Theodore Roosevelt: 26th President of the United States

On 2 September 1901, speaking at the Minnesota State Fair, the vice president of the United States told a crowd that the country should speak softly and carry a big stick. Twelve days later William McKinley was dead of an assassin’s bullet and Theodore Roosevelt, aged forty-two, was president.

He is the youngest person ever to hold the office. He is the first American awarded a Nobel Prize. He put roughly 230 million acres of the United States under federal protection, broke the largest railroad combination in the country, and sent the navy around the world to prove it could go. He also signed an order discharging three companies of Black soldiers without trial, and he wrote about race in terms that his admirers generally leave out.

This profile is maintained as a reference and was last updated on 25 August 2026.

Theodore Roosevelt timeline: key dates from 1858 to 1919

Sixty years, eleven public offices and one bullet he declined to be stopped by. The dates below are the load-bearing ones; each is expanded in the sections that follow.

Theodore Roosevelt’s early life: asthma, and the answer he built for it

Theodore Roosevelt was born on 27 October 1858 in a brownstone on East 20th Street in Manhattan, the second of four children of Theodore Roosevelt Senior, a glass importer and philanthropist from an old Dutch New York family, and Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, a Georgian whose brothers served the Confederacy.

Theodore Roosevelt was a severely asthmatic child. The attacks were frequent enough that his father would take him out in a carriage at night to force air into him, and for years the boy could not reliably sleep lying down. The response his father prescribed, and which he adopted with a completeness that shaped everything afterwards, was physical: a home gymnasium, boxing lessons, relentless outdoor exertion. What began as a treatment for a lung condition became a philosophy he would later publish under the title The Strenuous Life.

He was also, from childhood, a naturalist. He kept specimens, learned taxidermy at thirteen, and at one point maintained what he called the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History in his bedroom. That interest never left him. The president who created the Forest Service was the same boy who catalogued birds, and it is worth resisting the temptation to treat his conservation record as a political conversion rather than a lifelong preoccupation.

Harvard, marriage, and the day the light went out

Theodore Roosevelt entered Harvard in 1876 and graduated in 1880, having begun a serious history of the naval war of 1812 while still an undergraduate. On his twenty-second birthday, 27 October 1880, he married Alice Hathaway Lee.

Four years later, on 14 February 1884, his wife died of undiagnosed kidney disease two days after giving birth to their daughter, and his mother died of typhoid fever in the same house on the same day. He drew a large cross in his diary and wrote beneath it that the light had gone out of his life. He handed the baby to his sister, and he did not speak or write about Alice again in any substantial way for the rest of his life. His autobiography does not mention her.

The Dakota years

He went west. From 1884 to 1886 Theodore Roosevelt ran cattle in the Badlands of what is now North Dakota, at the Maltese Cross and Elkhorn ranches, wearing a buckskin shirt and being taken for a soft eastern gentleman until he stopped being taken for one. He served as a deputy sheriff and once tracked three boat thieves for days across frozen country, reading Tolstoy while guarding them.

The winter of 1886 and 1887 destroyed most of the cattle in the region and much of his investment with it. He came back east, married his childhood friend Edith Kermit Carow in London in December 1886, and re-entered politics. He also came back with a conviction about the fragility of American land that no amount of reading would have produced.

Theodore Roosevelt’s political career before the presidency

Before he was president he held six public positions in twenty years, at city, state and federal level, and he was thrown out of or resigned from most of them on his own initiative.

Theodore Roosevelt was elected to the New York State Assembly at twenty-three, the youngest member in the chamber, and made a name attacking corruption in the state judiciary. He served on the United States Civil Service Commission from 1889 to 1895 under two presidents of opposite parties, enforcing merit hiring against a patronage system that both parties liked.

Police commissioner in New York

In 1895 he became president of the New York City Police Commission and did the thing he is still remembered for there: he walked the beat at night, unannounced, to catch officers asleep or drinking. He also enforced the Sunday liquor law that his own party’s voters hated, on the ground that a law on the books is a law, which cost the Republicans an election and taught him something about the limits of righteousness in office.

