125 Years Ago: Teddy Roosevelt Becomes President
On September 14, 1901, in a private library in Buffalo, New York, a 42-year-old man raised his right hand and became the youngest president in American history.
Seven months earlier, the Republican Party bosses had maneuvered him into the vice presidency for the express purpose of getting him out of their way in New York. One of them, Senator Mark Hanna, is said to have warned party leaders as they made the pick, "Don't any of you realize that there is only one life between this madman and the presidency?" When one rogue anarchist's bullet found President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, Texas, that September, Hanna's nightmare came a reality. Riding the funeral train home, he reportedly put it more bluntly still: "Now look, that damned cowboy is President of the United States."
The cowboy's name was Theodore Roosevelt. A hundred and twenty-five years later, his ascension and legacy are worth remembering in full.
A House Divided
Roosevelt was never built for the role he would come to embody. Born in 1858 to a wealthy New York family, Roosevelt was a sickly, asthmatic child who willed himself into a different kind of body through gymnastics, boxing, and what he later called "the strenuous life." But the more important inheritance was not physical. His father, Theodore Sr., was a New York Unionist during the Civil War. His mother, Martha "Mittie" Bulloch, was the daughter of a wealthy Georgia planter family. Mittie was, in the words of the National Park Service's own account of her family home, "an unreconstructed confederate until the day she died."
Two of her brothers wore Confederate uniforms: James Dunwoody Bulloch, a former US Navy officer who became the Confederacy's chief naval procurement agent in Liverpool and personally arranged the construction of the commerce raider CSS Alabama, and Irvine Bulloch, who served as a midshipman aboard that same ship and, by family account, fired its last shot before it went down off Cherbourg. A third, half-brother Daniel Stewart Elliott through Mittie's mother's first marriage, died of tuberculosis while serving in the Confederate Army. Out of deference to his wife, Theodore Sr. never enlisted to fight them, a decision his son carried complicated feelings about his entire life. Mittie, for her part, sent care packages of medicine, food, and supplies south through Confederate agents in New York throughout the war. Roosevelt, caught in the middle of it all, was a Union boy from the nursery onward: he and his older sister reenacted naval battles on a bridge in Central Park, he as the Union ship and she playing the Confederate blockade-runner. Kneeling for evening prayers with a visiting Southern aunt, the young Teddy Roosevelt once asked God to "grind the southern troops to powder."
At Harvard he studied zoology and composition and fell in love with Alice Hathaway Lee, whom he married in 1880. At age 23, he won a seat in the New York State Assembly, and it was there, touring tenement factories with the labor leader Samuel Gompers, that he first saw firsthand the conditions industrial workers actually lived under. Then, on February 14, 1884, in the same house, Roosevelt's wife died of kidney disease and his mother died of typhoid fever, mere hours apart. He wrote a single line in his diary that day: an X, and beneath it, "the light has gone out of my life."
Roosevelt left his infant daughter with his sister and fled to the Dakota Territory to run cattle and chase down thieves as a deputy sheriff. He came back east in 1886 a harder man, ran for Mayor of New York City and lost, and spent the next decade climbing from Civil Service Commissioner under two different presidents to a reformer who terrorized corrupt cops as head of the New York City Police Board, and in 1897 he was appointed by President McKinley himself as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. It was Roosevelt himself who cabled Commodore Dewey to prepare the Asiatic Squadron for war before the fighting with Spain had even formally begun.
Just months after his mother and wife died, his uncles Bulloch had already visited him once. Both men "came under assumed names," Roosevelt would later write in his own autobiography, "as they were among the Confederates who were at that time exempted from the amnesty." Both settled permanently in Liverpool rather than face the legal exposure of returning home, and in 1869, when the Roosevelt family toured Europe, young Theodore was reunited with them there. He would later write that his mother used "to talk to me as a little shaver about ships, ships, ships and the fighting of ships, until they sank into the depths of my soul." That was the seed, by his own account, of a lifelong fascination with naval history and naval power that would shape the rest of his public life.
