Theodore Roosevelt

Richard M. Abrams

THE administration of Theodore Roosevelt was in some respects the first modern presidency. It is with Roosevelt that the most distinctive twentieth-century characteristics of the executive office emerged as more or less permanent traits. Roosevelt put the presidency and the federal government at the center of peacetime political action. He made the White House a national focus for the social mood and did much to set the moral tone of his times. He exploited the president's powers as commander in chief to initiate a forceful, independent foreign policy, deploying military forces abroad without direct (or any) consultation with Congress. And he extended presidential initiatives in policymaking to the domestic scene on an unprecedented scale, putting forward reform proposals for congressional action and using executive orders to promote major innovative programs.

Not all the traits that Roosevelt brought to the White House were admirable. There was sometimes as much truculence as confidence, as much belligerence as goodwill, and as much bravado as good sense. He set some dubious precedents in his bullying of small nations and in his sometimes casual regard for constitutional and international law. He did much to prod Americans to take up their responsibilities as a powerful nation to use their power for good internationally, even though it must be said that his own conception of "good" could not always meet a test for universal approval. He was, in short, not the perfect model for the ideal Philosopher King. But his contributions to good government certainly outweighed his shortcomings.

That Roosevelt went a long way toward persuading the nation of the legitimacy of federal responsibility for regulating business activities and husbanding the country's natural resources, unquestionably counts among his greatest contributions. By 1900, the corporate consolidation of the nation's business had greatly impaired the effectiveness of the market to allocate economic opportunities, advantages, and rewards equitably. Meanwhile, the predominantly interstate and global character of economic activity had rendered state governments constitutionally and administratively incapable of overseeing the nation's industrial and financial affairs so as to redress market imbalances. Nor had the states proved capable of controlling private exploitation of the public's mineral, timber, water, soil, scenic, and recreational resources, much of which by 1900 were beginning their way toward extinction. A longtime governmental vacuum awaited federal attention, which, given the parochial roots of congressional power, only the president could provide. The rise of "The Regulatory State" that gained much of its legitimacy during Roosevelt's presidency was as much an essential part of the modern political economy as was the emergence of the corporate form of business organization and the multinational business firm. Although in the final quarter of the century that began with the Age of Theodore Roosevelt a variety of economic interests came to use "deregulation" as an effective political slogan, in fact none of even those same interests truly envisioned a major withdrawal by the federal government of its regulatory role. Most of what went on in the politics of the 1880s and 1890s aimed chiefly at rearranging the structure of competitive costs and advantages that different business and other interests had constructed in previous decades. No one understood the vital importance of the modern regulatory state better than Theodore Roosevelt, and through all the political smoke of the 1890s it remained clear that his perceptions continued to serve modern government.

Meanwhile, the competition for empire among the leading industrial and military powers of Europe and Asia challenged the rationale of America's traditional isolationism and forced heavy responsibilities on the country's commander in chief. These developments greatly magnified the importance of the presidency and inevitably drew the attention of the press beyond state and local events to national politics. Later in the century, as film, radio, and television became public media instruments, the presence of the chief executive and his family would become more potent and more influential. But Theodore Roosevelt achieved such stature in advance of the new technology. It may be that Americans generally get the president who most closely mirrors their mood, but it is at least arguable that presidents shape the nation's mood, its manners, its tastes, and its morals somewhat more than they have been shaped by them. This seems especially true of Theodore Roosevelt.

The Man and His Times

Roosevelt's personality and political philosophy fitted the imperatives far more than they did the fashions of the times, so that the degree to which his behavior in the White House both hastened and shaped the dramatic growth of presidential power over the next seventy-five years must be seriously considered. Temperamentally, Roosevelt craved attention. It was said of him in jest that when he went to the theater, he envied the star; when he witnessed a wedding, he wished to be the bride; and when he attended a funeral, he resented the corpse. Once in the White House, especially in view of the changed national and international circumstances, he could not fail to focus national attention on the presidency.

Roosevelt believed in a strong "National Government" (his preferred term of reference to the federal administration), and he believed in the forceful use of presidential power. In this, he ran against the strong "Jeffersonian" current in nineteenth-century American politics, which treated power with suspicion, federal power with especial distrust, and presidential power as a threat to democratic impulses, which, it was long assumed, resided chiefly in the states and the legislatures. But Roosevelt moved strongly within other nineteenth-century currents that put power in a different perspective. The late Victorian era was, after all, the age of Darwinism, which featured an aggressive confidence in the triumph of the fit. Fit for the nineteenth-century American meant both physical and moral superiority, and moral superiority justified—indeed, mandated—vigorous uses of power. It was a major part of the very meaning of manliness, an idea of exceptional importance to contemporary males and to Roosevelt in particular.

Very much in the fashion of his times, Roosevelt viewed the world in terms of struggle between good and evil, between the righteous and the unjust, between civilization and barbarism. For the righteous to shrink from power would be to yield the arena to the unworthy. "I believe in a strong executive; I believe in power," he wrote during his last year in office to the British historian George Otto Trevelyan (and obviously for the historical record). "I greatly enjoy the exercise of power," he added. "While President, I have been President, emphatically; I have used every ounce of power there was in the office," he told Trevelyan. "I do not believe that any President has ever had as thoroughly good a time as I have had, or has ever enjoyed himself as much."

Roosevelt wrote these words by way of explaining why he had declined to run for another term in office. It was not, he made plain, that he felt burdened or disenchanted. It was rather that his view of the presidency required that there be a specific limit on how long any individual should serve. As president, he sought to use power up to, and beyond, the limits that ordinary law and a cautious interpretation of the Constitution set. He owed, he said, his primary obligation to the nation's welfare. That was true of officers in other branches of government, but no other agency of government could act with the efficiency and dispatch that the executive office could; neither did they have so much responsibility. When emergencies arose or unique opportunities beckoned, the president should follow the "higher law" of duty if the secondary law of men or states interfered. It did not trouble him that a president might sometimes play the autocrat—all the best presidents had occasionally done so. It was only important that the people know that after four years they would have the opportunity to dismiss an incumbent and that after eight years they would be assured a new president.

There was both arrogance and innocence in this, traits that, as in so many things, made T. R., as he was called, an archetype of his generation. Only someone so sure as he was of his hold on truth and of his faithful dedication to the nation's interests could be so casual in his regard for law and so certain of his calling to carry out a stewardship of the nation. That was the arrogance in the matter. The innocence consisted in the prevailing contemporary view that the difference between truth and error was plain for all godly and right-thinking persons to see, that virtue was a simple matter, and that honesty of purpose and heart was enough to rectify evil and to serve The Good Society. There was innocence, too, in the belief that no autocrat in the White House within four or eight years could do any permanent or substantial damage to the principles and practices of a free, orderly society ostensibly governed by the rule of law. The sufficiency of democratic, electoral institutions was taken for granted. This was, after all, a generation as yet untouched by the example of what modern technology combined with a populist absolutism could do in the service of the totalitarian state, a concept as yet unborn. It was, as even some contemporaries called it, an "age of confidence," when faith often served as truth, or was mistaken for it, and when values remained as yet unattenuated by pluralistic doubt.

An unquestioning ignorance left Americans at the turn of the century free to assume with certitude the superiority of the "Caucasian race," and, among that race, of Christians; among Christians, of Western civilization; and within that civilization, of the Protestant Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon "races." It was a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant God that a majority of Americans acknowledged presiding over the universe in the year T. R. entered the White House. Such conceit—or so we would call it today—permitted those with power to assume that laws were to be applied rigidly for the vicious but could be stretched for the virtuous by the stewards of civic order. It permitted one set of principles to guide policy toward large and powerful nations and another toward smaller or underdeveloped countries; one set for whites, another for nonwhites; one set for the wellborn and well-off, and another for the less well endowed. Such parochial assumptions were in no way novel. They were rather characteristic of the village loyalty and outlook, the clannishness of ethnic and class groupings that has dominated most of human history.

Neither was it a matter of class outlook in Western culture. If Roosevelt could write of his conviction "that English rule in India and Egypt like the rule of the French in Algiers or of Russia in Turkestan means a great advance for humanity," he was only affirming what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also had once contended. But whereas Marx and Engels saw European imperialism as serving benevolent historical forces "through the vilest of motives," Roosevelt affected a posture of benign obligation; and whereas Marx and Engels saw Western bourgeois domination as a necessary uplifting stage preceding the ultimate uplift of working-class revolution, Roosevelt committed his life's work to preventing just that eventuality. For Roosevelt, the nation-state was the finest product of social evolution, replacing the tribe and the clan; and it was to the nation that he insisted all class, ethnic, religious, economic, and provincial interests yield their loyalty.

By so insisting, Roosevelt raised a challenge to the prevailing ethos of the times. The country's rapid industrialization since mid-century had sud. denly enriched thousands of Americans who had come from modest and, in some cases, lower-class families. In fact, the wealth of the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Hills, and Harrimans substantially dwarfed the family fortunes enjoyed by the country's older, self-conscious "aristocracy," such patrician families as the Adamses, Schuylers, Peabodys, and Roosevelts. And along with the wealth went power. Theodore Roosevelt grew up in a family and in a social set whose political influence had been displaced by the new men of great wealth, men who were guided by a business, rather than a social, ethic and who lacked a family tradition of public service, a sense of noblesse oblige. These men had "made it" through the squalor of industrial conflict to take command of the levers of government and manipulate them in the hard-bitten style of their own experiences. Above all, these men increasingly exemplified the country's new standard of success, a standard built on the workaday values of industry and finance. The old patrician classes of the country could not compete with the men of new wealth on their own terms. By emphasizing nationalism, patriotism, and the virtues of manly and even martial strenuosity, Roosevelt put forward an alternative standard of success.

The Young T. R.

It had been one of Roosevelt's early accomplishments that he had successfully challenged his social set's condescending aloofness by entering the festering New York political scene, against all counsel, without losing his standing in society. "I intended," he said, "to be one of the governing class"; and if the men who then dominated that class were indeed too vulgar and rough for him, then "I supposed I would have to quit, but I certainly would not quit until I had made the effort and found out whether I really was too weak to hold my own in the rough and tumble." Of course, Roosevelt held his own. But more than that, he helped make politics an attractive career once more for well-educated, talented men and women of goodwill. He, as much as anyone in the country, was responsible for making reform respectable, removing from it the stigmas of radicalism on the one hand and of effeteness on the other. He rehabilitated the idea of the patrician in politics.

It is easy—perhaps too easy—to link Theodore Roosevelt's political philosophy and his behavior in the White House to his childhood and his upbringing. There is a strong consistency in his attitude toward duty, character, and power that runs the extent of the sixty-one years he lived. He was born in Manhattan on 27 October 1858, the second child and the older of two sons in a family of four children. His southern-born mother, Martha Bulloch, could well have been a model for the stereotype of the ineffectual Victorian female. His father, Theodore, Sr., appeared (at least in his older son's revering eyes) a paragon of civic and family virtue, a tall, strong, athletically built man of stern moral commitments, active in philanthropy and on the periphery of politics. His devoted son bore the burden of physical frailty and illness, a burden made doubly heavy by the inevitable comparisons he made to his father. Small-boned, soprano-voiced, nearsighted to the point of virtual blindness in one eye, and severely asthmatic, he wrote later as well as in his childhood diaries of the anguish he felt over his infirmities and of how he had had to depend on his younger brother, Elliott, to help deal with youthful belligerencies. Thoughts on strength and power must have been constant companions for him. In his book The Strenuous Life (1901), he would remark, "One prime reason for abhorring cowards is because every good boy should have it in him to thrash the objectionable boy as the need arises." As president in 1906, he wrote, "The chance for the settlement of disputes peacefully . . . depends mainly upon the possession by the nations that mean to do right of sufficient armed strength to make their purpose effective."

When T. R. was about twelve, his father urged him to work on developing his physical strength. The boy put aside his nature books for the regimen of weights, chinning bar, horseback riding, boxing, wrestling, and hunting. It seems to have worked. Although his eyesight would continue to deteriorate, Roosevelt conquered his asthma and built a muscular body capable of the strenuosity he craved, perhaps as proof of his worthiness to be his father's son. ("O, Father, Father how bitterly I miss you, mourn you and long for you!" he wrote when he was nineteen, weeks after his father's death. "I realize more and more every day," he added six months later, "that I am as much inferior to Father morally and mentally as physically.") That was in 1877. Within the next quarter of a century, the energy he poured into sport, scholarship, politics, and actual physical combat must have left him with at least some measure of vindication.

By the time he became president, Roosevelt had in fact accomplishments enough to make him something of a national legend, a career and exploits that might have rivaled any small boy's grandest daydreams. He had engaged in the "rough and tumble" of city and state politics. He had bought a ranch in the untamed Dakota Territory, ridden with cowpunchers, led a posse to capture three armed thieves, and come out the victor in a brief brawl with a (rather drunk) tough in a tavern. Farther west, he had hunted grizzlies and cougars in the Rockies and matched shooting skills with a group of "wild Indians." In that same period, he had written eight or nine books, including two serviceable biographies (Thomas Hart Benton, 1887, and Gouverneur Morris, 1888), a major four-volume history of the West (The Winning of the West, 1889–1896), and The Naval War of 1812 (1882), which for a time served as a textbook on the subject at Annapolis. He had served on the United States Civil Service Commission (1889–1895) under two presidents, on the New York City Board of Police Commissioners (1894–1896), and as assistant secretary of the navy (1897–1898). On the two commissions, he had managed to attract national attention because of his bold battles for nonpartisan administration of the law (while keeping his fences carefully mended within his party). In the third position, he had found himself in control of the United States Navy on 25 February 1898, ten days after the destruction of the battleship Maine in Cuba (Secretary of the Navy John D. Long had taken the day off), and had used that control with a characteristic disregard for lawful authority when the latter stood in the way of the national interest, as he viewed it. Acting with the brashness of a boy suddenly aware of power and heedless of instructions to the contrary, he ordered Commodore George Dewey's Pacific fleet to Hong Kong to prepare (although the country was still at peace) for combat with the Spanish fleet in the Philippines, thereby setting the stage for the Battle of Manila Bay and American annexation of the large Asian archipelago.

With the declaration of war soon after, Roosevelt resigned his office, helped organize a voluntary cavalry unit made up of a few hundred Dakota and other cowboys, a good number of Ivy League football players, a few New York City policemen, and fifteen or so American Indians. Promptly dubbed "The Rough Riders" by the overexcited press, First Regiment of U.S. Volunteer Cavalry with Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt as battle commander saw brutal action in the hills overlooking Santiago, Cuba. In taking its assigned target, the regiment suffered extraordinary losses, possibly owing to brief training and its commander's brash amateur leadership; but by some miracle Roosevelt survived, returned quickly to New York in time for the political season, and was elected governor of the country's most populous state that same November, in no small measure on the strength of his wartime notoriety. Two years later, his nomination for the vice presidency was arranged by New York Republicans who had wearied of T. R.'s tempestuous independence and wished him up and away. Then, in September 1901, at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, Leon Czolgosz' gun, hidden in his bandaged fist as he approached President McKinley to shake hands, put the Rough Rider in the White House.

In the White House

Although Roosevelt became president in a freakish way and was moreover, at not quite forty-three, the youngest man ever to hold the office, few United States presidents entered the White House who were as well qualified. John Quincy Adams had been at least as well read and had spent more time abroad in diplomatic activities before he, like his father, became president. But Roosevelt's numerous publications showed him to be a man of respectable scholarly accomplishments (his The Winning of the West was reviewed seriously in the American Historical Review by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1896) and a serious thinker about major contemporary issues, notably military strategy. His western exploits and his brief military career had given experience that Adams conspicuously lacked, to Adams' great disadvantage in his rivalry with Andrew Jackson. And Roosevelt had also traveled abroad frequently, both as a child and as an adult. He moved easily among the genteel and governing classes of England and Germany, and established there lifelong friendships sustained by a massive correspondence. When in 1886 he married Edith Carow, his second wife (his first, Alice Lee, had died in childbirth in 1884), it was in London, and Britain's future ambassador to the United States, Cecil Spring Rice ("Springy," to Roosevelt), served as his best man.

As John Morton Blum has astutely observed, Theodore Roosevelt spoke and wrote expansively on order, duty, justice, and power—but rarely on happiness, the word that stands at the center of liberal thought. Except for his commitment to a parliamentary and electoral politics, Roosevelt in fact showed few liberal characteristics. He spoke righteously for freedom but placed individual liberty in the context of a greater obligation to the nation. He acknowledged that most individuals probably preferred business as usual, to be left to cultivate their own gardens and to pursue modest livelihoods and comforts, but he viewed such an outlook with scorn. He found peace good but grandeur better. He vigorously defended the rights and privileges of private property, but he would have them subordinated to political priorities. Business competition in an unmanaged, open market, then the centerpiece of the liberal economic order, he regarded with skepticism, as wasteful, disorderly, and given to irrational outcomes. The rule of law, equally central to the legitimacy of power in a liberal state, Roosevelt regarded as an ideal that should be applied to customary matters and ordinary people; but power, he believed, was a better, more reliable guarantor of justice, progress, excellence, order, and nobility. Roosevelt as president strove to build an American national state that could serve as the focus of an orderly justice, but in that cause he himself evaded constitutional and legal constraints that were designed to guarantee orderly government.

