Michael L. Cooper

by Theodore Roosevelt

  It was “the wildest scramble in the history of the White House. The children, hearty and full of spirits, immediately proceeded to cut loose,” a servant named Ike Hoover recalled. There was “no tree too high to scramble to the top, no fountain too deep to take a dip, no furniture too good or too high to use for leapfrog and horseplay, no bed was too expensive or chair too elegantly upholstered to be used as a resting place for the various pets in the household.” Along with six children ranging in age from four to seventeen came a menagerie of pets that included Jack the terrier, Sailor Boy the Chesapeake Bay retriever, Eli the macaw, a flying squirrel, Jonathan the piebald rat, two kangaroo rats, a parrot that screeched “Hurrah for Roosevelt,” and a calico pony named Algonquin that the boys sometimes snuck up to their rooms on the second floor of the White House.

  Ted was in his first year at the Groton School and still trying to please his father. That autumn the skinny fourteen-year-old played a whole game of football despite a serious injury. “I was very sorry to learn that you had broken your collarbone,” TR wrote, “but I am glad you played right through the game.”

  The president didn’t want the newspapers to write about his children, but he had little control over Alice, who was nearly eighteen and loved the attention. Alice looked a lot like her mother—tall, blue eyed, and blonde. She was, declared The New York Tribune, “one of the prettiest girls in Washington.” Newspaper reporters crowned her “Princess Alice,” and she attracted more press coverage than any American except her father. The whole country read about how Alice carried a small green snake that she had named Emily, after her stepmother’s sister. The nation knew the teenager smoked in public, bet on horses at the racetrack, and drove her friends’ cars too fast. Her parents wouldn’t let her have her own car. Nor would they let her smoke in the White House so when she wanted a cigarette she climbed out onto the roof. In mock exasperation Theodore once quipped to his novelist friend Owen Wister, “I can be president of the United States, or I can attend to Alice. I can’t do both.”

  As for Edith, TR told a mutual friend, she “is too sweet and pretty and dignified as mistress of the White House and very happy with it.” Some historians consider her the first “First Lady,” in that Edith made the role of president’s wife into a semi-official position. She sorted the mail each day and picked out letters needing Theodore’s personal attention. He liked to respond to letters immediately and kept a team of stenographers busy. Edith managed Theodore’s schedule, annoying uncles and cousins by insisting they make appointments. She also managed the White House’s large staff of mostly African American servants.

  Early in 1902, President Roosevelt fired the first shot across the bow of corporate America. The president told his attorney general, Philander Knox, to study a recent railroad merger that had created the Northern Securities Company. Theodore wanted to know if the new company violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, a little-used law Congress passed in 1890 making it illegal for companies to create trusts or monopolies that restrained trade or prevented competition.

  John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company had pioneered the trust thirty years earlier, and the new business model had become common. In the case of Northern Securities, J. Pierpont Morgan, James J. Hill, and E. H. Harriman had owned the major railroads between Chicago and the West Coast and had been fierce competitors. But competition had proven so unprofitable that the men agreed to combine their companies into the Northern Securities Company—and to coordinate rates in order to maximize profits. It was the nation’s biggest trust and was expected to earn $100 million a year. Populists in the Midwest and South hated trusts, especially those involving railroads, and called for the government to take them over. Well aware of the public’s mood, Theodore had Knox file suit against Northern Securities, charging that the railroad company was an illegal monopoly.

  The Roosevelt family, 1903.

  Business consolidation and bigness were facts of life in the twentieth century, and Theodore had acknowledged that in his first State of the Union Address. But, “Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.” It was “wicked … foolish,” the president said, for businessmen to demand “immunity from governmental control.”

  It took over two years, but the Supreme Court decided Northern Securities was an illegal trust and had to be broken up. The court’s decision didn’t outlaw trusts, but it did subject them to more government regulation, which, at the time, was a novel—and to conservative businessmen and politicians a scary—idea. It was one of the big victories of Theodore’s first term. While progressives applauded Theodore, the men on Wall Street talked about making Mark Hanna the next president.

  Articles about the president’s policies competed with articles about his antics. Newspaper reporters were fascinated by “the strangest creature the White House ever held.” Theodore often went horseback riding through Rock Creek Park, a rugged natural area that runs through northwest Washington. He galloped along the trails taking potshots with his pistol at trees or stumps. Despite being guarded by the Secret Service, the president always, even in church, carried a pistol to defend himself. After all, three presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley—had been assassinated in his lifetime.

  Theodore also liked to take his White House lunch guests, who were usually government officials and diplomats, on ten- to fifteen-mile hikes along the Potomac River and in Rock Creek Park. Sometimes they hiked in freezing temperatures or in the pouring rain. On one outing the president, the French ambassador, and several other men went skinny-dipping.

