Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th president of the United States, from 1901 to 1909, and at 42 the youngest person ever to hold the office. A New York reformer, rancher, soldier and prolific author, he expanded the power of the presidency to regulate big business, protected vast areas of land as national forests, parks and monuments, built the Panama Canal and made the United States an active great power. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.

Roosevelt was born on 27 October 1858 in New York City into a wealthy family of Dutch descent. He suffered from severe asthma as a child and was educated mostly at home. Encouraged by his father, he took up boxing, hiking and an exhausting programme of exercise, and developed a lifelong passion for natural history, collecting and stuffing birds and animals. He graduated from Harvard in 1880 and married Alice Hathaway Lee the same year. His first serious book, The Naval War of 1812, appeared in 1882; he wrote around eighteen books in all.

Elected to the New York State Assembly in 1881, he made a name as an opponent of corruption. On 14 February 1884 his mother and his wife died in the same house within hours of each other, his wife two days after giving birth to their daughter Alice. Grief-stricken, he spent much of the next two years running cattle ranches in the Dakota Territory, an experience that shaped his image as a man of the West. In 1886 he married his childhood friend Edith Carow, with whom he had five children.

Roosevelt served on the federal Civil Service Commission from 1889 to 1895, fighting the practice of giving government jobs as political rewards, and then as president of the New York City police board, where he took on police corruption. In 1897 President William McKinley made him assistant secretary of the navy. He was an eager advocate of naval power and of war with Spain over Cuba, and when war came in 1898 he resigned to help raise a volunteer cavalry regiment, the Rough Riders. On 1 July 1898 he led them in the charge up Kettle Hill in the battle for the San Juan Heights outside Santiago. The war, which ended Spanish rule in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, made him a national hero; he was awarded the Medal of Honor for the charge only in 2001.

He was elected governor of New York in 1898, but his reforms irritated the state's Republican bosses, who helped move him out of the way by having him nominated for vice president in 1900. McKinley and Roosevelt won easily. On 6 September 1901 McKinley was shot by an anarchist in Buffalo and died eight days later, making Roosevelt president.

Roosevelt believed the president should act as a steward of the people, doing anything the Constitution did not forbid. He called his domestic programme the Square Deal, promising fairness to business, labour and consumers. In 1902 he used the Sherman Antitrust Act against the Northern Securities railroad combination, which the Supreme Court broke up in 1904, and his administration brought dozens of further antitrust suits. In the anthracite coal strike of 1902 he became the first president to bring owners and union to arbitration instead of simply sending troops. After winning a full term in 1904, he pushed through the Hepburn Act to regulate railway rates, and in 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.

Conservation was perhaps his most lasting achievement. He created the Forest Service in 1905, signed the Antiquities Act of 1906 and used it to proclaim 18 national monuments, including the Grand Canyon, and created five national parks, 150 national forests and the first federal bird reserves. In all, around 230 million acres came under federal protection during his presidency.

His record on race was mixed. In 1901 he invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, provoking fury among white southerners. But in 1906, after a shooting in Brownsville, Texas, was blamed on Black soldiers stationed there, he dismissed 167 men of the 25th Infantry without honour and without trial on thin evidence; the Army reversed the dismissals only in 1972.

Roosevelt summed up his foreign policy with a West African saying he liked to quote, about speaking softly and carrying a big stick. When Colombia rejected a treaty for a canal across its province of Panama in 1903, he backed a Panamanian revolt, recognised the new republic within days and signed a treaty giving the United States control of a canal zone. The Panama Canal opened in 1914, and the episode is still resented in the histories of Panama and Colombia. In 1904 he announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, claiming a right to intervene in Latin American countries that failed to pay their debts or keep order, and took control of the customs of the Dominican Republic.

He also mediated an end to the war between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan, hosting the talks that produced the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American to do so. In 1907 he sent the navy's battleships, the Great White Fleet, on a voyage around the world as a show of strength.

Roosevelt kept a promise not to seek a third term and backed his friend William Howard Taft in 1908. After leaving office he went on a long hunting and collecting expedition in Africa for the Smithsonian. Disappointed by Taft's caution, he challenged him for the Republican nomination in 1912 and, when he lost, ran as the candidate of the new Progressive, or Bull Moose, Party on a platform including women's suffrage, social insurance and the regulation of industry. On 14 October 1912 he was shot in the chest in Milwaukee and gave his speech before going to hospital. He came second, ahead of Taft, but the split let the Democrat Woodrow Wilson win.

In 1913–1914 he joined a dangerous expedition down the River of Doubt in the Brazilian Amazon, which damaged his health. He was a harsh critic of Wilson's neutrality during World War I and pressed for preparation for war. All four of his sons served, and the youngest, Quentin, a pilot, was shot down and killed over France in July 1918. Roosevelt died in his sleep at his home, Sagamore Hill, at Oyster Bay, New York, on 6 January 1919, aged 60.

Roosevelt is usually ranked among the most important presidents, and his face is carved on Mount Rushmore. He set the pattern of the modern, activist presidency, made conservation a federal responsibility and brought the United States onto the world stage, while his imperialism in the Caribbean and the Philippines and his views on race are now judged more critically. His fifth cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt, who married his niece Eleanor, carried his idea of an active federal government much further. His presidency marks the opening of the 20th century in the History of the United States.