Teddy Roosevelt Born: Trust-Buster and Conservation Champion

Theodore Roosevelt became president at 42, after an assassin shot William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in September 1901. McKinley died eight days later. Roosevelt was the youngest man to hold the office, and he used it with a vigor that redefined the presidency's relationship to corporate power, natural resources, and the American public. Born in New York City on October 27, 1858, into a wealthy Dutch-American family, Roosevelt was a sickly, asthmatic child who built himself up through exercise and outdoor activity. He attended Harvard, published his first book at 23, served in the New York State Assembly, ranched cattle in the Dakota Badlands after his wife and mother died on the same day in the same house, ran the New York City police department, served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. He was 39. His political career had barely started. As president, he busted trusts, filing antitrust suits against J.P. Morgan's Northern Securities Company and dozens of other corporate monopolies. He mediated the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, becoming the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He launched construction of the Panama Canal after engineering Panama's independence from Colombia, a maneuver that was effective and ethically questionable. He set aside 230 million acres of public land as national forests, parks, and monuments, more than all his predecessors combined. He created the U.S. Forest Service and pushed the Antiquities Act through Congress, which allowed presidents to designate national monuments without congressional approval. On October 14, 1912, during a campaign speech in Milwaukee as the Progressive "Bull Moose" candidate, he was shot in the chest by a saloon owner named John Schrank. The bullet lodged against his rib, slowed by his steel eyeglass case and a folded fifty-page speech in his breast pocket. He gave the speech anyway, speaking for nearly an hour with blood seeping through his shirt, before going to the hospital. He died on January 6, 1919, at 60.