In such characteristics lay the greatness, but also the danger, of Theodore Roosevelt. Greatness often requires a reaching beyond conventional limits, a recognition of the possibilities and opportunities that beckon beyond the horizons of ordinary law and custom. The America that Roosevelt contemplated at the turn of the century was about to enter seriously upon international happenings. The nation's business, its size, its expansive history and spirit had thrust it abroad. Yet Americans typically remained ignorant of the implications of such developments, innocent of the country's military and economic vulnerabilities. When, without consulting Congress, Roosevelt "took Panama," sent the fleet around the world, and signed secret agreements with Japan, he filled a void not merely in the constitutional distribution of powers but in the vision of contemporary Americans and their mostly provincial political leaders.

Similarly, the revolution in industrial production, organization, and marketing since 1875 had swiftly made archaic a constitutional and legal system that continued to treat private economic power as if it were still exercised mostly by small proprietary farmers and businessmen who serviced local or state communities. The sudden rise to dominance of a few very large interstate corporations was rapidly turning the open price and market system into a managed continental economy that rewarded the big and the powerful to the gross disadvantage of the masses of smaller business people of the country. Meanwhile, unrestrained private exploitation of natural resources threatened to squander the means whereby future generations might enjoy the same opportunities as did contemporaries. Roosevelt saw both danger and injustice in what was happening and also that the courts and Congress appeared incapable of taking notice. When the president bypassed Congress, expanding the use of executive orders to put some public lands beyond the reach of private exploitation, and when he fought to establish independent administrative agencies in the executive branch to supplement the courts' supervision of private economic behavior, he took the first small steps toward bringing the problems invoked by industrialization within the purview of a national policy. In all these things, in both domestic and foreign policies, Theodore Roosevelt showed remarkable vision, while he also set some precedents for the abuses of power by twentieth-century American presidents.

His private reaction to McKinley's death reveals the raw side of the man. While McKinley lay dying, Roosevelt wrote to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge:

We should war with relentless efficiency not only against anarchists, but against all active and passive sympathizers with anarchists. Moreover, every scoundrel . . . who for whatever purposes appeals to evil human passion, has made himself accessory before the fact to every crime of this nature, and every soft fool who extends a maudlin sympathy to criminals has done likewise.. . . Tolstoy and the feeble apostles of Tolstoy . . . who unite in petitions for the pardon of anarchists, have a heavy share in the burden of responsibility for crimes of this kind.

The "war" Roosevelt proposed here he meant in a moral sense; he never urged legislation that would in fact bring "soft fools" within the law's definition of an "accessory." But he did sign the Immigration Act of 1903, which permitted the deportation of "alien anarchists" and banned "anarchists" from entering the country or seeking citizenship. For the first time since the long-repudiated Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the United States applied a political test for immigration and citizenship. Most insidious, the act left it to local officials to define what kind of activities or speech made one an anarchist.

Roosevelt was not responsible for the act. A great surge of excess and violence followed in the wake of McKinley's assassination, which fed longstanding fires of antiradicalism and nativism. But the new president did and said nothing to deter the nativists' assaults upon civil liberties or to quell the lynch-law "justice" to which they gave expression. Although Roosevelt usually preferred a more orderly and legal form of justice, his own instincts sometimes drifted in other directions, as his behavior in the Brownsville incident suggests. In November 1906, Roosevelt summarily issued dishonorable discharges to more than 160 black soldiers because it had been alleged that members of their battalions rioted in the town of Brownsville, Texas, in August. In the melee, a bartender was killed and a policeman was wounded. No individual was ever indicted; no trial was ever held. But the punishment the president inflicted on the men was severe. Many of the men were close to retirement but were deprived of all benefits because of the dishonorable discharge. Several held the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military award. After a congressional outcry against the president's challenge to the Anglo-American legal principles that an individual is innocent until proved guilty and that individual guilt cannot be inferred from membership in a group, Roosevelt compounded his offense, denying that Congress had any right to interfere. In a much publicized speech, he boasted, "The only reason I didn't have them hung was because I could not find out which ones . . . did the shooting." As William Harbaugh points out, it is unlikely that racial bias entered significantly into Roosevelt's action in the case; there is no evidence that he would have treated white troops any differently. That may say something for Roosevelt's racial views but not much for his regard for law.

In office, Roosevelt rarely vented such impulses to impolitic righteousness. As Blum has remarked:

In order to win office and to make government function, he taught himself to restrain any politically dangerous impulse, to study complex matters of policy before dealing with them, and to balance his objectives against the likelihood of achieving them—an exercise he often obscured by clothing the art of the possible in the rhetoric of the imperative.

Bringing Industrialism Under Control

As in other matters, in his plan to place American industry under national supervision, Roosevelt proceeded cautiously. He well knew that government intervention in the private sector had profound roots in the American tradition and equally profound justification. But the tumultuous politics of the late nineteenth century had aroused a great fear of "mobocracy." The Greenback, Granger, and Populist movements, with their demands that government redress a dangerous imbalance of power between "the trusts" and "the people," had evoked a fierce counterattack not only against the particular regulatory and public-ownership measures proposed by the rural "radicals" but against the legitimacy of government intervention in the economy as a general principle. For decades, court and legislative actions had promoted and protected the growing industrial and transportation companies against foreign competition and against civil and criminal claims pursued by small business, farm, and labor interests. They had done so in the name of the public's interest in rapid industrial growth. But when, especially after 1875, shifting political majorities in several states led to legislation designed to mitigate some of the more conspicuous costs of industrialization, the groups that had grown powerful in the sunlight of government favor now cried foul. The ferocity of the counterattack had the effect of defining the terms of the contemporary debate—that is, of confining the debate to whether the federal government should do anything about restraining the private uses of economic power or even about ascertaining the measure to which the private uses of power had come to confound a consensus on the national interest.

In his first message to Congress, Roosevelt gently suggested that the corporations were, after all, creatures of the state and could therefore be made to serve a public purpose. In his second address, in December 1902, Roosevelt spoke more strongly: "This country cannot afford to sit supine on the plea that under our peculiar system of government we are helpless in the presence of the new conditions. The power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce is an absolute and unqualified grant, and without limitations other than those prescribed by the Constitution." There was, however, a major controversy over how one defined the legal reach of the phrase "interstate commerce" and over just what limitations the Constitution did place on government action. In 1895, for example, the Supreme Court had ruled that a sugar-processing corporation that controlled more than 80 percent of the processed sugar in the country, that purchased all its raw materials from outside the state in which it did its processing, and that sold its finished product across state and international boundaries was nevertheless primarily engaged in manufacturing within the confines of a state and was therefore beyond Congress' reach under the commerce clause. In the face of such obtuseness, a conventional, strictly legal approach to policymaking could only be pathetic.

In fact, on the eve of the twentieth century, the judiciary dominated American policymaking on economic matters. This is not altogether surprising. The American nation rested on no consistent theory of the state. The main features of the Constitution had been shaped to minimize the state, to restrain and deter the exercise of power, essentially to prevent the state from acting arbitrarily or, for that matter, decisively. Through most of the nineteenth century, the state played a small and diminishing role in determining how individuals related to one another and to their society. That was given over largely to private bargaining, with the courts developing, through case law, elaborate doctrines on contracts, liability, trespass, and property. The general antistatist political environment in America meanwhile tended to neutralize both the legislative and executive branches in fixing social and economic priorities as the basis for resolving day-to-day conflicts of interest and ambition. It was the courts, responding to the multitude of mundane claims of right and privilege, that structured the law that gave definition to the "liberty" to which the nation avowed commitment. That is, the doctrines that the courts shaped defined what kinds of social and economic actions enjoyed freedom from sanctions, what kinds ran greater risks, what kinds of access to and use of property were protected against public, community, or second-party claims, and what terms of contracts the state would be prepared to enforce.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, after a quarter century of industrialization and corporate growth had impaired the marketplace and had turned the struggles for advantage among a multitude of small economic strivers into a massive conflict of groups and classes, the many legislatures of the country moved to intervene. Americans continued to favor economic growth, but the costs borne by traditional business and agriculture, and by insurgent nonbusiness interests as well, gave rise to a sometimes violent politics of protest. The violence reflected a widespread loss of faith in the market's capacity for fairly and impersonally allocating the resources and rewards that the society had to offer. The intervention took many forms and included the creation of state railroad and public-utility regulatory commissions. The commissions were intermediary government agencies, part administrative and part legislative, designed to replace the flawed marketplace with a mechanism characterized by science and technical expertise. They were designed to become the new impersonal and just allocators of advantages. To these agencies, the state legislatures—and Congress, in creating the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in 1887—delegated considerable discretionary power, in effect creating an alternative to the courts for a flexible, law-adjusting response to day-to-day conflicts in the economic order.

Unhappily, to this alternative the courts reacted as to a challenge. Employing a novel interpretation of the due process clause of the Constitution, contriving an exquisitely narrow construction of the commerce clause, and inventing innovative uses of equity proceedings, state and federal judges—and, most important, those on the United States Supreme Court—repeatedly overrode the declared intentions of the legislative branches of American government in antitrust matters, labor relations, employment policies, and the regulation of selected practices of private industry. The number of cases was not large, but the deterrent effect of judicial vetoes had long-lasting and far-reaching impact.

It was these circumstances that Roosevelt confronted when he took office. In addition to the courts, he faced a congressional coalition of Republicans who represented (sometimes rather directly) the new corporate consolidations of economic power that Roosevelt sought to control together with southern Democrats, whose political instincts rebelled fiercely against any enlargement of federal power. So the president moved cautiously. Although more impatient reformers came to doubt Roosevelt's earnestness, although many likened his vigor to that of a rocking chair ("all motion and no progress"), and others charged him outright with "selling out to the interests," the conservatives were so deeply entrenched that one might be as readily impressed by Roosevelt's achievements as by how little was achieved.

Cooking Up the Square Deal

Roosevelt's primary task was to gain popular support for federal restraint of private power and, in this sense, to establish the legitimacy of federal power. The president's huge talent for publicity served him especially well in this. He chose his issues, and his enemies, carefully. The American business community was far from unified in its view of the tide of giant corporate mergers it had been witnessing since 1897. For many conservatives, the private enterprise system itself seemed at stake. When, in 1901, J. P. Morgan concluded the reorganization of the steel industry by buying out Carnegie and consolidating several other major steel producers into the new billion-dollar United States Steel Corporation, even the staunchly conservative Boston Herald was moved to remark, "If a limited financial group shall come to represent the capitalistic end of industry, the perils of socialism, even if brought about by some rude, because forcible, taking of the instruments of industry, may be looked upon by even intelligent people as possibly the lesser of two evils." In 1902, Morgan, J. J. Hill, and some other titans of finance and the railroad industry followed up the awesome steel consolidation by forming the Northern Securities Company, a merger of the Northern Pacific, the Great Northern, and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroads. Roosevelt seized the opportunity, instructing his attorney general to prosecute the company for violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

The issue and the timing were perfect. The country was newly sensitized to the trusts issue, and not even a pettifogging judiciary could deny that the railroad industry quintessentially concerned interstate commerce. By a 5-4 vote in 1904, the United States Supreme Court did indeed uphold the government's prosecution. (The minority held out on the issue of whether the merger amounted to an illegal restraint of trade.) From this and from the president's attacks on Standard Oil and the "meat trust," long-standing industrial pariahs, T. R. earned his reputation as a trustbuster. Roosevelt himself viewed the Northern Securities prosecution as the most important achievement of his first administration. But this was not because he generally opposed the business consolidations of the day. It was rather because the president of the United States had successfully called down several of the country's leading business tycoons—an achievement no president in several generations could boast of.

Roosevelt argued during his 1904 presidential campaign that the Northern Securities case was "one of the great achievements of my administration," because "through it we emphasized . . . that the most powerful men in the country were held to accountability before the law." It was a popularly held view. "If Roosevelt had never done anything else," the publisher Joseph Pulitzer wrote to his editor Frank Cobb (a steady Roosevelt critic), "and if he had committed a hundred times more mistakes . . . he would be entitled to the greatest credit for the greatest service to the nation" for his prosecution of the Northern Securities Company. In his autobiography, Roosevelt told the story of how the great J. P. Morgan had come to him after news of the suit broke and in avuncular fashion suggested that the whole scandal could have been avoided if the president's man (the attorney general) had met with Morgan's man to arrange matters. It had become habit for the country's business elite to view the federal government as merely a rival power, even as a lesser power that should consult with its betters before acting. T. R. implied that he had put Morgan in his proper place.

Roosevelt's presidency did much to restore public confidence in the government's ability to hold "the most powerful men in the country" accountable to the law, but there was still the question of what the law should be—or, perhaps more to the point, who should determine what the law should be. In this, Roosevelt was far more accommodating to the men of new corporate power than the bravado about his encounter with Morgan might suggest. In the first place, Roosevelt believed in free-market competition little more than did Morgan and his financier friends. The president acted against Northern Securities less from his concern about monopoly than from his concern about how the public might react to uncontrolled corporate arrogance. He frequently chided conservative critics that revolutionary upheaval was as likely to be inspired from "an attitude of arrogance on the part of the owners of property and of unwillingness to recognize their duty to the public" as by socialist or anarchist revolutionaries. It was more the manner than the substance of the Northern Securities merger that goaded him. Roosevelt himself had small regard for the successful antitrust suits of the McKinley administration, which aimed to break up major railroad traffic associations for fixing rates and routing among the members. "It is difficult to see," he told Congress, quoting the ICC on the subject, "how our interstate railways could be operated . . . without concerted action of the kind afforded through these associations." In his second administration, Roosevelt would urge Congress to amend the Sherman Act to permit cartel-like agreements within the railroad industry.

In 1903 public unhappiness with corporate arrogance permitted the president to push through Congress, against bitter conservative hostility, legislation establishing the Department of Commerce and Labor and, within it, the Bureau of Corporations. The bureau was authorized to investigate and publicize suspect corporate activities. Roosevelt acted from premises about the public's right to know and about the government's need to know in order to hold private economic power accountable. The emphasis on publicity proceeded also from a faith that a common sense of decency would force corporations to be good—not only to be honest but to avoid unscrupulous, even though strictly legal, practices. In other words, in large measure the policy arose from a conviction, not seriously tested by anyone at the time, that the country understood a common definition of such a concept as decency. In practice, of course, men like Roosevelt tended to assume the universality of their own definition.

In any case, Roosevelt had no intention of waging open warfare on big business. In the first place, the big corporations played too important a role in his vision of America's place in international rivalry. Small businesses could scarcely compete successfully for international resources and markets with the European cartels and Japanese zaibatsu. But more than that, Roosevelt did not view government and business as adversaries. In the spirit of the "New Nationalism," which he would develop more explicitly in his campaign to recapture the presidency in 1912, Roosevelt pictured the government as a coordinating agency for harmonizing the nation's varied interests and as a referee for interpreting and declaring the rules of the game. In keeping with this view, Roosevelt was prepared to assure corporations of immunity from antitrust prosecutions if he or the appropriate government agencies could be satisfied that their activities were honestly conceived and would benefit the community. When he was not so convinced, he proceeded, with his usual flare for the dramatic, to "bust the trusts," as when he attacked Standard Oil, the tobacco trust, the meat trust (with antitrust suits and with the Meat Inspection Act of 1906), and the Northern Securities Company.

But through the bureau, the president did enter into a series of gentlemen's agreements with Morgan interests. Companies such as United States Steel and International Harvester (organized in 1903) agreed to open records to the bureau's investigators, on the condition—which Roosevelt accepted—that the president would use such information only as backgrounding for his recommendations of policy to Congress and that nothing would be made public except with the consent of the corporations themselves. To make these arrangements, Roosevelt permitted Commerce and Justice department officials to confer with representatives of Morgan interests such as George W. Perkins, E. H. Gary, and Henry Clay Frick. The meetings gave the Morgan men a chance to debate the legality of their actions and to avoid prosecution by agreeing to correct any "technical" violations of the law in cases where they could not persuade the government otherwise. In spite of Roosevelt's autobiographical boasting, then, Morgan's men were meeting with the president's men to arrange matters.

