PORTRAIT FOR TIME BY MICHAEL J. DEAS
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Larger Than Life: Trust buster, Rough Rider, Patriot? Roosevelt.
The 20th Century Express
At home and abroad, Theodore Roosevelt was the locomotive President, the man who drew his flourishing
nation into the future
By RICHARD LACAYO
Presidents come and go, but monuments are always with us. There's a reason Theodore Roosevelt is the only
20th century President whose face is carved into Mount Rushmore, the only one who could hold his own with
Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson. Roosevelt not only remade America, but he also charmed the pants off
everybody while he did it. And just short of a century after he left the White House, in 1909, the collective
memory of his strength and intellect and charisma still lingers. How many times over the years since have
Americans settled their affections on some thoughtful, vigorous man who reminded them a bit of Roosevelt?
What was Ernest Hemingway if not a later edition of Teddy, without the burden of office but still equipped with
T.R.'s literate machismo? And who could look at John F. Kennedy, scrimmaging with his clan at Hyannis Port,
and not be reminded of another young President, tussling with his kids at Sagamore Hill? Is it any surprise when
more recent Presidents try to borrow a bit of his halo? Bill Clinton had Teddy's bust on his desk. George W.
Bush let it be known that he spent last Christmas vacation reading a Roosevelt biography, his second since he
got to the White House.
Teddy stays with us because he seems so much like one of us. Although he was born in 1858, it's the 20th
century he decidedly belongs to, the century he brought America into on his terms. Roosevelt's years in the
White House were one of those hinges upon which the whole of American history sometimes turns. When he
arrived there, he already understood the energies that had been building in the U.S. for decades after the Civil
War: the explosion of its industrial power, the ineluctable impulse to expand. He used his presidency to
discharge those energies in ways that left the U.S. profoundly changed. Again and again, he framed the
questions we still ask. How much influence should the government have over the economy? How much power
should the U.S. exert in the wider world? What should we do to protect the environment? The answer he liked
best--More--didn't satisfy everyone. It still doesn't. But anytime we offer our own, we know that we do it with
him looking over our shoulders.
Where was his impact the greatest? Start with the economy. When Roosevelt first came to the presidency, after
the assassination of William McKinley, the U.S. was emerging as one of the world's wealthiest nations. It was
first in the world in its output of timber, steel, coal, iron. Since 1860 the population had doubled, exports had
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tripled. But that bounding growth had brought with it all the upheavals of an industrial age--poverty, child labor,
dreadful factory conditions. Year after year, workers faced off against bosses with their fists clenched.
Roosevelt came to believe that government had the right to moderate the excesses of free enterprise. Although
his exercises of power seem modest to us now--the breakup of monopolies, the Pure Food and Drug Act, the
meat-inspection and industrial-safety laws--it was a shock to the system at the time. Roosevelt--a Republican!-insisted that one of the things government must govern is the economy. Today, when the Justice Department
goes after Microsoft or Enron, when the Environmental Protection Agency adjusts mileage standards or the Fed
tweaks the prime, somewhere his ghost is smiling.
By the time he returned to politics in 1912 to make an attempt at a third term in the White House, running under
the banner of the Progressive Party, he felt free to set out an even more radical vision of what must be done.
Social Security, regulation of stock trading, a minimum wage--those ideas would not be adopted until the
presidency more than two decades later of his distant cousin Franklin. But T.R. set them seriously in motion.
As at home, so in the world: in all places Roosevelt was an activist. He was the first President to urge
wholeheartedly that the U.S. accept its role as a global power. God knows, he accepted it. He looked at the U.S.
the way we now understand the universe, as a thing that began expanding the moment it was born. (It tells you
something that he never got over the habit of casting covetous glances toward Canada.) But not until just before
he reached the presidency had the nation finally burst through its continental confines. In 1898 the SpanishAmerican War and its aftermath had placed under U.S. supervision a whole collection of territories and
dependencies: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Suddenly, to Roosevelt's utter delight, the U.S.
was acting on a world stage, across two oceans. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy under McKinley--a job that
should have been nearly meaningless but that he turned into a power center--he had urged on the war. As a
Rough Rider, he had fought in it. As President, he would make Americans understand that their new global
prominence was a long-term proposition.
