Theodore Roosevelt

In the public life of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. seemed almost impossible to keep still. Born in Manhattan on October 27, 1858, he grew from a frail, asthmatic child into a politician, writer, soldier, conservationist, and president who made energy into a kind of creed. He served as the 26th president of the United States from 1901 to 1909, taking office after the assassination of William McKinley. At 42, he became the youngest person ever to hold the presidency.

Roosevelt’s early life helps explain the force of his later words. His childhood asthma attacks frightened both him and his parents, and doctors had no cure. He answered illness with exertion, hiking, boxing, rowing, and what he later called “the strenuous life.” He was homeschooled, curious, and drawn early to the natural world. At seven, after seeing a dead seal in a market, he and his cousins formed the “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.” By nine, he had written a paper called “The Natural History of Insects.” Family trips to Europe and Egypt widened his view of the world, while Harvard sharpened his interests in science, philosophy, rhetoric, history, biology, French, and German.

After Harvard, Roosevelt briefly attended Columbia Law School, but politics pulled harder. He began attending meetings of New York’s 21st District Republican Association and rose as a leader of the reform faction of Republicans in the New York State Legislature. Private grief altered the course of his life when his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, and his mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, died on the same day. He recovered in the Dakotas, buying and operating a cattle ranch. That experience fit the temperament he had been building since childhood: practical, physical, and unwilling to be passive.

Roosevelt first became widely known not only as a politician but also as a writer and soldier. His book The Naval War of 1812 established his reputation as a historian and popular writer. As assistant secretary of the Navy under McKinley, he helped plan the successful naval war against Spain in 1898, then resigned to help form and lead the Rough Riders, who fought the Spanish Army in Cuba. He returned a war hero and was elected governor of New York in 1898. Party leaders who disliked his ambitious state agenda helped place him on McKinley’s 1900 ticket as vice president, a post he held for only six months before becoming president.

In the White House, Roosevelt became a central figure of the progressive movement. His “Square Deal” called for fairness for all citizens, breaking bad trusts, regulating railroads, and pure food and drugs. His antitrust litigation earned him the nickname “the Trust Buster.” He also made conservation a priority, establishing national parks, forests, and monuments to preserve American natural resources. Abroad, he focused on Central America, began construction of the Panama Canal, expanded the U.S. Navy, and sent the Great White Fleet around the world. His work to end the Russo-Japanese War brought him the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize, making him the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize.

After winning a full term in 1904, Roosevelt supported William Howard Taft as his successor in 1908, then later broke with Taft’s conservatism. Unable to win the 1912 Republican nomination, he founded the Bull Moose Party and ran again, splitting the vote and helping Woodrow Wilson win. He later led a four-month expedition to the Amazon basin, where he nearly died of tropical disease, and during World War I criticized Wilson for keeping the United States out. Roosevelt died in 1919 after his health deteriorated. His words still carry the snap of a person who believed action mattered: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”