In 1907, Morgan's men would meet with the president himself to arrange a steel merger that virtually handed the United States Steel Corporation nearly complete domination of the industry. The bankers' panic that year occasioned the conference. Among the feared casualties of the panic was the Trust Company of America (TCA), a major New York City financial institution whose collapse might have deepened the crisis. As it happened, the principal owners of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TCIC) owed the TCA a lot of money. Morgan men Frick and Gary went to the president with a proposition. If they could be assured that there would be no antitrust prosecutions, the Morgan people would buy out the TCIC, thereby allowing its owners to pay off their debt to the TCA and keep the TCA solvent. Roosevelt may or may not have known the degree to which United States Steel's acquisition of the TCIC's steel plants, as well as its resources of coal and iron in Alabama, would substantially reduce competition in the industry. But he did see the virtue of averting a prolonged economic collapse (especially since the financial community was already whining loudly about how the crisis was all the fault of Roosevelt's "radical" attacks on the trusts). Roosevelt gave the green light to the merger. Whether he did so by explicitly approving Morgan's proposal or merely by leaving the matter as a tacit understanding, Roosevelt vigorously defended his role in the merger when he testified about it in 1911—after the Taft administration sued United States Steel for violation of the antitrust laws.

Roosevelt did not have to be apologetic about the steel merger, because he had not concealed his skepticism about the antitrust laws. Addressing Congress in 1907, he argued that the Sherman Act "should be . . . so amended as to forbid only the kind of combination which does harm to the general public." How should it be determined what kinds do harm? "Reasonable agreements between, or combinations of, corporations should be permitted provided they are submitted to and approved by some appropriate Government body." Instead of corporations testing legal limits in the courts by acting and then awaiting retaliatory action from the government or by private litigants, the new order would require the large interstate corporations to consult first with federal agencies established to pass on the acceptability of proposed moves. In the United States Steel case, Morgan had consulted with the president.

More than most of his contemporaries, Roosevelt understood that the corporation revolution had erased the main features of the rationale underlying the American liberal credo on the private uses of property for profit. A big, publicly financed corporation was not a private enterprise; it did not endow an individual entrepreneur with the qualities of independence and self-reliance on which the democratic polity counted; its size negated the competitive rivalry on which the democratic polity and the market economy depended to sharpen efficiency and to prevent arbitrary uses of power; its bureaucratic structure even denied the protection against a permanent preemption of power that mere human mortality afforded in an economy of individual proprietary enterprise. Finally, its managers were employees no less than were factory and mine operatives; the modern business corporation had indeed transformed Americans from a nation of self-employed enterprisers into a nation of hired hands.

Roosevelt's program called for establishment of a number of regulatory agencies modeled after, but with powers that considerably exceeded, those of the ICC and the Bureau of Corporations. His aim, as he later explained, was "to help legitimate business" by making the big corporations answerable to government regulation "as an incident to thoroughly and completely safeguarding the interests of the people as a whole." Roosevelt held such views from the start of his first administration, but it was not until his second that he could feel free to express them publicly. Meanwhile, with the ample rope that they had appropriated, America's corporate leaders prepared to hang themselves and open the way for increased federal intervention.

Their egregious effort to crush the anthracite coal miners in 1902 was a case in point. This was not merely a fight between miners and some coal operators. Seventy percent of the anthracite mines in the country were owned by six railroad companies—which themselves were controlled by financial interests associated with, or directed by, the houses of Morgan, Rockefeller, and closely associated financiers. Moreover, anthracite was the fuel on which millions of voters depended for heat in winter. McKinley's political mentor, Mark Hanna, had averted a strike in 1900 by quietly warning the corporations that an anthracite shortage and high prices in the fall might give Willam Jennings Bryan the edge to defeat McKinley. But in 1902, the companies were ready for a strike, at least in part to crush the United Mine Workers (UMW).

Wages were not the chief issue. Corporate spokesmen refused to countenance the legitimation of collective bargaining, even though collective capital had characterized the industry for decades. Although the public in 1902 cannot be said to have accepted collective bargaining in any substantial sense, neither was it as yet willing to accept fully the legitimacy of corporate collectivism, especially when it controlled one of the necessities of life. When the strike erupted, the national press generally supported the miners. In May, the Springfield Republican expressed an increasingly widespread sentiment: "It would be difficult to conceive of a monopoly more perfectly established or operated than this monopoly which holds complete possession of a great store of nature most necessary to the life of the day. There is but one way to deal with [it] . . . public control or ownership." George F. Baer, president of the Reading Railroad and spokesman for the mine. owners, gave point to their arrogance by declaring, in a private letter that was revealed to the press, that God had given the care of the country to the propertied people to protect against labor agitators and their like.

President Roosevelt meanwhile squirmed frantically. On the one hand, he yearned for the power to take control of the industry in the public interest. The mineowners, he wrote to Murray Crane, conservative governor of Massachusetts, "were backed by a great number of businessmen whose views were limited by the narrow business horizon, and who knew nothing either of the great principles of government or of the feelings of the great mass of our people." The "gross blindness" of the corporations, he complained to a Morgan partner, was "putting a heavy burden on us who stand against socialism; against anarchic disorder." To Lodge, he fretted, "That it would be a good thing to have national control, or at least supervision, over these big coal corporations, I am sure; but that would simply have to come as an incident of the general movement to exercise control of such corporations." Understanding that nothing of the sort would come from Senator Nelson Aldrich's and Speaker Joe Cannon's Congress for some time, perhaps generations, Roosevelt shied from even a verbal intervention. Conservatives such as Hanna and Crane took the lead, the latter even urging the president to meet jointly with the operators and the miners. The two party leaders, like Roosevelt, feared what a coal famine might do to Republican prospects that November.

With such encouragement, Roosevelt did force a joint conference. But it failed. For ten hours on 3 October, the president absorbed a barrage of vituperation from the mineowners, led by Baer. John Mitchell, president of the UMW, denied that recognition of the union was an issue in the strike, probably sensing that this was not a matter on which he could expect the public's or the president's support. The operators responded by showing (in Roosevelt's words) "extraordinary stupidity and bad temper," berating Mitchell and accusing the president of encouraging anarchy by suggesting that union leaders should have standing in a dispute between workers and their employers. They would not, they said, "deal with a set of outlaws."

As winter and the congressional elections approached, Roosevelt, enjoying public support, finally decided to act. Characteristically, he planned to act dramatically and not necessarily within the bounds of his acknowledged constitutional power. He would seize the coal mines. "The position of the operators," he later wrote to Crane, "that the public had no rights in the case, was not tenable for a moment." (Actually, Roosevelt himself had earlier accepted his attorney general's advice that the president did not properly have "any concern with the affair" and could not intervene.) Rumors were flying that trade unions across the country were considering joining the miners in a sympathy strike; that, Roosevelt told Crane, would mean "a crisis only less serious than the civil war." Roosevelt then explained to his conservative New England adviser the obligation he felt to the higher imperatives of government, which moved him beyond the apparent limits of the letter of the law:

I did not intend to sit supinely when such a state of things was impending.. . . I had to take charge of the matter, as President, on behalf of the Federal Government.. . . I knew that this action would form an evil precedent, and that it was one which I should take most reluctantly, but . . . it would have been imperative to act, precedent or no precedent—and I was in readiness.

Actually, a sudden stirring among "the most powerful men in the country" headed off the crisis. Roosevelt may have been bluffing; we cannot know. But he was too much of a puzzle for his conservative and well-connected advisers to want to test him. Elihu Root, Roosevelt's secretary of war, went to Morgan "as a private citizen," found him irritated with the way Baer and his crew had "botched things," and got him to twist some arms to force the operators to accept arbitration. A coal commission was agreed upon, but not before the operators won on their refusal to accept a labor man on the board. Later, citing the operators' petty obstructionism, Roosevelt chortled in derision that he overcame their objections to a labor man by filling the position designated for a "sociologist" on the commission with the individual whom the UMW had nominated. But the joke was on Roosevelt: the companies won in their insistence that unions per se had no legitimate place in employer-employee negotiations.

The anthracite coal strike is worth detailing because it illustrates several important points about Roosevelt as president. First, T. R. was most comfortable with crisis management, partly (it is at least reasonable to surmise) because crisis laid a gloss on his affinity for direct action beyond the fine points of legal limitation. He was, moreover, not averse to some hyperbole in depicting the troubles (although one must never underestimate the fear of revolution generated among the comfortable classes by contemporary agitation). At the same time, Roosevelt did not accept the view of labor and capital as adversaries. Although he tended to favor collective bargaining, he envisioned unionism as a way of institutionalizing the wage-earner interest vis-à-vis that of the corporate employers, between which interests the government could mediate on a basis of a public interest that was defined by the president and transcended the particular interests of the unions and the corporations. Finally, although Roosevelt did indeed possess a long-term vision of reform, he was above all a practical party man. He rarely challenged the commitments of the party leaders on fundamentals, and consequently much of what he accomplished had more symbolic than substantive value and did more to accommodate prevailing threats to the social order than it did to challenge that order itself.

The symbolism, of course, was not unimportant. Every change in the symbols by which we live fore-shadows substantive change. Roosevelt's mediating role in the anthracite strike altered no symbols for employer-employee relations, but there was symbolic force in the federal government intervening in industrial strife without special regard for the longstanding conventions of employer prerogatives. To paraphrase George E. Mowry, American business valued few things more highly than the right to keep its records in secrecy and the right to deal with employees without interference from government. Before the end of his first administration, Roosevelt had challenged both those assumed rights.

The Ripening of the Square Deal

Roosevelt's election to the presidency in his own right in 1904 freed him from many of the inhibitions he felt during his first administration. His popularity was so apparent that the Democrats had trouble finding a candidate to oppose him. Willam Jennings Bryan, the eloquent progressive who had lost twice to McKinley, had no appetite for a third try, this time against a Republican with strong progressive credentials of his own; he threw his support to the then-radical publisher, William Randolph Hearst, but the party was not prepared to accept the father of yellow journalism as its leader. The Democrats nominated instead a virtually unknown party loyalist, Judge Alton B. Parker of the New York State Supreme Court, who promptly alienated the mass of Bryan Democrats on the night of his nomination with a call for affirmation of the gold standard. Against such political clumsiness, T. R. faced no trouble. Nevertheless, unpersuaded of his own already preponderant strength, Roosevelt risked compromising his progressive standing by making quiet overtures to conservative party, corporate, and financial leaders. The corporate community, antireform though it was, knew more surely than did Roosevelt that Parker was a loser; it put on a happy face, contributed handsomely to T. R.'s campaign when asked, and left Parker to a quiet campaign on his own back porch. On 8 November 1904, Roosevelt swept the country with 336 electoral votes to Parker's 140, and 7.6 million popular votes to Parker's 5.1 million, the most lopsided popular margin of victory since national records had been kept. Roosevelt said he was delightfully "stunned" by the victory.

The year 1906 would be a landmark for progressive legislation, with the passage of the Meat Inspection, Pure Food and Drug, and Hepburn Railroad acts. These measures underlined the federal government's permanent entry as a regulator of the economic life of the nation. Each vested in a federal agency the power to investigate and to fix some of the conditions under which goods could be transported and sold across state lines. In the case of the Hepburn Act, Roosevelt won for the ICC limited rate-making powers, a form of price control that was unprecedented for the federal government.

The measures moved the American polity significantly toward the modern regulatory state, but it is important to understand that all three had powerful support from business groups. Many meat-packers resented the bad name the industry had earned at home and abroad because of the shipment of tainted meats by unscrupulous or simply negligent packaging companies. Similarly, adulteration and misrepresentation of packaged foods and pharmaceuticals hurt more scrupulous businesses, especially those trying to crack foreign markets. Finally, the seemingly arbitrary rate-making practices of the railroad industry had aroused the ire of shippers as well as farmers across the country. Aside from those particular businesses that feared immediate damage to their profits, opposition came from those who worried about where the move to increased federal power might someday lead and from others who saw a threat to orderly government in the arming of administrative agencies with broad discretionary powers of investigation and enforcement. Against these latter arguments, Roosevelt established the point that effective and therefore more orderly government depended precisely on the "continuous disinterested administration" of independent regulatory commissions.

The most enduring triumph of Roosevelt's administration lay in his program for the regulation of the country's natural resources. At the time he became president, private interests were in the process of laying waste to the country's remaining riches, as they had already done to the timber, soil, and water resources of the older settled regions of the continent. During the McKinley administration, millions of acres of public lands had been allowed to slip into the control of private interests without provision for government supervision or restraints on destructive use. Mineral rights had been sold off at prices far below market value. Virtually nothing had been done to safeguard recreational sites or to require replenishment of renewable resources. The movement for conservation (not yet dubbed with that name) had so far been confined to a number of engineers, agronomists, scientists, and public servants—an educated elite that foresaw clearly the ultimate exhaustion of vital assets on which the country had long counted for its economic growth. By winning Roosevelt as an ally, as they did even before he entered the White House, they gained a leader with an incomparable talent for combining the scientific imperatives of modern resource management with an appeal to the moral imperatives of a democratic civilization. It was the latter, of course, that would turn an elite interest into a broad popular cause.

The main lines of Theodore Roosevelt's conservation program were developed by Gifford Pinchot and Frederick H. Newell, easterners with a mission to prevent the continued destruction that uncontrolled private "development" had inflicted on the eastern third of the country, in concert with westerners of similar concerns such as George H. Maxwell of California and Congressman Francis Newlands of Nevada. They called for multiple-purpose projects for development of water and land resources; public-land leasing contracts that required controlled grazing of grasslands and selective cutting and replanting of timber; a land-use fee system that could make public management self-supporting; and the preservation of scenic lands for recreation and the protection of wildlife.

Legislation achieved some of the movement's objectives, but the core of the program depended on the president's use of executive orders and other administrative prerogatives. The Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 designated revenues from public-land sales to the construction of irrigation projects for the conversion into arable land of the vast arid regions of the American West. During Roosevelt's administration alone, more than thirty such projects, including the Roosevelt Dam in Arizona, were begun. The Newlands Act has been responsible for subsidizing the creation and maintenance of some of the country's most valuable agricultural land today. It is a worthy monument to the Roosevelt administration, although it is flawed by eighty-five years of uncontrolled violations of the act's provision that purported to limit reclaimed and irrigated land to 640 acres per owner.

Congressional legislation in 1905 also set up the Forest Service with broad powers to manage the country's forest reserves, including the water resources within them, and the power to make arrests for violations of its regulations. Roosevelt named Pinchot chief forester, and Pinchot promptly launched a veritable revolution. He used his authority to withdraw from use thousands of acres of land, not only in order to prevent unruly exploitation of timber stands but to keep the fast-growing electric utility companies from preempting valuable waterpower sites before an orderly program could be established.

In the conservation struggle, Roosevelt and his allies made much use of moral rhetoric, frequently appealing to Americans' antimonopoly sentiments and turning the cause into one of "the interests" versus "the people." There is little doubt that the national conservation program disrupted established lines of power between the special interests and state legislative and congressional blocs. Moreover, the entire constellation of issues that was embodied in the conservation movement clashed directly with principles of the business ethic: here was an area where, more clearly than in most, private profit appeared to contradict the social ethic, the public's long-term interest in protection of the national endowment. Yet it is inaccurate to treat the issue in "monopoly" and "antitrust" terms. Roosevelt himself came to acknowledge that he could count more often on the big corporations than he could on smaller and upwardly scrambling business groups for support of his regional programs. The most intractable problem lay in overcoming the parochial interests of state politicians and the shortsighted interests of local businessmen on the make. The big interstate corporations had long-term stakes in efficient resource management almost as much as the general public did. They could be more easily (though not very easily) converted to multiple-purpose uses of forest and water resources than could smaller, single-purpose business firms. And some of them would even enjoy some market advantages in the withdrawal of lands from the entry of potential competitors.

Roosevelt always played the political game with skill. Antimonopoly rhetoric evoked the clearest public response, so he used it. On the other hand, he knew that the more powerful potential antagonist was a public that might come to view conservation as a threat to its ambitions for economic development. Consider his support for San Francisco's plan to flood the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a natural wonder often compared to the Yosemite Valley, for a reservoir to serve the city's growing water needs. He wrote to the outraged naturalist John Muir:

I will do everything in my power to protect not only the Yosemite, which we have already protected, but other similar great natural beauties of this country; but you must remember that it is put of the question permanently to protect them unless we have a certain degree of friendliness toward them on the part of the people of the State . . . and if they are used so as to interfere with the permanent material development of the State . . . the result will be bad.

Roosevelt asked Muir not to put him "in the disagreeable position of seeming to interfere with the development of the State for the sake of keeping a valley . . . under national control."

Stretching Presidential Power

Immediately on his election in 1904, Roosevelt committed what most of his advisers and later historians considered his greatest political blunder: he announced then that he would not under any circumstances be a candidate for reelection to a third term in 1908. Certainly the move made him something of a lame duck at the outset of his only full administration. Yet, instead of limiting him, it is possible that lame-duck status served Roosevelt's purposes well. He may have felt in fact that it freed him morally to move to the far side of constitutional law whenever his view of the national interest required it. That, at least, would be consistent with the man's unwillingness to be controlled by anything less than his own moral commitment to serving the public interest as steward of the nation.

