Michael L. Cooper

by Theodore Roosevelt

  Amid all of the celebration, President Roosevelt made what many observers believe was his biggest political blunder. “Under no circumstances,” he announced, “will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.” The announcement shocked Theodore’s supporters. George Washington had started the tradition of serving only two terms, and the president felt he was upholding that tradition. But most people thought that completing McKinley’s term didn’t count and that Theodore was eligible to run for another term in 1908.

  His friends worried the announcement would hamper the president’s effectiveness in the following four years, but Theodore wasn’t.

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  “TOMORROW I SHALL come into office in my own right,” Theodore crowed the day before his inauguration. “Then watch out for me!”

  The president had his sights on problems both at home and abroad. For nearly a year he had been watching the war between Japan and Russia. It had started in early 1904 when Japan launched a surprise attack on Port Arthur, a new Russian seaport in southern China. Japan was a newly developing industrial nation that wanted to be dominant in the Far East, pretty much like Theodore wanted the United States to be dominant in the Americas. But Russia, already one of the world’s major powers, had been aggressively expanding its presence and influence with Japan’s neighbors, China and Korea. Japan went to war to stop Russia’s expansionism.

  Just after Theodore’s inauguration in March 1905, the Japanese won a two-month-long battle in Manchuria, which is part of China, that cost the Russians 100,000 dead or captured soldiers. Then in May, Japan’s navy ambushed the Russian navy at Tsushima Strait, between the Korean peninsula and the islands of Japan. The Japanese lost only three ships and 117 men, while destroying or capturing over two dozen Russian ships and killing or capturing an estimated 10,000 sailors.

  “I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory,” the president wrote to Kermit, who was at Groton. Theodore hoped Japan would check Russia’s imperialist ambitions, but he also knew that Japan had ambitions of its own. “The Japs interest me and I like them,” TR wrote to Cecil Spring Rice. “I am perfectly well aware that if they win out it may possibly mean a struggle between them and us in the future.”

  Theodore had been offering to mediate a peace agreement for a year when Japan, fresh from its naval victory, but short of money to continue paying for the war, accepted his offer. The president invited negotiators from both sides to meet in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to work out an agreement. “I have led the horses to water,” he remarked, “but Heaven only knows whether they will drink or start kicking one another beside the trough.”

  The negotiations soon bogged down. The Russians wouldn’t agree to two of Japan’s demands. The Japanese wanted an indemnity, or monetary settlement, and they wanted all of Sakhalin Island, which lies just north of Japan near the Russian mainland. They already occupied the southern half of the long, narrow island, which was rich in oil, coal, and other national resources. When the talks stalled, the president quietly went over the negotiators’ heads to their leaders, Japan’s Emperor Mutsuhito and Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II. He got the two nations to agree to divide Sakahlin Island. Then the president urged the Russians to pay some indemnity, but they refused. He turned to the Japanese and persuaded them to drop their demand for money by pointing out that prolonging the war would be much more costly than losing the indemnity.

  In early September, Japan and Russia formalized their peace agreement by signing the Treaty of Portsmouth. “It’s a mighty good thing for Russia and a mighty good thing for Japan,” President Roosevelt boasted, and “a mighty good thing for me too.” The leaders of France, Great Britain, and Germany all congratulated the president and in Washington crowds cheered his success. The following year, 1906, Theodore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; he was the first American ever to receive that honor.

  That summer, while the Roosevelts were visiting Sagamore Hill, there had been a security scare when a young man with a gun drove his carriage up to the gate and told the Secret Service guards he was there to marry Alice. There was a scuffle, and the man was taken away. The guards told the president that the intruder seemed mentally disturbed. “Of course he’s insane,” Theodore responded. “He wants to marry Alice.”

  Theodore didn’t worry so much about the sanity of the man who did marry Alice in early 1907, but there were other concerns. His twenty-two-year- old daughter was marrying a rich Ohio congressman named Nick Longworth, who was fifteen years older than she. Edith and Theodore didn’t approve of the age difference. They had recently dropped a friend who had married a woman twenty years younger; a “child wife” the Roosevelts called her. Another concern was Nick’s reputation for drinking and chasing women, which must have made Theodore and Edith wonder if he would be another Elliott. But Alice’s parents knew they couldn’t keep their headstrong daughter from marrying Nick.

  The president and his daughter, Alice, 1902.

  Before her wedding a reporter asked Alice what she needed in the way of wedding presents. “Trinkets. Preferably diamond trinkets,” she replied. They weren’t all diamond, but there were a lot of expensive gifts. The Emperor of China sent earrings that were set with pearls and precious stones, the German Kaiser sent a diamond bracelet, and the Cuban government sent a string of pearls valued at $25,000. The bride received so many expensive gifts they needed a special room with an around-the-clock guard.

  After her cousin Eleanor’s wedding to Franklin Roosevelt a few months earlier Alice had quipped, “Father always wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral,” because the wedding guests paid more attention to the talkative president than to the newlyweds. But at her ceremony Alice’s father was not himself.

