Today is the birthday of the 26th president of the United States:
Theodore Roosevelt Jr,
born in New York City on this date in 1858. He was born into privilege,
but he was a sickly child and suffered from asthma, so he spent much of
his time indoors. When his doctors discovered he had a weak heart, they
advised him to live a quiet life and take some kind of a desk job that
wouldn't prove too strenuous or stressful. But he dreamed of becoming a
naturalist and an adventurer, and by the time he was a teenager, he had
developed a program of rigorous exercise, including boxing and lifting
weights.
He worked hard at Harvard and went on to study law at Columbia, but
he grew impatient and left his studies in favor of politics, where he
enjoyed many early successes. But on Valentine's Day, 1884, both his
mother and his wife, Alice, died. Devastated, Roosevelt left behind the
world of politics — and his baby daughter — to become a cattle rancher
in the Badlands of the Dakota Territory. It would be two years before he
returned to the New York political scene.
His
political bent was progressive: he fought monopolies, reformed the
workplace, regulated industry, and championed immigrants and the middle
class. He supported desegregation and women's suffrage. He was serving
as vice president under William McKinley when McKinley was assassinated
in 1901. At age 42, Roosevelt was the youngest man ever to become
president of the United States. And the sickly child had grown up into a
man who championed "a life of strenuous endeavor," demanding that
everyone around him
adopt his now robust and active outdoor lifestyle. He served two terms —
from 1901 to 1909 — and then after a few years away, returned to
politics, feeling "fit as a bull moose," as he said. His quote gave rise
to his Progressive Party's nickname, the "Bull Moose Party." He felt so
fit that when he was shot in the chest during an assassination attempt,
he continued campaigning
for over an hour before seeking help, and he recovered quickly. Although
he received the largest number of votes for a third-party candidate in
U.S. history, he lost the election.
One
of Roosevelt's lasting legacies is the conservation movement. As a
young man, he had witnessed the near-eradication of the buffalo in the
Dakota Territory, and he realized that action was necessary to preserve
the country's natural resources and open spaces. During his presidency,
he provided protection for almost 230 million acres of land, creating
150 national forests and five national parks. In 1908, he gave a speech
at the Conference on the Conservation of Natural Resources, saying: "We
have become
great because of the lavish use of our resources and we have just reason
to be proud of our growth. But the time has come to inquire seriously
what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the
oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have been still further
impoverished and washed into the streams [...] It is time for us now as a
nation to exercise the same
reasonable foresight in dealing with our great natural resources that
would be shown by any prudent man in conserving and wisely using the
property which contains the assurance of well-being for himself and his
children."
Roosevelt's literary inclinations aren't as widely known as his
national parks or his reputation as a hale and hearty outdoorsman, but
they're unmatched by any other American president. He read voraciously,
and quickly; it's said he read an entire book every day before
breakfast. He loved poetry; Robert Frost once said, "He was our kind. He
quoted poetry to me. He knew poetry."
Roosevelt wrote some three dozen books himself; his first, History of the Naval War of 1812
(1882) was published not long after he graduated from Harvard. In it,
he boldly took on — and refuted — many of the accepted interpretations
of the war, and he earned respect as a historian at the age of 23.
Within two years, the book had sold three editions and was being used as
a textbook in some college classrooms. Within five years, it was
required reading in the U.S. Navy.
His work spanned a wide array of genres: history, political essay,
biography, autobiography, natural science, foreign policy, and
philosophy. He began writing when he was nine years old: a paper titled
"The Natural History of Insects," which was based on hours of field
research conducted by Roosevelt and his young cousins. And his last
book, published just after his death in 1919, was a bound collection of
warm and witty fatherly advice in the form of 20 years' worth of letters
to his children.
He
wrote, of his time in the Badlands: "My home ranch-house stands on the
river brink. From the low, long veranda, shaded by leafy cotton-woods,
one looks across sand bars and shallows to a strip of meadowland, behind
which rises a line of sheer cliffs and grassy plateaus. This veranda is
a pleasant place in the summer evenings when a cool breeze stirs along
the river and blows in the faces of the tired men, who loll back in
their rocking-chairs (what true American does not enjoy a
rocking-chair?), book in
hand — though they do not often read the books, but rock gently to and
fro, gazing sleepily out at the weird-looking buttes opposite, until
their sharp outlines grow indistinct and purple in the after-glow of the
sunset."
That weak heart that the doctors discovered in his childhood caught
up with him in the end. He died in his sleep, of a coronary embolism, at
the age of 60. His son Archie cabled the news: "The old lion is dead."
Considering
that one of the things Roosevelt is remembered for is his Roughrider
Army in Cuba it seems to me to be strange that he was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize.
