About Theodore Roosevelt (Biography) Biographical Sketch In a sense Theodore Roosevelt never really grew up. He was one of the most remarkable men of American history, and a great President, but he somehow managed to retain his boyish enthusiasm through his whole life. His wife Edith called him her seventh child! Roosevelt loved adventure as much as he loved power. He was a big game hunter who traveled all over the world in search of trophies. Late in his life he explored one of the last uncharted rivers in South America. That almost cost him his life. He loved to ride horses—in polo matches, fox hunting, steeple chasing, and on the open plains of the American West. Even as President, Roosevelt spent time every day playing hard with his children in the White House. Sometimes the wrestling matches or pillow fights were so strenuous that the President had to change his clothes before joining his important guests for dinner. Roosevelt was born on October 27, 1858 in New York City. He had one brother and two sisters: Elliott, Anna (known as Bamie), and Corinne. His father Theodore Roosevelt, sr., was a stern but generous and loving man who was independently wealthy. He was one of New York City’s leading philanthropists. Roosevelt later said his father was the greatest man he ever knew and the only man he ever feared. His mother Mittie was a florid southerner who sided with the South in the Civil War. She loved adventure stories and the romance of life. Theodore tried all of his life to be worthy of his father’s respect, and he never lost his mother’s love of a good story. As a child Roosevelt suffered from crippling asthma. There were times when he could barely breathe. He had terrible eyesight, which was not discovered by his family until relatively late in his childhood. He could not attend schools, even private ones, with his brothers and sisters. He was privately tutored. His illnesses were so severe that they disrupted Roosevelt family life. Finally, after a very difficult summer, his father challenged him to overcome his problems. Roosevelt was eleven years old. “You have the mind but not the body,” his father said. “You must make your body.” To this Theodore replied, “I will, papa. I will make my body.” And that’s just what he did. Theodore undertook a strenuous exercise program with barbells and boxing gloves, hikes and campouts, on foot and horseback, until he began to get the best of the severe asthma. Roosevelt attended Harvard University. He was a gifted if somewhat rambunctious student. He interrupted classroom lectures so often with questions and insights that finally one of his professors burst out, “See here, Roosevelt, I am the one teaching this course.” At first he intended to become a naturalist—a scientist with a special focus on wild animals and plants. In the end, he took a more general degree, graduating magna cum laude (with high honors) in 1880. That same year he married a beautiful young woman named Alice Hathaway Lee of Boston. Roosevelt was head over heels in love with her. He campaigned for her heart, and even threatened to fight a duel with rivals for her affection. Their marriage was a very short one. Alice gave birth to her first child on February 12, 1884. Two days later she died from complications from her pregnancy. She died of Bright’s Disease. The child, also named Alice, lived (until 1980). But on the same day his wife died, Roosevelt’s mother Mittie died (at 49) in the same house. It was the darkest day of Roosevelt’s life. “The light has gone out of my life,” he wrote. Eventually Roosevelt remarried. His second wife Edith Carow had been his childhood sweetheart. They fell in love sometime in 1885 and were married on December 2, 1886 in London, England. Edith was a strong, intelligent, resourceful woman, equal to Theodore in mind and a better judge of character. Being the wife of so energetic and impulsive a man could not have been easy. Once she said to him, “You are fortunate. You only have to be married to me, but I have to be married to YOU.” This was said in affection, but there is no doubt that Roosevelt was a source of considerable chaos in Edith’s life. Together they had five children: Theodore, jr. (1887), Kermit (1889), Ethel (1891), Archibald (1894), and Quentin (1897). Alice lived with them too, including in the White House, and proved to be a very rebellious and colorful child. In 1883 Roosevelt ventured west to the Dakota badlands to hunt a buffalo. After a very difficult hunt in the remotest region of the stark countryside near the Montana border, he got his buffalo. Meanwhile he fell in love with the badlands and impulsively sank a fair amount of his inheritance into first one, and then a second ranch in what is now western North Dakota. He thought he was recreating in his own life the adventures of such American heroes as Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and George Rogers Clark. He loved riding the Dakota plains in a buckskin shirt at breakneck speed. Still grieving from the death of his wife and mother, he said, “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.” He killed all sorts of big game during his western years, including a grizzly bear, and he had wild western adventures, such as punching out an abusive gunslinger in a bar, or chasing down the three thieves who stole his boat and marching them overland, under almost impossible spring blizzard