When war came with Spain, Roosevelt resigned his desk job and organized the volunteer cavalry that became known as the Rough Riders: cowboys, Ivy Leaguers, sheriffs, and Native American troopers drawn from every part of the country. He served under Major General Joseph Wheeler, a former Confederate lieutenant general 33 years earlier, and one of the finest cavalry commanders the South ever produced. At the Battle of Las Guasimas, caught up in the old rhythm of a cavalry charge, Wheeler was heard shouting to his men that they had "the damned Yankees on the run again," forgetting, for one thrilling second, which war he was even fighting. Roosevelt led the charge up San Juan Heights, the event that finally made him a figure of national renown. He called Cuba the great day of his life.
The people of New York elected him governor that November.
“That Damned Cowboy"
Governor Roosevelt was too much of a reformer for the New York GOP political machine that had backed him. The party's solution was simple: Kick him upstairs to the vice presidency, a job with no power and no future, and let him disappear. Roosevelt himself sensed the trap and didn’t want it. And yet, he took it anyway, campaigned across twenty-four states for the McKinley ticket, and settled into what everyone assumed would be four ceremonial years. He had been in office six months when McKinley was shot. Believing the president would recover, Roosevelt returned to a family vacation in the Adirondacks. When gangrene set in and the news finally reached him on a mountain trail, he raced through the night by wagon and train to reach Buffalo. He was sworn in that afternoon in the front parlor of a friend's house on Delaware Avenue, the simplest inauguration in American history, with no inaugural address and no parade. The Republican party bosses who had engineered his political exile now had to watch the exact outcome they feared most.
The Steward of the Public Welfare
As president, Theodore Roosevelt believed, as he would later put it, that the executive was "the steward of the public welfare", answerable not to a party, a region, or the men who financed campaigns, but to the nation as a single, indivisible public.
In 1902, when 147,000 anthracite coal miners struck against owners who refused even to negotiate, Roosevelt did something no president had ever done before. He summoned both sides to Washington and threatened to have the United States Army seize and operate the mines if the owners would not submit to arbitration. They did. The settlement gave miners a 10 percent raise and cut their workday from ten hours to nine. His Justice Department went further, filing more than 40 antitrust suits and breaking up the Northern Securities railroad monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act. He built the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903 to give the federal government a permanent voice on working conditions, with a Bureau of Corporations inside it empowered to investigate and publicize corporate misconduct. He pushed through the Elkins Act (1903) and the Hepburn Act (1906) to stop railroads from strangling farmers and small shippers with secret rebates and to give the Interstate Commerce Commission real rate-setting power for the first time. In 1902 he signed the Newlands Reclamation Act, funding irrigation and dam projects across the arid West out of the sale of public land — the ancestor of the entire twentieth-century project of settling the American interior. He signed the Expedition Act of 1903 to speed federal antitrust litigation through the courts, and the Employers' Liability Act of 1906, the government's first attempt to make railroads answerable for injuries to their own workers, later revised in 1908 after the courts struck the original down. And after reading Upton Sinclair's account of the meatpacking industry, he signed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act within the same year, 1906.
His conservation record is, by raw acreage, the largest of any president before or since: roughly 230 million acres of public land protected during his time in office, including 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, five national parks, and 18 national monuments designated under the Antiquities Act he signed into law in 1906. With the same authority he protected the Grand Canyon from private mining claims before Congress got around to making it a park. Beyond the country's borders, he negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War at Portsmouth in 1905, becoming the first American ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and sent the sixteen battleships of the Great White Fleet around the globe to demonstrate, without firing a shot, that American power was no longer a regional matter. In 1904, the country gave him a popular mandate: 56.4 percent of the popular vote and 336 electoral votes to his opponent's 140, the largest landslide margin in eighty years.
The Big Stick
Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most militantly heroic men ever to hold the presidency.
In "The Strenuous Life," Roosevelt warned that a nation content with "ignoble ease" would rot, and that failing to act as "some stronger and more manful race" abroad was "cowardly." As Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897 and 1898, he pushed for war with Spain before his own superiors were ready for it, and once war was declared, he went to fight in it personally. The war he helped bring about did not end with Cuba. The United States annexed the Philippines afterward, and when Filipino revolutionaries who had expected independence rose up against their new American rulers instead, Roosevelt was among the war's most committed defenders as it dragged on for years.
