Teddy Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt

Report

[pic][pic][pic][pic][pic]

Theodore Roosevelt

Icon of the American Century

[pic]

“The joy of living is his who has the heart to demand it.”

Theodore Roosevelt

executed: Magomedova Z.A.

examined: Akhmedova Z.G.

Makhachkala 2001

Contents

1. Introduction

page 3

2. Maverick in the Making , 1882 – 1901

page 3

3. Rough Rider in the White House , 1901 – 1909

page 7

4. The Restless Hunter , 1909 – 1919

page 10

5. Chronology of the Public Career of Theodore Roosevelt

page 14

6. Source

page 15

Introduction

The life of Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) was one of constant

activity, immense energy, and enduring accomplishments. As the twenty-sixth

President of the United States, Roosevelt was the wielder of the Big Stick,

the builder of the Panama Canal, an avid conservationist, and the nemesis

of the corporate trusts that threatened to monopolize American business at

the start of the century. His exploits as a Rough Rider in the Spanish-

American War and as a cowboy in the Dakota Territory were indicative of his

spirit of adventure and love of the outdoors. Reading and hunting were

lifelong passions of his; writing was a lifelong compulsion. Roosevelt

wrote more than three dozen books on topics as different as naval history

and African big game. Whatever his interest, he pursued it with

extraordinary zeal. "I always believe in going hard at everything," he

preached time and again. This was the basis for living what he called the

"strenuous life," and he exhorted it for both the individual and the

nation.

Roosevelt's engaging personality enhanced his popularity. Aided by scores

of photographers, cartoonists, and portrait artists, his features became

symbols of national recognition; mail addressed only with drawings of teeth

and spectacles arrived at the White House without delay. TR continued to be

newsworthy in retirement, especially during the historic Bull Moose

campaign of 1912, while pursuing an elusive third presidential term. He

remains relevant today. This exhibition is a retrospective look at the man

and his portraiture, whose progressive ideas about social justice,

representative democracy, and America's role as a world leader have

significantly shaped our national character.

Maverick in the Making , 1882 - 1901

Theodore Roosevelt was born on October 27, 1858, in a brownstone house

on Twentieth Street in New York City. A re-creation of the original

dwelling, now operated by the National Park Service, replicates the

tranquility of Roosevelt's earliest years. His father, Theodore Roosevelt

Sr., was a prosperous glassware merchant, and was one of the wealthy old

Knickerbocker class, whose Dutch ancestors had been living on Manhattan

Island since the 1640s. His mother, Martha Bulloch, was reputedly one of

the loveliest girls to have been born in antebellum Georgia. Together the

parents instilled in their eldest son a strong sense of family loyalty and

civic duty, values that Roosevelt would himself practice, and would preach

from the bully pulpit all of his adult life.

Unfortunately the affluence to which the young Theodore grew

accustomed could do little to improve the state of his fragile health. He

was a sickly, underweight child, hindered by poor eyesight. Far worse,

however, were the life threatening attacks of asthma he had to endure until

early adulthood. To strengthen his constitution, he lifted dumbbells and

exercised in a room of the house converted into a gymnasium. He took boxing

lessons to defend himself and to test his competitive spirit. From an early

age he never lacked energy or the will to improve himself physically and

mentally. He was a voracious reader and writer; his childhood diaries

reveal much about his interests and the quality of his expanding mind.

Natural science, ornithology, and hunting were early hobbies of his, which

became lifelong.

In the fall of 1876, Roosevelt entered Harvard University. By the time

he graduated magna cum laude, he was engaged to be married to a beautiful

young lady named Alice Lee. The wedding took place on Roosevelt's twenty-

second birthday. Amid the intense happiness he experienced during his first

year of marriage, he laid the foundations of his historic public career. "I

rose like a rocket," he said years later. Ironically, when he chartered his

own path for public office--the White House in 1912--he failed bitterly.