In 1897 President McKinley made him Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He spent a year lobbying for a bigger fleet, and when war with Spain came in 1898 he resigned to go and fight in it, which was not a metaphor.

The Rough Riders and the Spanish-American War

Theodore Roosevelt raised the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry, a regiment of Ivy League athletes, western cowboys, Native American scouts and New York policemen that the press immediately named the Rough Riders. He was its lieutenant colonel and then its colonel.

On 1 July 1898 the regiment took part in the assault on the San Juan Heights outside Santiago de Cuba, charging up Kettle Hill on horseback and then on foot under heavy fire. It was the making of him politically. He was a national figure within weeks and Governor of New York within a year.

The Medal of Honor, 102 years late

Theodore Roosevelt wanted the Medal of Honor for that day and said so, loudly, to anyone in the War Department who would listen. He did not get it. The National Archives has published the file on why, and the short answer is that he made enemies of the men who would have had to approve it, including the Secretary of War he had criticised in print.

President Bill Clinton awarded it to him on 16 January 2001, 102 years after the charge and 82 years after his death. His family accepted it on his behalf. He and his son Theodore Roosevelt Junior, decorated for Normandy, are the only father and son both to hold the medal.

Governor, vice president, and the accident that made him president

As Governor of New York from 1899 to 1900 he taxed corporate franchises and refused to take instruction from the state Republican machine, which found him uncontrollable. The machine’s solution was to promote him into the vice presidency, an office with no power, in 1900. Mark Hanna, McKinley’s manager, is said to have asked his colleagues whether they realised there would be only one life between that madman and the presidency.

McKinley was shot in Buffalo on 6 September 1901 and died on 14 September. Roosevelt was sworn in that day at a friend’s house in Buffalo, aged forty-two years and ten months, and remains the youngest person ever to hold the office. He was elected in his own right in 1904 by the largest popular margin any presidential candidate had then received, and on election night he announced that he would not be a candidate again in 1908. He kept that promise, honouring the two-term limit George Washington had established by custom and no law then required, and spent the rest of his life regretting it.

The Square Deal: Theodore Roosevelt’s domestic policy

Theodore Roosevelt called his domestic programme the Square Deal, and its premise was that the federal government should stand between capital and labour rather than behind either. It was a genuinely new proposition in 1901, and the legislation that came out of it is why the Progressive Era has his name attached to it.

The 1902 coal strike, and a president who took a side by refusing to

In the autumn of 1902 the anthracite coal miners of Pennsylvania had been on strike for months and the northeast was facing a winter without heat. Every previous president confronted with a major strike had sent troops to break it. Theodore Roosevelt summoned both sides to the White House, and when the operators refused to negotiate he let it be known that he was prepared to seize the mines and run them with the army.

They settled. The miners got a nine-hour day and a ten per cent rise, the operators got no recognition of the union, and an arbitration commission decided the terms. The precedent mattered more than the terms: a president had intervened in a labour dispute without automatically siding with the owners, and had treated a union as a party rather than a conspiracy.

Theodore Roosevelt and the trusts

The trust-busting reputation is half earned. In 1902 his attorney general sued the Northern Securities Company, the railroad holding company assembled by J. P. Morgan, James J. Hill and E. H. Harriman to control rail traffic across the northwest. Morgan came to the White House and suggested that his man and the president’s man could fix it up, which Roosevelt later cited as the precise attitude he was legislating against. The Supreme Court ordered the company dissolved in 1904.

Theodore Roosevelt brought about forty antitrust actions in seven years, against beef, oil, tobacco and the railroads. But he did not think large corporations were bad in themselves, and he said so repeatedly. He distinguished between good trusts and bad ones, and what he actually wanted was a federal regulator strong enough to supervise them, not a country of small firms. His successor William Howard Taft brought nearly twice as many antitrust suits in half the time and gets almost none of the credit, which is a reasonable measure of how much of this was reputation.

Conservation: the 230 million acres

This is the part of the record that is not disputed by anyone.

The National Park Service puts the total at nearly 230 million acres of public land protected during his presidency: 5 national parks, 18 national monuments, 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reservations and 4 national game preserves. He created the United States Forest Service in 1905 and put Gifford Pinchot in charge of it.