  Theodore, everyone soon realized, was totally uninhibited. “You must always remember that the president is about six,” observed Cecil Spring Rice, a friend and British diplomat. Because of his behavior, some people thought the president had a drinking problem. “Theodore is never sober, only he is drunk with himself and not rum,” wrote Henry Adams, a writer who lived on Lafayette Square across from the White House.

  As the 1902 congressional races began heating up, so did labor problems in Pennsylvania, where, in May, over 140,000 coal miners walked off their jobs to start one of history’s largest labor strikes. Coal mining was dirty, hard, and dangerous work. A typical miner could work ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week, and earned just $8 to $10 a week. The men, represented by the United Mine Workers (UMW), wanted shorter workdays and higher pay. Most significantly, the UMW—the largest union in the country—wanted the owners to do something they had never done before: to agree that the union had the right to represent the miners at the bargaining table. This last point seemed to be the most loathsome to owners.

  “The coal presidents are going to settle this strike, and they will settle it in their own way,” insisted George Baer, one of the most outspoken of the mine owners. “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators,” Baer declared, “but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.”

  In past labor conflicts, the government had always sided with company owners. Just eight years earlier, at the request of railroad owners and over the objections of the Illinois governor, President Grover Cleveland sent thousands of federal troops to Chicago to force striking Pullman railroad workers back to work. But Theodore didn’t think the federal government should take sides.

  Yet as the price of coal rose from $5 to $20 a ton, the president began to worry about a “winter fuel famine.” By late September many governors were urging Theodore to do something before cold weather caused misery and death for tens of thousands of people who wouldn’t have coal to heat their homes. Some worried about riots. “Unless you end this strike,” the governor of Massachusetts warned, “the workers in the North will begin tearing down buildings for fuel. They will not stand being frozen to death.” Acting on a suggestio
n from the governor, Theodore asked the UMW president and the mine owners to meet with him in early October.

  Just getting the six businessmen and the union leader together in the same room was an accomplishment, since the owners insisted that neither the union nor any other “agitator” could represent their workers. The White House was undergoing major renovations, so the men met in a nearby town house. The president, dressed in a blue striped bathrobe, was in a wheelchair because weeks earlier while campaigning for Republican congressmen in Massachusetts, a trolley had smashed into his carriage, killing a Secret Service man and badly injuring Theodore’s leg.

  The president began the meeting with a brief statement. “The urgency and the terrible nature of the catastrophe impending requires me to use whatever influence I personally can. I appeal to your patriotism, to the spirit that sinks personal consideration and makes individual sacrifices for the general good.”

  John Mitchell, the UMW president and a former miner, immediately said he was willing to sit down with the owners to try to come to terms. If that failed, he would accept arbitration, or settling the disagreement with outside help.

  But the owners responded by calling the miners “outlaws” and “instigators of violence and crime.” The president became so annoyed with one particularly loud owner, John Markle, he later remarked: “If it wasn’t for the high office I held I would have taken him by the seat of the breeches and nape of the neck and chucked him out of that window.” The owners wouldn’t budge, so the meeting ended quickly with no agreement in sight.

  Theodore wanted the strike resolved before winter. “I could not see misery and death come to the great masses of the people in our large cities.” He decided to declare a national emergency, take control of the coal fields, and send ten thousand soldiers to operate the mines. This plan was supposedly a secret, but, as Theodore no doubt intended, it was soon leaked to the newspapers.

  When the mine owners read about the plan to seize their mines, they agreed to arbitration. The miners immediately went back to work, and soon there was plenty of coal. After several months of hearings and discussions, the five-man arbitration board decided the coal miners should receive a 10 percent pay raise. More significantly, it was the first time that a president had treated the concerns of workers equally with those of company owners. He later explained in a speech that it was important that the government not take sides in labor disputes because both sides deserved a “square deal.” Theodore’s first term as president became known as the Square Deal administration.

  After the congressional elections in November 1902, when many Republican candidates won their races largely because Theodore had settled the coal strike, the president went bear hunting in Mississippi. In the first few days no one spotted a bear. His hosts, anxious for the president to have a successful hunt, finally captured a black bear, stunned it with a blow to the head, and tied it up. When Theodore saw the bear, which was about as tall as he was and only a few pounds heavier, he wouldn’t shoot it; there was no sport in shooting a tied-up animal. He told the other men to put the bear out of its misery, and one of them killed it with a knife.

  Later, The Washington Post published a cartoon of Theodore refusing to shoot the bear. It was a popular cartoon, and the cartoonist drew many others that included fat little bears with big ears. They gave a Russian Jewish immigrant named Morris Michtom of Brooklyn, New York, an idea. Michtom, who ran a toy shop, wrote the president asking for permission to use the name Teddy for a child’s stuffed bear. “I don’t think my name will mean much to the bear business,” Theodore replied, “but you’re welcome to use it.” Michtom made a cuddly bear cub, called it “Teddy’s bear,” and sold it for $1.50. At about the same time F.A.O. Schwartz, the famous New York toy company, began importing stuffed toy bears from Germany, which then became known as Teddy bears.

