Roosevelt, Theodore
Theodore Roosevelt
Born October 27, 1858
Died January 6, 1919
Oyster Bay, New York
American politician
"The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life."
Theodore Roosevelt was the twenty-sixth president of the United States, serving from 1901 (after the assassination of President William McKinley [1843–1901]) until 1909. An extraordinary individual by any measure, Roosevelt took strong action to curb the powers of so-called corporate trusts, or monopolies, that had been built up as the Industrial Revolution blossomed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In so doing, Roosevelt set the precedent for modern government regulation of business.
Before he was president, Roosevelt had been a deputy sheriff in North Dakota and a war hero who led his men into withering enemy fire during a cavalry charge in the Battle of San Juan Hill, in Cuba, during the Spanish-American War (1898). During a campaign for a third term in office, he was wounded in the chest in an assassination attempt, but insisted on delivering his speech despite spitting up blood. He was widely admired as an author of history and wildlife books and as a leading conservationist. And it was Roosevelt who harnessed his extraordinary energy and spirit to go after the giant corporations that, in his view, threatened competition in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Roosevelt was a contemporary of such giants of the Industrial Revolution as J. P. Morgan (1837–1913) and John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937; see entries) in an era when wealthy business owners were trying to build trusts, or effective monopolies, over such key industries as railroads and petroleum. Roosevelt believed that trusts stifled competition and did not benefit the United States, and he took an aggressive stand to break them up and restore competition.
Moreover, Roosevelt was the first president to establish agencies to protect public health by insisting on federal meat inspection, for instance, in the wake of revelations of horrific violations of basic sanitation in slaughterhouses. He also campaigned for an income tax, a federal minimum wage, and an eight-hour work day. A century after he took office, Theodore Roosevelt was still ranked among the half-dozen most-admired presidents.
Birth, childhood and early career
Theodore Roosevelt was born into a wealthy, long-established family in New York City in 1858, less than three years before the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War (1861–65). His ancestors had come to New York when it was still the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, in the 1640s. His mother, Martha Bulloch, was a descendant of the first president of the Georgia provincial legislature. Theodore (also called "Teddy") grew up in a cultured house in Manhattan, a member of New York City's aristocracy.
He was educated by private tutors. As a boy, Roosevelt suffered from asthma and poor eyesight and was regarded as somewhat weak and sickly. Legend has it that one day when he was around eleven, his father told him, "You have the mind but not the body and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body." And so he did. Using a punching bag and lifting weights in an exercise room his father installed in their townhouse, Roosevelt built up his body. When he was fourteen, he was beaten by a bully, and thereafter took boxing and wrestling lessons, and eventually learned the Asian art of self-defense called jujitsu.
Roosevelt learned his lessons well. Later, after he had been elected to the New York State legislature, he once knocked a political opponent unconscious. Before that, living as a rancher in the Dakotas where he worked as a deputy sheriff, he slammed a wanted man to a saloon floor. Even as president, he threw the governor of New Mexico down a flight of stairs during a reunion of the Rough Riders, his old regiment from the Spanish-American War.
Roosevelt grew up just at the time the United States was becoming fully engrossed in the Industrial Revolution, a period marked by the widespread replacement of manual labor by machines that began in Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century, and in the half-century when European settlers were heading west in wagon trains or via the new railroads that were being built. He reflected the spirit of machismo (pronounced ma-CHEESE-moe, from a Spanish word referring to masculine pride) associated with the American cowboy.
Roosevelt attended Harvard University, where he earned academic honors. He considered a career as a naturalist but disliked Harvard's concentration on laboratory work instead of studies outdoors in the field. His father died suddenly in 1878, when he was halfway through Harvard, and he considered becoming a lawyer after graduating in 1880. But eager to pursue his interests in history and politics, he dropped out of Columbia University's law school.
In 1882 Roosevelt decided to write a history of the War of 1812, one of more than fifty books he eventually authored. That same year, a Republican Party leader in New York recruited Roosevelt to run for the New York State legislature. Roosevelt won the seat and served in the Albany legislature for three terms, receiving positive notices in the press. Among other causes, Roosevelt worked to root out corruption in the New York City government and supported laws favoring the rights of working people.
Roosevelt married Alice Hathaway Lee of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, in 1880. In February 1884 his wife died not long after the birth of their daughter, Alice Lee; Roosevelt's mother died the same day. Grief stricken, Roosevelt retreated to a ranch he had bought in Dakota Territory, where he lived the strenuous life of a cowboy and occasional deputy sheriff.
