Teddy Roosevelt



Click here to hear a recording of Teddy Roosevelt's voice, .

• Vice President to:       William McKinley - Republican, from Ohio.
  
  
• Dates Served: Teddy served as Vice President from March - September 1901, then as President till 1909.
  
• Political Party: Teddy was a Republican, from New York.
  
• Born: 1858.
  
• Died: 1919, at the age of 61.
  
• The presidential opponent during the 1900 campaign was:
  
  
  • William Jennings Bryan - Democrat - Former US Representative from Nebraska, and popular speaker
    
    
• Campaign issues in 1900:
  
  
  • This year there was yet another new dominant issue; American Imperialism. The currency issue had faded into the background by this point. Gold had been discovered on the beaches of Alaska, which had boosted the currency and had helped raise the country out of the depression caused by the Panic of '93. As a result of winning the Spanish-American War, the US now had increased its influence over vast new territories, reaching from the shores of Asia to deep in the Caribbean. The Republicans argued that the US needed to step up to its new responsibility as a leader on the world stage, bringing democracy and American ideals to the "backwards peoples of the world". The Democrats argued that McKinley was letting the country morph into an American version of a Colonial Empire, abandoning its basic principles of localized government. Bryan was once again nominated as the Democrats' candidate and called for the independence of all territories captured during the war. Newly-appointed Vice President Teddy Roosevelt criss-crossed the country stumping for the improved economy under the Republican Administration, calling for "Four years more for the full dinner pail". McKinley won again by a wide margin. But, wait, Bryan wasn't through just yet.
    
    
  
  
• Notable Facts about Teddy Roosevelt:
  
  
  • Teddy Roosevelt liked to wear big hats and be photographed on horse-back.
    
    
  • Teddy craved being the center of attention. A relative once said, "Teddy wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral".
    
    
  • Teddy was related to 2 presidents: he was a third-cousin, twice-removed of Martin Van Buren, and a fifth-cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was also Eleanor Roosevelt's uncle.
    
    
  • Religious affiliation: Teddy was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church. His second wife was an Episcopalian so they church-hopped. While he was a student at Harvard he taught Sunday School at Christ's Church for a while, until the rector discovered the horrible truth that he wasn't Episcopalian, and promptly banned him from further Sunday Schooling. Teddy had memorized large parts of the Bible. While he was devoted to his faith he also believed that it was unconstitutional for the US currency to contain the phrase "In God We Trust", due to the principle of separation of Church and State, and he tried to have it removed during his term as President, but failed.
    
    
  • Teddy originally planned on becoming a Naturalist, but at the urging of his girlfriend in college, he entered law school with the goal of entering politics. He dropped out after one year to run for the State Assembly in New York, in which he served from 1882 - 1884. He never went before the Bar.
    
    
  • In 1884, Teddy's wife of 4 years died of Bright's Disease, at the age of 22. On that very same day his mother also died, in the same house as his wife. Partly in an effort to seek a change of pace, Teddy moved out West to the Dakota Territory and became a cattle rancher. During this period Teddy served for a while as Sherif, at age 26. After spending 2 years as a cowboy, Roosevelt returned to New York in 1886 and ran for Mayor of New York City but lost.
    
    
  • For the next 3 years he wrote political columns, got remarried in 1886, and in 1888 campaigned for Benjamin Harrison's presidential campaign.
    
    
  • From 1895 - 1897 he served as President of the New York City Police Board, rooting out corruption and making enemies as a result.
    
    
  • In 1897 President McKinley appointed Teddy Assistant Secretary of the Navy, in which capacity he served for 2 years. In 1898 the USS Maine was blown up in the Havana Harbor in Cuba, igniting the Spanish-American War. Teddy resigned his post and raised a militia - the popular "Rough Riders" - to fight in Cuba. His regiment stormed up San Juan Hill on horseback and a new war hero was born.
    
    As a side-note, the Rough Riders consisted of over 1,000 men. Roosevelt was actually second-in-command, serving as Liutenant Colonel, under Colonel Leonard Wood who had gained fame by fighting in several earlier Indian wars. The last Rough Rider out-lived Roosevelt by 56 years, dying in 1975; Jesse Langdon, from North Dakota, joined up when he was 16 and was 94 when he died.
    