The Antiquities Act and the tool he left behind

The instrument that made most of it possible was the Antiquities Act, which he signed on 8 June 1906. It lets a president protect land of historic or scientific interest by proclamation, without waiting for Congress. Roosevelt used it eighteen times, including for the Grand Canyon, which Congress had refused to protect and which he designated a national monument by declaring it scientifically interesting.

That tool is still in daily use and still contested. The same statute has been used by later presidents to create monuments and by others to try to shrink them, including the ninety per cent reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in 2026. Whether a president who can create a monument by proclamation can also abolish one is a question the Antiquities Act does not answer, and Roosevelt, who wrote nothing about it, is on both sides of the citation.

Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy: the big stick, Panama and a Nobel Prize

The phrase came first. Speaking at the Minnesota State Fair on 2 September 1901, twelve days before he became president, he offered what he called a West African proverb: speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far. He then spent seven years demonstrating that he meant the second half at least as much as the first.

Panama

Theodore Roosevelt wanted a canal. Colombia, which then held the isthmus, rejected the treaty terms the United States offered in 1903. A Panamanian independence movement rose weeks later, an American warship was conveniently positioned to prevent Colombian troops from landing, and the new republic signed a canal treaty with Washington within a fortnight. The State Department’s own account does not soften this sequence. Construction ran from 1904 and the canal opened in 1914. Roosevelt later told an audience at Berkeley that he took the isthmus, and the sentence has been quoted against the United States in Latin America ever since.

The Roosevelt Corollary

In his annual message of 1904 he added a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: if a state in the western hemisphere could not keep order or pay its debts, the United States would exercise an international police power and intervene rather than let a European creditor do it. The doctrine as he restated it underwrote decades of American intervention in the Caribbean and Central America, most of it after he left office and much of it under presidents who invoked him.

The Nobel Peace Prize

Against that, the same president mediated an end to the Russo-Japanese War. He brought delegations from both empires to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August 1905, and the treaty signed in September 1905 ended a conflict that had killed well over a hundred thousand people. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for it in 1906, the first American awarded a Nobel Prize in any category, and he gave the money away.

The two records are not reconcilable into a single verdict, and this page does not attempt it. He was a genuine and effective peacemaker between great powers and a straightforward imperialist toward small ones, and the distinction he drew between the two was explicitly racial.

The Great White Fleet

In December 1907 Theodore Roosevelt sent sixteen battleships, hulls painted white, on a circumnavigation of the globe. Congress had not funded the return leg. He announced that he had enough money to get the fleet to the Pacific and Congress could decide whether it came home, which is the big stick used domestically. The fleet returned in February 1909, two weeks before he left office.

Theodore Roosevelt’s speeches and best-known quotations

Theodore Roosevelt published around forty books and gave thousands of speeches, and he is the most quotable president after Lincoln, which is a problem, because a great deal of what circulates under his name he never said.

The most durable passage is from Citizenship in a Republic, delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris on 23 April 1910, seven weeks after he came out of Africa. It is universally known as the Man in the Arena. The credit, he told the French, belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who errs and comes short again and again, and who at the worst fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

He was out of office, out of the country and about to blow up his own party when he said it.

The 1912 Bull Moose campaign and the speech he gave with a bullet in him

Theodore Roosevelt came home in 1910 convinced that Taft had abandoned the programme. At Osawatomie, Kansas, on 31 August 1910 he set out what he called the New Nationalism: a federal government strong enough to regulate corporations nationally, an income tax, an inheritance tax, workers’ compensation, limits on political money. It is one of the most consequential speeches in American political history and most of it was enacted within thirty years, largely by his cousin’s wife’s husband.

Denied the Republican nomination in 1912 by a convention he believed was stolen from him, he walked out and formed the Progressive Party. Asked how he felt, he said he was as strong as a bull moose, and the party had its name.

Milwaukee, 14 October 1912

Outside a hotel in Milwaukee that evening, a man named John Flammang Schrank shot him in the chest at close range. The bullet passed through a folded fifty-page speech manuscript and a steel spectacle case before entering his chest and lodging against a rib. Roosevelt coughed into his hand, found no blood, concluded the lung was not pierced, and refused to go to hospital.

