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| (October 27, 1958 – January 6, 1919) |
Roosevelt was the second of four children born into a
long-established, socially prominent family of Dutch and English ancestry; his
mother, Martha Bulloch of Georgia, came from a wealthy, slave-owning plantation
family. In frail health as a boy, Roosevelt was educated by private tutors.
From boyhood, he displayed intense, wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. He
graduated from Harvard College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, in
1880. He then studied briefly at Columbia Law School but soon turned to writing
and politics as a career. In 1880 he married Alice Hathaway Lee, by whom he had
one daughter, Alice. After his first wife's death, in 1886 he married Edith
Kermit Carow (Edith Roosevelt), with whom he lived for the rest of his life at
Sagamore Hill, an estate near Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York. They had five
children: Theodore, Jr., Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin.
As a child, Roosevelt had suffered from severe asthma, and weak eyesight plagued him throughout his life. By dint of a program of physical exertion, he developed a strong physique and a lifelong love of vigorous activity. He adopted “the strenuous life,” as he entitled his 1901 book, as his ideal, both as an outdoorsman and as a politician.
Elected as a Republican to the New
York State Assembly at 23, Roosevelt quickly made a name for himself as a foe
of corrupt machine politics. In 1884, overcome by grief by the deaths of both
his mother and his wife on the same day, he left politics to spend two years on
his cattle ranch in the badlands of the Dakota Territory, where he became
increasingly concerned about environmental damage to the West and its wildlife.
Nonetheless, he did participate as a delegate to the Republican National
Convention in 1884. His attempt to reenter public life in 1886 was
unsuccessful; he was defeated in a bid to become mayor of New York City.
Roosevelt remained active in politics and again battled corruption as a member
of the U.S. Civil Service Commission (1889–95) and as president of the New York
City Board of Police Commissioners. Appointed assistant secretary of the navy
by President William McKinley, he vociferously
championed a bigger navy and agitated for war with Spain. When war was declared
in 1898, he organized the 1st Volunteer Cavalry, known as the Rough Riders, who were sent to fight in Cuba. Roosevelt
was a brave and well-publicized military leader. The charge of the Rough Riders
(on foot) up Kettle Hill during the Battle of Santiago made
him the biggest national hero to come out of the Spanish-American
War.
On his return, the Republican bosses
in New York tapped Roosevelt to run for governor, despite their doubts about
his political loyalty. Elected in 1898, he became an energetic reformer,
removing corrupt officials and enacting legislation to regulate corporations
and the civil service. His actions irked the party's bosses so much that they
conspired to get rid of him by drafting him for the Republican vice
presidential nomination in 1900, assuming that his would be a largely
ceremonial role.
Elected with McKinley, Roosevelt chafed at his powerless
office until September 14, 1901, when McKinley died after being shot by an
assassin and he became president. Six weeks short of his 43rd birthday,
Roosevelt was the youngest person ever to enter the presidency. Although he
promised continuity with McKinley's policies, he transformed the public image
of the office at once. He renamed the executive mansion the White House and
threw open its doors to entertain cowboys, prizefighters, explorers, writers, and
artists. His refusal to shoot a bear cub on a 1902 hunting trip inspired a toy
maker to name a stuffed bear after him, and the teddy bear
fad soon swept the nation….
From what he called the presidency's “bully pulpit,”
Roosevelt gave speeches aimed at raising public consciousness about the
nation's role in world politics, the need to control the trusts that dominated
the economy, the regulation of railroads, and the impact of political
corruption. He appointed young, college-educated men to administrative
positions…
Also in 1902 Roosevelt intervened in the anthracite coal
strike when it threatened to cut off heating fuel for homes, schools, and
hospitals. The president publicly asked representatives of capital and labour to meet in the White House and
accept his mediation. He also talked about calling in the army to run the
mines, and he got Wall Street investment houses to threaten to withhold credit
to the coal companies and dump their stocks. The combination of tactics worked
to end the strike and gain a modest pay hike for the miners. This was the first
time that a president had publicly intervened in a labour dispute at least
implicitly on the side of workers. Roosevelt characterized his actions as striving
toward a “Square Deal” between capital and labour, and those words became his
campaign slogan in the 1904 election.
Once he won that election—overwhelmingly defeating the
Democratic contender Alton B. Parker by 336 to 140 electoral votes—Roosevelt
put teeth into his Square Deal programs… Also in 1906, Roosevelt pressed
Congress to pass the Pure Food
and Drug and Meat
Inspection acts, which created agencies to assure
protection to consumers...
Roosevelt's boldest actions came in the area of natural
resources. At his urging, Congress created the Forest
Service (1905) to manage government-owned forest reserves, and he appointed
a fellow conservationist, Gifford Pinchot, to head the
agency. Simultaneously, Roosevelt exercised existing presidential authority to
designate public lands as national forests in order to make them off-limits to
commercial exploitation of lumber, minerals, and waterpower. Roosevelt set
aside almost five times as much land as all of his predecessors combined, 194
million acres (78.5 million hectares)…
In commemoration of Roosevelt's dedication to conservation, Theodore
Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota and Theodore
Roosevelt Island in Washington, D.C., a 91-acre (37-hectare) wooded island
in the Potomac River, were named in his honour…
Several times during Roosevelt's first years in office,
European powers threatened to intervene in Latin
America, ostensibly to collect debts owed them by weak governments there. To
meet such threats, he framed a policy statement in 1904 that became known as
the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe
Doctrine. It stated that the United
States would not only bar outside intervention in Latin American affairs but
would also police the area and guarantee that countries there met their
international obligations. In 1905, without congressional approval, Roosevelt
forced the Dominican Republic to install an American
“economic advisor,” who was in reality the country's financial director.
Quoting an African proverb, Roosevelt claimed that the right
way to conduct foreign policy was to “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Roosevelt resorted to big-stick
diplomacy most conspicuously in 1903, when he helped Panama to secede from Colombia and gave the United States a Canal Zone.
Construction began at once on the Panama Canal, which
Roosevelt visited in 1906, the first president to leave the country while in office.
He considered the construction of the canal, a symbol of the triumph of
American determination and technological know-how, his greatest accomplishment
as president… Other examples of wielding the big stick came in 1906 when
Roosevelt occupied and set up a military protectorate in Cuba and when he put
pressure on Canada in a boundary dispute in Alaska.
Roosevelt showed the soft-spoken, sophisticated side of his
diplomacy in dealing with major powers outside the Western Hemisphere. In Asia
he was alarmed by Russian expansionism and by rising Japanese power. In 1904–05
he worked to end the Russo-Japanese War by bringing
both nations to the Portsmouth Peace Conference and
mediating between them. More than just to bring peace, Roosevelt wanted to
construct a balance of power in Asia that might uphold U.S. interests. In 1907
he defused a diplomatic quarrel caused by anti-Japanese sentiment in California
by arranging the so-called Gentlemen's Agreement, which
restricted Japanese immigration. In another informal executive agreement, he
traded Japan's acceptance of the American position in the Philippines
for recognition by the United States of the Japanese conquest of Korea and
expansionism in China.
(Adapted from Britannica Encyclopedia)
(Adapted from Britannica Encyclopedia)