When others had selected him--as they did for the New York Assembly in

1881, for the governorship in 1898, and for the vice presidency in 1900--

his election was almost a foregone conclusion. Politics aside, Roosevelt

shaped and molded his life as much as any person could possibly do. He

could not control fate, however. On Valentine's Day, 1884, his mother died

of typhoid fever and his wife died of Bright's disease, two days after

giving birth to a daughter, Alice Lee. Amidst this personal trauma,

Theodore Roosevelt was on the verge of becoming a national presence.

Between 1882 and 1884, Theodore Roosevelt represented the Twenty-first

District of New York in the state legislative assembly in Albany. An 1881

campaign broadside noted that the young Republican candidate was

"conspicuous for his honesty and integrity," qualities not taken for

granted in a city run by self-serving machine politicians. This was the

start of Roosevelt's long career as a political reformer.

Roosevelt's political alliance with Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts

began in 1884, when the two were delegates to the Republican National

Convention in Chicago. In time, both men would become leaders of the

Republican Party. Their extensive mutual correspondence is an insightful

record of shared interests and American idealism at the turn of the

twentieth century. After serving in the United States House of

Representatives for six years, Lodge became a senator in 1893 and retained

his seat for the rest of his life. Like Roosevelt, Lodge was an advocate of

civil service reform (he recommended Roosevelt to be a commissioner in

1889), a strong navy, the Panama Canal, and pure food and drug legislation.

A specialist in foreign affairs, Lodge acted as one of Roosevelt's

principal advisers during his presidency. Yet Lodge did not support many of

Roosevelt's progressive reforms—women's suffrage, for instance—and he

refused to endorse his friend in the Bull Moose campaign of 1912.

Love of adventure and the great outdoors, especially in the West, were

the bonds that sealed the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and

Frederic Remington. "I wish I were with you out among the sage brush, the

great brittle cottonwoods, and the sharply-channeled barren buttes,"

Roosevelt wrote to the western artist in 1897 from Washington. After the

death of his wife Alice Lee in 1884, Roosevelt moved temporarily to the Bad

Lands in the Dakota Territory, where he owned two cattle ranches. In 1888,

Century Magazine published a series of articles about the West written by

Roosevelt and illustrated by Remington. In a May article, Roosevelt told

the story of his daring capture of three thieves who had stolen a boat from

his Elkhorn Ranch. Remington depicted their capture in this painting.

Jacob Riis was a valuable friend and source of information for

Roosevelt when he became a New York City police commissioner in the spring

of 1895. As a police reporter for the New York Evening Sun, Riis understood

the reforms needed within the police department, as well as the evils in

the slums, which he frequented to gather stories. Riis was successful in

awakening public awareness to the plight of New York's tenement population,

especially the children, in several books, including his classic How the

Other Half Lives. In 1904 Riis published a biography of his good friend,

with whom he used to walk the streets of New York, titled Theodore

Roosevelt: The Citizen.

I have "developed a playmate in the shape of Dr. Wood of the Army, an

Apache campaigner and graduate of Harvard, two years later than my class,"

Roosevelt wrote from Washington in 1897. "Last Sunday he fairly walked me

down in the course of a scramble home from Cabin John Bridge down the other

side of the Potomac over the cliffs." Theodore Roosevelt and Leonard Wood

liked each other from their first meeting that spring. Both were robust and

athletic, and both, from the vantage points of their respective

jobs—Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the navy, and Wood as an army

officer (and the physician of President and Mrs. William McKinley)—took a

belligerent attitude toward Spain with respect to Cuba. When Roosevelt was

offered the chance to raise a regiment of volunteer cavalry, he in turn

recruited the more experienced Wood to be the regiment's colonel and

commander. After the war in Cuba, Wood remained as military governor of

Страницы: 1, 2, 3



Реклама
В соцсетях
рефераты скачать рефераты скачать рефераты скачать рефераты скачать рефераты скачать рефераты скачать рефераты скачать