Roosevelt, Theodore

26th president, 1901–1909

Born: October 27, 1858

Died: January 6, 1919

Vice President: Charles W. Fairbanks

First Lady: Edith Carow Roosevelt

Children: Alice, Theodore, Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, Quentin

While John F. Kennedy was the youngest president-elect in U.S. history, it was Theodore Roosevelt who was the youngest person ever to take office. Vice President Roosevelt was 42 years old when President McKinley was assassinated.

Roosevelt was born in October 1858 in New York City to a wealthy family. He was a sickly child with poor eyesight. He built his body through exercises, such as boxing and horseback riding.

In 1884, his first wife, Alice Lee Roosevelt, and his mother died on the same day. Roosevelt spent much of the next two years operating his cattle ranch in the Badlands of Dakota Territory. On a visit to London, he married Edith Carow in December 1886.

After serving as the assistant secretary of the Navy in McKinley's first term, Roosevelt took command of a special fighting force that invaded Cuba in 1898. The U.S. victory made him widely popular.

• Roosevelt is one of four presidents whose faces are carved into Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. The other three are Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.
• During his presidency, Roosevelt suffered a detached retina in a boxing match, which caused him to become blind in one eye.
• In 1906, Roosevelt became the first president to win the Nobel Prize for peace.
• Roosevelt was the only president to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. It was awarded to him in 2001, more than 80 years after his death in recognition of his army service during the Spanish-American War.

Despite his youth, Roosevelt was a commanding personality who believed that the president should be an active leader. He fought for workers' rights against powerful business interests. He also fought to have government safety inspections of drugs and foods. Roosevelt was also one of the first presidents to speak about the importance of creating national parks and forests. He added enormously to the national forests in the West, reserved lands for public use, and fostered great irrigation projects.

In his dealings with foreign nations, Roosevelt was equally active and forceful. He ensured U.S. control of the Panama Canal and won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War.

When Roosevelt Was in Office

1902

Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle exposed the unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing industry. As a result, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

1903

Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful airplane flight, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

1904

New York became the first state to have a speed limit for automobiles.

1905

Albert Einstein proposed the theory of relativity.

1906

Much of San Francisco was destroyed in a major earthquake and fire.

1907

Oklahoma became a state.

1908

Henry Ford introduced the Model T automobile.

After leaving the presidency in 1909, Roosevelt went on an African safari, then jumped back into politics. In 1912, he ran for president as a third-party candidate. While campaigning in Milwaukee, he was shot in the chest by a fanatic. Roosevelt insisted on giving his speech before the bullet was removed. The death of his son Kermit in World War I caused terrible sorrow for Roosevelt, and he died shortly after the war ended in 1919.

On Roosevelt's Inauguration Day

Roosevelt had already been in office nearly four years when he gave his brief Inaugural Address. He was a very popular leader, and during his four years in office after McKinley's assassination, he had shown himself to be one the most active men ever to hold the office. The ambassador of Great Britain once remarked that spending time with "TR," as he was known, was like spending time with an energetic six-year-old.

Theodore Roosevelt's Inaugural Address

In Washington, D.C., Saturday, March 4, 1905

MY fellow-citizens, no people on earth have more cause to be thankful than ours, and this is said reverently, in no spirit of boastfulness in our own strength, but with gratitude to the Giver of Good who has blessed us with the conditions which have enabled us to achieve so large a measure of well-being and of happiness. To us as a people it has been granted to lay the foundations of our national life in a new continent. We are the heirs of the ages, and yet we have had to pay few of the penalties which in old countries are exacted by the dead hand of a bygone civilization. We have not been obliged to fight for our existence against any alien race; and yet our life has called for the vigor and effort without which the manlier and hardier virtues wither away. Under such conditions it would be our own fault if we failed; and the success which we have had in the past, the success which we confidently believe the future will bring, should cause in us no feeling of vainglory, but rather a deep and abiding realization of all which life has offered us; a full acknowledgment of the responsibility which is ours; and a fixed determination to show that under a free government a mighty people can thrive best, alike as regards the things of the body and the things of the soul.

Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities. Toward all other nations, large and small, our attitude must be one of cordial and sincere friendship.¹ We must show not only in our words, but in our deeds, that we are earnestly desirous of securing their good will by acting toward them in a spirit of just and generous recognition of all their rights. But justice and generosity in a nation, as in an individual, count most when shown not by the weak but by the strong. While ever careful to refrain from wrongdoing others, we must be no less insistent that we are not wronged ourselves. We wish peace, but we wish the peace of justice, the peace of righteousness. We wish it because we think it is right and not because we are afraid. No weak nation that acts manfully and justly should ever have cause to fear us, and no strong power should ever be able to single us out as a subject for insolent aggression.

Our relations with the other powers of the world are important; but still more important are our relations among ourselves. Such growth in wealth, in population, and in power as this nation has seen during the century and a quarter of its national life is inevitably accompanied by a like growth in the problems which are ever before every nation that rises to greatness. Power invariably means both responsibility and danger. Our forefathers faced certain perils which we have outgrown. We now face other perils, the very existence of which it was impossible that they should foresee. Modern life is both complex and intense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial development of the last half century are felt in every fiber of our social and political being.² Never before have men tried so vast and formidable an experiment as that of administering the affairs of a continent under the forms of a Democratic republic. The conditions which have told for our marvelous material well-being, which have developed to a very high degree our energy, self-reliance, and individual initiative, have also brought the care and anxiety inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in industrial centers. Upon the success of our experiment much depends, not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. If we fail, the cause of free self-government throughout the world will rock to its foundations, and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet unborn. There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright.

Yet, after all, though the problems are new, though the tasks set before us differ from the tasks set before our fathers who founded and preserved this Republic, the spirit in which these tasks must be undertaken and these problems faced, if our duty is to be well done, remains essentially unchanged. We know that self-government is difficult. We know that no people needs such high traits of character as that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright through the freely expressed will of the freemen who compose it. But we have faith that we shall not prove false to the memories of the men of the mighty past. They did their work, they left us the splendid heritage we now enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we shall be able to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our children and our children's children.³ To do so we must show, not merely in great crises, but in the everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical intelligence, of courage, of hardihood, and endurance, and above all the power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who founded this Republic in the days of Washington, which made great the men who preserved this Republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln.

Quotes to Note

1. "Toward all other nations..." Roosevelt's actions in the development of the Panama Canal did not support this statement. Roosevelt felt that Colombia wanted too much money for the rights to construct a canal at the isthmus of Panama—a province of the country. To gain the rights, he had U.S. forces support a revolution among the people of Panama against Colombia. He then negotiated the rights to the canal from the newly independent country.
2. "the tremendous changes wrought..." Roosevelt was active in assuring that the government oversaw big businesses to prevent their abuse of power. The Pure Food and Drug Act was passed and the Department of Commerce was established during his terms.
3. "we shall be able to leave this heritage..." Roosevelt makes what is possibly the first statement in an inaugural address about the importance of preserving the environment.