Back to politics
Two years later, Roosevelt returned to the East Coast and reentered politics, while at the same time turning out a series of history volumes. He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York in 1886, and two years later supported the successful Republican ticket that installed Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901) as president. In return for Roosevelt's political support, Harrison named him a civil service commissioner in 1889, in charge of regulating the hiring of federal employees. In this job, as in other political jobs he held, Roosevelt was determined to fight corruption. He soon earned a reputation as an honest reformer.
Partly as a result of this image, Roosevelt was appointed police commissioner of New York City in 1895, a job that enhanced his reputation for fighting corruption. After Republican William McKinley (1843–1901) was elected president in 1896, Roosevelt was named assistant secretary of the navy; in this post he became a strong advocate for going to war against Spain in order to control Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. When war did break out, Roosevelt insisted on resigning his post and organizing a cavalry group (soldiers trained to fight on horseback) to fight in Cuba. Known as the Rough Riders, the regiment earned fame, and Roosevelt became a national hero by leading his men in a charge into merciless gunfire in the Battle of San Juan Hill in 1898.
As a returning war hero Roosevelt made an attractive candidate for vice president on the Republican ticket headed by President McKinley in 1900. Not everyone was happy with McKinley's choice; some Republican politicians were uncomfortable having a man with Roosevelt's personality in line to become president. And in September 1901, their fears were realized when McKinley was shot at the world's fair in Buffalo, New York. President McKinley died a few days later, and Roosevelt, at age forty-three, became president.
Peace in the coal mines
Roosevelt was president for slightly more than seven years, the remaining three and a half years of McKinley's term and a full term that he won in his own right in the election of 1904. In a sense, his was the first presidency of the twentieth century, and much attention was focused on Roosevelt's foreign policy, summarized in the African proverb he occasionally quoted: "Speak softly, and carry a big stick." Under Roosevelt's leadership, the United States assumed a position as an equal to the main European powers in an era when African, Asian, and Latin American countries were largely dominated by European economic and military power.
Inside the United States, the Roosevelt administration defined a new relationship between government and private business as the Industrial Revolution overwhelmed the older agricultural economy of the United States. Two economic issues dominated the Roosevelt administration: the unrestricted power of monopolies (called trusts) and the emergence of workers as an organized political force.
Up until the Roosevelt administration, the U.S. government had played a small role in economic affairs. The prevailing philosophy was that business could, and should, look
after its own affairs, and the government should leave the economy to business leaders. The only role for government, it was thought by some, was to protect property rights and public order, which sometimes included suppressing workers trying to organize strikes. Of course, labor organizers had long been trying to organize unions (organizations of workers devoted to obtaining higher pay and better working conditions), and socialists (people who believe in government control over the economy) had long advocated democratic, government control over big business.
Under Roosevelt, a new role emerged for government: looking out for the good of the ordinary citizen and countering the power of private corporations—a role that government continues to take in the twenty-first century.
Roosevelt's first economic crisis came in 1902. Coal miners in Pennsylvania went on strike to demand higher wages, an eight-hour (as opposed to twelve-hour) workday, and recognition of their union, the United Mine Workers of America. The shutdown of the coal mines threatened to shut down the railroads as well, to close industries dependent on coal for fuel, and also to deprive millions of Americans in the Northeast of fuel to heat their homes in the coming winter.
For the mine owners, the issue was not just economic, but one of prestige as well. They resisted recognizing the union's role in coal mining and demanded that the federal government dispatch troops to end the strike. The strike had been accompanied by violence on both sides, resulting in several deaths. The two sides were unable to reach an agreement.
According to historian Edmund Morris, the governor of Massachusetts warned Roosevelt: "Unless you end this strike, the workers in the North will begin tearing down buildings for fuel. They will not stand being frozen to death."
Roosevelt faced a dilemma. As he noted at the time: "Unfortunately the strength of my public position before the country is also its weakness. I am genuinely independent of the big monied men in all matters where I think the interests of the public are concerned, and probably I am the first President of recent times of whom this could truthfully be said."
Eventually Roosevelt settled on a suggestion by the governor of Massachusetts, W. Murray Crane: a government arbitration panel would be set up to examine the issues separating the miners and the mine owners and recommend a compromise. Roosevelt sent a telegram to seven leading mine owners and to the mineworkers' union, inviting them to a conference in Washington, D.C., on October 3, 1902.
