Theodore Roosevelt

Roosevelt pursued an activist foreign policy from the beginning of his presidency, in keeping with his longtime motto “Speak softly and carry a big stick”. Sometimes he moved quietly and delicately behind the scenes, as when he fended off possible German intervention in Venezuela in 1902 and when he worked to preserve the European balance of power in a series of crises between 1904 and 1906. At other times he acted loudly and bluntly, as when he abetted the 1903 revolution in Panama that led to United States acquisition of territory for the Panama Canal, and when he proclaimed that the United States had “police power” over Latin America in the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904). He used both public and private channels in his mediation of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905—which won him the Nobel Peace Prize, the first to go to an American—and when he sent a delegation to the Algeciras Conference of 1906 to help settle a conflict between Germany and France over the control of Morocco.

Throughout his presidency Roosevelt laboured to strengthen and modernize the armed forces. His secretaries of war, Elihu Root and Taft, introduced the general staff system to the army and streamlined reserve methods. The navy remained a special concern with Roosevelt, and he harried Congress, with partial success, to build more battleships and cruisers. In 1907 he sent America's battle fleet on a voyage around the world, both to impress Japan during a controversy over exclusion of Oriental immigrants from the United States and to display the nation's new naval prowess. At the same time, he dispatched Taft to negotiate agreements that appeased Japanese interests in Dongbei and helped defuse the dispute over immigration. Roosevelt left a record of strong diplomacy usually tempered by sensitivity and restraint, and he made his last public appearance as president in February 1909, when he reviewed the fleet returning from its world cruise.

Stepping down from office at the age of 50, younger than most other presidents have been when first elected, Roosevelt went abroad for more than a year, first on a hunting and nature-study safari to Africa and then on a spectacular tour of the European capitals. On his return home in the summer of 1910 he quickly became embroiled in factional fights among Republicans and slowly but steadily became estranged from his successor. Roosevelt finally broke with Taft both because he could not abide the new president's inept handling of the split between progressive and conservative Republicans and because he resented his own loss of power. Assuming command of the progressives and advocating farther-reaching economic and social reforms, Roosevelt contested the 1912 Republican presidential nomination, winning most of the primaries but losing at the convention to the same party control machinery he had earlier used to nominate Taft. Charging that he had been cheated of the nomination, Roosevelt left the Republicans to run as the candidate of the hastily formed Progressive party. When he was wounded in an assassination attempt in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (October 1912), he made light of it, saying, “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose”. Thereafter, the Progressives were nicknamed the Bull Moose party. Roosevelt outpolled Taft—a tribute to his abiding popularity—but his hopes of winning and establishing a new major party were thwarted. The Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson, who also appealed to progressives, carried the election.

After his 1912 defeat, Roosevelt spent the last six years of his life in mounting frustration, first over Wilson's enactment of much of his reform programme, then over American neutrality after the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and finally over his own failure to be allowed to raise a division to fight in France after the United States entered the war in 1917. Although he continued to advocate domestic reforms, he increasingly devoted himself to calling for a strong pro-Allied foreign policy and greater military preparedness. Roosevelt was gradually reconciled with his former party opponents, including Taft. He disbanded the Progressives in 1916 to back the Republican nominee against Wilson, and it seemed certain that he would be the party's candidate in 1920. His four sons all fought in World War I, and the death of the youngest, Quentin, in combat as an aviator in August 1918, was a heavy blow. Roosevelt's health deteriorated during the final years of his life, partly as a result of tropical fevers contracted on an expedition to the Amazon region of Brazil in 1914. He died at his home in Oyster Bay, New York, on January 6, 1919.