He was right, of course. Roosevelt sounded the first chords of the American Century. But the Spanish-American
War was a quick and easy victory. Although it was followed by a bloody anti-American insurgency in the
Philippines, one that dragged on through Roosevelt's presidency, for the most part he did not live to see the
lethal predicaments a global power can face. We can't know what he might have thought about Vietnam, much
less Iraq. His expansionist impulse had its idealistic side; he too talked about spreading democracy. And you
could see its legacy in developments after his death, like the Marshall Plan. But every time the U.S. contrived to
overthrow an elected leader abroad who proved resistant to U.S. aims, some of Teddy's legacy was also at work.
There could not have been a more literal legacy than the 1953 coup engineered by the U.S. to oust Mohammed
Mossadegh, the Iranian Prime Minister who attempted to nationalize Iran's oil industry. The CIA officer in
Tehran who choreographed the overthrow was Roosevelt's grandson Kermit.
Another of Roosevelt's legacies was an unambiguous gift to the future. Teddy was never more himself than
when he was outdoors. He loved nature, knew the songs of dozens of birds, loved to ride, climb, hike and shoot.
As a boy he wanted to be a naturalist, and as a President he became the first to make environmentalism a
political issue. Under the tutelage of his friends--naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir, who convinced
Teddy that the Federal Government would be a better protector of parkland than the states, and U.S. Forest
Service chief Gifford Pinchot, who wanted strict controls over commercial use of woodlands--Roosevelt learned
to shape his love of nature into a policy to defend it. The year after leaving the White House, he explained his
philosophy to an audience in Kansas. He recognized the right, he said, even the "duty" of his generation to use
the nation's natural resources. "But I do not recognize the right to waste them," he added. "Or to rob, by
wasteful use, the generations that come after us."
We are those generations, and we have him to thank not only for the 150 national forests he created, the 51
national wildlife refuges, the five national parks, but also for the very idea that air, water, forests and animal life
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were somehow in our collective safekeeping. If he were alive today, he would be deeply interested in such
matters as global warming and the preservation of species.
Roosevelt was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud's, but a less self-analytical man would be hard to imagine. He
was outer directed in every way and keenly receptive to the possibilities of the moment. Henry Adams, the most
nuanced mind of Roosevelt's day, was exactly right when he called him "pure act." Roosevelt entered the White
House after three decades during which Congress had consistently had the upper hand over the President. He
lost no time in making it plain that he was a different breed. The "imperial presidencies" that followed his, from
those of Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush, all owe something to his example. When
Congress did nothing to curb the power of the trusts--huge monopolistic corporations--Roosevelt simply
directed his Justice Department to start bringing suits. When Congress balked at embarking on the Panama
Canal, Teddy found a way to go forward. "I took the Isthmus," he later explained, "started the canal and then
left Congress--not to debate the canal, but to debate me." He added dryly, "But while the debate goes on, the
canal does too." No one would ever have to wonder what he meant when he said, "While President, I have been
President--emphatically."
He did everything emphatically. Above all, he had a supreme sense of the great future in store for the U.S. No
one was ever more certain of the nation's destiny. Few Presidents were more formidable in shaping it. More
than that, he gave the nation a picture of itself as a place that could not fail to succeed, because it produced
people who were vigorous and commanding--people like Teddy Roosevelt. It's not just that he was excited to be
an American. He made it more exciting to be one.
The War of 1912
T.R. failed in his brash bid to regain the White House, but his Bull Moose Party pushed ideas that would
animate the century.
By PATRICIA O''TOOLE
When Theodore Roosevelt challenged William Howard Taft for the Republican presidential nomination in
1912, few cheered. Enemies accused him of monumental egotism, and most admirers, foreseeing his defeat,
were worried that posterity would frown on his quest for an unprecedented third term. But as Roosevelt saw it,
he had to involve himself. He had left the White House in 1909 with the expectation that Taft, his good friend
and chosen successor, would continue on the progressive course set by the Roosevelt Administration. Instead,
Taft had filled his Cabinet with corporate lawyers, bungled a chance to overhaul an antiquated tariff that
enriched manufacturers at consumers' expense and undermined Roosevelt's farsighted environmentalism. Taft
means well, Roosevelt would say, "but he means well feebly."
