10/30/2024
The following is written by Jared Kline, my classmate from “The Citadel, Military College of South Carolina” about President Theodore Roosevelt’s extraordinary life. Being President of the United States was just one of his many accomplishments.
Jared Kline, October 26th, 2024
Has it really been 166 years already?
Tomorrow would have been President Theodore Roosevelt's 166th birthday. He was born in New York City on 27 October 1858. What a life he had. It is impossible for me to briefly summarize it without leaving an awful lot out, so I apologize up front for not being able to do a better job with this today.
Roosevelt was born a sickly child with a pretty bad asthma, but he was tougher than the asthma was and overcame his physical problems by means of his answer to any personal problem, which was strenuous exercise. He was terribly nearsighted, but that only made him more determined to become a crack rifle and pistol shot, thick glasses and all. All his life he had a terrific energy about everything he did.
He was "home schooled”, learned to speak French and German, studied history, natural science, and obtained a scholarship to Harvard University. One story about him as a university student involves a professor telling him, “See here, Roosevelt, I am the one teaching this class!"
He wrote a great number of books, including "The Naval War of 1812" (1882), which established him as a learned historian and even a popular writer. He went into New York politics, which was rough on the political establishment, beginning with his start as the leader of the "reform faction" of Republicans in New York's state legislature. I should mention that he was the youngest person to ever become a state representative for New York when he was elected at age 23, which record I understand he still holds.
President McKinley made Theodore Roosevelt the Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897. When (they said) the Spanish sunk the USS Maine off the coast of Cuba while his boss was on vacation, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt, on his own assumed authority, sent Commadore George Dewey to the Philippines to take out the Spanish Navy. Roosevelt then declared a state of War with Spain, despite the fact the he had absolutely no authority to do so. Acting on Roosevelt's orders, Dewey then sunk the entire Spanish fleet at Manila in about four hours. Commadore Dewey later said that the early orders from Roosevelt were key to his success at the Battle of Manila.
President McKinley and Congress caught up on the required paperwork to officially declare war on Spain in due course.
At this point, Theodore Roosevelt resigned his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and raised a volunteer regiment, the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, popularly remembered by their nickname "the Rough Riders". He took anybody who wanted to join, regardless of race or creed, and headed out to Cuba to defeat the enemy. At the Battle of San Juan Hill, the decisive battle that sealed the American victory in Cuba, Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt won the Congressional Medal of Honor (due to paperwork latency, it would be 2001 before President Clinton finally signed off on it) for "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity”, and was promoted to full Colonel.
After the war, Colonel Roosevelt decided to run for Governor of New York. He won, and as soon as the New York political establishment realized that Roosevelt was going to clean out all the corruption in state and local administration, there was strong political support to nominate him as a candidate for Vice President of the United States, a post where he presumably wouldn't have any power to do anything.
The McKinley-Roosevelt ticket won, and as we know President McKinley was assassinated. Theodore Roosevelt became President on 14 September 1901. He was 42 years old, and still holds the record as the youngest US President in history. He is remembered for his "Square Deal" domestic policies, promising fairness in government and commerce for the "average citizen”, breaking of trusts, and government regulation of railroads.
As industrial agriculture and processed food became more prevalent as the country (and the world) grew more densely populated, while at the same time medicine was also becoming an industrial interest, he involved the government in the regulation of food and drugs with his "Food and Drug Administration".
He was a historian who knew where urbanization and pressure of population were leading, and he made conservation a top priority; establishing many new national parks, forests, and monuments intended to preserve the country's natural resources and environment.
His main foreign policy focus was on Central America, where he began the construction of the Panama Canal. He significantly expanded the US Navy and sent the famous "Great White Fleet" on a world tour to project the United States' naval power around the globe.
He was re-elected in 1904 to a full term, during which President Roosevelt continued to promote the policies he considered important and necessary, notwithstanding the circumstance that many of his efforts and much of his legislative agenda were eventually blocked by the political establishment in Congress. President Roosevelt successfully prepared his close friend, William Howard Taft, to take over after he was done, and Taft won the 1908 presidential election.
I should mention that President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for negotiating the end to the Russo-Japanese War. How many people in history ever won both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Congressional Medal of Honor? I only know one.
