词条 | Roosevelt, Theodore |
释义 | Roosevelt, Theodore president of United States Introduction bynames Teddy Roosevelt and TR born October 27, 1858, New York, New York, U.S. died January 6, 1919, Oyster Bay, New York ![]() The early years Roosevelt was the second of four children born into a long-established, socially prominent family of Dutch and English ancestry; his mother, Martha Bulloch of Georgia, came from a wealthy, slave-owning plantation family. In frail health as a boy, Roosevelt was educated by private tutors. From boyhood, he displayed intense, wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. He graduated from Harvard College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, in 1880. He then studied briefly at Columbia Law School but soon turned to writing and politics as a career. In 1880 he married Alice Hathaway Lee, by whom he had one daughter, Alice (Longworth, Alice Roosevelt). After his first wife's death, in 1886 he married Edith Kermit Carow (Edith Roosevelt (Roosevelt, Edith)), with whom he lived for the rest of his life at Sagamore Hill, an estate near Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York. They had five children: Theodore, Jr., Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin. ![]() ![]() ![]() On his return, the Republican (Republican Party) bosses in New York tapped Roosevelt to run for governor, despite their doubts about his political loyalty. Elected in 1898, he became an energetic reformer, removing corrupt officials and enacting legislation to regulate corporations and the civil service. His actions irked the party's bosses so much that they conspired to get rid of him by drafting him for the Republican vice presidential nomination in 1900, assuming that his would be a largely ceremonial role. ![]() From what he called the presidency's “bully pulpit,” Roosevelt gave speeches aimed at raising public consciousness about the nation's role in world politics, the need to control the trusts that dominated the economy, the regulation of railroads, and the impact of political corruption. He appointed young, college-educated men to administrative positions. But active as he was, he was cautious in his approach to domestic affairs. Roosevelt recognized that he had become president by accident, and he wanted above all to be elected in 1904. Likewise, as sensitive as he was to popular discontent about big business and political machines, he knew that conservative Republicans who were bitterly opposed to all reforms controlled both houses of Congress. Roosevelt focused his activities on foreign affairs and used his executive power to address problems of business and labour and the conservation of natural resources. Above all, Roosevelt relished the power of the office and viewed the presidency as an outlet for his unbounded energy. He was a proud and fervent nationalist who willingly bucked the passive Jeffersonian tradition of fearing the rise of a strong chief executive and a powerful central government. “I believe in a strong executive; I believe in power,” he wrote to British historian Sir George Otto Trevelyan. “While President, I have been President, emphatically; I have used every ounce of power there was in the office. … I do not believe that any President ever had as thoroughly good a time as I have had, or has ever enjoyed himself as much.” The Square Deal ![]() Also in 1902 Roosevelt intervened in the anthracite coal strike when it threatened to cut off heating fuel for homes, schools, and hospitals. The president publicly asked representatives of capital and labour to meet in the White House and accept his mediation. He also talked about calling in the army to run the mines, and he got Wall Street investment houses to threaten to withhold credit to the coal companies and dump their stocks. The combination of tactics worked to end the strike and gain a modest pay hike for the miners. This was the first time that a president had publicly intervened in a labour dispute at least implicitly on the side of workers. Roosevelt characterized his actions as striving toward a “Square Deal” between capital and labour, and those words became his campaign slogan in the 1904 election. ![]() ![]() Foreign policy Roosevelt believed that nations, like individuals, should pursue the strenuous life and do their part to maintain peace and order, and he believed that “civilized” nations had a responsibility for stewardship of “barbarous” ones. He knew that taking on the Philippine Islands (Philippines) as an American colony after the Spanish-American War had ended America's isolation from international power politics—a development that he welcomed. Every year he asked for bigger appropriations for the army and navy. Congress cut back on his requests, but by the end of his presidency he had built the U.S. Navy (United States Navy, The) into a major force at sea and reorganized the army along efficient, modern lines. Several times during Roosevelt's first years in office, European powers threatened to intervene in Latin America (Latin America, history of), ostensibly to collect debts owed them by weak governments there. To meet such threats, he framed a policy statement in 1904 that became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (see primary source document: Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (Theodore Roosevelt: Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine)). It stated that the United States would not only bar outside intervention in Latin American affairs but would also police the area and guarantee that countries there met their international obligations. In 1905, without congressional approval, Roosevelt forced the Dominican Republic to install an American “economic advisor,” who was in reality the country's financial director. Quoting an African proverb, Roosevelt claimed that the right way to conduct foreign policy was to “speak softly and carry a big stick (Big Stick Policy).” Roosevelt resorted to big-stick diplomacy most conspicuously in 1903, when he helped Panama to secede from Colombia and gave the United States a Canal Zone. Construction began at once on the Panama Canal, which Roosevelt visited in 1906, the first president to leave the country while in office. He considered the construction of the canal, a symbol of the triumph of American determination and technological know-how, his greatest accomplishment as president. As he later boasted in his autobiography, “I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me.” Other examples of wielding the big stick came in 1906 when Roosevelt occupied and set up a military protectorate in Cuba and when he put pressure on Canada in a boundary dispute in Alaska. ![]() During his second term Roosevelt increasingly feared a general European war. He saw British and U.S. interests as nearly identical, and he was strongly inclined to support Britain behind the scenes in diplomatic controversies. In secret instructions to the U.S. envoys to the Algeciras Conference in 1906, Roosevelt told them to maintain