Then came the midterm elections of 1910. The G.O.P. lost control of the House, and Roosevelt began criticizing
Taft's policies in print. The final rupture occurred a year later when Taft's Attorney General filed an antitrust
suit against the U.S. Steel Corp. because of a 1907 acquisition that Roosevelt had personally approved. T.R.
was outraged. The decision to challenge Taft soon followed. T.R.'s campaign would not succeed, but the ideals
that he and his Bull Moose Party enunciated in 1912 would resonate in American political life for decades.
They still do. They shaped much of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and influenced domestic policy until the
1980s, when the Reagan Revolution began dismantling social programs. Even now, echoes of that campaign
can be heard in debates on what government should do for citizens and how to make it more accountable.
Roosevelt's odds of unhorsing an incumbent President were long, but not as long as they would have been in
previous election years, when nominees were chosen by a handful of bosses and rubber-stamped at state party
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caucuses. In 1912 a dozen states were letting voters do the choosing in primaries, a political innovation just
beginning to catch on. If T.R. could win big in the primaries, he could present himself as the people's choice
and Taft as the creature of the bosses.
Collectively, the primaries gave T.R. a shot at 362 votes, and he stunned the party by walking off with 278 of
them. Taft finished a distant second, with 48. But in the 36 states without primaries, Roosevelt was outflanked
by the bosses. In June, as delegates headed to Chicago for the national convention, Taft's men boasted that their
candidate had 557 votes--17 more than he needed for the nomination. T.R. could see that his primary delegates
plus delegates from renegade factions elsewhere had left him about 70 votes short. His aides noisily challenged
the legitimacy of scores of Taft supporters, but when it became clear that he could not win, T.R. executed one of
the gutsiest maneuvers in the annals of American presidential campaigns: he denounced the Republicans as
thieves and bolted the convention.
A bolt spared Roosevelt the humiliation of losing to Taft. It also kept his candidacy alive on a brand-new ticket
of his own creation, the National Progressive Party, better known as the Bull Moose Party, a nickname that
came from the answer T.R. had given when someone in a crowd yelled out to ask how he felt. "Like a bull
moose," he yelled back.
The Bull Moose Party got off to a thundering start. Within seven weeks, the Progressives had established the
party in nearly every state and were back in Chicago for their first national convention. But who were the
Progressives? Although Republicans of the day cast the Progressives as radicals, in truth they were teachers and
lawyers, farmers and small-town folk, urban reformers of every ilk, crusaders for peace and women's suffrage,
champions of the little guy. They were less a movement than a catch basin for civic-minded men and women
impatient with politics as usual but a bit frightened of Eugene V. Debs and his Socialist Party. While many
Progressives could not see past their pet causes, T.R. managed to bring them together in a big tent held aloft by
the idea that the government, which ought to serve the people, had been hijacked by special interests. "To
destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics
is the first task of the statesmanship of the day," the Progressive platform declared.
A brief for a strong Federal Government, the Progressive platform was so far ahead of its time on many points
(Social Security and the minimum wage, for example) that it would take a generation and another Roosevelt,
T.R.'s fifth cousin Franklin, to bring them into being. In hopes of protecting the investing public from swindlers,
the Progressives called for federal regulation of stock offerings and fuller disclosure of corporate financial
transactions, ideas that found their way into the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934.
During his presidency, a time when corporations were growing ever larger, Roosevelt operated on the principle
that the Federal Government was the only institution strong enough to combat their Darwinian tendency to
crush competitors and maximize profits by keeping wages low and prices high. In 1912 he was even more
adamant.
T.R. welcomed African Americans into his new party, but the whites organizing the Progressives of the Deep
South insisted that if any black were permitted to hold a party office or serve as a delegate, Southern whites
would refuse to join. Left to choose between acquiescence and no presence in the South, Roosevelt acquiesced
and was roundly criticized. W.E.B. DuBois and other black leaders saw Roosevelt as a hypocrite and threw
their support to the Democratic nominee, Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey. They would regret it.
Southern Democrats were frankly committed to white supremacy. Wilson's Cabinet, dominated by Southerners,
soon resegregated the civil service, erasing most of the gains made during the Roosevelt and Taft presidencies.