At the conference, Roosevelt told the owners and the union that there were in fact three parties to their dispute: the mine owners, the miners, and the public, represented by Roosevelt himself. Initially the mine owners refused Roosevelt's suggestion to settle the dispute. They apparently believed that their property rights were being threatened and arrogantly stalked out of a meeting with Roosevelt, insisting that he send in federal troops to guard their mines against the union and protect strikebreaking workers willing to go back to work.
Facing a potential national crisis, Roosevelt told the mine owners that he was prepared to use federal troops—not to end the strike by forcing strikers back to work, as the owners wanted, but to seize the mines from the owners and get coal supplies flowing again.
Ten days after the president first convened the meeting between mine owners and the union, the owners made a major concession: they would accept arbitration (referring a dispute to an impartial group for judgement on the matter), and they would accept the United Mine Workers union as the representative of their workers. The crisis was over. Eventually, both the miners and mine owners accepted the compromise settlement proposed by Roosevelt's commission. The big winner was the president, whose popularity soared as the crisis over winter heating disappeared. According to Sean McCollum, he later wrote about the settlement in a letter to his sister:
The little world in which the [mine owners] moved was absolutely out of touch with the big world that included practically all the rest of the country.… The trouble with those who said that they would rather die of cold than yield on such a high principle as recognizing arbitration with these miners was that they were not in danger of dying of cold … but the poor people around them could not get coal and with them it would not be discomfort but acute misery and loss of life.
Roosevelt's successful strategy set the precedent for presidential involvement in labor disputes thereafter.
Busting the trusts
Roosevelt's other great economic challenge came from the emerging trusts, or monopolies, that were gaining domination over key industries. Businessmen like John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, for example, had gradually obtained control over so much of the oil and steel industries, respectively, that they were in a position to dictate terms and prices to their customers. Smaller firms could not compete and often ended up selling out to the trusts or simply being driven out of business. By driving competitors out of business, the trusts had consolidated not only economic power but political power as well.
Muckrakers and the Trusts
President Roosevelt had help in understanding the implications of trusts, or monopolies, on American life. He was president at a time when crusading journalists and writers were constantly revealing excesses of corporate greed.
The Roosevelt era coincided with the era of "muckraking" journalism, a term Roosevelt coined to describe newspaper and magazine stories that revealed the everyday implications of uncontrolled corporate maneuvering.
Among the best-known muckrakers were Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens , and Upton Sinclair (see entry on The Muckrakers). They wrote both nonfiction (for instance, Tarbell's 1904 book The History of the Standard Oil Company) and fiction (Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle, about the unsanitary conditions in Chicago's stockyards) to bring home to Americans the abuses of the industrial age.
Several popular magazines, especially Collier's and McClure's, specialized in reports on abuse of power by giant companies—and at the same time made it easier for Roosevelt to use government power to address the abuses. The continuing popular appeal of these magazines was evidence of growing public discontent with the evolution of the powerful business monopolies. And continuing revelations about corporate greed made business tycoons—the Industrial Revolution's so-called robber barons—into highly unpopular symbols of the abuse of power by giant corporations.
The muckraking movement was closely aligned with the Progressive Party headed by Roosevelt in the election of 1912.
The tendency of capitalists (people who own large businesses) to create anticompetitive monopolies had long been recognized; the Scottish economist Adam Smith (1723–1790; see entry) wrote about it in the mid-1700s. But until the time of Theodore Roosevelt, no American president had been willing to take on the giants of business, partly because politicians relied on the financial support of big business to remain in office. And most politicians in the latter half of the 1800s thought that government had no role in business and economic affairs. But in his first address to Congress, in December 1901, Roosevelt put forward a different viewpoint: "There is," he said, "a widespread conviction among the American people that the great corporations known as trusts are … hurtful to the general welfare. It is based upon sincere conviction that combination and concentration [of business interests] should be, not prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled."
In 1902 Roosevelt proposed—and Congress created—a Bureau of Corporations, designed to regulate the previously unregulated corporations.
Roosevelt initiated a more significant move on February 18, 1902, by filing a lawsuit against the Northern Securities Company, accusing it of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. His choice of targets was significant: the Northern Securities Company had been organized by the foremost financier of the day, J. P. Morgan. Northern Securities was a company designed to control two railroads, the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern, which formerly had competed with one another to carry passengers and freight east-to-west across the northern tier of states. The objective of the Northern Securities Company was to organize the two railroads so that they would cooperate instead of compete. To the owner and developer of the Great Northern, James J. Hill (1838–1916; see entry), it was simply a question of improving efficiency.
The case worked its way through federal courts and two years after it was initially filed, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government. The Northern Securities Company was ordered broken up into its original companies.