As president, Theodore Roosevelt proved what American hard power could accomplish when wielded with purpose. When Britain, Germany, and Italy blockaded Venezuela's ports in 1902 to force repayment of debts, Roosevelt at first waved the crisis off, only to watch Germany use the opening to shell the Venezuelan coast and seize its navy. Roosevelt never made that mistake again. Two years later, in his 1904 annual message to Congress, he issued the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, declaring that "chronic wrongdoing" by any Western Hemisphere nation might require the United States to exercise "an international police power" over its own hemisphere, precisely so that European powers would never again have a pretext to plant themselves in America's own backyard.
He put this doctrine to immediate use by taking over customs collection in the Dominican Republic to head off a second European intervention before it could start. In 1903 he backed Panamanian separatists against Colombia, recognized the new Panamanian government within days, and secured the treaty rights to build the canal that, more than a century later, still moves roughly a fifth of all US maritime trade and remains one of the most consequential engineering and geopolitical achievements of the entire twentieth century. In 1905 he personally mediated an end to the Russo-Japanese War at Portsmouth, stopping a conflict that had already killed well over 100,000 men, and became the first American ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for it. In 1906 he sent his own delegation to the Algeciras Conference in Spain to help defuse a crisis between France and Germany over Morocco, the first time an American president had inserted the country into the internal balance-of-power politics of Europe itself. And running beneath all of it was a naval buildup that, by the time he left office, had made the United States Navy the second-largest battle fleet on Earth, the fleet the Great White Fleet's world cruise existed to put on display, sailing around the globe for over a year, because Roosevelt believed visible strength, not just the willingness to use it, was what kept the peace.
Blue and Gray
As a young man of twenty-six, writing for the North American Review in 1885, Roosevelt savaged a Cleveland administration appointee for being too close to former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, comparing Davis's public character to Benedict Arnold's. Davis, retired in Mississippi, wrote back a furious letter accusing him of "libelous and false" slander; Roosevelt's reply was short, and told the former Confederate president he saw no reason for the two of them to correspond further. A year later, in a biography of Thomas Hart Benton, Roosevelt called Davis one of the men who had "engineered and guided for their own ends" the secession crisis, earning "a place among the arch-traitors in our annals." One biographer who reviewed Roosevelt's papers concluded he privately went on regarding Davis as an "unhung traitor" for years afterward.
Yet in that very same 1885 essay, Roosevelt drew the line that would define his public position for the rest of his life, and it ran between the men who led the rebellion and the men who fought in its ranks. "The mass of the Northern people now feel no bitterness whatever toward the gallant ex-Confederates of the South," he wrote. "We readily acknowledge that they honestly thought their cause just, and we have nothing but praise for their heroic constancy and brilliant courage." He welcomed the ordinary Confederate soldier home as a "prodigal son," in his phrase, while reserving contempt for the men "praising the most obnoxious of the companions who led him astray."
That distinction widened, gradually, the longer he was in public life. In October 1905, as president, Roosevelt traveled to Roswell, Georgia, his mother's hometown, and told the crowd there, "Men and women, don't you think I have the ancestral right to claim a proud kinship with those who showed their devotion to duty as they saw the duty, whether they wore the blue or the gray?" Two years later, on October 21, 1907, he went further still. Campaigning through Mississippi and standing at the Vicksburg courthouse, Jefferson Davis's own adopted political home, flanked that day by former Confederate General Stephen Dill Lee, the mature President Theodore Roosevelt, having once compared Jefferson Davis to Benedict Arnold, now offered warm, complimentary remarks about the Confederacy's only president. As the local paper covering the visit put it, generations later, Roosevelt "was a wise politician... but in Davis' hometown he made complimentary remarks about him." Jefferson Davis's surviving daughter, Margaret Howell Davis Hayes, wrote to the White House five days afterward to thank him, telling Roosevelt she admired his "rare courage" and recalling that her father had kept fond memories of Roosevelt's own mother and uncle, and had recognized Roosevelt's own leadership qualities "even in his college days." Roosevelt wrote back to thank her for her kindness.