He went to the auditorium and spoke for roughly ninety minutes. He opened by telling the audience that he had just been shot, that it took more than that to kill a bull moose, and that he would ask them to be quiet. The bloodstained manuscript is in the collections. The bullet stayed in him for the rest of his life.

He finished second, ahead of the sitting Republican president, which remains the strongest third-party performance in modern American history, and he split the Republican vote so thoroughly that Woodrow Wilson won with under forty-two per cent.

Theodore Roosevelt’s controversies: Brownsville, race and empire

Three weeks after a shooting affray in Brownsville, Texas, in August 1906, in which one man was killed and the evidence pointed unreliably at Black soldiers stationed nearby, Roosevelt signed an executive order on 5 November 1906 discharging without honour the entire complement of three companies of the all-Black 25th Infantry Regiment, some 170 men, without a trial and without individual findings. Several were Medal of Honor holders. Several had more than twenty years of service. The discharges were reviewed and overturned in 1972, by which time one of the men was still alive.

He had also, on 16 October 1901, invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, the first time a Black American had been entertained there as a guest of the president. The southern press response was violent enough that he never repeated it. Both facts are his.

On empire he was consistent and unapologetic. He supported the annexation of the Philippines and the war that followed it, in which American forces killed civilians on a large scale, and he wrote about what he called the expansion of civilised races in terms that were mainstream in his class and time and are indefensible now. He also, at the same time, appointed more Black officials in the South than his predecessors, prosecuted peonage cases, and was denounced by segregationists for it. None of that cancels the rest. It is simply the record.

The River of Doubt and the last years

In 1913 and 1914, at fifty-five, Theodore Roosevelt joined the Brazilian explorer Cândido Rondon on the descent of an uncharted Amazon tributary called the Rio da Dúvida, the River of Doubt. He gashed his leg, developed a severe infection and a fever near 105 degrees, and at one point told his son to leave him behind. He came out of it two dozen kilos lighter and never fully recovered his health. The river is now the Rio Roosevelt.

His youngest son Quentin, a pilot, was shot down and killed over France in July 1918. Friends said the loss finished him. He died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill, his house at Oyster Bay on Long Island, in the early hours of 6 January 1919, aged sixty. His son Archie cabled the family that the old lion was dead. His vice president’s successor, Thomas Marshall, remarked that death had to take him sleeping, because awake there would have been a fight.

Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy and historical impact

He is on Mount Rushmore, between Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, the only one of the four who was alive within living memory of the sculptor. Sagamore Hill, his birthplace on East 20th Street and the North Dakota badlands where he ranched are all administered by the National Park Service, an agency created seven years after his death out of the system he built.

The presidency Theodore Roosevelt left was a different institution from the one he inherited. He used the office as what he called a bully pulpit, meaning a splendid platform, and he established that a president may act unless the Constitution forbids it rather than only where it permits. Every activist presidency since, of either party, runs on that theory. So does every objection to one.

His domestic programme was largely enacted by others: the income tax, the regulation of food and drugs, the federal supervision of corporations, and eventually the whole architecture of the New Deal, built by a distant cousin who married his niece. His conservation record is the part that is physically still standing, and it is the reason a man who shot and stuffed a great many animals is claimed by the environmental movement.

He also built a tennis court at the White House and ran what the press called his tennis cabinet, a habit of settling policy while exercising that later presidents have adapted to their own tastes. The teddy bear is named after him, from a 1902 hunt in Mississippi at which he refused to shoot a bear that had been tied to a tree for him. It is the smallest item in the record and the one most people can name, and there is something apt in a legacy that includes 230 million protected acres, a canal taken by force, a Nobel Prize, a discharged regiment and a soft toy.

Last updated

This profile was last reviewed on 25 August 2026. The biographical record and the primary sources cited here are stable. Figures for protected acreage follow the National Park Service; the Brownsville discharge count varies between 167 and 170 depending on the source, and the higher figure used above is the one given in contemporary documents held by the Library of Congress.

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