Temporal checks on power are not, of course, the equivalent of faithfully regarded constitutional checks. A lot of damage can be done in only a short time by government administrators—regulatory commissioners as well as presidents—when they exercise

power that is restrained by their own sense of justice alone. Blum has written, "It did not require eight years or even four for a president to lead the nation beyond the edge of war, or to employ his 'bully pulpit' to lie to the people, or to employ his authority to subvert the rights of individuals." Roosevelt in fact did none of these things, Blum notes, but he wonders if Roosevelt would have been so restrained if he had confronted global war and massive economic collapse, as some future presidents had to.

On the other hand, although Roosevelt was quite capable of magnifying a sense of crisis as occasion demanded, his presidency did not in fact confront great national or international troubles that might have tested his restraint. More than that, sensitivity to the abuse of presidential power stems from many decades of strong presidential leadership that by the 1970s eventuated in what came to be called—aptly enough—the Imperial Presidency. Theodore Roosevelt's generation faced the opposite problem—decades of weak leadership in which images of governmental usurpation were served up regularly by special interests trying to preserve their immunity from public control and accountability. Moreover, not even the severest critics of modern government (the lunatic fringe aside) would be comfortable now with the relatively small power that resided in the presidency even at the conclusion of T. R.'s reign. As Richard E. Neustadt noted in his landmark book Presidential Power, "A striking feature of our recent past has been the transformation into routine practice of the actions we once treated as exceptional.. . . The exceptional behavior of our earlier 'strong' Presidents has now been set by statute as a regular requirement." That Roosevelt acted to the degree that he did in advance of such statutory requirements says more for his intelligence than for his recklessness.

In the area of foreign policy, however, there is room for serious questioning. To cite Blum once more, Roosevelt's "belief in power and his corollary impatience with any higher law presumed that governors . . . possessed astonishing wisdom, virtue and self-control. As much as anything he did, his direction of foreign policy made that presumption dubious."

The key to Roosevelt's foreign policy lay in his division of the world into "civilized" and "barbarous" countries. "Peace cannot be had," he insisted, "until the civilized nations have expanded in some shape over the barbarous nations." Among the civilized nations, his diplomacy sought a balance of power. For the barbarian countries, he was ready to acknowledge an assignment of stewardships among the civilized nations. Russia belonged in Turkestan, Britain in India and Egypt, France in Algiers, and so on.

That there were racial implications in his portrait of global statuses cannot be denied, but that they were "racist" in the modern sense cannot be sustained. Roosevelt's estimate of nations and peoples was, as with so many things, conditioned by considerations of power. When Roosevelt expressed condescension or scorn for nonwhite peoples, his attitude originated in the evident weaknesses of the nations where they predominated; he reacted to the weakness, not to the race. Moreover, he never appears to have begrudged respect to individuals whose personal traits diverged from the stereotypes attributed to the ethnic or racial groups with which they were identified. "I suppose we have all outgrown the belief that language and race have anything to do with one another." The same thing is true, he suggested, regarding character. "A good man is a good man and a bad man a bad man wherever they are found."

His view of the Japanese should make this clear. Japans' economic and military power won from Roosevelt ungrudging respect for the Japanese people. "I am not much affected by the statement that the Japanese are of an utterly different race from ourselves," he wrote to a British friend during the Russo-Japanese War. To the Japanese, in fact, Roosevelt assigned responsibility for civilizing and policing East Asia, or at least that part which "surrounds the Yellow Sea, just as the United States has a paramount interest in what surrounds the Caribbean." He wrote to his German friend Speck von Sternberg in 1900, "I should like to see Japan have Korea. She will be a check upon Russia, and she deserves it for what she has done." In 1904 he let it be known to both the British and the Germans that Japan ought to have Korea, as well as a role in bringing China "forward along the road which Japan trod" toward membership among the great civilized powers.

With Japan's victory over Russia in 1905, Roosevelt moved quickly to reestablish a balance of power in the Far East. Partly for his role in the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, peace conference that concluded the war, Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906. But Roosevelt never courted "the odium of being a professional peacemaker." He was concerned rather with assuring that Japan's new ascendancy would not go unchecked. To this end, and without consulting Congress or informing the American people, Roosevelt informally committed the United States to the Anglo-Japanese alliance and recognized Japan's hegemony in Korea and its "paramount interest" in Manchuria, in exchange for a Japanese pledge to honor United States sovereignty in the Philippines. It was not until 1925, as the result of historian Tyler Dennett's research, that the American people first learned of the "Taft-Katsura Agreement" and Roosevelt's secret arrangements.

Roosevelt was aware that the agreement provided for the direct violation of a multipower treaty guaranteeing Korea's independence. When the Germans invaded Belgium in 1914 in defiance of similar international guarantees of that country's neutrality, Roosevelt's public indignation was challenged on the grounds of his earlier acquiescence (indeed, collaboration) in Korea's violation. Roosevelt was infuriated by the analogy. "Any obligation by outside powers," he protested, "is of course dependent upon the power concerned itself standing for its own rights.. . . If it shows itself impotent . . . it is of course impossible to expect other powers to aid it." He wrote on another occasion:

To be sure by treaty it was solemnly covenanted that Korea should remain independent. But . . . the treaty rested on the false assumption that Korea could govern herself well.. . . Japan could not afford to see Korea in the hands of a great foreign power.. . . Therefore, when Japan thought the right time had come, it calmly tore up the treaty and took Korea.

It was, he said, a procedure "like that done under similar circumstances by the chief colonial administrators of the United States, England, France, and Germany." With such chilling candor about tearing up "solemnly covenanted" treaties, Roosevelt made clear his view that power established its own legitimacy and that those without power need expect no law to be honored in their favor.

Roosevelt's policies in the Caribbean of course fitted that view perfectly. The establishment of a protectorate in Cuba, the "taking of Panama," and the declaration of what came to be called the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine all were founded on the assumption that "great powers" have the moral right to "spank" small countries (as Roosevelt put it) whose squabbling or inadequacies imperiled the security or merely the tranquillity of their more civilized neighbors.

The Cuban case in some respects impels a musing that "considering the opportunities" one must wonder at the restraint. The United States had gone to war with Spain in 1898 at least partly to pacify the troubled nearby island of Cuba. To underline its "missionary" objectives, it had declared in advance its commitment to Cuba's independence. Yet independence scarcely would guarantee no further disorders, nor would it prevent other powers from exploiting new disorders to replace Spain on the island. In belated recognition that the whole enterprise lacked logic if the United States simply withdrew without some way of exercising control over what happened to Cuba, the Roosevelt administration drafted, and the Senate ratified, a treaty that recognized Cuba's independence but that included a proviso. Called the Platt Amendment, it forbade Cuba from making any treaties or financial commitments with foreign governments that might compromise its independence, permitted United States oversight of Cuban finances, and authorized the United States to quell any internal disorders that might make Cuba prey to foreign intervention.

Although the reasoning by which Roosevelt justified Japan's annexation of Korea could have been applied to Cuba (to be sure, the United States faced no power so close as Russia was to Japan), the United States minimized its involvement with the Cubans. Cuba did become a protectorate whose internal disorders provoked one three-year military presence beginning in 1906 and several other actions in succeeding decades. But Roosevelt's preferred method of stabilizing the island was to improve its economy. To this end, he persuaded Congress, over ferocious opposition from domestic sugar growers and Republican protectionist ideologues, to give Cuban sugar, the island's biggest economic asset, preferred import status into the United States market.

The Panama episode had its immediate cause, as is legend, in the ocean-to-ocean dash of the USS Oregon around Cape Horn in 1898 to join the U.S. squadron off Cuba before the Spanish-American War ended. The epic argued the necessity for a canal across the Central American isthmus. (Californians and other westerners had also clamored for a canal to reduce their dependence on the monopoly power of transcontinental railroad companies.) Original plans for such a canal through Nicaragua blew up with the eruption of a volcano near the proposed site. There remained an abandoned project through Panama begun by a French company that still held a valid charter. Panama at the time was an unruly province of Colombia that had virtually defied governing for eighty years. The trouble lay, as Walter LaFeber writes, in "the type of person the Isthmus attracted—the rootless, lawless transient who obeyed no authority . . . 'a community [according to one contemporary observer] of gamblers, jockeys, boxers, and cockfighters.' " During the course of the nineteenth century, Colombia had to cope with more than fifty insurgencies aimed at secession. At least four times, Colombia called on the United States, with which it had arranged treaty obligations in 1846, to assist in repressing rebellions.

The only asset of the province was that it lay in the way of seagoing traffic between the east and west coasts of North and South America. For this, as the Americans contemplated a canal, Colombia prepared to exact its price. Colombia initiated the negotiations in 1900. In January 1903, Roosevelt offered Colombia $10 million plus $250,000 per year for a ninety-nine-year lease on a six-mile-wide canal zone. In addition, $40 million was approved by Congress to pay off the Panama Canal Company (PCC), which held the rights to the route. The Hay-Herran treaty embodying the terms was ratified by the United States Senate, but in August the Colombian Senate unanimously turned it down. They wanted more money, including (they later specified) $15 million of the $40 million earmarked for the PCC. Roosevelt exploded, using a variety of tame expletives to describe the Colombian legislators—"inefficient bandits," "a corrupt pithecoid community," "homicidal corruptionists," and so on.

What lay at the heart of Roosevelt's exasperation was the conflict between a political ethic and a social ethic to which he was equally and profoundly committed. The social ethic dictated that reward should go to work and ingenuity. It was the work and ingenuity of others needing to cross the isthmus that gave value to the Colombian property and, indeed, provided livelihoods for the "community of gamblers, jockeys, boxers, and cockfighters" that prevailed there. On the other hand, the political ethic that informed Roosevelt's leadership dictated a strong regard for property rights and national sovereignty. A more conservative nationalist would have yielded the point to Colombia on the principle of sovereign prerogatives. But Roosevelt could not leave it at that. Progress in civilization demanded that legal "technicalities" give way to the more fundamental moral imperatives—at least when the former were unsupported by adequate power.

Meanwhile, suggestions flew from within and without the administration that perhaps the United States ought to encourage, rather than to help Colombia repress, the next Panama rebellion. But as late as October 1903, Roosevelt wrote privately that though he would delight in Panamanian independence, "I cast aside the proposition made at this time to foment the secession of Panama. Whatever other governments do, the United States cannot go into securing [the canal] by such underhand means." He preferred the more direct approach: he drafted a message for Congress asking authority to seize the isthmus. The draft was never completed. Taking the many cues that had been given, the Panamanians revolted. Without Congress' authority, and in spite of United States treaty obligations to Colombia, the president then dispatched the USS Nashville with covert instructions to block Colombian military efforts to suppress the new insurgency. With success of the rebellion assured, Roosevelt then negotiated the terms of United States recognition of Panamanian independence, not with any bona fide representative of the Panamanian government but with Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a French operator who was acting both as political broker and agent for PCC investors. Presented with a fait accompli, the Panamanians accepted the treaty in anguish, having yielded more of their sovereignty and territory than had been included in the pact offered Colombia.

For public purposes, and in deference to the prevailing political ethic, Roosevelt loudly denied any United States complicity in the rebellion. Privately he wrote, "The United States is certainly justified in morals, and therefore . . . in law . . . in interfering summarily in Panama and saying that the canal is to be built and that they [the Colombians] must not stop it." But his attorney general, Philander Knox, is supposed to have said to him, "Oh, Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality!" Years later, in his autobiography, Roosevelt boasted, "I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me."

Having acquired the canal in order to alleviate one kind of strategic problem, Roosevelt acquired for his country new strategic burdens. Outposts beyond the continental borders require protection. Insofar as the canal would become a vital part of the American strategic periphery, the possibility of encroachment in the area by any of the world's powers had to be viewed with concern. The most likely threat came from European powers moving in on Caribbean countries that got into financial trouble with their European creditors. Shortly before becoming president, Roosevelt had written to his German friend Sternberg, "If any South American State misbehaves towards any European country, let the European country spank it." As president in 1904, when the Dominican Republic failed to make its debt payment because of local disorders and several European countries prepared to dispatch warships, Roosevelt stayed cool. "If I possibly can, I want to do nothing," he wrote. But then an international court of arbitration adjudicating the claims of European creditors against Venezuela ruled disproportionate awards to those bondholders whose government (Germany) had sent warships to bombard the Venezuelan coast. Roosevelt finally understood that unless the United States stepped in the Caribbean would teem with European navies. "We must ourselves undertake . . . [to see to it that] a just obligation shall be paid," he told Congress. It was, he pointed out, ultimately a matter of national security. In 1907, when disorders again threatened payments on the Dominican Republic's foreign debts, Roosevelt, acting on his authority as commander in chief, took over the Santo Domingo customhouse. And so the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine became the foundation for repeated United States intervention in the governing of countries in, or bordering on, the Caribbean. It remains in place today.

The T. R. Administration in Retrospect

As his presidency neared its end, Roosevelt seemed to grow proudest of the things he had done to make the United States into a major military power. In a letter dated 28 December 1908 to a journalist acquaintance who was planning an article on his administration, T. R. cited first of all his "doubling" of the size of the navy. Possibly that was because at that moment, the Great White Fleet was on its trip around the world advertising America's big stick while signaling (with the white paint and the exposure of the American coasts) the country's pacific intentions. Roosevelt also stressed his actions in the coal strike; his steps "toward exercising proper national supervision and control over the great corporations"; his massive increase in the country's forest reserves; the Reclamation Act, which he believed was matched only by the Homestead Act of 1862 in the development of America's farm economy; and "the great movement for the conservation of our national resources." But second on his list was the Panama Canal, about which he wrote: "I do not think any feat of quite such far-reaching importance has been to the credit of our country in recent years, and this I can say absolutely was my own work, and could not have been accomplished save by me or by some man of my temperament." To this he added his pride in the reorganization of the War Department, in the inauguration of regular army and navy maneuvers, and the military interventions in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, which he believed would leave both countries with better prospects for "a stable and orderly independence" than they had ever enjoyed before. He noted furthermore how many of these deeds were "done by me without the assistance of Congress."

Next to such accomplishments, the outgoing president added without elaboration: "I think the peace of Portsmouth was a substantial achievement. You probably know the part we played in the Algeciras conference." In fact, for his efforts in settling the Russo-Japanese War and in calming the tensions between Germany and France over influence in Morocco, Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906. So it is curious that he used such tame words to note them in a long letter otherwise uncharacterized by modesty. He had no reason to be modest about either the prize or about his triumphs at Portsmouth and Algeciras; they represented Roosevelt at his best as an international leader. Although Roosevelt turned easily to military measures when he treated with small countries, he was the model diplomatist when he negotiated with sizable powers. The prize testified to that. Yet it was clearly strength rather than finesse of which he was most proud, a fact that remains among his most dubious legacies.

When Roosevelt stepped down in 1909, he had set well in motion a powerful current that propelled the American state into the mainstream of its modern responsibilities. His successors, most notably Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, moved even more substantially toward committing the federal government to restoring the congruity of the American business system to the country's chief priorities, to protecting the nation from the less constructive effects of the industrial and corporative transformation of the economy, and to bringing the country's resources to bear on international problems. Roosevelt himself would contribute further to the current over the remaining ten years of his life, but as a goad and gadfly rather than as a direct force.

At fifty, he was still a young man when he retired from the presidency. In that respect alone it was probably inevitable that he would return to presidential politics. His 1904 vow not to seek reelection in 1908 did not mean he would never seek the presidency again. After a brief interlude in 1909 and 1910 hunting in Africa and hobnobbing with Europe's aristocracy, T. R. returned to the United States amid reform Republicans' growing disenchantment with William Howard Taft, Roosevelt's chosen successor in the White House. Among other things, Taft's dismissal of Gifford Pinchot from the Forest Service rankled particularly because it suggested the undoing of Roosevelt's much cherished conservation program. When Taft chose in the fall of 1911 to prosecute the United States Steel Corporation for antitrust violations in its 1907 merger with the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, Roosevelt took the move as a personal affront because of his own role in that affair. That winter T. R. threw his own hat in the ring against Taft for the 1912 Republican presidential nomination.

Taft defeated Roosevelt for the nomination, and T. R. bolted from the Grand Old Party to run for president as the standard-bearer of the newly organized Progressive party. Woodrow Wilson was elected with only 42 percent of the popular vote over both Roosevelt and Taft. It is worth noting that it was in the 1912 election campaign that T. R. gave full expression to the "New Nationalism," a view of government that he had sought unsuccessfully during his presidency to make Republican party policy. It was a program that called upon Americans to put the national interest above their own special competitive interests; to accept government supervision of business, of labor relations, and of resource use and allocation; to take up responsibility for aiding the poor, the disabled, and the aged with federal unemployment, welfare, and retirement insurance plans; to accept both consolidation of economic power and government regulation of such power; and to make cooperation and control rather than competition and cupidity the new model for an American commonwealth.