Eventually, Roosevelt's government would file a total of forty-three such lawsuits, including one of the most famous that resulted in the breakup of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company in 1911, after Roosevelt had left office.
In addition to filing suits against trusts, Roosevelt was vigorous in pushing unprecedented legislation to regulate the activities of businesspeople. During his years in office, magazine stories and books published by the Muckrakers (see box on page 156) exposed corporate abuses and generated a strong public sentiment in favor of gaining control over private businesses or eliminating competition and driving independent businesspeople into financial ruin.
Was Teddy Roosevelt antibusiness?
Roosevelt's suits and legislation enraged many businessmen, who continued to feel that the government had no right to regulate business—an attitude that has persevered into the twenty-first century. To some, he was considered antibusiness.
Roosevelt saw things differently. He believed that in order to prosper, industrial-era businesses had to grow. But he realized that such growth gave corporations unprecedented social and economic power, and that government needed to step in to act as a counterbalance to that power. The economic influence exerted by huge corporations, he believed, could soon dwarf the political power of the government, resulting in a society dominated by the wealthy. It is a struggle that continues to play out in the twenty-first century.
For his part, Roosevelt had promised in 1904 that he would not run for another term in 1908. But during the term of William Howard Taft (1857–1930), the Republican who succeeded Roosevelt, the ex-president grew restless and dissatisfied with what he thought was Taft's leaning in the direction of the interests of corporate owners at the expense of ordinary voters.
In 1910 Roosevelt launched a campaign for what he called the "new nationalism," an era in which the national government would take precedence over local governments and serve an active role in regulating business for the common good. Roosevelt challenged Taft for the 1912 Republican nomination, and although he easily won in party primary elections (elections held to choose a political party's candidate for office), Roosevelt ultimately lost the nomination to Taft, who exerted his control over officials inside the Republican Party.
Not one to give up without a strenuous fight, Roosevelt switched parties and ran for president as the head of the Progressive Party (sometimes called the Bull Moose Party). Roosevelt called for a federal tax on incomes and inheritances, increased regulation of corporations, and legislation to create social justice for working people. In the election, he and Taft divided the vote of the Republicans, allowing a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), to be elected president.
By then, the era of reform was largely over. Some of the muckrakers of the previous decade actively supported Wilson, even though it was Roosevelt who started the push to regulate industrial enterprises and clean up the corruption and bribery that had allowed businesses at all levels, from local to national, to influence government.
After losing the election of 1912, Roosevelt continued to take an active role in the public arena. After World War I (1914–18) broke out in Europe in 1914, he campaigned for the United States to enter the war on the side of Britain and France. He criticized President Wilson for being too slow in mobilizing the U.S. Army once the United States did enter the war in 1917. After the war, he questioned the wisdom of the United States's joining the League of Nations, a predecessor to the United Nations that Woodrow Wilson hoped would avoid future wars.
Roosevelt was among the most influential of all presidents in shaping the future. It was he who realized the need for a new balance of power between the huge corporations born of the Industrial Revolution, and ordinary citizens as represented by the government. He addressed the balance of property rights and human rights. He saw the dangers in having a society marked by a huge imbalance of wealth, in which a handful of business owners were worth billions of dollars while millions of working people were on the verge of starvation.
Roosevelt was also responsible for the federal government taking an active role in protecting environmental treasures in the American West from unregulated economic exploitation by creating national monuments and parks.
Theodore Roosevelt died at his estate in Oyster Bay, Long Island, on January 6, 1919.
For More Information
Books
Auchincloss, Louis. Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2001.
Dalton, Kathleen. Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Morris, Edmund. Theodore Rex. New York: Random House, 2001.
Roosevelt, Theodore. Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children. New York: Scribner's, 1919.
Schuman, Michael A. Theodore Roosevelt. Springfield, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 1997.
Periodicals
McCollum, Sean. "Teddy—the Bear in the Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt Could Be Brash and Outrageous, but He Shaped the Modern Presidency." Scholastic Update, November 3, 1997, p. 15.
Morris, Edmund. "Theodore Roosevelt, President." American Heritage, June–July 1981, p. 4.
Web Sites
Theodore Roosevelt Association.http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/ (accessed on February 15, 2003).
"Theodore Roosevelt, His Life and Times on Film." Library of Congress.http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/trfhtml/trfhome.html (accessed on February 15, 2003).
"Theodore Roosevelt: Icon of the American Century." Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery.http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/roosevelt/ (accessed on February 15, 2003).