Whether Vicksburg reflected a genuine private softening or a masterful piece of political diplomacy in the home state of the man he'd once called a traitor is a fair question, and the honest answer is probably some of both. In 1916, looking back on his own uncles, he called them "valiant and high-minded men." And in a 1915 address on Americanism, laying out his case that ethnic origin should count for nothing against national loyalty, he reached for his own era's most obvious proof, naming Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Farragut alongside their ethnic ancestries (English, German, Irish, Spanish) and then, in the same breath, without qualification, adding: "This was just as true of Lee and of Stonewall Jackson and of Beauregard." Theodore Roosevelt masterfully put Union and Confederate generals in the same sentence, as men who had each been, whatever flag they served under, simply Americans.
An American & Nothing Else
As early as an 1894 essay called "True Americanism," Roosevelt argued that citizenship had to be judged "on his worth as a man, without regard to the land from which his forefathers came." By 1915, addressing the Knights of Columbus in New York at the height of the debate over immigration and the looming world war, he made the case in its sharpest form: "There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else." In the same breath he insisted that any native-born citizen who discriminated against Catholics, Jews, or the foreign-born on the basis of ancestry was equally un-American, and that a naturalized citizen "heartily and singly loyal to this Republic" was "just as good an American as any one else," full stop. He built his own cabinet from men of English, French, German, Irish, and Dutch descent, and picked General George Goethals (the son of Dutch immigrants) to build the Panama Canal precisely because Goethals was, in Roosevelt's words, "just plain United States." And in the same 1915 speech in which Roosevelt pled for equal treatment "without regard to creed" also called for deporting any immigrant who failed to learn English.
Weeks into his presidency, in October 1901, he invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House. This was the first time in American history that any Black American had been received in the White House as a dinner guest rather than a daytime visitor. Despite Southern uproar, Roosevelt continued to consult Black leaders privately, and he appointed Dr. William Crum as customs collector in Charleston over furious opposition. He told a friend once that a man deserved to be judged "strictly on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less than he shows himself worthy to have."
The New Nationalism
Roosevelt left the White House in 1909 still only fifty years old, and watched his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, let the reform momentum stall. By 1910 he'd had enough. In a speech at Osawatomie, Kansas that August, shaped heavily by Herbert Croly's 1909 book The Promise of American Life, he laid out the platform he called the New Nationalism: a government that put the nation's welfare before any sectional or private interest, that treated human welfare as more important than property claims, and that refused to let the country's economic life be run by whichever trust or combination happened to have captured it. "No man is above the law and no man is below it," he told the crowd, "nor do we ask any man's permission when we require him to obey it."
When the Republican Party establishment blocked his 1912 comeback exactly as it had once tried to sideline him into the vice presidency, Roosevelt walked out and founded the Progressive Party, nicknamed the Bull Moose Party after his own boast that he felt "fit as a bull moose." Its platform, adopted that August, was the single most comprehensive reform document any major American party had put forward to that date. In full, the party pledged itself to: equal suffrage for women; the prohibition of child labor; a minimum wage for working women; the prohibition of night work for women; an 8-hour day for women and young workers, and one day of rest in seven for all wage earners; a system of national social insurance to protect against sickness, unemployment, and old age; a National Health Service consolidating the government's existing medical agencies; workers' compensation for industrial death and injury, shifting the cost from broken families onto industry itself; public disclosure of wages, hours, and workplace injury data; direct election of United States Senators; direct primaries and a presidential preference primary; the initiative, referendum, and recall; strict limits on and full public disclosure of campaign contributions; mandatory registration of lobbyists and public recording of committee votes in Congress; a constitutional amendment authorizing a federal income tax; a graduated inheritance tax; a federal securities commission to police the stock markets; and farm relief and rural credit programs. Nearly all of it (the income tax, women's suffrage, direct election of Senators, Social Security's forerunner in social insurance, the Federal Trade Commission, child labor law, the 8-hour day) became the settled law of the land within the following three decades.
On the campaign trail that October, a delusional gunman shot him in the chest outside a Milwaukee hotel. Roosevelt refused treatment, walked into the auditorium with blood soaking through his shirt, and opened his remarks with the line that has outlived every other sentence from that campaign:
"I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose."
He spoke for 90 minutes with the bullet still in his chest. It stayed there for the rest of his life. He split the Republican vote that November and handed the presidency to the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson.
