Roosevelt, Theodore

Roosevelt, Theodore (b. 27 Oct. 1858, d. 6 Jan. 1919). 26th US President 1901–9 Born in New York City, he graduated with a BA from Harvard in 1880. He entered the New York state legislature in 1881, was US Assistant Navy Secretary (1897–8), and distinguished himself in the Spanish–American War of 1898 as a commander of a volunteer force of ‘rough riders’. He was governor of New York State, 1899–1901. Vice-President under McKinley in 1901, he became the youngest US President upon the latter's assassination.

A Republican, Roosevelt was also a key progressive reformer, whose blend of nationalism and reformism led him to belligerent foreign policy rhetoric and active domestic regulation. He believed that the Presidency was a ‘bully pulpit’, by which he meant a platform from which to exhort the nation to great deeds. His administration's policies—nicknamed the ‘square deal’—included selective attack on trusts and monopolies in business, supported conservation legislation, and created the federal system of food and drugs regulation. Abroad, he announced the Roosevelt Corollary, promising that the USA would act as an international police power ‘walking softly but carrying a big stick’. He also sent the expanded US navy on a world cruise to demonstrate US power, gained a lease on the Panama Canal Zone, and in 1906 won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediation in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5.

In 1912 he ran against his successor, William Howard Taft, as a Progressive on a platform of New Nationalism. Despite being shot during the campaign, which necessitated a short hospitalization, Roosevelt's ‘Bull Moose’ ticket gained what was to be the biggest third-party vote of the twentieth century in percentage terms (27.8 per cent). He thus split the opposition to the Democrats so that Woodrow Wilson, their candidate, was elected President. Roosevelt lost the Republican nomination in 1916, but continued to criticize Wilson for what he perceived was his hesitancy to become engaged in World War I.