🐻Theodore Roosevelt

26th President · 1901–1909

Theodore Roosevelt became president at 42 — still the youngest in American history — after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901. In seven and a half years, he launched the modern Progressive movement, broke up industrial monopolies, protected roughly 230 million acres of public land, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War.

A Sickly New York Child

Roosevelt was born into a wealthy New York family but suffered debilitating asthma as a child. His father built him a home gymnasium and encouraged a regimen of boxing, horseback riding, and outdoor life to build up his strength. The "strenuous life," as he later called it, became a personal philosophy. After graduating from Harvard in 1880 and marrying Alice Hathaway Lee, he entered New York politics and began writing history at a furious pace — he eventually published more than 35 books.

Tragedy and the Dakotas

On February 14, 1884, Roosevelt's mother and his wife Alice died on the same day, in the same house, within hours of each other — his mother of typhoid fever, his wife of kidney failure two days after giving birth to their daughter. Devastated, he left his newborn daughter with his sister and retreated to the Dakota Badlands, where he spent two years ranching, hunting, and serving as a deputy sheriff. The experience gave him a lifelong commitment to conservation and a reputation as a westerner — something that mattered politically.

Rough Riders and the Vice Presidency

Roosevelt served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under William McKinley before resigning at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 to lead a volunteer cavalry regiment — the Rough Riders — in Cuba. Their charge up Kettle Hill during the Battle of San Juan Heights made Roosevelt a national hero overnight. He returned, won the governorship of New York, and in 1900 was placed on the Republican ticket as McKinley's running mate. Six months into that second term, McKinley was assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Roosevelt was sworn in as the 26th president on September 14, 1901.

Square Deal and Trust-Busting

Roosevelt called his domestic program the Square Deal: conservation of natural resources, regulation of big business, and protection of consumers. His administration filed landmark antitrust suits against the Northern Securities Company (a railroad monopoly) and Standard Oil, earning him the "trust-buster" reputation. He signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act in 1906, partly in response to Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, and mediated the 1902 Coal Strike on the side of the miners — an unprecedented move for a Republican president.

Conservation and Foreign Affairs

Roosevelt protected more land for public use than any president before or since — five national parks, eighteen national monuments, 51 bird reservations, and 150 national forests, totaling roughly 230 million acres. He negotiated the purchase of rights to build the Panama Canal in 1903, and sent the "Great White Fleet" of U.S. battleships around the world in 1907 to demonstrate American naval power. He won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese War — the first American to win any Nobel Prize.

Roosevelt Trivia

• His face is one of four on Mount Rushmore, carved between 1927 and 1941.
• The teddy bear is named after him, following a 1902 hunting trip in Mississippi where he refused to shoot a tethered bear.
• He was shot in the chest during a 1912 campaign speech and delivered the speech anyway, with the bullet still lodged in his pectoral muscle.
• After leaving office, he led a year-long scientific expedition into an uncharted tributary of the Amazon, nearly dying in the process.
• His distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt and his niece Eleanor (whom FDR married) would also become central figures of 20th-century American politics.

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