Roosevelt, Theodore
ro'ze-velt, Theodore (1858-), the twenty-fifth president of the United States. He was born in New York City, October 27, 1858. He came of good old Dutch Knickerbocker stock, with an admixture of Irish and Huguenot ancestry. As a child he was considered rather delicate in health. He was educated at home rather than at school. He developed into an active, affectionate, adventurous boy, ready to fight or to make up, according to circumstances. At Harvard, he was known as a reader, a thinker, and a talker. He took an active interest in athletics. In 1880, after graduation, he spent a few months in Europe. He climbed the Jungfrau and the Matterhorn, and was elected a member of the Alpine Club. On his return home, he took an active interest in local politics. In 1882 he was elected to the legislature of New York, and, although the youngest man in the body, he became the recognized leader of the Republican minority. A few years later he was a candidate for mayor of New York, but was defeated.
While still a young man, he went West, partly for his health, partly for love of adventure. He bought an interest in a large ranch on the banks of the Little Missouri, near Medora, in the Bad Lands of North Dakota. He stayed in a log house for several years, living the life of a cowboy, ranch owner, and sportsman. Here he gathered material for a number of books, including Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, The Wilderness Hunter, and The Deer Family. While this period of his life was no doubt of great benefit to the future president, it is to be regretted for the completeness of the story that he lost rather than made money in raising cattle. Returning to New York he was made a civil service commissioner in 1889, and in 1895 he was made president of the New York police board. His administration of these important offices may be described briefly as a systematic campaign against dishonesty and corruption in public office. In 1897 he was appointed assistant secretary of the navy. When war broke out between the United States and Spain, he resigned, organized a regiment known as the "Rough Riders," and went to Cuba. On his return he found himself more or less of a national hero.
He was elected governor of the state of New York in 1898. In 1900 the Republicans nominated Roosevelt for the vice-presidency. He did not desire the nomination, but it was forced upon him by leaders who desired to get him out of the way. It was considered that a vice-president could not become a formidable candidate for the presidency. The tragic death of President McKinley at Buffalo elevated Roosevelt to the presidential chair. He took the oath of office September 14, 1901. In 1904 he was nominated for the presidency and was elected by the most overwhelming majority ever given a presidential candidate since the day of Washington.
In addition to volumes of adventure, President Roosevelt has won no little distinction as the author of a history known as The Winning of the West. He has written lives of T.H. Benton, Gouverneur Morris, and Oliver Cromwell. His suggestions and contributions to periodicals have appeared under various titles, including American Ideals and The Strenuous Life.
The present Mrs. Roosevelt is a second wife. Alice Roosevelt, now Mrs. Longworth, is a daughter by a former marriage. The family home is at Oyster Bay, Long Island. President Roosevelt's life has been very different from that of Jackson, Lincoln, and other Americans who have been idealized. He came of a prominent family. He was born to comfort and had every possible opportunity for an education. Intellectually, and every other way, he may be called an unspoiled child of fortune. He had great opportunity and made the most of it. Americans recognize in him a fine type of manhood. He is wealthy, but not covetous; thrifty, but without greed; and generous, without being wasteful. As a public man, he is kindly, but not credulous; alert, not suspicious; and ambitious, but not envious. He has unbounded courage, tempered by shrewdness; he is bullet-headed, but not unreasonable. Finally, in the eye of the people, he stands for a strenuous life, for publicity, and for a square deal. He became president on the eve of stupendous revelations of venality in commercial and public life. Belief in his integrity gave courage to men of honesty, and did much to restore confidence in the ultimate triumph of right dealing.
In 1909 at the close of his term of office, Roosevelt allied himself with the forces of the Smithsonian Institution and went to Uganda, Africa, on a hunting and collecting trip. He wrote interesting accounts of his experience for Scribner's Magazine. On the return journey he lectured in Cairo, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Oxford. He was received more like a monarch than a plain American citizen and on landing in New York in June, 1910, he was accorded a welcome and a reception in point of spontaneity unequaled in American history.
The following extract from an article by Judge Ben. B. Lindsey in Everybody's Magazine is descriptive of Roosevelt's political courage:
Toward the close of September, in the campaign, Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, came to Denver, and he was challenged to defend the position of the Republican party upon certain issues of the contest. Colorado was a free-silver state, almost unanimously, and the game was to make Roosevelt either embarrass his party or himself by forcing him to handle the free-silver question before an audience that would resent the opinions of an Eastern "gold-bug." however mildly he might put them.
The Opera House was packed with people. Senator Lodge of Massachusetts held their attention for a time, but they were impatient to hear "Teddy." He was late. He had not yet arrived. Expectation became noisy, restless, hostile. Presently we heard the low grumble of a crowd shouting in the street. The word was cried about that he was coming. And almost immediately, in a crash of music from the band, he strode down to the footlights and faced the shouting audience.
He looked tired. But without waiting for silence, with his head down as if he were about to charge, he bared his teeth and uttered something unintelligible in a hoarse voice. The audiences roared. He took a long breath, watching them, dogged, determined, filling his lungs; and then--with a sudden gesture that compelled silence--he screamed at them, with all his teeth showing: "We--stand--on a--gold--platform!"
It came to them like a blow in the face; and before they could take voice, he added, pounding out the words with his fist: "We stand for the same thing in Colorado that we stand for in New York!"
He got no further. The shout of applause that followed came in a roar of delight from a thousand throats. They cheered him as if he had said the one thing they had been waiting to hear, instead of the very thing that no Republican politician in Denver would have dared whisper to any single one of them in the dark behind a locked door. They cheered him as if they would split their throats. They cheered his courage, his truth, his defiance of political hedging, his honesty, his manliness. It was the cheer of pride, of love, of admiration. It was the voice of our people raised to greet those very qualities in a politician which the Beast has tried to crush. It was, to me, the voice of hope.
I went home that night resolved never to forget the lesson. Often since, when I have faced the hoot of prejudiced opposition from my own small stage in public life, I have remembered Roosevelt, and filled my lungs again, and cleared my throat for another defiance. For I believe, in that way, with our people, there is hope.
QUOTATIONS.
The people that do harm in the end are not the wrong-doers whom all execrate; they are the men who do not do quite as much wrong, but who are applauded instead of being execrated. The career of Benedict Arnold has done us no harm as a nation because of the universal horror it inspired The conscienceless stock speculator who acquires wealth by swindling his fellows, by debauching judges and corrupting legislatures, and who ends his days with the reputation of being among the richest men in America, exerts over the minds of the rising generation an influence worse than that of the average murderer or bandit, because his career is even more dazzling in its success, and even more dangerous in its effects upon the community.
The prime thing that every man who takes an interest in politics should remember is that he must act, and not merely criticise the actions of others. It is not the man who sits by his fireside reading his evening paper, and saying how bad our politics and politicians are, who will ever do anything to save us; it is the man who goes out into the rough hurly-burly of the caucus, the primary, and the political meeting, and there faces his fellows on equal terms.
If you are going to do anything permanent for the average man, you have got to begin before he is a man. The chance of success lies in working with the boy and not with the man.
Teach the boy that he is to be expected to earn his own livelihood; that it is a shame and scandal for him not to be self-dependent, not to be able to hold his own in the rough work of actual life. Teach the girl that so far from its being her duty to try to avoid all labor, all effort, that it should be a matter of pride to her to be as good a housewife as her mother was before her.
I want to see our education directed more and more toward training boys and girls back to the farm and the shop, so that they will be first-rate farmers, first-rate merchants, fit to work with the head and to work with the hands; and realizing that work with the hands is just as honorable as work with the head.