Roosevelt's New Nationalist campaign forced Wilson to counter with his own version of an industrial policy. Wilson called it the "New Freedom." It contrasted with Roosevelt's proposals in some significant matters, but the two programs held in common a firm commitment to a strong central government prepared to intervene in the nation's business economy whenever compelling reasons of state—including a considered judgment about intolerable levels of human suffering—might require. Except for the regressive Republican interlude in the 1920s, it would become the established political posture of both major parties for almost seventy years.

On the other hand, by leading progressive Republicans out of the Republican party, Roosevelt in effect conceded the party to the reactionaries, who in a single generation turned the GOP into the minority party it basically remained for more than half a century. Meanwhile, Roosevelt quickly abandoned the Progressive party after the 1912 campaign, leaving it to dissolve without a leader or a cause before even the next election came around. It was not a noble performance. Nor did the years after 1912 add stature to Theodore Roosevelt as a citizen or statesman.

In office and campaigning for office, T. R. usually tempered his moral enthusiasm with a strong sense of realism and responsibility. Out of office, and especially on foreign policy matters, Roosevelt often gave in to his less generous impulses. The Great War, as contemporaries referred to it, would bring out the worst in Roosevelt. Long committed to at least an informal Anglo-American alliance, the expresident railed intemperately in public and in private for an early United States intervention on Britain's side against Germany. He denounced President Wilson and others who strained to keep the country neutral as mollycoddles, cowards, hybrid Americans, and even traitors. When the United States did enter the war in 1917, he led the cry for punishment of all dissenters whether they were pacifists who opposed the war on religious or ethical principles or were critics of the government's particular domestic and foreign policies. As always, suggestions about constitutionally protected individual rights won no favor from Roosevelt. In a war, he believed, loyalty to the nation, right or wrong, must be prompt, vigorous, unquestioning, and complete.

That the Woodrow Wilson administration often enough acted on those principles during the 1917–1920 period was in no small measure because of the pressure for a draconian repression that men like Roosevelt persistently demanded. The blows suffered by civil liberties during that period in fact shattered for years the confidence that progressive reformers had once placed in a strong central government. Roosevelt's final years did much to undo what he had achieved for reform as president.

Conclusion

That Theodore Roosevelt is counted among the great heroes of the progressive democratic tradition, alongside Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, must be counted an oddity of historical circumstance. In essence, he was profoundly conservative, especially in his exaltation of martial values; in his emphasis on duty; in his simplistic view of patriotism; in his absolutistic understanding of morality, justice, and right; in his candid assertion of the moral superiority of the "right people" (defined by their effective organization and uses of power); in his easy distinction between the righteous and the malevolent, the civilized and the savage. But he happened upon the presidency just as the nation confronted seriously for the first time the emergence of a national, interstate corporate power that transformed traditional modes of business enterprise, threatened the integrity of democratic processes, and tampered with the mechanisms for free-market allocation of economic resources, rewards, and opportunities. As champion of a federal government strong enough and willful enough to restrain the men of new corporate power, Roosevelt became a democratic hero. His foreign policy, equally vigorous, bold, and prescient, continues to draw more mixed reviews.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The indispensable printed source is Elting E. Morison, John Morton Blum, and Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., eds., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1951–1954); volumes 2, 4, 6, and 8 also contain perceptive essays by the editors. Henry Cabot Lodge, ed., Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–1918, 2 vols. (New York, 1925), is far more limited and purposefully edited, but useful nevertheless. John M. Blum, The Republican Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass., 1954; 2d ed., 1977), is a masterful analysis of Roosevelt the man and the president. Blum's chapter on Roosevelt in his The Progressive Presidents: Roosevelt, Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson (New York, 1980), fine-tunes the portrait. Morton Keller, ed., Theodore Roosevelt: A Profile (New York, 1967), contains sharply focused excerpts from a variety of books on Roosevelt himself and on the Progressive era.

The best single biography remains William H. Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1961; rev. ed., 1975). But Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (Lawrence, Kans., 1991), provides more concentrated attention on the presidency than Harbaugh and more detail than the present article. For an account of the young T. R. see David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback (New York, 1981). All Roosevelt's biographers continue to be indebted to the keen insights and comprehensive research in Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore, 1956), for an understanding of T. R.'s foreign policy. Richard H. Collin, Theodore Roosevelt's Caribbean: The Panama Canal, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Latin American Context (Baton Rouge, La., 1990), brings that part of the Roosevelt story in touch with more recent revisionist historiography. An important account of Roosevelt appears in John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), an excellent exercise in comparative biography. David H. Burton, The Learned Presidency: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson (Rutherford, N.J., 1988), treats the extraordinary succession of learned, even scholarly, presidents in that extraordinary era at the turn of the century when the well-earned credentials of intelligence were still important political assets.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston, 1973); George E. Reedy, The Twilight of the Presidency (New York, 1970); and Richard E. Neustadt's pioneering study Presidential Power, 2 vols. (Durham, N.C., 1976), deal with Roosevelt only in passing but will help put his presidency in historical perspective, as will James David Barber, The Presidential Character (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972), which offers a theoretical framework for "predicting performance in the White House." George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900–1912 (New York, 1958), remains one of the best accounts of T. R.'s administration within the context of the Progressive era.

Richard M. Abrams, The Burdens of Progress: 1900–1929 (Glenview, Ill., 1978), provides a broader cultural and political context for understanding Roosevelt's personality and leadership. Robert H. Wiebe, "The House of Morgan and the Executive, 1905–1913," in American Historical Review 65 (1959), from which a part of the account of Roosevelt's consultations with Morgan was taken, should be supplemented by Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), while there is no better account of the conservation movement than Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). Among the more recent works, Paul R. Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt: The Making of a Conservationist (Urbana, Ill., 1985), adds personal detail to the story that Hays treats with a broader brush.

Recent works include Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York, 2001), the second of a trilogy profiling the life of the president; this volume focuses on the presidency. The first volume of his early life is The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1979). See also Louis Auchincloss, Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 2001), H. W. Brands, T.R.: The Last Romantic (New York, 1997), and Nathan Miller, Theodore Roosevelt: A Life (1994).

Theodore Roosevelt

The first modern American president, Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) was also one of the most popular, important, and controversial. During his years in office he greatly expanded the power of the presidency.

A strong nationalist and a resourceful leader, Theodore Roosevelt gloried in the opportunities and responsibilities of world power. He especially enlarged the United States role in the Far East and Latin America. At home he increased regulation of business, encouraged the labor movement, and waged a long, dramatic battle for conservation of national resources. He also organized the Progressive party (1912) and advanced the rise of the welfare state with a forceful campaign for social justice.

Roosevelt was born in New York City on Oct. 27, 1858. His father was of an old Dutch mercantile family long prominent in the city's affairs. His mother came from an established Georgia family of Scotch-Irish and Huguenot ancestry. A buoyant, dominant figure, his father was the only man, young Roosevelt once said, he "ever feared." He imbued his son with an acute sense of civic responsibility and an attitude of noblesse oblige.

Partly because of a severe asthmatic condition, Theodore was educated by private tutors until 1876, when he entered Harvard College. Abandoning plans to become a naturalist, he developed political and historical interests, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and finished twenty-first in a class of 158. He also began writing The Naval War of 1812 (1882), a work of limited range but high technical competence. Four months after his graduation in 1880, he married Alice Hathaway Lee, by whom he had a daughter.

Early Career

Bored by the study of law in the office of an uncle and at Columbia University, Roosevelt willingly gave it up in 1882 to serve the first of three terms in the New York State Assembly. He quickly distinguished himself for integrity, courage, and independence, and upon his retirement in 1884 he had become the leader of the Republican party's reform wing. Though his reputation was based on his attacks against corruption, he had shown some interest in social problems and had begun to break with laissez-faire economics. Among the many bills he drove through the Assembly was a measure, worked out with labor leader Samuel Gompers, to regulate tenement workshops.

Roosevelt's last term was marred by the sudden deaths of his mother and his wife within hours of each other in February 1884. After the legislative session ended, he established a ranch, Elkhorn, on the Little Missouri River in the Dakota Territory. Immersing himself in history, he completed Thomas Hart Benton (1886) and Gouverneur Morris (1887) and began to prepare his major work, the four-volume Winning of the West (1889-1896). A tour de force distinguished more for its narrative power and personality sketches than its social and economic analysis, it won the respect of the foremost academic historian of the West, Frederick Jackson Turner. It also gave Roosevelt considerable standing among professional historians and contributed to his election as president of the American Historical Association in 1912. Meanwhile, he published numerous hunting and nature books, some of high order.

Politics and a romantic interest in a childhood friend, Edith Carow, drew Roosevelt back east. Nominated for mayor of New York, he waged a characteristically vigorous campaign in 1886 but finished third. He then went to London to marry Carow, with whom he had four sons and a daughter.

In 1889 Roosevelt was rewarded for his earlier services to President Benjamin Harrison with appointment to the ineffectual Civil Service Commission. Plunging into his duties with extraordinary zeal, he soon became head of the Commission. He insisted that the laws be scrupulously enforced in order to open the government service to all who were qualified, and he alienated many politicians in his own party by refusing to submit to their demands. By the end of his six years in office Roosevelt had virtually institutionalized the civil service.

Roosevelt returned to New York City in 1895 to serve two tumultuous years as president of the police board. Enforcing the law with relentless efficiency and uncompromising honesty, he indulged once more in acrimonious controversy with the leaders of his party. He succeeded in modernizing the force, eliminating graft from the promotion system, and raising morale to unprecedented heights. "It's tough on the force, for he was dead square … and we needed him," said an unnamed policeman when Roosevelt resigned in the spring of 1897 to become President William McKinley's assistant secretary of the Navy.

As assistant secretary, Roosevelt instituted personnel reforms, arranged meaningful maneuvers for the fleet, and lobbied energetically for a two-ocean navy. He uncritically accepted imperialistic theories, and he worked closely with senators Henry Cabot Lodge and Alfred Beveridge for war against Spain in 1898. Although moved partly by humanitarian considerations, he was animated mainly by lust for empire and an exaggerated conception of the glories of war. "No qualities called out by a purely peaceful life," he wrote, "stand on a level with those stern and virile virtues which move the men of stout heart and strong hand who uphold the honor of their flag in battle."

Anxious to prove himself under fire, Roosevelt resigned as assistant secretary of the Navy in April to organize the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment (the "Rough Riders"). He took command of the unit in Cuba and distinguished himself and his regiment in a bold charge up the hill next to San Juan. In late summer 1898 he returned to New York a war hero.

New York's Governor

Nominated for governor, Roosevelt won election in the fall of 1898 by a narrow margin. His 2-year administration was the most enlightened to that time. By deferring to the Republican machine on minor matters, by mobilizing public opinion behind his program, and by otherwise invoking the arts of the master politician, Roosevelt forced an impressive body of legislation through a recalcitrant Assembly and Senate. Most significant, perhaps, was a franchise tax on corporations. As the Democratic New York World concluded when he left office, "the controlling purpose and general course of his administration have been high and good."

Roosevelt accepted the vice-presidential nomination in 1900. A landslide victory for McKinley and Roosevelt ensued. Then, on Sept. 14, 1901, following McKinley's death by an assassin's bullet, Roosevelt was sworn in. Not quite 43, he was the youngest president in history.

First Presidential Administration

Roosevelt's first three years in office were inhibited by the conservatism of Republican congressional leaders and the accidental nature of his coming to power. He was able to sign the Newlands Reclamation Bill into law (1902) and the Elkins Antirebate Bill (1903); he also persuaded Congress to create a toothless Bureau of Corporations. But it was his sensational use of the dormant powers of his office that lifted his first partial term above the ordinary.

On Feb. 18, 1902, Roosevelt shook the financial community and took a first step toward bringing big business under Federal control by ordering antitrust proceedings against the Northern Securities Company, a railroad combine formed by J. P. Morgan and other magnates. Suits against the meat-packers and other trusts followed, and by the time Roosevelt left office 43 actions had been instituted. Yet he never regarded antitrust suits as a full solution to the corporation problem. During his second administration he strove, with limited success, to provide for continuous regulation rather than the dissolution of big businesses.

Hardly less dramatic than his attack on the Northern Securities Company was Roosevelt's intervention in a five-month-long anthracite coal strike in 1902. By virtually forcing the operators to submit to arbitration, he won important gains for the striking miners. Never before had a president used his powers in a strike on labor's side.

Foreign Policy

Roosevelt's conduct of foreign policy was as dynamic and considerably more far-reaching in import. Believing that there could be no retreat from the power position which the Spanish-American War had dramatized but which the United States industrialism had forged, he stamped his imprint upon American policy with unusual force. He established a moderately enlightened government in the Philippines, while persuading Congress to grant tariff concessions to Cuba. He settled an old Alaskan boundary dispute with Canada on terms favorable to the United States. And he capitalized on an externally financed revolution in Panama to acquire the Canal Zone under conditions that created a heritage of ill will.

At the instance of the president of Santo Domingo, Roosevelt also arranged for the United States to assume control of the customs of that misgoverned nation in order to avert intervention by European powers. He had about the same desire to annex Santo Domingo, he said, "as a gorged boa constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong-end-to." But he had already forestalled German intervention in Venezuela in 1902 and was anxious to establish a firm policy against it. So on May 20, 1904, and again in December he set forth what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The United States, he declared, assumed the right to intervene in the internal affairs of the Latin American nations in the event of "chronic wrongdoing" or "impotence."

Roosevelt's first administration was also marked by a revitalization of the bureaucracy. The quality of appointees was raised, capable members of minority groups were given government posts (in 1906 Roosevelt named the first Jew, Oscar Straus, to a Cabinet position), and the civil service lists were expanded. At the same time, however, the President ruthlessly manipulated patronage so as to wrest control of Republican party machinery from Senator Mark Hanna and secure his nomination to a full term in 1904. "In politics," he disarmingly explained, "we have to do a great many things we ought not to do." Overwhelming his conservative Democratic opponent by the greatest popular majority to that time, Roosevelt won the election and carried in a great host of congressional candidates on his coattails.

Second Administration

Although the resentment of the Republican party's Old Guard increased rather than diminished as his tenure lengthened, Roosevelt pushed through a much more progressive program in this second term. His "Square Deal" reached its finest legislative flower in 1906 with passage of the Hepburn Railroad Bill, the Pure Food and Drug Bill, an amendment providing Federal regulation of stockyards and packing houses, and an employers' liability measure. Yet he probably did even more to forward progressivism by using his office as a pulpit and by appointing study commissions such as those on country life and inland waterways. Several of his messages to Congress in 1907 and 1908 were the most radical to that time. In the face of the Old Guard's open repudiation of him, moreover, he profoundly stimulated the burgeoning progressive movement on all levels of government.

Conservation Program

In conservation Roosevelt's drive to control exploitation and increase development of natural resources was remarkable for sustained intellectual and administrative force. In no other cause did he fuse science and morality so effectively. Based on the propositions that nature's heritage belonged to the people, that "the fundamental idea of forestry is the perpetuation of forests by use," and that "every stream is a unit from its source to its mouth, and all its uses are interdependent," his conservation program provoked bitter conflict with Western states'-rightists and their allies, the electric power companies and large ranchers. In the end Roosevelt failed to marshal even a modicum of support in Congress for multipurpose river valley developments. But he did save what later became the heart of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) by vetoing a bill that would have opened Muscle Shoals to haphazard private development.

By March 1909 Roosevelt's audacious use of executive power had resulted in the transfer of 125 million acres to the forest reserves. About half as many acres containing coal and mineral deposits had been subjected to public controls. Sixteen national monuments and 51 wildlife refuges had been established. And the number of national parks had been doubled. As Roosevelt's bitter enemy Senator Robert M. La Follette wrote, "his greatest work was inspiring and actually beginning a world movement for … saving for the human race the things on which alone a peaceful, progressive, and happy life can be founded."

Foreign Policy

Roosevelt's pronounced impact on the international scene continued during his second term. He intervened decisively for peace in the Algeciras crisis of 1905-1906, and he supported the call for the Second Hague Conference of 1907. But it was in the Far East, where he gradually abandoned the imperialistic aspirations of his pre-presidential years, that he played the most significant role. Perceiving that Japan was destined to become a major Far Eastern power, he encouraged that country to serve as a stabilizing force in the area. To this end he used his good offices to close the Russo-Japanese War through a conference at Portsmouth, N.H., in 1905; for this service he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He also acquiesced at this time in Japan's extension of suzerainty over Korea (Taft-Katsura Memorandum).

By 1907 Roosevelt realized that the Philippines were the United States' "heel of Achilles." He had also come to realize that the China trade which the open-door policy was designed to foster was largely illusory. He consequently labored to maintain Japan's friendship without compromising American interests. He fostered a "gentleman's agreement" on immigration of Japanese to the United States. He implicitly recognized Japan's economic ascendancy in Manchuria through the Root-Takahira agreement of 1908. (Later he urged his successor, President William H. Taft, to give up commercial aspirations and the open-door policy in North China, though he was unsuccessful in this.)

