Theodore Roosevelt: life and presidency

Theodore Roosevelt: An American for a New Age

Few Americans have so profoundly influenced the modern era as Theodore Roosevelt. Statesman and cultural crusader, the twenty-sixth president of the United States brought issues of race, conservation, and American power to the forefront of public discussion. Roosevelt was both a product of his times and a sign of things to come. Raised in New York City, he developed an affinity for the American West and all that it symbolized. Product of the era of the Civil War, he advanced upon the issues that came out of the conflict and tried to lead the country forward. Roosevelt's views on race and social relations would reflect reformist attitudes. He believed strongly in the idea of projecting American power and influence across the globe. America, he thought, possessed unique qualities that could serve as lessons to a wider world. He was a peacemaker and a fighter, distinguishing himself in diplomacy and war. Above all, Theodore Roosevelt was born of the tragedies and triumphs that were the story of his own personal life and experiences. A self-made man he rose above the strictures of his upbringing and class to forge a new identity. And it was this identity that the force of his indomitable personality attempted to bring to the country and the world.

The Twenty-sixth President was born in New York City on October 27, 1858. At odds with later legend, the young Roosevelt grew up a child of privilege in the largest city in the United States. Roosevelt's experience of the outdoors and the Wild West were either occasional or but on the level of fantasy. The young "Teedie" - or so he liked to be called - requested a gymnasium from his financier father, and so begin a lifelong interest in athletics.

At the age of eleven, he traveled to Europe for the Grand Tour - the true mark of cultural education for a gentleman.

Roosevelt's early education steeped him in the traditions of Western Civilization. He was brought up to see the world as his exalted social rank demanded that he see it. In the process he was given his first taste of other peoples and cultures. Less than three years later, he went abroad again, this time visiting the monuments of Ancient Egypt. As a result of the experience, it was with the intention of becoming a leading naturalist that he entered Harvard in 1876.

Harvard of the late 1870s was a school well-attuned to Theodore's temperament. Recent reforms by university President Eliot had introduced the idea of a largely elective curriculum. Roosevelt studied math, physics, and chemistry along with Latin, Greek, and German.

The selection of courses reflected the future president's interest in both the natural, scientific world and the realm of human events and interactions. Roosevelt's focus on language, in particular, showed his interest in communication and reaching out to others. As well, the particular languages studied could be seen as an attempt to understand the human forces that shaped his world. Greece and Rome were seen at the time as the primary sources of Western civilization, Greece a kind of empire of the mind, while Rome was, of course, the great political empire and source of laws. Germany, in Roosevelt's time at Harvard, had just come into being as single, unified state. Its rapid growth and industrialization appeared to foreshadow an enormous role in world affairs. The German predilection for science and order suggested, too, a new "modern" outlook that would have appealed to Roosevelt. Theodore's father died while he was at Harvard, and he also fell in love with Alice Lee, his future wife. The two experiences further completed his progress to adulthood, each contributing to the making of an independent man. Roosevelt determined to preserve his father's legacy by going into public life.

His first forays into public life came in the form of his voluminous writings. Roosevelt liked to observe and to record his observations and musings. For this Harvard graduate, action was an essential completion of thought. Roosevelt's desire to know the world and to be at the source of its inspiration led him inevitably to America's Western frontier. Like so many of the time, he conceived of this half-wild half-settled land as the place where new ideas were born and where civilization could be improved and perfected. He started a cattle ranch in the Dakota Territory and wrote three books that focused on the natural history of the area. Others saw ranching as a business, but for Roosevelt it was a hands-on introduction to the conservationist ideas that were to become so important to him. Theodore saw in the frontier a confirmation of the theory of social Darwinism and this is reflected in his writings.

Roosevelt was among the major proponents of new movement that turned on its head traditional American notions of progress and relationship to the land. Men like Jefferson had seen farmers as the backbone of society, whereas Roosevelt looked to the wild landscape and the hunter as a source of real American virtue. Modern people were becoming too detached from the land and from their cultural origins. Mass immigration was transforming American society, "Through hunting, American men sought to invigorate themselves with frontier manliness, rekindle individualism and self-reliance, and demonstrate Anglo-Saxon might to immigrants and upstart foreign powers."

Roosevelt was formulating his own uniquely American worldview in response to both the foreign world he had seen in Europe and the Middle East, and that which he had encountered through his studies and at home in New York. The Frontier offered a way to find balance and move forward. One could impose new controls while rising to challenges.

