Murdering Mckinley: Making of Theodore Roosevelt\'s America

Murdering McKinley: the Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America

On September 6, 1901, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was on vacation, on a camping trip in the Adirondacks in New York State. News that President McKinley had been shot in Buffalo reached the vice president, and he "rushed to Buffalo and took the oath of office there on September 14 after McKinley died," according to an article in USA Today.

An article in History Today claims that McKinley was "killed as much by botched surgery as by the bullet, which the surgeons said they were unable to locate in the president's abdomen because he was so fat."

Meanwhile, no matter how McKinley really died, he did pass on, and he passed on to Roosevelt the presidency, an active presidency which those who knew "Teddy" Roosevelt were not at all surprised to witness as it unfolded. According to an article in Time magazine, "Roosevelt not only remade America," but in fact "he charmed the pants off everybody while he did it."

Writer Richard Lacayo explains that after McKinley died, Roosevelt found himself faced with "the explosion of industrial power" and "the ineluctable impulse to expand." And he stared down such questions as, "How much influence should the government have over the economy?" And "How much power should the U.S. exert in the wider world?" Another question he approached with his typical fierce energetic style, though it's less well-known, is, according to Lacayo, "What should we do to protect the environment?"

When Roosevelt moved into the White House as the top man in the executive branch, the U.S. was emerging as a powerful economic force in the world, Lacayo writes; in fact, the U.S. was "first in the world in its output of timber, steel, coal, iron"; and since 1860 the American population had "doubled" and exports had "tripled." Yet, there were serious problems Roosevelt was forced to address, namely "poverty, child labor," and "dreadful factory conditions." And when Roosevelt decided to take action - unlike the lumbering, indecisive McKinley - he rolled up his sleeves and made things happen. For example, Lacayo writes that Roosevelt helped "break up the monopolies"; he passed the "Pure Food and Drug Act"; he rammed "meat-inspection and industrial-safety" legislation through Congress; and "as President, he would make Americans understand that their new global prominence was a long-term proposition."

And the Roosevelt legacy that many outdoors-minded Americans appreciate the most today is the fact that he created "150 national forests," 51 national wildlife refuges, and "five national parks"; and in fact he "became the first President to make environmentalism a political issue," Lacayo explained.

One could argue that today "Global Warming" - clearly an environmental issue - has been made into a "political issue" by the current executive branch and by those who prefer no restrictions on the release of greenhouse gases and who doubt the kind of dire consequences that former vice president Al Gore depicts in his film, "An Inconvenient Truth." However, what Roosevelt did was listen to powerful, environmentally-involved naturalists like John Muir, "who convinced Teddy that the Federal Government would be a better protector of parkland than the states." He also listened when his U.S. Forest Service chief, Gifford Pinchot, advised the president that "strict controls over commercial use of woodlands" was the best policy, Lacayo continues.

After his presidency was over, he spoke to a group in Kansas, explaining that he felt it was "the duty" of his generation to wisely preserve the nation's national resources, Lacayo writes. "But I do not recognize the right to waste them," Roosevelt added, "Or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us."

And so, right in these few accomplishments that describe Roosevelt's term in office, one can see that the assassination of President McKinley - tragic though it was on one level - led to a far more visionary, more activist presidency in Theodore Roosevelt.

Why did Roosevelt become so active in protecting America's natural resources? Another Time magazine article, "The Self-Made Man," by Kathleen Dalton, explains that Roosevelt was "sickly" and part of it was due to his asthma. "The sickly boy seemed unlikely to survive into manhood or amount to much if he did," Dalton writes. But his father, called "Thee," and his mother, Martha, "directed him to embrace a life of vigorous exercise." Thee told Teddy to "make your own body" and to "turn his back on his 'nervous and timid' childhood and embrace manhood," Dalton continues.

As a result, Roosevelt became active, "a fierce champion of what he called the 'strenuous life,' a self-imposed struggle to live with vigor and determination," Dalton asserts. Roosevelt became a boxer, he lifted weights and climbed mountains (he ascended the Matterhorn at the age of 22). His famous charge up Kettle Hill (Battle of San Juan Heights, Rough Riders) during the Spanish-American War set him apart as an athletically gifted soldier with courage and heart.

And along with his workouts and activism, he "began to collect animal specimens, including fireflies and squirrels"; he filled notebooks with "drawings and life histories of animals and insects"; he read Darwin and Huxley; and, Dalton continues, he loved camping and became an "experienced outdoorsman."

When the "strain of the job" of president "weighed on him," Dalton explained, "he stepped outside to watch the spring birds migrating"; he "identified the blackpoll warblers perched in the elms outside the Oval Office," and kept notes on his various bird sightings. In the spring of 1903, the president went West "to dramatize his commitment to preserving wild places," and he went birding in Yellowstone Park, rode mules into Yosemite with John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club), and slept "under the stars" with Muir on a night when it snowed; the two awoke under a "blanket of snow," Dalton continued.

On matters of foreign policy, Roosevelt was both aggressively expansionistic and cautiously temperate, depending on the situation. He was given to occasional bombast; according to an article in Naval History by James R. Homes, Roosevelt once told a Naval War College audience that "No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war." Roosevelt's geopolitical views "aligned to a great extent" with Read Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, Homes explains, and Mahan believed that in order to "wrest away" America's "rightful share of foreign commerce," the U.S. would need "a battle fleet able to 'fight, with reasonable chances of success, the largest force likely to be brought against it'."