conditions, to the nearest sheriff. He had encounters with American Indians that he regarded as potentially hostile. He took long lonely rides in the broken country along the Little Missouri River Valley. He participated in roundups and brandings and he tried unsuccessfully to join a group of vigilantes who were pursuing horse thieves. He also wrote parts of several books during his badlands years. Later, visiting Medora, North Dakota, on the campaign trail in 1901, he said, “It was here that the romance of my life began.” Roosevelt regarded his adventure in the Dakota badlands as the formative moment of his life. He later said that he would never have become the President of the United States were it not for these experiences. We may doubt his claim, but he didn’t. All of this is interesting, and important, to an understanding of Roosevelt, but it was not his main work in life. He defined himself principally as a public, not a private, man. When the Spanish-American war broke out in April 1898, he resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and cobbled together what he called a “harum scarum group of Rough Riders” and led that voluntary cavalry brigade in the Cuban campaign that culminated on July 1, 1898, in the famous assault on Kettle and San Juan Hills overlooking Santiago. Roosevelt was dashing, resourceful, grimly happy, and reckless. He was lucky not to be killed by Spanish sniper fire. A newspaper reporter said, alone on horseback, Roosevelt was the most conspicuous target in the battle. After the successful assault on what he called “my crowded hour,” and “the great day of my life,” Roosevelt became an instant national hero. This enabled him to advance rapidly in the political arena. He was soon nominated as a reform Governor of New York, but everyone knew that his eye was now on the Presidency. All of his life Roosevelt was a politician and a reformer. The list of offices he held is long and distinguished. He served three terms as a New York State assemblyman. He was a U.S. Civil Service Commissioner for six years. He was a police commissioner of New York City. He was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the first McKinley administration. He was the Governor of New York. Then he became the Vice President of the United States in McKinley’s second administration. When President McKinley was assassinated in September 1901, just months into his second term, Vice President Roosevelt became the 26th President of the United States, and the youngest too. He was just 42 years old when he was inaugurated in an emergency ceremony at the home of a private friend in Buffalo, New York, the city where McKinley had died. Roosevelt regarded himself as an “accidental President,” because he had not actually been elected to the office. So he campaigned with all of his heart in 1904, although without making public appearances, and he was thrilled to be elected on November 8, 1904, by the largest plurality of votes in American history. Roosevelt’s Presidency helped to define America’s role in the world in the 20th century. He is sometimes called a “trust buster” for his work to break up huge holding corporations that tended to monopolize business in key American industries. But he was in fact a rather cautious reformer. He pushed for, and signed into law, landmark American legislation: the creation of the Commerce Department; the Newlands Reclamation Act, which permitted the federal government to finance public water storage and irrigation projects in the American West; the Pure Food and Drug Act, which permitted the federal government to regulate the nation’s industrially produced food supply; the National Monuments and Antiquities Act, which enabled President Roosevelt to set aside and protect places of great natural or cultural importance in the American West, like Devil’s Tower and the Grand Canyon. Roosevelt believed that in an age of urban, industrial capitalism, it was essential that the government of the United States involve itself in protecting natural resources and the least powerful people of America so that everyone in the country got what he called a “square deal.” He believed that if the government did not regulate and reform the business community, the country would become so unfair to average Americans that there might be a socialist revolution here, as there was in Russia in 1905 (and again in 1917). Roosevelt also played the key role in America’s creation of the Panama Canal. He later said, “I took Panama. . . I built the canal,” but in fact he just took maximum advantage of events that were unfolding before him. Probably there would have been a Panama Canal even if he had never been President, but it might not have come so soon. He was so proud of his achievement—the greatest American event after the Louisiana Purchase and the Annexation of Texas, he said—that he became the first President to leave the United States while in office in order to see the canal’s progress in Panama. All of his adult life, Roosevelt had been an advocate of a big American military, particularly a big navy. During his Presidency, America’s navy grew from being the fifth largest in the world to the second largest, and it was on its way to being grander even that that of Great Britain. At the end of his tenure, without consulting with Congress, Roosevelt dispatched the entire U.S. Navy on a round-the-world cruise. He