Theodore Roosevelt was tested as few could have been when on February 14, 1884 his wife Alice and his mother died on the same day. Nature had conquered in the most ghastly way. Theodore left for the Badlands leaving his only daughter in the care of his sister. His sense of loss appeared to be reflected in the desolate landscape where, during the summer, "when the grassy prairies are left and the traveler enters a region of alkali desert and sagebrush, the look of the country becomes even more grim and forbidding. In places the alkali forms a white frost on the ground that glances in the sunlight like the surface of a frozen lake." It was as if the still young Roosevelt was pondering the strange turn his life had taken. Much as alkaline coatings might mimic frost, so too might the troubles of his current life be mirages that could be overcome through deep thought. For a time he gave up everything to nature. In the serve winter of 1886-1887 his cattle were wiped out. The disaster drove Roosevelt back to New York and to public life. The future president had learned that nature could not be defeated. It would take life according to its own rhythms. It operated in accord with its own laws. The experience turned Roosevelt even more to those areas that he could change while instilling within him a strong respect for the powers of the untamed.

Politics would be Theodore Roosevelt's new frontier and he would learn how to tame it. By 1895 he had become President of the New York City Board of Police Commissioners, a position in which he showed himself capable of making independent decisions. He challenged the machine but was ultimately unsuccessful in achieving lasting reform.

Still his demonstration of moral rectitude was an excellent recommendation for his next major post that of Assistant Secretary of the Navy during President McKinley's first term. Here he displayed many of the lessons he had learned before. Roosevelt earned the contempt of many career officers by trying to subject the military to stronger and more direct civilian control.

As everywhere else, Theodore saw himself as the great reconciler; the enlightened modern man who stood up for moral and progressive administration. As Assistant Secretary and later, as effective Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt laid the groundwork for policies he would pursue during his own presidency. He turned to the foreign "frontier" as a new area for American expansion. Isolationism was the way of the past. Roosevelt wanted to remake the established order in America's favor, a position that required going against the attitudes of the old Civil War generation of which McKinley was a part. Roosevelt struggled against what he held to be the "extreme conservatism of the President."

Clearly, anyone who blocked his plans for change would be seen as steadfastly refusing to move with the times. When war came with Spain, Theodore resigned his post as Assistant Secretary and formed the First United States Volunteer Cavalry Regiment.

Known as the Rough Riders, the regiment appeared to represent everything that Theodore Roosevelt had become and all he believed. For Roosevelt these men represented the epitome of manhood. Many had been frontier fighters in the Indian Wars, even Texas Rangers who, in his own words, "were already trained to obey and to take responsibility.... They were accustomed to living in the open, to enduring great fatigue and hardship, and to encountering all kinds of danger."

The war against Spain and for the liberation of Cuba was one that would prove the superiority of America and its ideals. The United States, too, could join the nations of Europe as a major world power, with interests in every corner of the globe. Roosevelt became a hero as a result of his exploits in the Spanish-American War - a modern day crusader. He used his standing to vault to the governorship of the State of New York. As Governor he now headed the wealthiest most populous state in the nation, enjoying a position of influence and power unparalleled in his career. New York was the great melting pot, the entry point for the vast waves of immigrants that were arriving from Europe. Immigration in this era had changed dramatically from the earliest days of the Republic. Not only the numbers were different, but the people who came were different. To many, the teeming masses were a European version of the benighted peoples of the distant areas of the globe. Interestingly, it was after his election as Governor of New York in 1898 that Rudyard Kipling sent a copy of his poem "The White Man's Burden" to Roosevelt. His aim was simple, to convince Theodore to throw his weight behind the full American occupation and colonization of the Philippines, Spain's former colony in the Far East, - "Now go in and put all the weight of your influence into hanging on permanently to the whole Philippines. America has gone and stuck a pickaxe into the foundations of a rotten house and she is morally bound to build the house over again from the foundations or have it fall about her ears."

Roosevelt was a kindred spirit. His views also appealed to the general public. Added to McKinley's ticket as candidate for Vice president, Roosevelt carried the day with his expansionist rhetoric and support of the gold standard against William Jennings Bryan. Theodore appeared to have the pulse of the nation as he pronounced, "Speak softly and carry a big stick."

