Theodore Roosevelt

Roosevelt, Theodore 

Born Oct. 27, 1858, in New York City; died Jan. 6, 1919, at Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay, N. Y. US statesman. Member of the Republican Party.

Roosevelt served as president of the New York City Board of Police Commissioners from 1895 to 1897, as assistant secretary of the navy from 1897 to 1898, and as governor of New York from 1899 to 1900. A propagandist of geopolitical ideas, he demanded the construction of a large navy. He promoted the outbreak of the Spanish-American War of 1898. In January 1901, Roosevelt became vice-president of the USA, and in September 1901, after President W. McKinley was assassinated, he became president. Elected to another term in 1904, he served from 1905 to 1909. Reacting to an upsurge in the labor movement, the spread of socialist ideas, and the growth of the democratic antimonopoly movement, Roosevelt proposed a bourgeois reformist program calling for government regulation of monopolies and the broadening of social legislation. The antitrust laws passed under his administration were demagogic and lacking in practical significance.

Roosevelt pursued an actively imperialist foreign policy, proclaiming a “big stick” policy in Latin America and in 1904 issuing a new interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, under which the USA assumed the role of “policeman of the western hemisphere.” The policy of the Roosevelt administration was one of the main factors contributing to the Venezuelan crisis of 1902–03. In 1901 the Roosevelt administration imposed the Platt Amendment and other oppressive agreements on Cuba, which was occupied by US troops, and suppressed an anti-imperialist revolt there. Cuba was occupied by American troops from 1906 to 1909. After Panama’s secession from Colombia and the formation of the Republic of Panama (Nov. 3, 1903), the USA seized the Panama Canal Zone from Panama.

The Roosevelt administration provided Japan with financial and diplomatic support during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. During the presidential election of 1912, Roosevelt was one of the founders of the Progressive Party, an outgrowth of a group that left the Republican Party. The Progressive Party, which advocated an expanded program of bourgeois reformism, fell apart after Roosevelt’s defeat in 1912.

REFERENCES

Lenin, V. I. “Itogi i znachenie prezidentskikh vyborov ν Amerike.” Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 22.
Zubok, L. I. Ekspansionistskaia politika SShA ν nachale XX veka. Moscow, 1969.
Beliavskaia, I. A. Burzhuaznyi reformizm ν SShA (1900–1914). Moscow, 1968.
Dement’ev, I. P. Ideinaia bor’ba ν SShA po voprosam ekspansii. (Na ru-bezhe XIX–XX vv.) Moscow, 1973.

I. P. DEMENTEV