called it the Great White Fleet. It was a triumph of naval logistics (keeping coal and other necessary provisions in all of those boats across the entire planet) and of diplomacy, but it was also America’s announcement that it had now become one of the great powers in the world arena. Congressional critics howled and said Roosevelt had no authority to order the fleet on so expensive and risky a circumnavigation. Roosevelt absorbed the criticism and gloried in his achievement. He was on hand in Hampton Roads in the lower Chesapeake in February 1909, to welcome the fleet home, just days before he left the Presidency. Roosevelt might have been elected to a third term in 1908. There was then no constitutional prohibition on third terms. But he kept a two-term-only pledge he had made on election night 1904 and retired voluntarily from the Presidency in March, 1909. His successor was a friend and trusted lieutenant, William Howard Taft. Roosevelt knew that Taft would have a hard time establishing his own style in the shadow of so vital and popular a President as he had been. So to give him a chance, Roosevelt determined to go on a yearlong safari in Africa with his son Kermit immediately after Taft’s inauguration. They had a bully time, and they killed so many large animals that even Roosevelt was a little sheepish. When he returned to the United States in 1910, Roosevelt realized that Taft had proved to be a weak successor and that he was jeopardizing many of the reforms that Roosevelt had spent decades working towards. Fueled by admiring friends and reformers, and his own giant ambition and ego, Roosevelt let himself be talked into challenging Taft for the Republican nomination in 1912. It was one of the great mistakes of his life. When Taft won the nomination after all, Roosevelt bolted the Republican Party, which he accused of corruption and desertion of its core principles, and helped to form the Progressive or Bull Moose Party. Taft lost the general election, thanks to Roosevelt, but Roosevelt did not win, though he received the largest third party vote in American history. The Republican schism insured that Woodrow Wilson (the Democrat) won the Presidency in 1912. Roosevelt was denounced as a self-serving and reckless man, who cared more about himself than about the future of the Republican Party. To nurse his wounds, he decided to go on a lecture tour of South America. While he was there, in late 1913, he was persuaded to join an exploration party whose mission was to chart the River of Doubt, a newly discovered tributary of a tributary of the Amazon River. “It’s my last chance to be a boy!” Roosevelt said, and off he went, portly, unfit, and too old for so difficult an undertaking. His son Kermit went along. The exploration party had one crisis after another. A man drowned. A pet dog was shot full of arrows by Amazonian Indians. There was a mutiny. Everyone got sick. Their boats shattered in the rapids and falls, and their food supply disappeared. Eventually Roosevelt believed he was dying of fever and an infection in his leg caused by a boat accident. He asked Colonel Rhondon, the expedition leader, and his son Kermit to leave him to die beside the river. He could only slow them down, he said, and if they waited for him they might all perish in the wilderness. Kermit positively refused to abandon his father, so somehow Roosevelt found the energy to get himself out of the jungle. In his last years Roosevelt wrote books on many subjects, and public newspaper columns that badgered President Woodrow Wilson and abused him for not preparing the country for what Roosevelt regarded as its inevitable entry into World War I. When the United States finally entered the war, Roosevelt asked President Wilson to send him with a regiment of Rough Riders to the front in France. Probably Roosevelt wanted to die in battle exhibiting the same indomitable character he had begun to create back when he was eleven years old. President Wilson refused to indulge his old rival. He rightly said that war was now a professional undertaking. Roosevelt was too old and infirm for such a posting. And his celebrity might bring danger to the troops who served with him. Roosevelt was bitterly disappointed. Still, all four of his sons fought in the Great War. Quentin, the youngest and Roosevelt’s favorite, was shot down in an aerial dogfight in July 1918. He was one of the first American military aviators. Roosevelt took the news stoically, but his spirit was shattered, and he died in bed just a few months later, on January 6, 1919. Roosevelt was a larger-than-life figure in American history. It would be hard to think of any American historical figure who lived more energetically than he did, sought more risks than he did, wrote more, read more, moved more rapidly or with more decisiveness, than he did. He rightly belongs on Mount Rushmore because it would be impossible to capture his life spirit without employing a mountain as a canvas. When he left the Presidency in 1909, Roosevelt said, “I don’t think any President ever enjoyed himself more than I did.” To which he added, “I don’t think that any family has ever enjoyed the White House more than we have.” Probably no person ever enjoyed an American life or made more of sixty hectic years than Theodore Roosevelt, who is buried in the family plot at Oyster Bay, on Long Island, in New York State. Clay Jenkinson |