As the Progressives at the convention moved toward the moment of anointing Roosevelt as their first
presidential candidate, his lieutenants were scrambling to line up a Vice President. T.R. yearned for Hiram
Johnson, the Progressive Governor of California, but Johnson yearned not to run. He was sure that the Bull
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Moose Party would lose and that his career would be over. Johnson did not surrender until the last minute, after
Roosevelt's men insisted that if the great T.R. did not shrink from defeat in a noble cause, no one else should
either.
Whatever Johnson's sentiments, just about everyone else at the convention found it an exhilarating combination
of barn raising and revival meeting. They hammered together their platform, belted out hymns and interrupted
Roosevelt's acceptance speech 145 times to holler and applaud. When he closed with the best line from his first
speech after the bolt--"We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord"--they burst into what may still be
history's loudest rendition of Onward, Christian Soldiers.
The battle would be short. Election Day, Nov. 5, was only two months off when the Progressives went forth to
proselytize. Taft had already dropped from sight, telling the newspapers that he planned to take a long vacation
and would stand on his record. It was said that the ideological difference between Roosevelt and Wilson was the
difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but on one fundamental they sharply disagreed. Wilson was a
states'-rights man who contended that the history of liberty was a history of limiting the power of the national
government. Roosevelt was a confirmed nationalist, convinced that the history of social progress proved that
only a strong central government could level the playing field.
The urgent questions of the day were economic: how best to regulate the economy and what to do about a tariff
policy that kept consumer prices artificially high by protecting American companies from foreign competition.
The tariff had been created decades earlier to raise revenue (income tax being a thing of the future) and to
nurture a stripling American manufacturing establishment. As the manufacturers prospered, they convinced
their captives in Congress that ever thicker blankets of protection were needed to preserve American jobs.
Wilson, calling the tariff "stiff and stupid," promised an immediate revision. Roosevelt, arguing that a speedy
change would disrupt the economy, proposed a permanent nonpartisan commission of experts able to make
impartial recommendations for more gradual reform.
T.R. also campaigned forcefully for a commission to regulate corporations. Its members--accomplished, publicspirited business leaders--would study a company's affairs, require change when there were signs of monopoly
and stamp a company "approved" when all was in order. Once approved, the company could operate without
fear of prosecution under the country's confusing antitrust law. To Wilson, the corporations commission was a
dangerous merger of business and government, sure to enable Big Business to regulate the regulators. Even Taft
roused himself to condemn it as "the most monstrous monopoly of power in the history of the world."
While Taft vacationed and Wilson gave as few speeches as possible, Roosevelt raced up the East Coast and
down, across the South and into the Midwest. In Milwaukee, Wis., on Oct. 14, as he stood in an open car to
salute a cheering crowd, a man a few feet away drew a revolver and fired, hitting Roosevelt in the chest and
knocking him back into the car seat.
Three Presidents had been assassinated in T.R.'s lifetime, and he had long ago prepared himself for such a
moment. He put his fingers to his lips, saw that he was not bleeding from the mouth and concluded that the
bullet had not perforated a lung. The bullet, slowed by the contents of his breast pocket--a steel eyeglass case
and a copy of the speech he was about to give--had lodged in a rib. He insisted on proceeding to an auditorium
where a crowd of 10,000 was waiting for him. In full command of his political instincts, he showed the
audience his bloodstained shirt and said, "I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose."
Roosevelt spoke for 90 minutes, then consented to go to a hospital.
From first to last, no candidate in 1912 fought harder than Roosevelt, but in the end, the country chose Wilson.
The results resembled those of 1992, when Ross Perot's third-party run deprived Bill Clinton of a popular
majority but gave him a victory, with 43% of the vote. Wilson's plurality was 42%. Roosevelt finished with
27% and Taft with 23%. Debs drew 6%, twice the share he had won in 1908. Monday-morning quarterbacks
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have claimed that if T.R. had sat out 1912, his votes would have gone to Taft. Not so. As the numbers show,
77% of the electorate wanted anyone but Taft.
Roosevelt lost, and in a political culture set in its two-party ways, the Bull Moose Party was destined for a short
life. But T.R.'s 1912 campaign still quickens the pulse, in part because his foresight on social policy proved to
be 20/20 but even more because he was that rare person able to see past the corruption and mediocrity of his
time. Theodore Roosevelt understood what a government devoted to its citizens might achieve, and he got the
country talking as seriously as it ever has about what it wanted to be.