The Rival
The rivalry between Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson was one of the most consequential personal and political conflicts in American history. John Milton Cooper Jr., in his dual biography The Warrior and the Priest, observed that the two men "became, if not close friends, warm and mutually admiring acquaintances" in their early years. They first met in Baltimore in 1896, speaking together in support of the municipal reform movement, and became frequent correspondents on academic and political subjects. Roosevelt visited Wilson at Princeton, while Wilson spent part of a weekend with Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill. Wilson so delighted in Roosevelt's becoming president that he considered switching to become a Republican, while Roosevelt, for his part, sent admiring regards as Wilson became President of Princeton University in 1902. For most of the years Roosevelt occupied the White House (1901–1909) and Wilson led Princeton (until 1910), they remained supportive acquaintances.
The rupture came in 1912. When Roosevelt, having broken with his handpicked successor William Howard Taft, launched a third-party bid as the Progressive Party's "Bull Moose" candidate, he and Wilson found themselves competing for the progressive vote. The real contest of that election, historians have noted, was between Roosevelt and Wilson for control of the progressive majority. Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" called for a strong national government to regulate business and insure the welfare of the people. Wilson's rival philosophy, the "New Freedom," concentrated on individualism and the reestablishment of old values, favoring a smaller federal government that could keep bad businesses in check while allowing the country to grow. Though both men favored an activist federal government, Wilson was more sympathetic to states' rights and shied away from federal planning and programs.
Despite the intensity of the contest, Roosevelt maintained a measure of personal restraint. In an August 17, 1912 campaign speech in Milwaukee (delivered just after he had been shot in the chest by a would-be assassin) Roosevelt acknowledged that Wilson had "seen fit to attack me," but declared he would not respond in kind, insisting he spoke of Wilson "with no mind of bitterness." After losing the election (Wilson won 435 electoral votes to Roosevelt's 88) Roosevelt graciously telegraphed his congratulations: "The American people…have conferred upon you the highest honor in their gift. I congratulate you thereon."
In June 1914, campaigning for Progressive candidates, Roosevelt attacked Wilson's economic and trust policies, saying Wilson "has done precisely and exactly nothing about the trusts." And yet, he maintained a conditional willingness to support the administration. In September 1914, writing in Outlook magazine, Roosevelt urged Americans to support Wilson's administration "as long as the policy upheld the honor and interests of our Nation."
Foreign policy, however, would finally drive the two men apart. When World War I erupted in Europe, Wilson pursued a policy of neutrality, leaving Roosevelt as the country's leading advocate of military preparedness and, eventually, war with Germany. On May 10, 1915, less than a week after the sinking of the Lusitania killed 128 Americans, Wilson gave a speech in Philadelphia in which he declared: "There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right." For Roosevelt, who believed that German militarism threatened democratic civilization and that American honor demanded a forceful response, Wilson's words were unforgivable. In a June 17, 1915 letter to Viscount Lee, Roosevelt expressed being "disgusted with… pacifists, and with President Wilson in particular for his statement about being 'too proud to fight.'" By April 1916, his private correspondence had turned openly hostile. In a letter to WW Sewall, he declared: "What a dreadful creature Wilson is! I cannot believe our people have grown so yellow as to stand for him."
The 1916 presidential campaign brought Roosevelt's fury into full public view. Wilson ran for reelection on the slogan "He kept us out of war," a phrase Roosevelt found beneath contempt. In an October 10, 1916 press statement, Roosevelt scathingly labeled Wilson a "coward," thundering that "in actual reality…war has been creeping nearer and nearer until it stares at us…and we face it without policy, plan, purpose or preparation." The final rupture came on January 22, 1917, when Wilson addressed the Senate with his vision of a "peace without victory." Roosevelt denounced the speech as "profoundly immoral" and quipped that "peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight."
When Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917, a temporary thaw occurred. On April 10, Roosevelt visited Wilson at the White House to congratulate him on his war address. The meeting, according to contemporary accounts, was "though cold at first, they soon become friendly" in demeanor. Roosevelt formally asked to raise a volunteer regiment to fight in France, a chance to relive his Rough Rider glory. Wilson refused, believing that such a regiment would "contribute practically nothing to the strength of the Allied armies" and would "seriously interfere with the carrying out of the chief and most immediately important purposes contemplated by legislation." Roosevelt, who had already selected eighteen officers and begun actively recruiting volunteers, was incandescent with rage. In a June 11, 1917 letter to Oric Bates, he unloaded his bitterness: "If Mr. Wilson had been able to rise above the cheapest kind of party politics, I would be over myself. My four sons are going."