  Clifford Berryman’s famous 1902 cartoon that linked Theodore and the teddy bear.

  Unlike many of his predecessors, the president took an active interest in international affairs. All “civilized and orderly powers,” he said, should “insist on the proper policing of the world.” The policing was especially important, Theodore felt, in North and South America.

  The United States already had the three-quarters-of-a-century-old Monroe Doctrine, which forbade European nations from interfering in the internal affairs of or from colonizing newly independent countries in the Americas. The president expanded that doctrine in his 1904 State of the Union Address by adding what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary: “Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendliness. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with decency in industrial and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, then it need fear no interference from the United States.” But, “chronic wrongdoing” or “general loosening of the ties of civilized society” will invite America’s intervention. If this sounds a bit vague, it was. In practical terms, it was up to American leaders to decide if their neighbors were acting “civilized” or not.

  The Pacific was another area that Theodore felt was important to the United States. He had long advocated annexing Hawaii before President McKinley did so in 1897. But about five thousand miles west of Hawaii, the Philippines was now proving to be a major problem for the president.

  A year after acquiring from Spain in 1898 the seven thousand islands that comprise the Philippines, the United States began sending tens of thousands of soldiers—some 126,000 in all—to fight Filipino nationalists who resisted American occupation just as forcibly as they had resisted Spanish occupation. American officials explained that they wanted to impose “orderly freedom” and to “teach the people of the Philippines … how to make good use of their freedom.” The United States occupied the Philippines for nearly a half century until finally granting independence in 1946.

  Critics denounced the American occupation of the Philippines as needless expansionism and imperialism. Many Americans wanted their country to remain isolated from the world’s problems. Others believed the country should acquire new territory and expand its power and influence around the world. As assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore had made it clear he was an unapologetic imperialist and expansionist. As president he had many more opportunities to exert America’s influence abroad.

  The Panama Canal, which the president considered “the great bit of work of my administration … one of the greatest bits of work that the twentieth century will see,” was one of his more controversial accomplishments. On January 22, 1903, the United States signed a treaty with Colombia to lease—for $10 million up front and $250,000 “in perpetuity”—a six-mile swath of land across the Isthmus of Panama, which at the time was part of Colombia. After the agreement had been signed, Colombia’s senate rejected it and demanded more money.

  Mad at the Colombians for trying to “bar one of the future highways of the civilization,” Theodore considered asking Congress to take the isthmus by force. While mulling over this option, he was visited on October 10 by Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a French engineer whose company had tried and failed to build a canal across the Panamanian isthmus. Bunau-Varilla told the president that, with a little help from the United States, a revolution making Panama a separate country could happen, and that the new country would readily agree to U.S. terms for a canal. Panamanians, isolated from Colombia by a mountain range, had tried many times to secede, only to be put down by the Colombian army, often with help from the U.S. Navy. Both TR and Bunau-Varilla insisted they made no specific deals in their meeting, but the president later observed that Bunau-Varilla “would have been a very dull fellow had he been unable to make such a guess.” The president had tacitly agreed to support the revolution.

  Madame Bunau-Varilla sewed together the first Panamanian flag in their New York hotel room, while her husband wrote the new country’s constitution. The Frenchman had been told by the secretary of state that three U.S. warships would arrive in Colón, a city on Panama’s Caribbean
coast, on November 2 or 3. Bunau-Varilla, whose company would earn $40 million by selling the United States its construction equipment and other assets in Panama, sent $100,000 to cohorts on the isthmus and told them to declare independence from Colombia on November 3.

  On the second of November, the USS Nashville dropped anchor in Colón and a squad of Marines marched into the city to prevent Colombian soldiers stationed there from stopping the Panamanians from declaring independence. The soldiers didn’t put up a fight. Within forty-eight hours of the November 3 declaration, Theodore officially recognized the new government of Panama. The nation’s first president declared, “The world is astounded by our heroism. Yesterday we were but the slaves of Colombia; today we are free… . President Roosevelt has made good.”

  In the spring of 1904, workers started digging the Panama Canal, which would connect the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean. When it was completed ten years later, the canal cut the distance ships had to travel from New York to San Francisco from fourteen thousand to six thousand miles. This greatly reduced the travel time between the east and west coasts for cargo, passenger, and navy ships.

  As work on the canal got under way, Theodore was preparing for the Republican National Convention. Mark Hanna, the president’s biggest obstacle to being nominated as his party’s presidential candidate, had died in February. Theodore had no trouble winning the nomination that summer and little trouble winning election that November.

  “Have swept the country by majorities which astound me,” TR wired Senator Lodge. “I have the greatest popular majority and the greatest electoral majority ever given a candidate for president,” he wrote Kermit. “My dear, I am no longer a political accident,” Theodore told Edith.