Progressive Movement

Rejecting suggestions that he run for reelection, Roosevelt selected Taft as his successor. He then led a scientific and hunting expedition to Africa (1909) and made a triumphal tour of Europe. He returned to a strife-ridden Republican party in June 1910. Caught between the conservative supporters of Taft and the advanced progressive followers of himself and La Follette, he gave hope to La Follette by setting forth a radical program—the "new nationalism"— of social and economic reforms that summer. Thereafter pressure to declare himself a candidate for the nomination in 1912 mounted until he reluctantly did so.

Although Roosevelt outpolled Taft by more than 2 to 1 in the Republican primaries, Taft's control of the party organization won him the nomination in convention. Roosevelt's supporters then stormed out of the party and organized the Progressive, or "Bull Moose," party. During the three-cornered campaign that fall, Roosevelt called forcefully for Federal regulation of corporations, steeply graduated income and inheritance taxes, multipurpose river valley developments, and social justice for labor and other underprivileged groups. But the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson, running on a more traditional reform platform, won the election.

World War I

Within 3 months of the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, Roosevelt began his last crusade: an impassioned campaign to persuade the American people to join the Allies and prosecute the war with vigor. He believed that a German victory would be inimical to American economic, political, and cultural interests. But he was also influenced, as in 1898, by his romantic conception of war and ultranationalism. As a result, he distorted the real nature of his thought by trumpeting for war on the submarine, or American-rights, issue alone. More regrettable still, he virtually called for war against Mexico in 1916.

Following America's declaration of war in April 1917, Roosevelt relentlessly attacked the administration for failing to mobilize fast enough. Embittered by Wilson's refusal to let him raise a division, he also attacked the President personally. He was unenthusiastic about the League of Nations, believing that a military alliance of France, Great Britain, and the United States could best preserve peace. He was prepared to support Senator Henry Cabot Lodge's nationalistic reservations to the League Covenant, but he died in his home at Oyster Bay, Long Island, on Jan. 6, 1919, before he could be effective.

Roosevelt's reputation as a domestic reformer remains high and secure. He was the first president to concern himself with the judiciary's massive bias toward property rights (as opposed to human rights), with the maldistribution of wealth, and with the subversion of the democratic process by spokesmen of economic interests in Congress, the pulpits, and the editorial offices. He was also the first to understand the conservation problem in its multiple facets, the first to evolve a regulatory program for capital, and the first to encourage the growth of labor unions. The best-liked man of his times, he has never been revered because his militarism and chauvinism affronted the human spirit.

Further Reading

Roosevelt can be studied through his own writings. Especially valuable are his Letters, edited by Elting E. Morison and John M. Blum (8 vols., 1951-1954), and a collection of his essays, books, and speeches, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, edited by Hermann Hagedorn (24 vols., 1923-1925). A general collection, Writings, was edited by William H. Harbaugh (1967). Roosevelt's An Autobiography (1913) is revealing despite the usual deficiencies of such works.

William H. Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (1961; rev. ed., entitled The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, 1963), is a full-length biography. The best study of Roosevelt's early career is Carleton Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 1: The Formative Years (1958); the best treatment of his governorship is G. Wallace Chessman, Governor Theodore Roosevelt (1965). John M. Blum, The Republican Roosevelt (1954; new ed. 1962), is a penetrating essay. The roots of Roosevelt's imperialism are examined in David H. Burton, Theodore Roosevelt: Confident Imperialist (1968).

Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (1956), is a seminal study. Fine short accounts are George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900-1912 (1958), and G. Wallace Chessman, Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Power, edited by Oscar Handlin (1969). □

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE 1858-1919

President of the united states, 1901-1909

A Modern President

As president, Theodore Roosevelt embodied the new century, full of boundless energy and endless possibilities. His dynamic personality overshadowed the accomplishments of both his predecessor, William McKinley, and his successor, William Howard Taft. Roosevelt's youthful vigor and active lifestyle personalized the presidency to an extraordinary degree. Public focus shifted away from the party to the man in office, as Roosevelt continued McKinley's efforts to modernize the presidency and aggressively exercised his executive powers instead of playing the part of "caretaker president." Roosevelt used the office as his "bully pulpit," lecturing his fellow citizens on moral, ethical, and political issues. America's power and presence on the world stage expanded further under Roosevelt's "Big Stick" diplomacy, while his writings and speeches also had a major impact on domestic issues. By the time he left office, the presidency had been permanently transformed.

Background

Theodore Roosevelt was born on 27 October 1858 in New York City to Theodore Roosevelt Sr., a wealthy glass importer, and Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, a southerner whose relatives had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. The elder Theodore Roosevelt hired a substitute to serve in his place during that war—an action that influenced his son to seek active duty in times of military crises. Young Theodore was a sickly child. Afflicted with asthma, he was forced to spend much time indoors during his young years, but his illness did not prevent him from becoming an expert amateur naturalist. He began collecting and embalming animals, a passion he maintained the rest of his life. He also became a voracious reader. At thirteen he was given glasses to correct his poor eyesight, which fueled his enthusiasm for collecting and reading. Yet his illness also aroused a desire to strengthen his body, fostering a life-long love of sports and what he later called "the strenuous life." Encouraged by his father, he took up sports such as boxing, swimming, horseback riding, calisthenics, and shooting, eventually overcoming his asthma.

Harvard, Marriage, and Politics

Until he entered Harvard University in 1876, Theodore (who did not like to be called "Teddy") was privately educated by tutors. At Harvard he briefly considered becoming a naturalist or scientist before deciding to study history. His father's death from cancer in early 1878 came as a severe blow, but he managed to enjoy his remaining time in college. In the fall of his junior year, he met Alice Hathaway Lee, a delicate seventeen-year-old from a well-to-do Boston family. After a persistent courtship, she finally agreed to marry him and did so on his twenty-second birthday. After graduation in 1880, Roosevelt studied law at Columbia University, invested in cattle ranching in the Dakota Territory, and wrote The Naval War of 1812 (1882), the first of his many books on subjects such as history, politics, and nature. Elected to the New York State Assembly as a Republican in 1881 and reelected in 1882 and 1883, he sponsored legislation to improve the working conditions of cigar makers in New York City, opposed railroad baron Jay Gould, and even tangled with Gov. Grover Cleveland. Roosevelt's splashy entrance into politics caused some problems with the Republican leadership, but from the beginning of his political career he cultivated the press, helping to shape his image and get his message out.

Tragedy and Decisions

The year 1884 was one of immense struggle for Roosevelt. His wife died only hours after giving birth, and his mother died of typhoid fever in the same house on the same day. Roosevelt left his daughter, named Alice after her mother, in the care of his sister while trying to get his life back together. After creating a memorial for his wife, he never mentioned her again and never allowed anyone else to discuss her in his presence. That same year James G. Blaine received the Republican presidential nomination. When Blaine, who was disliked by eastern Republicans for his financial dealings and close association with the party's conservative faction, received the nomination, some of Roosevelt's friends urged him to join them in bolting the party to support the Democratic nominee, Grover Cleveland. In the end he and his friend Henry Cabot Lodge from Massachusetts decided that staying in the party was the best thing for their political careers. After his wife's death, Roosevelt began dividing his time between New York and his Dakota ranch. He ended up losing most of his investment in the ranch, some 20 percent of his estate; yet as Lewis L. Gould has noted, "The gains in his physical well-being, emotional release, and political appeal lasted throughout his life." In Dakota he battled storms, punched cattle, killed grizzlies, and served as deputy sheriff—in all, collecting enough experiences to fill three new books.

Fighting Corruption

In 1886 New York City Republicans asked him to run for mayor against land reformer Henry George and Democrat Abram S. Hewitt. He finished a poor third but served the purpose of keeping the office from George. That December he married a childhood sweetheart, Edith Kermit Carow. After the hard winter of 1886-1887 he had lost most of his Dakota investment, and in 1892 he gave up ranching for good, settling with his wife and daughter at Sagamore Hill, in Oyster Bay, Long Island. After Benjamin Harrison was elected president in 1888, he appointed Roosevelt to the Civil Service Commission. During his six years at this post he learned about national politics and party patronage from the inside. In 1895 he asked for and received an appointment as one of four New York City police commissioners. His nighttime undercover expeditions around Manhattan to find on-duty policemen sleeping or drinking in saloons became the stuff of legend and great copy for the press. His effectiveness in cleaning up the department helped to create a new image for the city police, "New York's Finest," but his vigor in enforcing unpopular prohibition laws that closed saloons on Sunday met with resistance.

War

The election of Republican William McKinley to the White House in 1896 brought Roosevelt an appointment as assistant secretary of the navy, which he helped to modernize in preparation for war with Spain. Though in favor of overseas expansion and a greater role for the United States in world affairs, he did not hasten the war with Spain, as some biographers have asserted. He did not have a large role in the conduct of McKinley's diplomacy, nor did he create the tensions that led to the Spanish-American War of 1898. On 25 February 1898 he sent a telegram ordering Adm. George Dewey, in the event of hostilities with Spain, to bottle up the Spanish navy in Asia and then attack the Philippines. Yet the order stemmed from war plans dating back to 1895 and was part of the ongoing preparations for war at that time. Once the war began, Roosevelt volunteered immediately, entering the army as a lieutenant colonel in a volunteer regiment commanded by Col. Leonard Wood. The mix of western cowboys, eastern aristocrats, and Indians in the regiment made great copy for the newspapers, which were soon calling it "Roosevelt's Rough Riders." After a month's training, they landed in Cuba to oust the Spanish. In July, during the American assault on the San Juan Heights around the city of Santiago, Roosevelt, who had been promoted to colonel, led his men, including some African American troops, in attacks on Kettle and San Juan Hills, killing at least one Spaniard. The experience became "the great day of my life," and he long believed afterward that he deserved the Medal of Honor. The war in Cuba ended shortly thereafter, and he returned home in August 1898 to popular acclaim and a nomination as the Republican candidate for governor of New York. A narrow margin of victory and the tenuous support of party regulars did not keep him from carrying out policies such as conservation and the use of publicity to regulate corporate power. Feeling the pressure from campaign contributors, party leaders maneuvered to get Roosevelt out of New York and onto the national ticket as President McKinley's running mate in 1900. Little did they know that the assassination of the president in September 1901 would elevate Roosevelt to the presidency six months into McKinley's second term.

The Roosevelt White House

Roosevelt's actions as chief executive—both official and unofficial—made great newspaper copy. His energy seemed boundless. He hiked, camped, hunted, and played tennis with almost reckless enthusiasm. He had little respect for a man who refused to join him in such pursuits. The president's practice of jujitsu sparked a national rage for the martial art, and after his refusal to shoot a small bear on a November 1902 hunting trip in Mississippi, a toy manufacturer created one of the most popular toys of all time by naming a stuffed bear the "Teddy Bear." Roosevelt's young family also became a great political asset for him, capturing the nation's attention and holding it for eight years. Edith Roosevelt often commented that the president was simply the oldest of her children. He was frequently found playing cowboys and Indians with his children and their friends or helping them feed their veritable zoo of pets. His eldest daughter, Alice, so entranced "high society" that a shade of blue was named for her and quickly became fashionable. When she married Congressman Nicholas Longworth on 17 February 1906 in a White House ceremony, the wedding made international news. A learned couple, the Roosevelts entertained a wide array of people at the White House, all of whom could expect to hear the president speak knowledgeably on almost any topic.

Retired from Politics?

After two successful terms in office, Roosevelt "retired" from the political limelight and went off to Africa for some big-game hunting and then to Europe for a triumphant tour of European capitals. But he was never far from the eye of the press. Disapproving of his successor's efforts as president, Roosevelt reentered the political fray in 1912. He first tried to recapture the Republican nomination, but he was outmaneuvered by President William Howard Taft. Disenchanted Progressives turned to Roosevelt after their original choice, Robert La Follette, appeared physically unable to carry out the campaign. "Feeling fit as a bull moose," Roosevelt picked up the banner of progressivism and launched one of the most successful third-party campaigns in U.S. presidential election history against his old friend Taft. His candidacy as the Progressive "Bull Moose" Party nominee split the Republican vote, enabling Woodrow Wilson to become the first Democrat to occupy the White House in sixteen years. Roosevelt remained in the political spotlight during World War I, criticizing President Wilson's position of neutrality during the period before the United States entered the war and actively campaigning for Wilson's Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, in 1916. After the United States finally entered the war in 1917, he quickly volunteered to lead troops into combat, a request the president rebuffed. Frustrated, Roosevelt went to South America to search for the source of the Amazon River. He discovered a new river but also suffered great physical distress and illness that hastened his death. The loss of one of his sons during the war was a blow from which he never recovered. He died quietly in his sleep on 6 January 1919.

Sources:

Paul Russell Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt: The Making of a Conservationist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985);

Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991);

William Henry Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1961).

Theodore Roosevelt 1858-1919, 26th President of the United States (1901-9), b. New York City.

Early Life and Political Posts

Of a prosperous and distinguished family, Theodore Roosevelt was educated by private tutors and traveled widely. He was a delicate youth, and his determined efforts to overcome this had a marked effect on his character. After graduating (1880) from Harvard, he studied law at Columbia.

Roosevelt's interest was drawn to politics, and while serving (1882-84) in the New York state legislature as a Republican, he strongly opposed the nomination of James G. Blaine for the U.S. presidency. After Blaine's nomination, however, Roosevelt supported him, and that lost him much of his political backing. Discouraged by this turn of events, and bereaved by the deaths (1884) of his mother and his wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, Roosevelt retired to his ranch in the Dakota Territory.

He returned (1886) to New York City and ran as the Republican candidate for mayor against Henry George and Abram S. Hewitt; he came in third. He became increasingly important in Republican party politics. Appointed (1889) by President Benjamin Harrison as a member of the Civil Service Commission, he was noted for his vigor in the post until he resigned in 1895. As head (1895-97) of the New York City police board, Roosevelt accomplished little but nevertheless gained public notice by his advocacy of reform.

In 1897 he returned to federal office as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President McKinley. An ardent supporter of U.S. expansion, he worked toward putting the U.S. navy on a war basis for the coming war with Spain. After the outbreak of the Spanish-American war, he resigned to organize, with Leonard Wood , the volunteer regiment that won fame as the Rough Riders . Returning from Cuba a popular hero, Roosevelt ran (1898) for the governorship of New York state, winning by a small margin. Republican "boss" Thomas C. Platt had supported him in his candidacy, but after Roosevelt's inauguration the two differed when Roosevelt imposed taxes on corporation franchises. It was at least partially to shelve Roosevelt that Platt backed his nomination as Vice President in 1900. The McKinley-Roosevelt slate was elected, but Roosevelt served as Vice President only a few months. McKinley was assassinated, and Roosevelt became (Sept. 14, 1901) President shortly before his 43d birthday, making him the youngest person to hold that office. (John F. Kennedy was the youngest person to be elected President.)

Presidency

Domestic Policy

Roosevelt's inexhaustible vitality and enthusiasm, aided by his ability to dramatize himself and to coin vivid phrases, made him a popular president. His intellectual interests did much to elevate the tone of American politics. On the other hand, he drew considerable criticism for his glorification of military strength and his patriotic fervor.

He recognized, from the outset of his first administration, the growing demand for reform that was expressed in the writings of the muckrakers . From 1902 he set about "trust busting" under terms of the moribund Sherman Antitrust Act , ordered the successful antitrust suit against the Northern Securities Company, and led the attack on a number of other large trusts. Altogether, his administration began some 40 suits against trusts. Roosevelt's threat to intervene in the anthracite coal strike of 1902 induced the operators to accept arbitration.

In his first term he also fathered important legislation, including the Reclamation Act of 1902 (the Newlands Act), which made possible federal irrigation projects; the bill (1903) establishing the U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor; and the Elkins Act of 1903, which put an end to freight rebates by railroads. Roosevelt's vigorous championship of the rights of the "little man" captured the American imagination, and when he ran for reelection in 1904 he defeated Alton B. Parker, the Democratic presidential candidate, by 196 electoral votes.

In his second administration Roosevelt directed the passage (1906) of the Hepburn Act, which revitalized the Interstate Commerce Commission and authorized greater governmental authority over railroads. In 1906 he backed the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. A firm believer in conservation of national resources, he sought to halt exhaustion of timber and mineral supplies by private interests and added many millions of acres of land to public ownership. His progressive reforms were directed not at the abolition of big business but at its regulation—an attitude shown by his tacit approval of the absorption of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company by United States Steel in the panic of 1907. By his aggressive domestic policy, Roosevelt decisively increased the power of the President.

Foreign Policy

Roosevelt's forcefulness was equally manifest in his foreign policy. Ably backed by John Hay and Elihu Root , he set out to solidify the world position won by the United States in the Spanish-American War. His efforts to enhance U.S. prestige and influence won him the hatred of anti-imperialist groups. Most notable, perhaps, was his Caribbean policy. In the Venezuela Claims dispute, Roosevelt, fearing German intervention in Venezuela, worked for a peaceful settlement that would maintain Venezuela's territorial integrity.

