Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography

About the Author

In style and in substance, Theodore Roosevelt, who occupied the White House from 1901 to 1909, was the first modern American president. A gifted and courageous politician and a natural leader with an intuitive grasp of the value of public relations, Roosevelt employed the “bully pulpit” of the presidency to great effect as he pursued pathbreaking, transformative programs in both domestic and foreign affairs. Roosevelt's various initiatives pertaining to workers' rights, consumer protection, and restrictions on corporate behavior in the public interest were labeled the Square Deal, and they launched the process of progressive reform that was to become a central feature of American life in the twentieth century. Roosevelt also was the first—and remains the most ambitious and the most significant— environmentalist president in U.S. history. Regarding foreign policy, Roosevelt determinedly built up the U.S. Navy (particularly its battleship fleet) and brought America into the center of global diplomacy by establishing U.S. hegemony in the Caribbean, upholding U.S. interests in the western Pacific, constructing a strong partnership between the United States and Great Britain, and employing personal mediation to end one great power war and to prevent another. In the process, Roosevelt greatly enhanced the international image and stature of the United States.

The second of four children and the older of two sons, Roosevelt was born into the comfort of a prosperous, close-knit family in New York City on October 27, 1858. The young Roosevelt was educated at home by tutors. His two extended sojourns abroad and frequent visits to the countryside facilitated the development of a cosmopolitan spirit and a passionate, lifelong interest in nature that would lead him to become one of the United States' foremost authorities on natural history. Graduating from Harvard College in 1880, Roosevelt embarked on a career that over the next two decades proved varied and productive. After serving in the New York State Assembly as a Republican reformer, he spent substantial portions of 1884–1886 as a rancher and hunter in the Badlands of the Dakota Territory. From 1889 to 1895 Roosevelt held an appointment on the U.S. Civil Service Commission, following which he became president of New York City's Board of Police Commissioners. Then, from 1897 to 1900, he served, respectively, as a highly influential assistant secretary of the navy, as the heroic (and fortunate) colonel of the “Rough Riders” during the Spanish-American War, and as a dynamic governor of New York. Throughout these twenty years, Roosevelt wrote prolifically on a wide range of subjects, including U.S. history and life in the American West. The Naval War of 1812 (1882) revealed Roosevelt as a budding strategic thinker, while The Winning of the West (1889–1896), a four-volume history of the frontier from 1769 to 1807, was his most formidable and important scholarly undertaking.

Displeased with the independent conduct and reformist policies of Governor Roosevelt, New York's Republican Party boss Thomas Platt maneuvered to secure the nomination of his state's popular chief executive as President William McKinley's running mate in 1900, hoping that vice presidential obscurity would befall Roosevelt. Instead, when McKinley succumbed to an assassin's bullet on September 14, 1901, the forty-two-year-old Roosevelt became the youngest ever president in U.S. history.

President Roosevelt was a broad constructionist, believing that the president possesses a wide range of powers that are not expressly withheld from him by the U.S. Constitution. By skillfully acting in accord with this theory and also by working effectively with Congress, Roosevelt was able to build an extraordinary record of achievement in domestic and foreign policy. He immensely enjoyed his seven and one-half years as president and almost certainly would have won decisively if he had sought another term in 1908. But on the heels of his landslide victory in 1904, Roosevelt had issued an ill-considered public pledge to relinquish his office in March 1909, and he stood by that pledge.

Roosevelt's postpresidential decade was filled with adventures, political battles, and literary output. In June 1910 Roosevelt returned from a long trip to Africa, Great Britain, and continental Europe unhappy with the work of his hand-picked successor, President William Howard Taft. Eventually Roosevelt challenged Taft, unsuccessfully, for the 1912 Republican nomination. Attributing the failure of this endeavor to unscrupulous behavior by conservative Republican operatives, Roosevelt then bolted the Republicans and formed the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) Party. As the Progressive nominee, although he outpolled Taft by a wide margin and won the electoral votes of six states, Roosevelt still came in a distant second to the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who assumed the presidency in 1913. As a detractor of Wilson and an outspoken proponent of preparedness and a pro-Allies policy during World War I, Roosevelt inexorably drifted back into the Republican Party. When the United States entered the war in April 1917, Roosevelt requested but was denied the opportunity to fight at the front. His four sons did take part, and Quentin, the youngest, was killed in aerial combat over France. During these postpresidential years, Roosevelt wrote several books—most notably Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (1913) and Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914)—and innumerable magazine and newspaper articles. Notwithstanding a multitude of grand accomplishments in the realm of public service, a very active family life, a variety of recreational passions, and truly voluminous reading, Roosevelt astonishingly managed over a relatively short lifespan to write approximately thirty books, many hundreds of articles and speeches, and more than one hundred thousand letters. Roosevelt was considered a leading contender for the 1920 Republican presidential nomination at the time of his death on January 6, 1919.