreign policy

Roosevelt believed that nations, like individuals, should pursue the strenuous
life and do their part to maintain peace and order, and he believed that
“civilized” nations had a responsibility for stewardship of “barbarous” ones. He
knew that taking on the Philippine Islands as an American colony after
the Spanish-American War had ended America’s isolation from international
power politics—a development that he welcomed. Every year he asked for
bigger appropriations for the army and navy. Congress cut back on his
requests, but by the end of his presidency he had built the U.S. Navy into a
major force at sea and reorganized the army along efficient, modern lines.

Several times during Roosevelt’s first years in office, European powers

threatened to intervene in Latin America, ostensibly to collect debts owed them
by weak governments there. To meet such threats, he framed a policy
statement in 1904 that became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to
the Monroe Doctrine. It stated that the United States would not only bar
outside intervention in Latin American affairs but would also police the area
and guarantee that countries there met their international obligations. In 1905,
without congressional approval, Roosevelt forced the Dominican Republic to
install an American “economic advisor,” who was in reality
the country’s financial director.

Quoting an African proverb, Roosevelt claimed that the right way to

conduct foreign policy was to “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Roosevelt
resorted to big-stick diplomacy most conspicuously in 1903, when he helped
Panama to secede from Colombia and gave the United States a Canal Zone.
Construction began at once on the Panama Canal, which Roosevelt visited in
1906, the first president to leave the country while in office. He considered the
construction of the canal, a symbol of the triumph of American determination
and technological know-how, his greatest accomplishment as president. As he
later boasted in his autobiography, “I took the Isthmus, started the canal and
then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me.” Other examples
of wielding the big stick came in 1906 when Roosevelt occupied and set up a
military protectorate in Cuba and when he put pressure on Canada in a
boundary dispute in Alaska.

Roosevelt showed the soft-spoken, sophisticated side of his diplomacy in

dealing with major powers outside the Western Hemisphere. In Asia he was
alarmed by Russian expansionism and by rising Japanese power. In 1904–05
he worked to end the Russo-Japanese War by bringing both nations to
the Portsmouth Peace Conference and mediating between them. More than just
to bring peace, Roosevelt wanted to construct a balance of power in Asia that
might uphold U.S. interests. In 1907 he defused a diplomatic quarrel caused
by anti-Japanese sentiment in California by arranging the so-
called Gentlemen’s Agreement, which restricted Japanese immigration. In
another informal executive agreement, he traded Japan’s acceptance of the
American position in the Philippines for recognition by the United States of the
Japanese conquest of Korea and expansionism in China. Contrary to
his bellicose image, Roosevelt privately came to favour withdrawal from the
Philippines, judging it to be militarily indefensible, and he renounced any
hopes of exerting major power in Asia.

During his second term Roosevelt increasingly feared a general European war.
He saw British and U.S. interests as nearly identical, and he was strongly
inclined to support Britain behind the scenes in diplomatic controversies. In
secret instructions to the U.S. envoys to the Algeciras Conference in 1906,
Roosevelt told them to maintain formal American noninvolvement in European
affairs but to do nothing that would imperil existing Franco-British
understandings, the maintenance of which was “to the best interests of the
United States.” Despite his bow toward noninvolvement, Roosevelt had broken
with the traditional position of isolation from affairs outside the Western
Hemisphere. At Algeciras, U.S. representatives had attended a strictly
European diplomatic conference, and their actions
favoured Britain and France over Germany.
Last years as president of Theodore Roosevelt

The end of Roosevelt’s presidency was tempestuous. From his bully pulpit, he
crusaded against “race suicide,” prompted by his alarm at falling birth rates
among white Americans, and he tried to get the country to adopt a simplified
system of spelling. Especially after a financial panic in 1907, his already
strained relations with Republican conservatives in Congress degenerated into
a spiteful stalemate that blocked any further domestic reforms. Roosevelt also
moved precipitously and high-handedly to punish a regiment of some
160 African American soldiers, some of whom had allegedly engaged in a riot in
Brownsville, Texas, in which a man was shot and killed. Although no one was
ever indicted and a trial was never held, Roosevelt assumed all were guilty and
issued a dishonourable discharge to every member of the group, depriving
them of all benefits; many of the soldiers were close to retirement and several
held the Medal of Honor. When Congress decried the president’s actions
Roosevelt replied, “The only reason I didn’t have them hung was because I
could not find out which ones…did the shooting.” This incident, along with his
establishment of independent agencies within the executive branch and his
bypassing of Congress and expanded use of executive orders to set aside public
lands beyond the reach of the public, is why some historians see in Roosevelt’s
presidency the seeds of abuse that flowered in the administrations of later
20th-century presidents. Roosevelt’s term ended in March 1909, just four
months after his 50th birthday.

Later years

Immediately upon leaving office, Roosevelt embarked on a 10-month hunting

safari in Africa and made a triumphal tour of Europe. On his return he became
ineluctably drawn into politics. For a while, he tried not to take sides between
progressive Republicans who supported his policies and those backing
President William Howard Taft. Although Taft was Roosevelt’s friend and hand-
picked successor, he sided with the party’s conservatives and worsened the
split in the party. Both policy differences and personal animosity eventually
impelled Roosevelt to run against Taft for the Republican nomination in 1912.
When that quest failed, he bolted to form the Progressive Party, nicknamed
the Bull Moose Party—in a letter to political kingmaker Mark Hanna, Roosevelt
had once said “I am as strong as a bull moose and you can use me to the
limit.”