    
  • Fresh from his military adventure, Teddy returned home that same year and ran successfully for Governor of New York. He continued his anti-corruption crusade and made more enemies by limiting mandatory work-hours, child-labor, and signing into law the first corporate state-taxes.
    
    
  • With the death of Vice President Garret Hobart in office, Teddy Roosevelt was nominated to run for the post with President McKinley in his campaign for re-election in 1900. He received the hearty support of New York Party bosses, largely in an effort to get him out of New York and end his inconvenient meddling in their corrupt shenanigans. With McKinley's strong victory in 1900 Teddy became US Vice President, a position in which he expected to spend 4 years in relative obscurity.
    
    
  • Teddy had this to say about the office he now occupied, "I would a great deal rather be anything, say professor of history, than vice president."
    
    
  • After resigning himself to his fate, he had this to say of his new job title: "The office of the Vice Presidency is like a fifth wheel to a coach... it is not a stepping stone to anything except oblivion. I fear my bolt is shot". A shot, however, from a gun, was to prove him wrong.
    
    
  • Teddy served as Vice President for 6 months, ascending to the big chair at the sudden death of the President. Ironically, Teddy Roosevelt owed his ascension to the posts of both Vice President and President to the deaths of both of his predecessors.
    
    
  • Teddy was the youngest person to be sworn in as President, at age 42.
    
    
  • In his inauguration speech, Teddy became the only President to not use the personal pronoun "I" even once during his speech.
    
    
  • While President, Teddy kept a pet snake in the White House. He also kept a pet black bear, several dogs, cats, squirrels, raccoons, rabbits, guinea pigs, a badger, a rat, and a talking parrot. Teddy loved a crowd.
    
    
  • Teddy was the only President to ban Christmas trees from the White House. Reason unknown.
    
    
  • Teddy liked to box in his spare time while President. During one match with an aid he received a hard left hook to his left eye which detached his retina, going permanently blind in that eye.
    
    
  • After Teddy's successful campaign for President in 1904 which, in his view, legitimized his seat in office, he declined to run again in 1908, instead backing his chosen successor William Taft. For the next year he embarked on a lengthy safari in Africa where he collected many specimens for the Smithsonian Museum, followed by a publicity tour in Europe. Upon his return in 1910, to throngs of devoted fans, he gradually decided that he had made a mistake in his support of Taft, due to Taft's increasingly Conservative policies in office. He came to the conclusion that he had been duped and Taft was not the man he thought he was.
    
    
  • In 1912 Teddy decided to run for President again and sought the Republican nomination. However, he didn't get it, with the Party backing Taft instead. Teddy bolted in a huff and formed his own party which he called the Progressive Party, but which was popularly called the Bull Moose Party, due to Teddy's statement that he "felt as vigorous as a Bull Moose". It all made for a lively election year, complete with an assassination attempt against Roosevelt, in which he was shot in the chest on his way to a campaign speech, but didn't injure him enough to prevent him from speaking for an hour prior to seeking medical attention. But it predictably split the Republican Party and handed the election to the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson.
    
    
  • In 1913 Teddy sued the "Iron Age" magazine for libel, after it accused him of public drunkenness. He demanded, and won, a fine of 6 cents from the magazine.
    
    
  • During the next seven months he embarked on a new adventure, going on an Amazon expedition down the "River of Doubt" in Brazil, where he caught malaria and lost 55 pounds, almost dying in the forests. Brazil later renamed the river "Roosevelt River", in his honor.
    
    
  • When the US entered World War I in 1916 Teddy volunteered to organize another militia like the Rough Riders to go and fight in Europe, but President Wilson turned him down.
    
    
  • Teddy Roosevelt died in January of 1919, one year after the end of World War I, as a result of recurring problems stemming from his bout with malaria 6 years earlier in Brazil.
    
    
  • The Teddy Bear was named after him, in reference to a cartoon that appeared in a newspaper that showed him refusing to shoot a helpless bear while on a hunt.
    

