Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919) was an American statesman, writer and naturalist who served as the 26th President of the United States from 1901 to 1909. [1] He expanded the powers of the presidency, pressed antitrust actions against large corporations, and set aside an unprecedented amount of land for national forests, parks and monuments. [2] He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. [3]
Early life and education
Roosevelt was born on 27 October 1858 in New York City into a wealthy Dutch-descended family. A sickly, asthmatic child, he was educated largely at home and at Friends Seminary before entering Harvard College, where he studied natural history and began writing a history of the naval war of 1812. He went on to Columbia Law School but left before completing his degree to enter politics. [1]
Elected to the New York State Assembly in 1881, he built an early reputation as a reformer. After the deaths of his wife and mother on the same day in 1884 he withdrew to the Dakota Territory, where he worked as a rancher and deepened the interest in wilderness and conservation that shaped his later policy. [2]
Rise to national office
Roosevelt returned to public life as a United States Civil Service commissioner, then as president of the New York City Police Board, and in 1897 as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. When the Spanish-American War began in 1898 he resigned to help raise a volunteer cavalry regiment, the Rough Riders, and led it in the fighting in Cuba. The resulting fame carried him to the governorship of New York and then, in 1900, to the vice presidency. [1]
The assassination of President William McKinley in September 1901 made Roosevelt president at the age of forty-two, the youngest person to hold the office. He was elected in his own right in 1904.
Presidency
Roosevelt described his domestic programme as the Square Deal, promising fair treatment for workers, consumers and business alike. His administration revived the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up railroad and industrial combinations, intervened in the 1902 anthracite coal strike on terms acceptable to the miners, and secured the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. [2]
Conservation was central to his record. Using executive authority and the Antiquities Act, he established national forests, bird reservations, national monuments and national parks covering roughly 230 million acres of public land, and created the United States Forest Service. [2]
In foreign affairs he pursued an assertive policy, supporting Panamanian independence from Colombia to secure the route for the Panama Canal, issuing the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine asserting a United States policing role in the Americas. His mediation of the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, brought him the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. [3]
Later years
Roosevelt declined to seek another term in 1908. Dissatisfied with his successor William Howard Taft, he ran again in 1912 as the candidate of the Progressive ("Bull Moose") Party, splitting the Republican vote and finishing second to Woodrow Wilson. He survived an assassination attempt during that campaign. [1]
He died at Sagamore Hill, his home on Long Island, on 6 January 1919. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor in 2001 for his actions in Cuba. [1]
Legacy
Roosevelt is credited with transforming the presidency into an active instrument of national policy and with placing conservation permanently on the American political agenda. [4] His likeness is one of the four carved at Mount Rushmore, and historians have also examined the imperial and racial assumptions that ran through his foreign policy.