Later (1904), when the Dominican Republic—which was deeply in debt to European bond holders—was threatened with intervention by European powers, the President enunciated a new U.S. policy that would forestall such action. In what came to be known as the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the President claimed that the United States had direct interest and the obligation to impose order in the affairs of Latin American countries. The Dominican Republic was forced to accept the appointment of a U.S. customs receiver. This policy aroused great indignation in Latin America.

Even more drastic was Roosevelt's action regarding the Panama Canal . After the Colombian senate refused to ratify the proposed Hay-Herrán Treaty , a U.S. navy warship, the Nashville, prevented the landing of additional Colombian troops in Panama, thus contributing to the success of the Panamanian revolution (1903). Roosevelt immediately recognized the new republic of Panama, and the Panama Canal was begun. Roosevelt's policy in Latin America prepared the way for "dollar diplomacy" in that area.

Roosevelt was also active generally in world affairs. With Hay, he endeavored to maintain the Open Door in China. In 1904, as mediator, he brought about the peace conference at Portsmouth, N.H., to end the Russo-Japanese War; and he was awarded the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. He was an ardent advocate of the Hague Tribunal, and it was through his offices that the Algeciras Conference was called in 1906 to settle the Morocco question. In 1907 his gentleman's agreement with Japan to discourage emigration of Japanese laborers to the United States eased the tensions caused by California's anti-Japanese legislation.

The 1912 Election and After

Roosevelt virtually dictated the nomination of his presidential successor, William Howard Taft ; after an African big-game expedition and a triumphal tour of European cities, Roosevelt returned (1910) to the United States and joined the campaign for the direct primary in New York. President Taft alienated the progressive Republicans headed by Robert M. La Follette, and the Republican party in 1912 was threatened with a split over the presidential nomination. The conservatives, however, controlled the Republican convention of 1912, and Taft was nominated for reelection.

Roosevelt led his followers out of the convention, organized the Progressive party —also called the Bull Moose party—and was nominated for President on this third-party slate. In the resulting three-cornered election he ran second to the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. Forced into retirement, Roosevelt denounced the policies of Wilson—whose attempt to secure a treaty awarding Colombia damages for the loss of Panama particularly enraged him. After the outbreak of World War I he attacked Wilson's neutrality policy; and when the United States entered the war he pleaded vainly to be allowed to raise and command a volunteer force. He died soon after the end of World War I.

Writings

During his busy career he had found time not only for hunting and exploring expeditions—including exploration (1913) of the River of Doubt (now called the Roosevelt River or Rio Teodoro) in the Amazon jungle—but also for writing a great number of books. They deal with history, hunting, wildlife, and politics. Among them are The Naval War of 1812 (1882), biographies of Thomas H. Benton (1887) and Gouverneur Morris (1888), The Winning of the West (4 vol., 1889-96), African Game Trails (1910), The New Nationalism (1910), Progressive Principles (1913), Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914), and his important autobiography (1913).

Children

Alice, his daughter by his first wife, married Nicholas Longworth in the White House; "Princess Alice" attracted much notice by her forthright personality, unconventional ways, and able tongue. There were five children of his second marriage (1886) to Edith Kermit Carow—Theodore, Jr., Kermit, Archibald Bullock, Ethel Carow (Mrs. Richard Derby), and Quentin. Quentin was killed in World War I; Theodore, Jr., and Kermit both died in active service in World War II.

Bibliography

See biographies by H. F. Pringle (rev. ed. 1956, 1992), N. F. Busch (1963), D. W. Grantham, ed. (1971), H. W. Brands (repr. 1998), and K. Dalton (2002); G. E. Mowry, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement (1946, repr. 1960); J. M. Blum, The Republican Roosevelt (1954, repr. 1962); H. K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (1956, repr. 1989); W. H. Harbaugh, The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (1963); G. W. Chessman, Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Power (1969); E. Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) and Theodore Rex (2001); D. McCullough, Mornings on Horseback (1980); M. L. Collins, That Damned Cowboy (1989); C. Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey (2005); P. O'Toole, When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House (2005).

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE

Theodore ("Teddy") Roosevelt served as the twenty-sixth president of the United States from 1901 to 1909. A writer, explorer, and soldier, as well as a politician, Roosevelt distinguished himself as president by advocating conservation of natural resources, waging legal battles against

economic monopolies and trusts, and exercising leadership in foreign affairs. An energetic man with a colorful personality, Roosevelt later sought to reclaim the presidency in 1912 as the head of the progressive party.

Roosevelt was born on October 27, 1858, in New York City, a descendant of a wealthy and aristocratic family that first settled in New York in the 1600s. A sickly boy, Roosevelt developed a regimen of diet and exercise that transformed him into a vigorous young man. He graduated from Harvard University in 1880 and was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1881.

Roosevelt resigned in 1884, following the death of his wife, and spent two years at his ranch in the Badlands of the Dakota Territory. During this period he developed both his association with the Wild West world of cowboys and his appreciation of the wilderness. He returned to New York City in 1886 and ran unsuccessfully for mayor. From 1889 to 1895, Roosevelt served as a civil service commissioner in Washington, D.C. In 1895 he was appointed as a reform-minded New York City police commissioner. His main occupation, however, was that of writer: he wrote many magazine articles and twelve books between 1880 and 1900.

Roosevelt's rise to national prominence came during the spanish-american war of 1898. Anxious to be a part of the forces that would go to Cuba, he organized a group of cowboys and New York aristocrats into a cavalry regiment nicknamed the Rough Riders. As a lieutenant colonel, Roosevelt became a national hero and darling of the national news media when he led his Rough Riders to victory at the Battle of San Juan Hill in July 1898.

The New York republican party, under the leadership of Senator Thomas C. Platt, nominated Roosevelt for governor in 1898, in the hope that his popularity could rescue a party plagued by scandal. Roosevelt was easily elected but soon offended party leaders by asserting his political independence. Platt became so frustrated with Roosevelt's reform agenda that he persuaded President william mckinley to make Roosevelt his vice presidential running mate in 1900. Reluctantly, Roosevelt accepted the nomination. His popularity helped McKinley win a second term. On September 6, 1901, an anarchist named Leon F. Czolgosz shot McKinley when he visited the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Eight days later McKinley died and Roosevelt assumed the presidency.

As president, Roosevelt sought to attack corruption and to promote economic and political reform. He insisted that government should be the arbiter of economic conflicts between capital and labor. He demonstrated his convictions by negotiating a settlement of a strike between coal miners and mine operators in 1902, the first time a president had intervened in a labor dispute. Roosevelt referred to his platform for business and labor as the Square Deal.

Roosevelt won public acclaim for being a "trust buster." By the early twentieth century, a few large companies in key industries, including railroads, oil, and steel, had stifled competition and created monopolies. In one of his first major acts, Roosevelt filed suit to dissolve the Northern Securities Company, a trust controlled by the three major railroads in the Northwest. Using the sherman anti-trust act of 1890 (15 U.S.C.A. § 1 et seq.), the Roosevelt administration successfully broke up Northern Securities; antitrust lawsuits against forty-three other major corporations soon followed.

In 1904 the Republican Party nominated Roosevelt for a second term. He easily defeated the Democratic candidate Alton B. Parker of New York. In his second term Roosevelt helped enact several groundbreaking pieces of federal legislation. Spurred in part by public concern over the unsanitary food packing methods revealed by Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle, Roosevelt pressured Congress and the meat packing industry to support the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 (21 U.S.C.A. § 601 et seq.). In 1906 Congress also passed the Pure Food and Drug Act (21 U.S.C.A. § 301 et seq.), which criminalized the misleading and harmful sale of patent medicines that made false claims about their medicinal effects. The act also established the food and drug administration, putting in place a federal agency dedicated to consumer protection. Roosevelt also was instrumental in the passage of the Hepburn Act of 1906 (34 Stat. 584), which increased the powers of the interstate commerce commission (ICC), allowing the ICC to inspect the business records of railroads.

Roosevelt became the first president to play a major international role in foreign policy. His favorite motto, based on an African proverb, was "speak softly and carry a big stick." The motto epitomized Roosevelt's foreign policy, as he increased the size of the U.S. Navy and sent the fleet around the world in 1908 to demonstrate both U.S. military strength and U.S. involvement in world affairs.

Roosevelt initiated the construction of the Panama Canal in 1902, reduced domestic discord by making an agreement with Japan on limiting the number of Japanese immigrants to the United States, and negotiated the end of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 at a peace conference held in Portsmouth, Maine. He earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for mediating the peace agreement.

Perhaps the most innovative aspect of Roosevelt's presidency was his commitment to the conservation of natural resources. He lobbied successfully for funds to convert large portions of federal land into national forests. In seven years 194 million additional acres of federal land were closed to commercial development, five times more than his three predecessors had reserved for conservation purposes. Roosevelt also approved the Newlands Act of 1903 (32 Stat. 388), which called for part of the receipts from the sale of public lands in the western states and territories to be reserved for dams and reclamation projects. The legislation saved much western wildlife from extinction.

Despite his relative youth and energy, Roosevelt declined to run for another term. His progressive reforms had angered many conservative Republicans in Congress. In addition, his public comments on "race suicide," in which he lamented the declining birthrate of U.S. citizens of northern European ancestry and the accelerating birthrate of Russian and southern European immigrants, troubled many people. He approved the Republican presidential nomination of his secretary of war, william howard taft, in the belief that Taft was a progressive Republican. Taft won the presidency in November 1908.

"No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we ask him to obey it."
—Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt

After leaving office in March 1909, Roosevelt spent ten months in Africa on a hunting trip and then visited Europe. Upon his return to the United States in 1910, he was shocked at Taft's capitulation to the conservative Republicans in Congress. His animosity toward Taft grew, and in 1912 Roosevelt declared his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Although he won most of the primaries, the Republican Party leaders controlled enough votes to give the nomination to Taft. Undaunted, Roosevelt

formed a third party, called the Progressive Party. Following a failed assassination attempt against him in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in October 1912, he said that it would take more than that to kill a bull moose. Thereafter, the Progressives were nicknamed the Bull Moose Party.

Roosevelt won more votes than Taft, but the division of Republican strength allowed Democrat woodrow wilson to be elected president. Roosevelt grew to despise Wilson and his policies, leveling harsh criticism against Wilson's foreign policy. Incensed when Wilson denied him the opportunity to form a regiment and fight in world war i, Roosevelt denounced Wilson's proposal for the league of nations, even though Roosevelt himself had once advocated such an organization.

Roosevelt's health deteriorated rapidly in his last years. He died on January 6, 1919, at his home in Oyster Bay, New York.

further readings

Burns, James MacGregor. 2001. The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America. New York: Atlantic Monthly.

Holmes, James. 2003. "Police Power: Theodore Roosevelt, American Diplomacy, and World Order." Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 27 (winter-spring).

Posner, Theodore R., and Timothy M. Reif. 2000. "Homage to a Bull Moose: Applying Lessons of History to Meet the Challenges of Globalization." Fordham International Law Journal 24 (November-December).

Rauchway, Eric. 2003. Murdering Mckinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. New York: Hill and Wang.

cross-references

Antitrust Law; Monopoly.

Theodore Roosevelt

Born: October 27, 1858
New York, New York
Died: January 16, 1919
Oyster Bay, New York
American president, politician, and cavalryman

The first modern American president, Theodore Roosevelt was also the youngest and one of the most popular, important, and controversial. During his years in office he greatly expanded the power of the presidency.

Overcoming sickness

Theodore Roosevelt was born in New York City, New York, on October 27, 1858. His father was of an old Dutch mercantile (relating to trade) family in the city's affairs. An energetic, dominant figure, his father was the only man, young Roosevelt once said, that he "ever feared."

As an adult, Roosevelt was known for his great energy and athleticism. But as a young boy, he was very sick. He suffered from severe asthma, a respiratory disease that can cause difficulty breathing. Because of his sickness, he was educated at home by private tutors until the time that he entered college. At age twelve he followed his father's advice and began building his strength through weightlifting, horseback riding, boxing, wrestling, and hunting. He grew to love such activities throughout his life.

Early career

Roosevelt entered Harvard College in 1876. At Harvard, he developed his lifelong political and historical interests. Four months after his graduation in 1880, he married Alice Hathaway Lee, with whom he had a daughter.

In 1882 Roosevelt began the first of three political terms in the New York State Assembly, one of the houses of government of New York state. Upon his retirement in 1884 he had become the leader of the Republican party's reform wing. As a reformer, he gained a reputation for fighting against political corruption (illegal or unethical practices).

In his last term, Roosevelt was discouraged by the sudden deaths of his mother and his wife within hours of each other in February 1884. He retired to a ranch in the American West to study history, completing books on the American senator Thomas Hart Benton and the American statesman Gouverneur Morris. He also began writing his major work, the four-volume Winning of the West.

Politics and a romantic interest in childhood friend, Edith Carow, eventually drew Roosevelt back east. He married Carow in 1886. The couple had four sons and a daughter.

Serving the nation

In 1889 he was in Washington, D.C., where he had been appointed by President Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901) to serve on the Civil Service Commission. Under Roosevelt's leadership the group became dedicated to opening equal opportunities for all who were qualified to serve and work in government.

In 1895 Roosevelt returned to New York City to serve two years as president of the police board. He enforced the law with relentless efficiency and honesty, which often led him into arguments with the leaders of his own Republican party. He succeeded in modernizing the force, limiting corruption, and raising morale to new heights. However, he resigned from this position in 1897 to become President William McKinley's (1843–1901) assistant secretary of the Navy.

As assistant secretary, Roosevelt worked closely with senators in Congress to promote war against Spain. This conflict, the Spanish American War (1898), ended Spain's control of colonies in Latin America and resulted in America's gaining its own territories, including the Philippines. Roosevelt embraced the war mainly to expand America's global influence and because he had exaggerated notions of the heroic glories of war. Anxious to prove himself under fire, Roosevelt resigned from the navy in April 1898 to organize the 1st Volunteer Cavalry regiment. This horseback cavalry unit was known as the "Rough Riders." Roosevelt took command of the unit in Cuba and distinguished himself in a bold charge up the hill next to San Juan. In late summer 1898 he returned home as a war hero and was nominated for governor of New York.

From governor to president

Roosevelt won election as governor in the fall of 1898. His two-year administration was full of positive activity. Winning the favor of public opinion and showing himself to be a master politician, he forced an impressive body of new laws and regulations through a reluctant New York Assembly and Senate.

In 1900 Roosevelt accepted the Republican vice presidential nomination. A landslide victory for McKinley and Roosevelt followed, but on September 6, 1901, McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York, and he died eight days later. Roosevelt was sworn in as president.

First presidential term

Roosevelt's first three years in office were limited by the conservative policies of Republicans in Congress and the way in which he had come to power. Nevertheless, in 1902 Roosevelt shook the financial community by ordering proceedings against the association of railroad groups known as the Northern Securities Company. When a group of firms or corporations combines or cooperates in order to control prices or reduce competition, this action is known as a trust. Efforts to combat trusts, such as Roosevelt's actions against Northern Securities, are known as antitrust actions. By the time Roosevelt left office as president he had begun forty-three antitrust actions.

In his foreign policy, Roosevelt was intent on expanding the United States' global power. He established a somewhat tolerant government in the Philippines, settled an old Alaskan boundary dispute with Canada on terms favorable to the United States, and took advantage of a revolution in Panama to acquire the Panama Canal Zone. Roosevelt's policies aimed at expanding American influence and limiting European power in the Western Hemisphere. The United States, he declared, assumed the right to intervene in the internal affairs of the Latin American nations in the event of "chronic wrongdoing" or "impotence [weakness or inability]."

In 1904 Roosevelt ran for a second, full presidential term. He won the election and carried in a great number of candidates to Congress through the influence of his popularity.

Second administration

Roosevelt pushed through a much more progressive program in his second term. One of his primary accomplishments was his drive to protect and to increase development of America's natural resources. By March 1909 Roosevelt's use of his executive power had resulted in the transfer of 125 million acres to the forest reserves. About half as many acres containing coal and mineral deposits had been placed under greater public control. Sixteen national monuments and fifty-one wildlife refuges had been established, and the number of national parks had been doubled.

In the area of foreign policy, Roosevelt's impact on the international scene continued during his second term. This was especially true in the Far East. Perceiving that Japan was destined to become a major Far Eastern power, he encouraged that country to serve as a force to keep the area stable. To this end he used his influence to end a war between Russia and Japan that took place in 1904–5. For his efforts, he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Progressive movement

Rejecting suggestions that he run for reelection, Roosevelt selected William Howard Taft (1857–1930) as his successor. Taft was elected and this led to disputes within the Republican Party. Caught between the conservative supporters of Taft and the advanced progressive followers of himself and Senator Robert M. La Follette, Roosevelt set forth a radical program of social and economic reforms in 1910. Thereafter pressure to declare himself a candidate for the nomination in 1912 mounted until he reluctantly did so.