Roosevelt's tenure as Vice President was brief. McKinley's assassination in September 1901 propelled him into the nation's highest office. At only 42, he was the youngest president then or now. Seizing the opportunity, he quickly set about implementing his own ideas. Success in the Spanish-American War had placed the United States in a position of unique power in the Western Hemisphere. Theodore quickly used this leverage to formulate the Roosevelt Corollary - a new interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine that gave America the right to interfere in nations that were, from the American perspective, not being properly governed. Specifically, the Roosevelt Corollary applied the idea that a nation's inability to manage its debt would be an excuse for U.S. intervention, this intervention to be conducted as means of preventing one or other of the European powers form fulfilling the same role and so expanding its influence in the Americas. Oliver Wendell Holmes saw Roosevelt's new doctrine as a legitimate response to renewed European interest in Latin America, and as a fulfillment of America's role of protecting its fellow republics and ensuring their territorial integrity.

In foreign affairs, the new president's "big stick" was turning out to be a way to keep other nations in line. Successive presidents would use similar ideas, again and again, to enforce supposed American values; values that, like Theodore Roosevelt, they increasingly presented as universal concepts.

Universal ideas about how nations should behave were easily translated into notions of what the citizens of those nations might want. In this area, Theodore began at home. His "Square Deal" couched in trademark plain, no-nonsense terms the belief that ordinary Americans deserved the protection of government. They deserved equal standing in their dealings with the industrial behemoths that were in the process of taking over the American economy and, with it, running the day-to-day lives of average men and women. The Square Deal applied initially to the anti-trust measures that were gaining strength at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Roosevelt insisted on equality between the corporations and the workers. In essence, he sought to preserve order by preventing either side from gaining too much power, while recognizing the fact that rampant industrial growth was adversely affecting basic American notions of personal liberty.

The Hepburn Act of 1906 represented the very first time in American history that a president had gone directly to the people in his attempt to achieve legislation.

Congress had opposed the legislation as it took control over shipping rates away from the powerful railroads and placed it under control of the Interstate Communications Commission. Railroads were a fact of modern life, and Roosevelt was endeavoring to make their management fairer to the population at large and to those other businesses that made use of their services. It was an important step in direct Federal Government involvement in U.S. business.

1904 saw Theodore's Roosevelt's election to a second time - another validation of his policies and attitudes as he had never actually been elected to the office. The second term saw the beginning of the actual construction of the Panama Canal. Roosevelt had negotiated the treaty in 1903, overseeing the creation of an independent Republic of Panama. The treaty was forced on Colombia. In keeping with his firmly-held belief that he was only bringing inevitable progress, he had denounced Colombia's leaders as the "cutthroats and blackmailers of Bogota," and that nation's president as "Pithecanthropoid" - the last an aptly scientific-sounding insult from a man who did so much to urge America onto the path of conservation.

Social Darwinism was evidently the prelude to direct management of nature. The Panama Canal gave the United States control of a strategic sea route that linked the Atlantic (through the Caribbean Sea) and Pacific Oceans. Roosevelt's second term saw a continued push to project American power and influence. The Great White Fleet made its world tour from December 1907 to February 1909. This awesome show of American naval strength was quintessential Theodore. The nation showed off its very real military prowess while allowing other lands to observe America's industrial and technological skill. The entire voyage was also, in effect, a grand global pageant. The sight of so many large and modern warships flying the American colors was a spectacle that attracted the attention of the common people of the world along with their leaders. Still, this show of American Power could also backfire. The Latin American public was annoyed by the incessant moralizing that accompanied the ships, and they saw Roosevelt as all too willingly brandishing his "Big Stick" over much of Central and South America.

With the "wild "regions of the world suitable impressed or even cowed, President Roosevelt could attend also to the needs of biological nature. Theodore Roosevelt's presidency was instrumental in laying the foundations for today's conservationist movement. In 1903 he created the nation's first bird preserve and soon followed that up with the American Bison Society - an attempt to save the last of the nearly-extinct bison and preserve them for future generations. The United States Forest Service, which Roosevelt established in 1905, quickly came to head a network of national parks. Much as he strove to give the oppressed peoples of the world a place to call their won, and a chance to thrive, so too was he given animals and birds a chance to live as they were meant to live, free from human industrial and economic interference. Still, Roosevelt did not neglect the human aspect. He established the principle of managing these wild lands according to the principles of practical forestry. This meant that they would be open to logging under the right, "managed" conditions, an arrangement which presented few problems in the first half of the Twentieth Century as there was sufficient timber areas not actually within the national parks.