In the presidential campaign as the Progressive candidate, Roosevelt espoused

a “New Nationalism” that would inspire greater government regulation of the
economy and promotion of social welfare. Roosevelt spoke both
from conviction and in hopes of attracting votes from reform-minded
Democrats. This effort failed, because the Democrats had an attractive,
progressive nominee in Woodrow Wilson, who won the election with an
impressive 435 electoral votes to Roosevelt’s 88. Roosevelt had been shot in the
chest by a fanatic while campaigning in Wisconsin, but he quickly recovered.

Since the Progressive Party had managed to elect few candidates to office,
Roosevelt knew that it was doomed, and he kept it alive only to bargain for his
return to the Republicans. In the meantime, he wrote his autobiography and
went on an expedition into the Brazilian jungle, where he contracted a near-
fatal illness. When World War I broke out in 1914, he became a fierce partisan
of the Allied cause. Although he had some slight hope for the 1916 Republican
nomination, he was ready to support almost any candidate who opposed
Wilson; he abandoned the Progressives to support the Republican
candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, who lost by a narrow margin. After
the United States entered the war his anger at Wilson boiled over when his
offer to lead a division to France was rejected. His four sons served in combat;
two were wounded, and the youngest, Quentin, was killed when his airplane
was shot down. By 1918 Roosevelt’s support of the war and his harsh attacks
on Wilson reconciled Republican conservatives to him, and he was the odds-on
favourite for the 1920 nomination. But he died in early January 1919, less
than three months after his 60th birthday.
10 facts about Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt was one of most dynamic Presidents in White House
history, and on the occasion of his birthday, here are 10 fascinating facts about
the 26th President.

Roosevelt came from a

wealthy New York
family, but he didn’t
take an easy path
through life. Born on
October 27, 1858 in
Manhattan, Roosevelt
survived the tragedy of
losing his wife and his
own mother to illness on
the same day in 1884,
an assassination
attempt in 1912, and an
extremely dangerous
military charge in Cuba
in 1898.

The former President passed away in 1919 at the age 60 from a blood clot that
had lodged in his heart. He had been in declining health for several years.

Here are some interesting facts about the most dynamic of American
Presidents.

1. As a child, Roosevelt witnessed the Abraham Lincoln funeral

procession. There is a photo of the young Roosevelt perched in a window
watching the procession in New York City in April 1865 that surfaced in the
1950s. Young TR and his brother were at his grandfather’s mansion.

2. Theodore Roosevelt had a really, really good memory. Roosevelt claimed

he had a photographic memory, but it is a statement that can’t be easily
proven today. But biographer and historian Edmund Morris cited several
documented cases where Roosevelt was able to recite obscure poetry and other
content well over a decade after he read the documents.

3. What’s the deal with how the Roosevelts were related? Theodore and
Franklin Roosevelt were fifth cousins. Eleanor Roosevelt was Theodore’s niece.
And Uncle Theodore presented the bride at Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s
wedding.

4. The Republican leaders really didn’t want Roosevelt as President. As a

young Bull Moose Republican in politics, TR had angered top GOP honchos by
refusing to appoint Republicans to bureaucratic positions. Party bosses Mark
Hanna and Thomas Platt were able to “kick Roosevelt upstairs” as the vice
presidential nominee in 1900 for the incumbent President, William McKinley.
Roosevelt agreed because he was thinking of running for President in 1904. No
one thought that Roosevelt would take over for McKinley later in 1901.

5. Roosevelt was the first President to win a Nobel Peace Prize. As

President, Roosevelt adopted an aggressive foreign policy, but he also saw
America as deserving a role as a global peacemaker. In 1906, he convinced
Japan and Russia to attend a peace conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire
to end their conflict. TR was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.
Roosevelt also settled a dispute between France and Germany over the division
of Morocco.

6. Roosevelt was a prolific writer. Aided by his excellent memory and his

always-high energy level, TR wrote about 35 books in his lifetime and an
estimated 150,000 letters. And he did write an autobiography!

7. He was also the father of the modern U.S. Navy. To say Roosevelt was
obsessed with naval power would be an understatement. As an undergrad at
Harvard, Roosevelt’s scholarship on the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812 is
still cited today. He also served as the Undersecretary of the Navy as the
conflict started with Cuba in 1898, and he sent the American navy on a
worldwide tour in 1907 as a show of strength. And then there was his ultimate
naval power achievement: the Panama Canal.

8. Roosevelt was a grad college dropout. While Roosevelt graduated from

Harvard, he left law school at Columbia without receiving a degree. Roosevelt
had become focused on local politics and lost interest in a legal career.

9. Roosevelt was blind in one eye after a boxing injury in the White
House. The President continued with his hobby of boxing well into his
presidency. He suffered a detached retina in a bout in 1908, and stopped
fighting. He switched to jiu-jitsu instead.

10. What is the deal with the Teddy Bear? While on a hunting trip as
President, guides in Mississippi had arranged for Roosevelt to shoot an old bear
they had tied to a tree. Roosevelt refused to do so, on sporting grounds.
(Instead, he had someone else shoot the bear.) The first part of the incident
became a newspaper cartoon, which then inspired a shopkeeper to sell stuffed
bears, with Roosevelt’s permission.