Although Roosevelt outpolled Taft easily in the Republican primaries, Taft's control of the party organization won him the nomination. Roosevelt's supporters then stormed out of the party and organized the Progressive Party, also known as the Bull Moose Party. During the campaign that fall, Roosevelt called forcefully for federal regulation of corporations, tax reform, river valley developments, and social justice for workers and the underprivileged. But the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), won the election.

Roosevelt died at his home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, on January 6, 1919. Today, his reputation as a domestic reformer remains secure.

For More Information

Brands, H. W. T. R: The Last Romantic. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Burton, David H. Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972.

Gable, John A. Theodore Roosevelt Cyclopedia Rev. ed. Westport, CT: Meckler, 1989.

Morris, Edmund. Theodore Rex. Random House, 2001.

Roosevelt, Theodore. Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1913. Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1985.

Roosevelt, Theodore (1858–1919), twenty‐sixth president of the United States.Born in New York City, Theodore Roosevelt grew up in comfortable circumstances in the wealthy family of Theodore Roosevelt Sr. and Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt. He struggled with asthma and poor eyesight as a child but also showed the determination to excel, love of books, and fascination with the outdoors that marked his life. A graduate of Harvard, he married Alice Lee in 1880. Fascinated with politics, he won election to the New York Assembly in 1881. The sudden deaths of his mother and his wife on the same day in February 1884 left him with a baby daughter, Alice Lee Roosevelt, and a desire to escape New York. He ranched in the Dakotas for several years.

In 1886, Roosevelt married Edith Kermit Carow, a childhood friend, with whom he had five children. He ran for mayor of New York that year, but came in third. Appointed to the U.S. Civil Service Commission in 1889, he served until 1895. In 1897, after two years as the president of New York City's Board of Police Commissioners, he resigned to become assistant secretary of the navy in the administration of President William McKinley. In that office he urged the expansion of the navy and lobbied for war with Spain.

When the Spanish‐American War began in April 1898, Roosevelt volunteered. The regiment that he led, known as the Rough Riders, attacked the Spanish in Cuba on 1 July 1898 in a battle that made him a national hero. That fall, running on the Republican party ticket, he was elected governor of New York State in a close election. An activist governor, Roosevelt spoke out for worker protection, the conservation of natural resources, and the mild regulation of corporations, lending the state's Republican boss, Thomas C. Platt, to conclude that Roosevelt would be less troublesome as vice president. In the absence of credible alternatives, and since he also had the support of western Republicans and younger party members, Roosevelt joined the national Republican ticket in 1900 and campaigned vigorously for McKinley's reelection. He was inaugurated as vice president on 4 March 1901.

On 6 September 1901, McKinley was shot by an assassin; he died eight days later. At forty‐two, Roosevelt became the nation's youngest president. He promised to continue McKinley's policies, but his energy, activism, and distinct leadership style soon led him in fresh directions. Taking on corporate America and revitalizing the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, he ordered the Justice Department to file what proved to be a successful suit to break up the Northern Securities Company, a railroad conglomerate, early in 1902. He also helped settle a bitter anthracite coal strike later that year on terms that established him as a champion of the “Square Deal” for labor. In foreign policy, he settled an Alaska boundary dispute with Canada, and in 1903 secured control of the Panama Canal Zone in a manner that outraged Colombia but pleased most Americans. He pushed construction of the Panama Canal and became the first president to leave the continental United States when he visited the Canal Zone in 1906. Roosevelt's achievements and popularity secured his election to the presidency in his own right in 1904 when he decisively defeated the Democratic nominee, Alton B. Parker. On election night he announced that he would not be a candidate in 1908.

Roosevelt pursued a more activist course in his second term. In foreign affairs, he acted as peacemaker for the Russo‐Japanese War in 1905, winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. His diplomacy facilitated the Algeciras Conference of 1906 that quieted differences between France and Germany over Morocco, and he sent a powerful naval force, the “Great White Fleet,” around the world in 1907–1909 as a display of American strength. In Latin America, he proclaimed the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, warning European nations against exploiting the troubles of Caribbean countries for military or political advantage.

In domestic affairs, Roosevelt championed railroad regulation through the Hepburn Act, sponsored the Pure Food and Drug Act, and secured meat‐inspection legislation, all in a single year, 1906. More reformist as his term progressed, he pushed for corporate regulation, toughened the antitrust laws, and promoted sweeping conservation policies. Although he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House, his peremptory dishonorable discharge of African‐American soldiers in 1906 because of their purported participation in a shooting incident in Brownsville, Texas, marred his record and reflected his ambiguity on the race issue.

Roosevelt hand‐picked William Howard Taft as his successor and helped Taft win the White House in 1908. Upon leaving office, he went on safari in Africa in 1909–1910. Progressive Republicans' increasing unhappiness with Taft's policies, culminating in the Ballinger‐Pinchot controversy, led Roosevelt to announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination in 1912. Losing the nomination to Taft after a bruising primary battle and a tumultuous national convention, Roosevelt bolted the Republican party and ran on the Progressive party ticket. He spoke out for social justice, but finished second to the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson.

The Progressive party did not prosper and Roosevelt returned to his Republican roots soon after World War I broke out in 1914. Unhappy with Wilson's neutrality, he urged the country to prepare for war and, if necessary, intervene on the side of the Allies. Roosevelt lost to Charles Evans Hughes in the race for the 1916 Republican nomination. Once the United States entered the war in April 1917, Roosevelt sought to raise a volunteer division to fight in France. Wilson and the army refused. Theodore Roosevelt was the likely candidate for the Republican presidential race in 1920, but he died on 6 January 1919.

A major figure in establishing the presidency in its modern form, TR (a nickname he favored) was both intensely controversial and a political celebrity of vast popularity. A forceful orator and an advocate of the strenuous life (he installed a boxing ring in the White House), Roosevelt with his bushy mustache, pince‐nez, and wide, toothy grin was a caricaturist's delight. Vigorous and outspoken, he basked in the limelight: “He wanted to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral,” a relative commented. A century after he came to the White House, his fame still endured.
See also Antitrust Legislation; Brownsville Incident; Civil Service Reform; Conservation Movement; Economic Regulation; Expansionism; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Asia; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Latin America; Northern Securities Case; Progressive Party of 1912–1924.

Bibliography

John Morton Blum , The Republican Roosevelt, 1954.
Willard B. Gatewood , Theodore Roosevelt and the Art of Controversy: Episodes of the White House Years, 1970.
William H. Harbaugh , The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, 1975.
David McCullough , Mornings on Horseback, 1981.
John Milton Cooper Jr. , The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, 1983.
Lewis L. Gould , The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 1991.

Lewis L. Gould

Roosevelt, Theodore (1858–1919), assistant secretary of the navy, governor of New York, vice president, and twenty‐sixth president of the United States.Born to a wealthy New York family, a puny, asthmatic, and nearsighted child, Theodore Roosevelt seemed destined for a sheltered life. Instead, he developed his body and an appetite for public service in an obsessive quest to prove his masculinity and to assert his independence. He became a dynamic political leader.

Roosevelt embraced things military from an early age. Two years after graduating from Harvard in 1880, he published The Naval War of 1812, reflecting the navalist thinking later codified by Capt. Alfred T. Mahan. Roosevelt developed his political skills as a New York State legislator, U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, and New York police commissioner. In 1897, he became assistant secretary of the navy in the McKinley administration.

An ardent advocate of the Spanish‐American War, Roosevelt used his political connections to secure an appointment in 1898 as lieutenant colonel in the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry regiment, the “Rough Riders.” His friend Col. Leonard Wood commanded the unit initially, but he left for a higher command. Roosevelt's most famous military exploit came when he led a charge in the Battle of San Juan Hill (actually Kettle Hill) outside Santiago, Cuba. The well‐publicized exploit helped him win the New York governorship in 1898 and vice presidency in 1900.

Roosevelt became president in September 1901 after President McKinley's assassination. A moralist in tone but realist in practice, Roosevelt worried about competition with Germany in the Caribbean and, later, about tensions with Japan. Diplomatically, he acted as a mediator and won a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to the Russo‐Japanese War in 1905.

A fervent believer in the Mahanian doctrine of sea power, Roosevelt paid particular attention to the U.S. Navy as the first line of defense and a primary instrument of American foreign policy. He used the navy to signal American concern during the Venezuelan crisis of 1902–03 and deployed naval forces to block Colombian suppression of the Panamanian revolt in 1903, clearing the way for construction of the Panama Canal. Roosevelt operated in effect as his own secretary of the navy. A competitor in the international naval arms race of the day, he won congressional approval for sixteen battleships, including new, powerful dreadnoughts, and he increased the naval budget by 60 percent.

Roosevelt also pushed for more realistic and frequent training exercises. He united the navy's battleships in a true fleet formation and then sent the “great white fleet” on a world cruise from 1907 to 1909 to test its ability to operate coherently and to demonstrate U.S. naval power.

With Secretary of War (and later State) Elihu Root, Roosevelt also sought to enlarge and modernize the army. He supported the General Staff Act, endorsed larger unit training, elevated able officers, and approved reform legislation in 1903 and 1908 to make the National Guard a more reliable federal reserve. He also pushed for the development of aviation and the machine‐gun service.

Roosevelt left office in 1909 and lost a bid for the presidency in 1912 on the Progressive Party ticket. As a former president, he played a leading role in the military “Preparedness” movement in 1915–17 for universal military training and for a larger navy. He assailed Woodrow Wilson's foreign and military policies, urging the United States to enter the war after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. Upon American intervention in 1917, Roosevelt asked to lead a volunteer division, but President Wilson refused. During World War I, Roosevelt denounced dissenters and urged a postwar coalition with Britain. He died shortly after the end of the war.
[See also Caribbean and Latin America, U.S. Military Involvement in the; Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.]

Bibliography

Howard Beale , Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power, 1956.
William Henry Harbaugh , Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, 1961; rev. ed., 1975.
Richard Collin , Theodore Roosevelt's Caribbean: The Panama Canal, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Latin American Context, 1990.
Lewis L. Gould , The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 1991.

Matthew Oyos

Roosevelt, Theodore (1858–1919) 26th president of the United States. A frail, asthmatic youth, Roosevelt, born in New York City, fought against his infirmities and became an avid sportsman. He had an abiding interest in natural history and published a scholarly paper while still in college. By 1882, this prodigious polymath had also begun work on The Naval War of 1812, still recognized as a major work of scholarship. After college, he studied law but dropped out. He entered the New York State Assembly in 1882, where, although nominally a Republican, he quickly won a reputation for independence and supported a bundle of “good government” measures. After the death of his wife in 1884, he moved to his ranch in western Dakota and considered quitting politics and becoming a rancher. Nonetheless, in 1886 he ran for mayor of New York City, coming in third; he also remarried. In 1887 he became chairman of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, where he continued to emphasize merit as the basis for advancement. From 1895 to 1897, he served as New York City's police commissioner, tightening discipline and setting high standards for police officers. He was assistant secretary of the navy (1897–99) but resigned to organize a regiment of volunteer cavalry, called the “Rough Riders,” whom he led in a famous assault on San Juan Heights, Cuba, during the Spanish-American War. In November 1898 he won election as governor of New York, on the strength of his war record and his ebullient personality. In that position he supported progressive measures such as limits on women and child labor, eliminated separate schools for white and black students, and made efforts to preserve the state's natural beauty. Roosevelt ran for vice president in the election of 1900 and became president in 1901 upon the assassination of President William McKinley. Believing that federal regulation was necessary to redress inequalities in the nation's social and economic spheres, he moved to break up the huge trusts that dominated the country's economy, beginning with the Northern Securities Company; he also used his influence, and threats of nationalization, to bring miners and owners back to the negotiating table during the 1902 coal strike and to win de facto recognition of the union. During his second term Roosevelt supported additional progressive legislation, including the Pure Food and Drug bill, the expansion of the civil service, and federal inspection of stockyards and slaughterhouses. He also continued to press for preservation of the nation's natural resources. In foreign policy, he supported a buildup of the navy, the open door policy in China, and U.S. hegemony in Latin America; he encouraged the revolution in Panama (1903) that allowed for the construction of the Panama Canal, and believed peace could best be maintained by a balance of power. His mediation of the Russo-Japanese War (1905) earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. Despite Roosevelt's energy, his charisma, and his sprawling intellect, he did not command the loyalties of his fellow Republicans, who resented his domination of the party's politics, and who did not share his views on the role of the federal government. Roosevelt responded by condemning them as lackeys of the wealthy and by claiming that corporations were purchasing favors from politicians. In 1912, having been denied renomination by the Republican party, Roosevelt ran on as a third-party candidate representing the Progressive, or Bull Moose, party but came in second to Woodrow Wilson. From 1912 on, he wrote voluminously, explored Brazil, and advocated military preparedness as World War I loomed, criticizing pacifists and advocating universal conscription. He supported Charles Evans Hughes for president in 1916 because he though Hughes would better prepare the nation for the inevitability of war. He eventually supported the League of Nations, although he continued to believe that U.S. military leadership was essential to world peace.

Roosevelt was, at forty-two, the youngest man ever to win the presidency.

Roosevelt, Theodore (1858–1919), 26th President of the U.S. (1901–9), born in New York City of a distinguished family, graduated from Harvard (1880). After writing a history of The Naval Operations of the War Between Great Britain and the United States—1812–1815 (1882), he entered politics, serving in the state legislature (1882–84), where he led the Republican “insurgents” against Blaine. He retired to his ranch in Dakota Territory after Blaine's nomination, wrote books on his life in the West and biographies of Thomas Hart Benton (1886) and Gouverneur Morris (1888), and began The Winning of the West, before returning to politics in an unsuccessful campaign for the mayoralty of New York (1886). President Harrison appointed him to the Civil Service Commission (1889–95), after which he headed the New York City Police Board (1895–97), working against corrupt politics and collaborating with Jacob Riis in an attack on slum conditions. He was assistant secretary of the navy (1896–98), retiring to help organize the Rough Riders, in whose Spanish‐American War exploits he became the popular hero. His newly won reputation brought him the governorship of New York (1898–1900), but his reforms alienated conservatives, who “shelved” him in the vice‐presidency (1900), only to have him become President (1901) upon McKinley's assassination. During his two terms he championed the rights of “the little man,” made a war against “malefactors of great wealth” in his regulation of trusts, and supported such reforms as the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drugs Act. Although Congress claimed he had usurped its powers, he worked for the conservation of natural resources, and in this and in other mat‐ters his technique brought opposition on the grounds that he was attempting to dominate a government based on the theory of checks and balances.

His foreign policy was marked by jingoism, exhibited in the aid advanced to Panama in its revolution against Colombia, in order that the U.S. might begin the Panama Canal, and a “big stick” policy giving the U.S. a sort of police power in Latin American affairs. Other matters of foreign policy were a retention of the “Open Door” in China, mediation to end the Russo‐Japanese War (1905), and the instigation of the Algeciras Conference to settle colonial problems of European powers. He virtually dictated the nomination of Taft (1908), but was alienated by his successor's conservative policies, and in 1912 formed the “Bull Moose” or Progressive Republican party, which nominated him for a third presidential term, but the split gave the election to Wilson.

In addition to his early books, he used authorship to promote his beliefs and tell of his adventures in and out of politics. The Winning of the West (4 vols., 1889–96) is considered his most significant work, and others include American Ideals and Other Essays (1897); The Rough Riders (1899); The Strenuous Life (1900), concerned with personal conflicts resulting from his philosophy of life; African Game Trails (1910), an account of his hunting expeditions; African and European Addresses (1910), a discussion of colonial problems; The New Nationalism (1910), a statement of beliefs embodied in his Bull Moose party; History as Literature, and Other Essays (1913), on the theory of history illustrated in The Winning of the West; Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (1913); Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914), an account of an exploration; and America and the World War (1915), Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916), and The Great Adventure (1918), views on World War I.

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.

Roosevelt, Theodore (1858–1919) Twenty-sixth US president (1901–09), fifth cousin of Franklin Roosevelt and uncle of Eleanor. Roosevelt gained national fame as the organizer of the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War (1898). He became Republican governor of New York in 1899, and vice president in 1901. Roosevelt became president after the assassination of William McKinley, and he was elected in 1904. A vigorous progressive, he moved to regulate monopolies through anti-trust legislation. Abroad, he expanded US power and prestige, gaining the Panama Canal, and taking an increasing role in world affairs. His mediation after the Russo-Japanese War earned him the Nobel Peace Prize (1905). After retiring in 1909, he returned to challenge his successor, President William Taft, for the presidency in 1912 as leader of the National Progressive Party (Bull Moose Party). The ensuing Republican split produced a Democratic victory.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents

Roosevelt, Theodore (known as ‘ Teddy’ Roosevelt) (1858–1919) US Republican statesman, 26th President of the USA (1901–09). He was elected Vice-President in 1900, succeeding William McKinley in 1901 following the latter's assassination. At home Roosevelt was noted for his antitrust laws, while abroad he successfully engineered the US bid to build the Panama Canal (1904–14) and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War.