There are a number of other things that President Theodore Roosevelt was the first US President ever to do. Here is a partial list:
Theodore Roosevelt was the first US President to:
- fly in an airplane
- own an automobile
- invite an African-American (Booker T. Washington) to the White House
- dive in a submarine
- have a telephone in his home
- ride in an automobile
- travel outside the US while in office
- receive the first electoral vote cast by a woman delegate (Helen B. Scott in 1912)
- advocate a Jewish homeland in Palestine (1917)
- advocate the establishment of a League of Nations (1915)
- host the Olympics (St. Louis, Missouri, 1904)
I should also mention that, during President Roosevelt's second year in office, it was discovered there was corruption at work in the federal bureaucracy; specifically found in the Indian Service, the Land Office, and the Post Office Department, whose corrupt officials soon wished that somebody else was President.
President Roosevelt understood, better than any 21st Century political figure I can name, that the moral is to the physical as three to one, so he vigorously investigated and prosecuted corrupt Indian agents who had cheated the Creeks and various tribes out of land parcels.
He also uncovered land fraud and "speculation” involving federal timberlands in Oregon. In November 1902, President Roosevelt forced Binger Hermann, the General Land Office Commissioner, to resign his office, and on 6 November 1903 he appointed Francis J. Heney as a special prosecutor for this big action to clean up the Executive Branch. There were 146 federal criminal indictments for one Oregon Land Office bribery ring alone. US Senator John H. Mitchell was indicted for bribery to expedite illegal land patents, found guilty in July 1905, and sentenced to six months in prison.
President Roosevelt discovered still more corruption in the Postal Department, which led to indictments for an additional 44 government employees on charges of bribery and fraud. During President Roosevelt's regime, personnel assigned within the Executive Branch were expected to be diligent and honest, or else.
It was 1902; it was not 2024. The federal bureaucracy was afraid of the President; the President was not afraid of the federal bureaucracy. Anyway, he completed his mission as President in 1908, leaving the Ship of State to President Taft.
President Taft disappointed his old friend and, frustrated with President Taft's relatively modest conservatism in facing the political establishment, Theodore Roosevelt tried (arguably a little too late) to win the 1912 Republican nomination. Failing that, he refused to give up and founded a third party, the Progressive Party, known by its nickname (he liked nicknames) the “Bull Moose Party", which aimed to carry on with his program of reforms for the government, which still needed a vigorous cleaning with an iron brush, from his point of view.
On 14 October 1912, while campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Theodore Roosevelt was shot by an assassin named John Flammang Schrank, who was a New York saloonkeeper who had immigrated to New York from Bavaria when he was nine years old. He said that he wanted to help Taft win the election. As soon as he shot President Roosevelt, he was seized and disarmed, and Roosevelt said to him, "You poor creature."
Anyway, the bullet went through his steel eyeglass case as well as his 50-page speech that he had folded double and had in his coat pocket. President Roosevelt pulled out a white handkerchief and coughed into it. Seeing no blood, he concluded that the bullet had not nicked a lung, and so he could continue. He declined some rather urgent suggestions to go to the hospital immediately, and went on to deliver his 90-minute speech, right on schedule. He opened his speech by asking people to keep their voices down so as better to hear him:
“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately, I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet – there is where the bullet went through – and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best. “
After his speech he went to the hospital, where probes and an x-ray disclosed to the doctors (who were very impressed with his physical condition) that the bullet had lodged in Roosevelt's chest muscle, but did not pe*****te the pleura. The doctors concluded that it would be less dangerous to leave it in place than to try to remove it, so President Roosevelt carried the bullet with him for the rest of his life.
The operational effect of President Roosevelt's intervention with his "Bull Moose Party" in 1912 was to split the Republican vote, and the Democrat candidate Woodrow Wilson won the election.
After losing the election, President Roosevelt led a two-year long expedition to the Amazon, where he nearly died of some kind of tropical disease.
During the First World War, he criticized President Woodrow Wilson for keeping the country out of the war with Germany, and he even offered to raise another regiment of American volunteers to go to France, but this was prevented as it was seen as a kind of private foreign policy.
Though he had considered running for president again in 1920, President Roosevelt's health continued to deteriorate (it wasn't the years, it was the mileage --- long service, bullets, and third world diseases will do that to you), and he died in his sleep on 5 January 1919 at the age of 60 years. A blood clot had detached from a vein and traveled to his lungs, and that is what killed him.
President Wilson's Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, said, "Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight."
Anyway, 27 October 2024 would have been President Theodore Roosevelt’s 166th birthday. I have to think of him today.
