Theodore Roosevelt

About this figure

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) was the twenty-sixth president of the United States and one of the most energetic and multifaceted public figures of his era, whose interests ranged across politics, natural history, military affairs, and exploration. Born into a wealthy New York family and afflicted with severe childhood asthma, he built himself into a model of vigorous physical activity through boxing, hiking, and ranching, an ethic he later termed "the strenuous life" and held up as both a personal and a national ideal. He entered New York state politics in his early twenties, served as a U.S. Civil Service Commissioner and as New York City's police commissioner, and became assistant secretary of the Navy under President McKinley, a post he resigned in 1898 to help organize and lead a volunteer cavalry regiment, the "Rough Riders," in the Spanish-American War, gaining fame for a charge up Kettle Hill in Cuba.

Elected governor of New York later that year, Roosevelt was placed on the 1900 Republican ticket as vice president largely to sideline him within his own party, and became president after McKinley's assassination in 1901 at the age of forty-two, still the youngest person to hold the office. As president, he pursued antitrust action against major industrial trusts, intervened in a major coal strike on behalf of a negotiated settlement, and set aside roughly 230 million acres of public land for national forests, parks, and monuments, establishing him as one of the most consequential conservationists in the nation's history. He negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906, and oversaw construction of the Panama Canal, later remarking that he "took the isthmus" through a mix of diplomacy and force.

After leaving office in 1909, Roosevelt undertook a major scientific expedition to Africa collecting specimens for the Smithsonian, and in 1913–1914 co-led a dangerous, near-fatal expedition into the Brazilian Amazon to chart an unmapped tributary later renamed the Rio Roosevelt, an ordeal recounted in Through the Brazilian Wilderness. Frustrated with his chosen successor William Howard Taft, he ran for president again in 1912 on the ticket of his own Progressive, or "Bull Moose," Party, splitting the Republican vote and losing to Woodrow Wilson, though he survived an assassination attempt during the campaign, delivering a scheduled speech with a bullet still lodged in his chest. He continued writing prolifically until his death in 1919, on subjects including hunting, his own life in An Autobiography, and, during the First World War, wartime editorials sharply critical of Wilson's policies.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.