The Police Commish
With righteous fury and mixed results, Roosevelt tried to weed out corrupt cops and suppress vice in big, bad
New York City in the 1890s.
By RICHARD ZACKS
In the 1890s, New York City was unrepentantly wide open. Day or night, a man with a thirst or a letch or the
urge to gamble could satisfy his cravings with ease. Long past midnight, small bands played in dozens of
Manhattan concert saloons while prostitutes in floor-length dresses trawled the tables. Streetwalkers divvied up
the various corners in the Tenderloin, and touts handed out cards for $1-a-date Bowery brothels. Bettors
wanting action could wander into Frank Farrell's crystal-chandeliered casino on West 33rd Street. Tourists
could smoke opium in no-frills dens in Chinatown.
And where were the cops? Quite a few were busy taking bribes. It was no secret that crooked officers shared
their illegal profits with an equally corrupt Democratic political club, Tammany Hall. But on May 6, 1895,
Republican mayor William Strong appointed to the city's four-man board of police commissioners the
Manhattan native and former state legislator Theodore Roosevelt. Selected at once as board president,
Roosevelt eagerly embraced the mayor's mandate for reform, calling it "a man's work." Quite simply, the author
of The Winning of the West aimed to clean up Dodge, even if it had 2 million people. Although he never
entirely succeeded--who could?--T.R.'s time on the police beat gave the Knickerbocker aristocrat a glimpse of
life among the urban poor that shaped the Progressive he became.
Roosevelt set ambitious goals: to make merit replace bribery in the system of job assignments (sergeants
sometimes paid $15,000 for lucrative captaincies) and, crazy as it sounds, to compel officers to actually enforce
all the laws. He scored a few successes initially, weeding out corrupt veterans. To see whether patrolmen were
walking their beats, he began making the same rounds late at night and incognito--though at times in the
company of a newspaper reporter. Once, Roosevelt found three bluecoats loitering outside a saloon at 2:30 a.m.
"What are you men doing here?" he asked abruptly. "What the %$*&# is that your business?" snapped one of
them, in vintage New Yorkese. Roosevelt, spectacles glinting, then introduced himself and lectured them on
performing their duty. "These midnight rambles are great fun," he later confided to his sister Anna. "I get a
glimpse of the real life of the swarming millions." On some of those nights, Roosevelt's companion was the
photographer and social critic Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives), who guided him through the circles of
hell suffered by the city's struggling immigrants.
Roosevelt was settling in at 300 Mulberry Street, the police headquarters, when he embarked on what would be
the costliest struggle of his tenure. He decided to enforce the moribund blue law against Sunday drinking. In a
New York minute, he went from lauded to loathed. Fearlessly, he vowed not to back down. "Dry Sundays" led
Manhattanites to flee to Coney Island for a beer; 540,000 mugs were sold one Sunday. German Americans,
missing their beer gardens, held an anti-Roosevelt parade. Two mail bombs arrived and were defused. "I would
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rather see this administration turned out for enforcing laws than see it succeed for violating them," Roosevelt
proclaimed. Privately, though, he agonized. "I have now run up against an ugly snag, the Sunday Excise Law,"
he wrote to Anna. "It is altogether too strict, but I have no honorable alternative save to enforce it and I am
enforcing it, to the furious rage of the saloon keepers, and of many good people too; for which I am sorry."
The situation turned even bleaker for Commissioner Roosevelt when his fellow Republicans passed an illconceived law to crack down on what little legal Sunday drinking remained, mainly at hotels. The Raines Law
decreed that only hotels with 10 or more rooms could serve alcohol with a meal on Sundays. Within weeks,
almost every saloon, beer dive and dance hall in the city transformed itself into a "Raines Law hotel." Tavern
owners thumbed their nose at Teddy. "Ten beers and one hard-boiled egg scarcely constitute a meal," groused
Roosevelt, but wink-wink Tammany judges disagreed, one even stating that 17 beers and a pretzel were
sufficiently nourishing to qualify.
Even more infuriating to Roosevelt, prostitutes and unmarried couples began renting--by the hour--those 10
hastily constructed rooms over the bar. Meanwhile, Roosevelt fell into an ongoing feud with a scheming fellow
commissioner, Andrew Parker, which stalemated the board. "I cannot shoot him or engage in a rough-andtumble with him," Roosevelt lamented. The would-be reformer was bogging down, spending his time giving out
awards for stopping runaway carriages.