formal American noninvolvement in European affairs but to do nothing that would imperil existing Franco-British understandings, the maintenance of which was “to the best interests of the United States.” Despite his bow toward noninvolvement, Roosevelt had broken with the traditional position of isolation from affairs outside the Western Hemisphere. At Algeciras, U.S. representatives had attended a strictly European diplomatic conference, and their actions favoured Britain and France over Germany. Last years as president The end of Roosevelt's presidency was tempestuous. From his bully pulpit, he crusaded against “race suicide,” prompted by his alarm at falling birth rates among white Americans, and he tried to get the country to adopt a simplified system of spelling. Especially after a financial panic in 1907, his already strained relations with Republican conservatives in Congress degenerated into a spiteful stalemate that blocked any further domestic reforms. Roosevelt also moved precipitously and high-handedly to punish a regiment of some 160 African American soldiers, some of whom had allegedly engaged in a riot in Brownsville (Brownsville Affair), Texas, in which a man was shot and killed. Although no one was ever indicted and a trial was never held, Roosevelt assumed all were guilty and issued a dishonourable discharge to every member of the group, depriving them of all benefits; many of the soldiers were close to retirement and several held the Medal of Honor. When Congress decried the president's actions Roosevelt replied, “The only reason I didn't have them hung was because I could not find out which ones … did the shooting.” This incident, along with his establishment of independent agencies within the executive branch and his bypassing of Congress and expanded use of executive orders to set aside public lands beyond the reach of the public, is why some historians see in Roosevelt's presidency the seeds of abuse that flowered in the administrations of later 20th-century presidents. Roosevelt's term ended in March 1909, just four months after his 50th birthday. Later years ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Since the Progressive Party had managed to elect few candidates to office, Roosevelt knew that it was doomed, and he kept it alive only to bargain for his return to the Republicans. In the meantime, he wrote his autobiography and went on an expedition into the Brazilian jungle, where he contracted a near-fatal illness. When World War I broke out in 1914, he became a fierce partisan of the Allied cause. Although he had some slight hope for the 1916 Republican nomination, he was ready to support almost any candidate who opposed Wilson; he abandoned the Progressives to support the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes (Hughes, Charles Evans), who lost by a narrow margin. After the United States entered the war his anger at Wilson boiled over when his offer to lead a division to France was rejected. His four sons served in combat; two were wounded, and the youngest, Quentin, was killed when his airplane was shot down. By 1918 Roosevelt's support of the war and his harsh attacks on Wilson reconciled Republican conservatives to him, and he was the odds-on favourite for the 1920 nomination. But he died in early January 1919, less than three months after his 60th birthday. For additional writings by Roosevelt, see The Monroe Doctrine and National Honor (Theodore Roosevelt: The Monroe Doctrine and the National Honor) and False Sentimentality About the Indians (Theodore Roosevelt: False Sentimentality About the Indians). Cabinet of President Theodore Roosevelt Cabinet of President Theodore RooseveltThe table provides a list of cabinet members in the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt. Cabinet of President Theodore Roosevelt Additional Reading Roosevelt's 2,000 published works include several books and hundreds of articles on history, politics, travel, and natural history; many of them are collected in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, memorial ed. 24 vol., (1923–26), which also includes the most comprehensive collection of his more than 150,000 personal letters. Among his books, reflecting his wide range of interests, are The Naval War of 1812 (1882), Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885), Thomas Hart Benton (1886), Essays on Practical Politics (1888), the four-volume The Winning of the West (1889–96), The Strenuous Life (1901), Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (1913), History as Literature and Other Essays (1913), and A Book Lover's Holidays in the Open (1916). A superb collection of his more important letters appears in Elting E. Morison (compiler and ed.), The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 8 vol. (1951–54). A Bully Father: Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children (1995), shows his affection for his offspring.Biographies include Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979); William H. Harbaugh, The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, new rev. ed. (1975); and John Milton Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (1983). Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, rev. ed. (1956), although brilliantly written, is perhaps prejudiced against its subject. Comprehensive works on his early life include Carleton Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt (1958), covering the years 1858 to 1886; and David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback (1981).Particularly brilliant short interpretations are G. Wallace Chessman, Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Power (1969); and John Morton Blum, The Republican Roosevelt, 2nd ed. (1977). David H. Burton, The Learned Presidency: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson (1988), advances the concept that the philosophies of these three presidents helped transform the passive presidencies of the 19th century into the dynamic presidencies of the 20th century. Other special studies of value are George E. Mowry, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement (1946); Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (1956); G. Wallace Chessman, Governor Theodore Roosevelt (1965); Frederick W. Marks III, Velvet on Iron: The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt (1979); Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1991); and H. Paul Jeffers, Commissioner Roosevelt: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and the New York City Police, 1895–1897 (1994), and Colonel Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt Goes to War, 1897–1898 (1996), covering Roosevelt's participation in the Spanish-American War.General histories of Roosevelt's times are George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900–1912 (1958); and Richard H. Collin, Theodore Roosevelt: Culture, Diplomacy, and Expansion: A New View of American Imperialism (1985). |
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