  On February 17, hundreds of guests in the White House looked on as the Marine Band played the “Wedding March” and Theodore escorted his daughter down the aisle. The bride wore a white satin dress trimmed with old lace from her mother’s wedding dress. She looked a lot like the first Alice, whose funeral had been twenty-two years and a day earlier. Instead of flashing his famous smile, Theodore looked grim and uncomfortable. No one knows for sure why he appeared upset. Perhaps it was because his daughter reminded him of her mother. Theodore never talked about his first wife after her death, even with his daughter, nor did he ever refer to her in any of his writings.

  At the reception afterward Edith startled guests who heard her tell Alice, “I want you to know that I’m glad to see you leave. You have never been anything else but trouble.” While most people thought she was joking, Alice wasn’t so sure. But she didn’t let it ruin the party as she borrowed a Marine’s ceremonial sword to cut the wedding cake.

  After the wedding the president prepared for a fight with Congress over several new regulatory laws. Many citizens wanted their government to provide more services and to regulate the economy to make life more orderly and stable. These people were part of a broad and diverse movement called Progressivism. It had started years earlier among the growing middle class in Chicago, New York, Boston, and other cities. Sick of what Theodore labeled the “unrestricted and ill-regulated individualism” of corporations, progressives were electing new congressmen and senators. Theodore, although more moderate than many, was the most visible and politically skilled progressive. Yet the older congressmen, with their years of experience and the support of big business, remained powerful and fought regulation of nearly every kind.

  The president’s legislative agenda got an unexpected boost that spring when the socialist author Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel about the awful working conditions in the meat packing industry. But it wasn’t the description of downtrodden workers that alarmed the public; it was the stomach-churning detail about how the sausages and canned meats sold to American families were made with diseased cattle, rats, and rat feces, or how the occasional worker who fell into a vat of boiling animal fat was processed and sold to housewives as “Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard.”


  Government officials, at Theodore’s behest, had recently conducted an investigation of the industry, and he knew conditions were even worse than Sinclair described. “The information given me seems to show conclusively that as now carried on the business is both a menace to health and an outrage to decency,” he wrote to the chairman of the House Agricultural Committee, urging “drastic and thoroughgoing” legislation. The public disgust spurred Congress to pass two bills the president supported. The Meat Inspection Act, which required federal inspection of packing plants, and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which established the Food and Drug Administration and gave the government authority to regulate foods sold across state lines.

  The biggest fight between the president and conservative congressmen was over the Hepburn Act, a law giving the Interstate Commerce Commission authority to set “just and reasonable rates” for railroad shipping and to examine company financial records. The act would expand the ICC’s regulatory power not only over railroads, but over other businesses as well. The “government ought not to conduct the business of the country,” the president explained. “It ought to regulate it so that it shall be conducted in the interests of the public.”

  The railroads, the richest and most powerful companies in the nation, wanted to run their companies privately and their own way. They and their conservative allies in Congress fought regulation tooth and nail, while the president worked to organize bipartisan support. “The rate bill fight is dragging slowly along,” he wrote Kermit. “I am now trying to see if I cannot get it through in the form I want by the aid of fifteen or twenty Republicans added to most of the Democrats.” He complained that the Republicans wanted to take too much out of the bill, while Democrats wanted to put too much in. It was the president’s persistent effort that got Congress to pass the Hepburn Act, which became law in the summer of 1906.

  The president summed up his accomplishments in a letter to a friend. “It has been a great session. The railroad rate bill, meat inspection bill & pure food bill, taken together, mark a noteworthy advance in the policy of securing Federal supervision and control of corporations.” One historian called the Hepburn Act “an historic event—the most important, perhaps, in Theodore Roosevelt’s public career—and a not insignificant one in our national history.”

  The Wall Street businessmen who had contributed over $2 million in 1904 to help elect Theodore felt betrayed. Henry Clay Frick, a wealthy industrialist, complained, “We bought the son of a bitch and then he didn’t stay bought.”

  Another noteworthy accomplishment during Theodore’s second term was conservation. The president fought to protect as much of the country’s natural resources as possible. “We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; that is not so,” the president pointed out in his State of the Union Address at the end of 1907. “As a people we have the right and duty,” he said, “to protect ourselves and our children against the wasteful development of our national resources.” Indeed, Theodore considered conservation “the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life.”

  More than any other president before him, Theodore relied on experts to help run the government. One of those experts was Gifford Pinchot, one of America’s first professional foresters. He had graduated from Yale University and studied forest management in France before going to work for the U.S. Department of Interior in 1898. Seven years later Theodore appointed him the first chief of the newly created National Forest Service. Pinchot, one of few men to have floored the president during a boxing match, was Theodore’s closest advisor on conservation.

  The three previous presidents had placed 50 million acres into the National Forest Reserve, which was created in 1891 to protect forests from rapacious lumber companies. Theodore, acting on Pinchot’s advice, placed 150 million acres into the national reserve before Congress, responding to protests from lumber companies and landowners, restricted the president’s power to add to the reserve.