By August 1896, a scant 15 months into the job, Roosevelt was seeking to escape. As William McKinley's
presidential campaign began gearing up, he mentioned to an influential McKinley backer, Maria Storer, that his
dream job was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt began passionately campaigning for McKinley,
electrifying crowds from Massachusetts to North Dakota.
McKinley was elected, but Roosevelt was dour on his own prospects."This is the last office I shall ever hold,"
he told a friend. "I have offended so many powerful interests and so many powerful politicians." The Presidentelect was indeed wary. "I am told your friend Theodore is always getting into rows with everybody," he
informed Mrs. Storer. "I am afraid he is too pugnacious." But at the last moment, McKinley relented.
His legacy as police commissioner? He helped introduce a bicycle squad and pistol-shooting practice. Vice
triumphed, but Roosevelt survived with his honor intact and with an enlarged sympathy for the struggles of the
poor. "He is a fighter, a man of indomitable pluck and energy," wrote the Washington Post. "A field of
immeasurable usefulness awaits him. Will he find it?"
The Self-Made Man
He was a sickly child. But through sheer will, muscular effort--and a lot of time in the great outdoors--he
became a powerful, passionate adult.
By KATHLEEN DALTON
The young Theodore Roosevelt did not strike most people as promising enough to become one of the nation's
greatest Presidents. His august Knickerbocker family had grown rich from generations of shrewd investments in
real estate, banking, glass importing and even hardware. But in his youth--and for that matter in his adulthood-T.R. showed very little interest in adding to the family fortune. When Roosevelt was a toddler, his asthma began
to overshadow everything he did. As he grew, Theodore was too "delicate" for school--until Harvard he was
educated at home--and too weak to stand up to other boys. On doctor's orders his father Theodore Sr.--called
Thee by everyone in the family--and his mother Martha, called Mittie, rushed him to seashore resorts one day
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and mountain cabins the next in search of air to help him breathe. The sickly boy seemed unlikely to survive
into manhood or amount to much if he did.
But Roosevelt's childhood weakness would turn out to be the provocation for the ferociously robust man he
became. At about the time Theodore reached the end of boyhood, Thee, whom young T.R. adored, set off a
crisis in their relationship. He insisted on making his favorite child into a strong man by directing him to
embrace a life of vigorous exercise. He told him with characteristic sternness to throw off his invalidism by
force of will. He ordered the boy to "make your own body." According to Theodore's sister, Theodore "resolved
to make himself strong," to turn his back on his "nervous and timid" childhood and embrace manhood. The cure
would come by way of sports and outdoor activity, mountains to be climbed and harsh weather to be endured.
From that day forward, T.R. became a fierce champion of what he called the "strenuous life," a self-imposed
struggle to live with vigor and determination. He boxed and pulled at weight machines, and his chest expanded
along with his capacity to breathe. To conquer his fragility he began, wrote a friend, "constantly forcing himself
to do the difficult and even dangerous thing." Years later, T.R. wrote in his autobiography that his life changed
forever because he set fearlessness before him "as an ideal" that by dogged practice he achieved. Advised that
he had a bad heart and shouldn't climb stairs, the 22-year-old T.R. ascended the Matterhorn.
His self-making had costs. Throughout his life he repeatedly injured himself, even sustaining a boxing injury
when he was 45 that on top of a cataract cost him the sight in his left eye. Obsessively seeking strength through
exercise and adventure, he developed an equally overdone hatred for sissies, "cripples and consumptives," for
anyone who could not measure up physically or who reminded him of his childhood shortcomings. He even told
his sons he'd rather see them dead than have them grow up to be weaklings. He could never admit to frailty in
himself. That was one reason his charge up Kettle Hill in the Battle of San Juan Heights with the Rough Riders,
the volunteer cavalry unit he organized to fight in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, was so important to
him. It proved to the world--and himself--that Roosevelt, a man who could talk very admiringly about war, had
the strength and courage to fight in one. Although all his life, even when he was President, he continued to
suffer on occasion from asthma he did not want the public to know of his illnesses. It didn't fit his self-image.
