IV.

Domestic Policy

Roosevelt's entry into the White House changed politics more in mood than in substance. With his vivid personality, ceaseless activity, young family, and social glamour, he became a popular idol, a position he cultivated by careful attention to the press and a flair for the dramatic. On domestic issues he moved cautiously, probably going little further in his first term than McKinley would have done. Well-publicized prosecutions of big businesses earned him acclaim as a “trustbuster”, breaking up monopolies—and his public mediation of the anthracite coal strike in 1902 showed sympathies for labour and consumers. One issue on which he did move boldly was conservation, both by publicizing it long before any other leader and by using his presidential powers, often high-handedly, to set aside 125 million acres (about 51 million ha) of western land as national forests.

Roosevelt went further after his triumphant election in 1904. Having consolidated his position among Republicans, he won the nomination without opposition and ran on his record, which he called the Square Deal, to win an enormous victory over his colourless Democratic opponent, Alton B. Parker. Roosevelt's second term brought two legislative milestones—passage of the Hepburn Act of 1906, which strengthened the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which established the Food and Drug Administration. He later advocated further measures to deal with big business and social problems, but conservative opponents in his own party blocked those proposals. Roosevelt wielded his political power at home for the last time in 1908 by picking his friend, Secretary of War William Howard Taft, as his successor, engineering Taft's nomination and aiding his election to the presidency.