  Few presidents before or since can match Theodore’s record on the preservation and conservation of America’s national resources. That record includes persuading Congress to create five new national parks such as Crater Lake in Oregon and Mesa Verde in Colorado. After Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906, which gives the president the power to protect areas of scientific or historical interests, primarily Native American ruins, by classifying them as national monuments, Theodore used that power to preserve unique natural areas that Congress was unwilling to protect. He saved Arizona’s Petrified Forest from souvenir hunters and the Grand Canyon from mining companies by designating them national monuments. Later, Congress made both national parks. The president created a total of eighteen national monuments. Theodore, said Robert La Follette, a progressive Wisconsin senator who later became a political rival, “did many notable things, but that his greatest work was inspiring and actually beginning a world movement for staying territorial waste.”

  While the president was saving national resources and regulating business, he also had his hands full regulating his sons. Quentin, who friends called “Q,” was eight years old and attended public school, just as his older brothers had before going up to Groton. Theodore rarely whipped his children, even though at the time it was a common type of discipline. But he related to Kermit that Quentin had left “school without permission, and told untruths about it. I had to give him a severe whipping.” Kermit was hardly a role model for his younger brother. At Groton, he was fighting with the headmaster, sneaking away from campus, drinking, and smoking opium. Ted, who was attending Harvard, was on academic probation. Plus, he had been roughed up and arrested after one of his friends struck a police officer. Senator Lodge had intervened to get Ted off.

  The president’s biggest challenge the following year was the economy. In March 1907, a major bank failed and the stock market declined 50 percent, plunging the country into a depression. Risky speculation and cutthroat competition among big banks was responsible, but Theodore’s Wall Street critics said his new regulations had caused the trouble. The president responded in a speech by charging that “certain malefactors of great wealth” wanted “freedom from all restraint which will permit every unscrupulous wrongdoer to do what he wishes unchecked provided he had enough money.”

  When more banks failed that autumn and the economy looked as though it would get much worse, the president made a deal with his old foe, J. P. Morgan. A large coal and iron company in Tennessee teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. If it failed, it might cause banks and other businesses to fail, too. Morgan, who already owned many coal and iron properties, agreed to buy the company to save it from bankruptcy if the president promised not to prosecute him under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Theodore agreed. Morgan purchased the company at a bargain-basement price. Critics said Theodore, who had trouble balancing his own checkbook, had been duped.

  Needless to say, Theodore didn’t agree. “I am absolutely certain,” he wrote Kermit, “that what I have done is right and ultimately will be of benefit to the country.” He later insisted that “the result justified my judgment.” The depression didn’t get worse, but the criticism continued. Conservatives still blamed the economy’s problems on his regulations, while progressives blamed him for making under-the-table deals with robber barons.

  Some people were angry at the president, but he was a master at maintaining his popularity with the majority of Americans. Theodore distracted himself and the public from the troubled economy by sending the navy’s new battleships around the world. Officially, the global cruise was a training mission, but it was also the largest display of naval power in history. The idea was to “speak softly and carry a big stick,” an expression that had won him thunderous applause during a speech in Chicago in 1903. It meant that the nation should quietly pursue its interests, but be able to defend those interests if challenged.

  “The Great White Fleet” consisted of sixteen battleships, dozens of smaller support craft, and eighteen thous
and men. It got its nickname in the press because the ships had all been painted white, probably because it’s the color of the internationally recognized flag of truce and indicated the navy’s peaceful purpose. The fleet steamed out of Hampton Roads, Virginia, in December 1907 to begin a fourteen-month, forty-six-thousand-mile cruise around South America’s Cape Horn, across the Pacific Ocean, though the Sea of Japan, into the Mediterranean Sea, and across the Atlantic Ocean back to Virginia. Theodore, watching from his presidential yacht the Mayflower, was as excited as a six-year-old. “Did you ever see such a fleet? Isn’t it magnificent? Oughtn’t we all feel proud?”

  The president hoped the attention-getting voyage would not only advertise America’s military strength but also encourage Congress to appropriate more money to build more warships. At first, Congress had refused even to approve money to pay for the Great White Fleet’s mission. But the president told the legislators he had the money to send the fleet halfway around the world. If Congress wanted the fleet back, then it would have to appropriate more money.

  After the ships disappeared over the horizon, the Mayflower cruised back up the Potomac River to Washington, where the president began to plan for the 1908 Republican National Convention in Chicago. Ironically, Theodore spent his first term making sure he would win his party’s nomination and his second term making sure he wouldn’t.

  The president, as far back as 1905, felt that William Howard Taft should be his successor. After Root stepped down as secretary of war in 1904, Theodore had appointed Taft. “Taft is a splendid fellow,” TR wrote Ted, “and will be an aid and comfort in every way.”

  People called the secretary “Big Bill” because he weighed over three hundred pounds, which was the subject of endless jokes. Upon hearing that Taft had been on a twenty-five-mile horseback ride, Elihu Root had asked, “How is the horse?” But Big Bill laughed off the jokes. Part of his appeal was his good nature. One person described him as “a huge pan of sweet milk.”