Theodore Roosevelt

Roosevelt, Theodore

(1858–1919) twenty-sixth U.S. president; born in New York City (fifth cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt). Born into a patrician family, he was sickly as a boy but he built up his body and physical abilities. He graduated from Harvard in 1880, and the next year gained election to the New York legislature (Rep., 1882–84). During the 1880s he also began his extensive historical writings, including such works as The Naval War of 1812 (1882), Essays on Practical Politics (1888), and the four-volume The Winning of the West (1889–96). In 1884–86 he ran a ranch in Dakota Territory. He went to Washington, D.C., to serve as a U.S. Civil Service commissioner (1889–95). Named president of the New York police board in 1895, his vigorous reformist efforts—and his tendency to get himself into the headlines—gained him a national reputation, which led to his being appointed assistant navy secretary by President William McKinley (1897). When war with Spain broke out in 1898, Roosevelt resigned to lead the "Rough Riders," a volunteer cavalry unit whose celebrated charge up Kettle Hill in the battle outside Santiago, Cuba, made him a national hero; this helped take him to the governorship of New York (1889–1901) and then to the 1900 Republican ticket as McKinley's vice-president. Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency on the assassination of McKinley in 1901, and proved a powerful and effective leader in a time of national expansion, easily gaining reelection in 1904. Citing as his motto, "Speak softly and carry a big stick," he demonstrated American power on the world stage—including machinations that led to the creation of the Panama Canal—and built up the navy. In the "Roosevelt corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine he proclaimed the U.S.A. the policeman of the Western Hemisphere. Equally active on the domestic front, he pioneered in government regulation of big business with his prosecution of corporations for trust violations; he also created national parks, oversaw passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, and signed the Hepburn Act regulating railroads. During his campaign in 1904, he declared that he would not run again; in 1908, reluctantly, he promoted his protégé William Howard Taft in a successful presidential campaign. He moved on to a life of traveling, hunting, and writing but by 1911 he was clearly unsatisfied with the conservative direction of the government. He made an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1912 with the Progressive ("Bull Moose") Party. As World War I proceeded, he began to denounce President Wilson's cautious policy and he was considering another run for the presidency when he died suddenly. Theodore Roosevelt can be claimed as a hero or villain by proponents of many ideologies or causes, but all would agree that he was defiantly one of a kind as both man and president.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

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

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.