There was another dimension of the young Roosevelt's determined embrace of vigor: his wholehearted
encounter with nature, sometimes as a naturalist, sometimes as a hunter. It shaped his life and his enduring
image. Nature provided the setting for his struggle to make himself strong, and it opened up a world of
scientific discovery at the same time. Roosevelt always remembered the day during his boyhood when he was
walking up Broadway and spotted a dead seal on display in a market. Fascinated by the animal, he went back to
see it again and again and eventually took its skull home to study. It was the first of countless natural-history
projects.
Roosevelt began to collect animal specimens, including fireflies and squirrels. He filled his notebooks with
drawings and life histories of animals and insects, such as the common black ant, and then read Darwin and
Huxley, who helped him ponder how Homo sapiens coexisted with the so-called lesser creatures. When the
American Museum of Natural History unpacked 2,200 mounted creatures from the collection of the Verreaux
brothers, French naturalists, the unabashed young Theodore donated his own mounted menagerie--a bat and 12
mice.
Delighted to see that his son loved nature, Thee took him camping and encouraged his interest in biology and
dissection. Mittie was not so enthusiastic. Dead-animal stink and the reeking chemicals used to preserve hides
upset the decorum of her parlor. But nature and the science of nature were the solace of Roosevelt's invalid
childhood, a refuge where he could achieve intellectual mastery at a young age. Under his father's loving
tutelage, T.R. fashioned himself into a naturalist whose specimens can be viewed in museums today; scientists
later welcomed him as an equal into their debates about how to classify species.
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When Thee died of cancer at age 46, Theodore, then 19, was overcome by grief, but within a year he fell in love
with a Brahmin beauty named Alice Lee, who found his stories of hunting in the Maine woods charming. Just
before they wed in the fall of 1880, he went West to hunt with his brother Elliott. He hoped life in a saddle and
breathing the open air all day would build up his strength once more. On the trail, he fell in love again, this time
with the American West.
By the time he graduated from Harvard, T.R. had made himself the most experienced outdoorsman in a class
filled with the sons of wealth and comfort. And his fierce determination to make his life count for something
larger than his own interests sent him into writing and politics and the study of history. Indeed, even as he
settled into married life with Alice and attended Columbia Law School, T.R. turned back to nature. He
eventually bought two ranches in the Dakota Territory, where he could raise cattle to sell to the Eastern markets
and at the same time retreat for health-giving hunts when his life in the East permitted.
Thus began the pattern of his adulthood, to work fiercely in the East for the causes he cared about, writing and
politicking, until he was so weary that he headed West to regain his health. Nature replenished him when he
was depleted. When Alice died in February 1884, shortly after giving birth to a daughter who would share her
name, T.R. headed to the Dakotas to find solace for his grief.
When Roosevelt became President in 1901, he took his love of nature with him to the White House. When the
strain of the job weighed on him, he stepped outside to watch the spring birds migrating. He identified the
blackpoll warblers perched in the elms outside the Oval Office. And he kept a list of his sightings. Anytime he
yearned for the strenuous life outside the White House, Roosevelt cheerfully dragged ambassadors and small
boys to climb rock faces and ford streams in Rock Creek Park. Few could keep up with him.
In a way, President Roosevelt regarded the nation's trees and open land and animal inhabitants as prime
constituencies whose interests he must serve. His dear friend forester Gifford Pinchot joined him in warning the
public that the natural resources of the U.S. were not inexhaustible, that a timber famine was imminent and that
coal, iron, oil and gas would run out someday. Congressional leaders didn't want to hear about game or tree
protection or the resource needs of future generations. Roosevelt took advantage of what he called the "bully
pulpit" of the presidency to educate voters and legislators about the need for laws to protect natural resources.
In the spring of 1903, Roosevelt used a trip out West to dramatize his commitment to preserving wild places.
With the nature writer John Burroughs he followed birdsongs in Yellowstone Park, then rode mules into
Yosemite with John Muir, the great preservationist and founder of the Sierra Club. Roosevelt and Muir slept
under the stars and were covered overnight by a blanket of snow. T.R.'s journey from asthmatic ornithologist to
hearty rancher turned President proved that a silver-spoon birth does not have to prevent a man from
developing, over time, a broad vision and a rare kind of political gumption. All he required was a chance to
make himself a new man by embracing nature and its creatures with his whole heart.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1207820,00.html
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