Notable Events during his Vice Presidency:

• Construction of the Panama Canal. Initiated diplomatically in 1901, Britain conceded to the US the right to pursue the project on the condition that there be no stipulations placed on which nation's ships could pass through the canal. Originally planned to be built across Nicaragua, Roosevelt instead decided to build it across the neck of Panama and offered to purchase the desired area from Columbia, since Columbia's borders then included what is now the nation of Panama. But Columbia played hardball and refused the offer. With suspiciously convenient timing, a revolution suddenly erupted in the area the US wanted to purchase and it seceded from Columbia, declaring itself the independent nation of Panama. Three days after the revolution, in 1903, the US recognized the new nation and purchased the strip of land from them for $10 million. The Canal was completed in 1914 and was open for business in 1920, one year after Roosevelt died.
  
  
• On September 6, 1901 President McKinley was shot twice while greeting people in a receiving line at the Pan American Expo in Buffalo, New York. One of the people in line was a man named Leon Czolgosz, age 28, who was a member of an organization devoted to the principle of Anarchy - the total abolition of all government. He was carrying a gun in his hand, hidden under a bandage. As McKinley reached out to shake his hand Czolgosz fired 2 shots at point-blank range, hitting McKinley in the pancreas, just like President Garfield had been exactly 20 years earlier. As with Garfield, doctors operated to try and remove the bullet but couldn't find it. Ironically, on display at the Expo was a new invention called an X-ray machine, but no one thought of using it on McKinley. He died 7 days later, of gangrene that had developed around the bullet. His assassin was tried for murder, with him refusing the right to an attorney since, as an Anarchist, he didn't recognize the authority of the court or its laws. He was electrocuted the following month, and his body was dissolved in sulfuric acid to quickly decompose it, since no one wanted a trace of him left in this world.
  
  

Notable events during his completion of McKinley's Presidential term:

• The Big Stick Diplomacy. In President Roosevelt's messages to Congress in 1904 and 1905, he stated that it was the United States' moral obligation to enforce the Monroe Doctrine in the Americas and to intervene anywhere deemed necessary, in order to preserve order. In reference to the US's role as enforcer in the Western Hemisphere, Roosevelt said that the US should "Speak softly and carry a big stick".
  
  
• The Anthracite Coal Strike, in 1902. From May through October, hundreds of thousands of coal miners in Pennsylvania went on strike for the right to Unionize, demanding shorter work hours and higher wages. The mining companies at first refused to negotiate, but then had a change of heart after Roosevelt threatened to seize the mines and negotiate with the workers on their behalf. The strike ended when the mining companies gave in to all the demands, with the exception of recognizing the Unions.
  
  
• Conservation Policies. In 1902 the Reclamation Act was passed which created 125 million acres of national forests and financed the construction of giant dams and irrigation projects throughout the West from the sale of public lands. In 1906 he created the nation's first National Monument, Devil's Tower in Wyoming.
  
  
• Louis Feinberg, later to become the Stooge named Larry, is born Oct. 5, 1902. (Later changes last name to Fine)
  
  
• Bob Hope is born, on May 29, 1903. Tells his first joke 3 years later.
  
  
• Jerome Horwitz, later to become the Stooge known as "Curly", is born on Oct. 22, 1903. (Family name later changes to Howard)
  
  
• In 1904 Teddy appointed William Howard Taft as his Secretary of War, a post he held until 1908 when Teddy backed him for the next Presidential term, which he won. What Taft really wanted, though, was to be a Supreme Court Justice. He got his wish in 1921 when President Harding appointed him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in which post he served until 1930. Taft was the only president to move from the big chair to the really big chair.
  
  
• During his time in office, Teddy was the first president to:
  
  
  • Travel outside of the United States while in office, when he travelled to Panama to inspect the construction of the Canal then underway.
    
    
  • Fly in an airplane. In 1910 he rode in a small plane at an airshow, which reached a height of 50 feet and flew for 4 minutes.
    
    
  • Go down in a submarine.
    
    
  • Own his own car.
    
    
  • Have a telephone in his house.