Wilson had run against Roosevelt's 1912 New Nationalism with the New Freedom: a smaller, restrained federal government, hostile to bigness itself, trusting competition rather than regulation to keep corporations honest. For most of his first term, he governed that way. Then two things happened that pushed him, however reluctantly, onto Roosevelt's ground instead of his own. First, facing reelection in 1916 and needing to win over the voters Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign had organized four years earlier, Wilson spent that year signing the measures that the Progressive platform had called for: a Federal Trade Commission to police corporate conduct, a federal child labor law, a federal workers' compensation act for government employees, the Adamson Act mandating an eight-hour day for interstate railroad workers, and a Federal Farm Loan Act extending credit to farmers. Progressive Republicans in Congress openly credited Roosevelt's platform as the source for Wilson's signature.
The second was the World War, and it did more to prove Roosevelt's argument than any single speech ever could have. To mobilize the country after April 1917, Wilson's administration built the War Industries Board under Bernard Baruch that decided, in the words of one historian's account, "what got made, from what materials, in what quantities, at what price, and in what order of priority" for the entire national economy. Wilson also established the War Labor Board to manage every major labor dispute in the country, the Food Administration under Herbert Hoover directing what Americans grew and ate, and, on December 26, 1917, an outright nationalization of the nation's entire private railroad system, run for the next two years by Wilson's own Treasury Secretary as a public utility. The legal authority for that seizure rested on the same regulatory foundation that President Roosevelt had built with the Hepburn Act's grant of rate-setting power to the Interstate Commerce Commission. Wilson had first campaigned against the idea that the federal government should run the economy, but by the end of his second term, the Wilson administration was running the railroads, the food supply, and the factories, because the war had made Roosevelt's argument for him: A nation's welfare sometimes cannot wait for the market to sort itself out.
The Last Years
His son Quentin, an Army pilot, was shot down and killed over France in the final months of the First World War. Roosevelt, who had begged Wilson without success for a combat command of his own at 59, never fully recovered from the loss. He died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill on January 6, 1919, at sixty years old. Vice President Thomas Marshall said it best:
"Death had to take him sleeping, for if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight."
Two months later, his surviving son, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., organized the Paris meeting of American servicemen that founded the American Legion, carrying the family's instinct for organized public service into the next generation, even though the elder Roosevelt did not live to see it.
Following Teddy’s death, Woodrow Wilson sent a personal cable to Roosevelt's widow, Edith, asking her to "accept my heartfelt sympathy on the death of your distinguished husband, the news of which shocked me very much." More notably, Wilson issued an official presidential proclamation ordering flags flown at half-staff for thirty days. In it, Wilson praised Roosevelt's "strenuous devotion" and "watchful care," and in a line that must have seemed richly ironic to those who knew the depths of their feud, Wilson credited Roosevelt with having "awakened the nation to the dangers of private control which lurked in our financial and industrial systems. It was by thus arresting the attention and stimulating the purpose of the country that he opened the way for subsequent necessary and beneficent reforms."
Why Roosevelt Still Matters
It would be easy to file Roosevelt away as just another face on Mount Rushmore, four tons of granite and nothing more urgent. But that would miss his true legacy, and it would miss what made him unusual even among reformers of his own era, in both directions at once: no other president did more to make the federal government the guarantor of ordinary people's welfare, and few did more to make American power something the rest of the world had to reckon with by force if necessary. Roosevelt believed that no hyphen, no racial ancestry, no old regional loyalty should stand between a citizen and the single flag he answers to. The monopolies he tore down have modern heirs in the financial and technology corporations that now shape more of American life than most governors or senators do. The stewardship he claimed for the presidency, that the government answers to the whole public or it answers to no one, is exactly the standard the New Nationalists of America hold the government to today.
In fact, one hundred and twenty-five years on, that dissident cowboy is still the reason that America’s "New Nationalism" has a name at all.
