Theodore Roosevelt, born on October 27, 1858, was a man of action. Whether he was engaged in politics or on safari, few, if any, American presidents were men of such vigor and energy. Roosevelt was the proverbial unstoppable force.
Born in New York City into a wealthy family, young Theodore Roosevelt did not show the signs of growing into the man he would become; he was small and in poor health, and his terrible vision compelled him to wear glasses from an early age. However, as he grew, he became ambitious and athletic, eventually attending Harvard and graduating in 1880. Though his early forays in politics were not always successful—he lost the election for mayor of New York in 1886—his willingness to engage in a fight kept him returning to the political arena.
He ascended to the White House through the political ranks, beginning with his early years as a New York state legislator. He would serve as assistant secretary of the navy, governor of New York, and vice president of the United States before becoming president after President William McKinley was murdered in Buffalo, New York, in September 1901.
Roosevelt’s famous charge in 1898 up San Juan Hill, Puerto Rico, ranks as one of his most dramatic accomplishments. Roosevelt describes the battle in his autobiography:
By the time I had reached the lines of the regulars of the first brigade I had come to the conclusion that it was silly to stay in the valley firing at the hills, because that was really where we were most exposed, and that the thing to do was to try to rush the intrenchments [sic]. Where I struck the regulars there was no one of superior rank to mine, and after asking why they did not charge, and being answered that they had no orders, I said I would give the order. There was naturally a little reluctance shown by the elderly officer in command to accept my order, so I said, "Then let my men through, sir," and I marched through, followed by my grinning men. The younger officers and the enlisted men of the regulars jumped up and joined us. I waved my hat, and we went up the hill with a rush. Having taken it, we looked across at the Spaniards in the trenches under the San Juan blockhouse to our left, which Hawkins brigade was assaulting. I ordered our men to open fire on the Spaniards in the trenches.
Roosevelt’s presidency was marked by his trust-busting, certainly, but also by significant reforms in the meat- and food-processing industries. Roosevelt is credited for having coined the term “muckraking” to describe the journalism of writers like Upton Sinclair who wrote of corruption in industry and politics.
After reading The Jungle, Roosevelt used his administration to sponsor legislation that forced comprehensive change in the packaging industry. Also, the Pure Food Act was passed in 1906, the result of Roosevelt’s having absorbed lessons like Sinclair’s dramatic and visceral discussion of the slaughterhouses and packing plants:
There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausages; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was mouldy and white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage.
Roosevelt aggressively pursued reform in this realm, as he believed that meat supplied to the soldiers in the Spanish-American War was of poor quality and the product of corrupted processing. However, as Sinclair biographer Leon Harris observes, Roosevelt did not credit Sinclair’s writing as being the impetus for change, noting, “He thought of Sinclair and the other muckrakers . . . as fanatics whose excessive demands did more harm than good, and who would have done little good or no good at all without his moderating role as Solomon.”
Theodore Roosevelt was the first American president to receive a Nobel Prize for peace (three other presidents—Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama—have also received the peace prize). Roosevelt also greatly expanded the White House, pushing the fabled West Wing into place. Passionate about conservation, Roosevelt designated millions of acres as the national park lands, vastly increasing the scope of the National Park Service. Having attained the highest office in the land at the age of forty-two (he would turn forty-three within six weeks of his inauguration), Roosevelt found himself with plenty of time for big-game hunting and for post-presidential politics upon his retirement. Discouraged with the efforts of his successor, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt ran for president again in 1912.
Although he lost the election, the 1912 campaign trail yielded a further notch in Roosevelt’s rawhide-like reputation. In October of that election year, Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a lunatic, John Shrank. Shrank’s bullet entered the former president’s lung, but it could not penetrate Roosevelt’s spirit; he finished his speech—and the campaign. Upon losing the election, he went hunting in South America, where he finished off a few animals before almost getting finished himself by injury and fever. He survived this episode, however, as he had the others.
Theodore Roosevelt died in his home at Oyster Bay, New York, in January 1919.
—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery
Theodore Roosevelt / Adrian Lamb, copy after Philip Alexius de László / Oil on canvas, 1967 copy after 1908 original / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Theodore Roosevelt / Pach Brothers Studio / Platinum print, 1898 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Joanna Sturm
Cited:
Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1913).
Upton Beall Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Doubleday, 1906)
Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1975).
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