Theodore Roosevelt
The president who turned a continental republic into a naval power with a global reach, and invented the American habit of policing other countries' affairs.
Theodore Roosevelt became president on September 14, 1901, when an anarchist's bullet killed William McKinley, and at forty-two he remains the youngest person ever to hold the office. He was also the first to run American foreign policy on the assumption that the United States was a great power with interests everywhere, and the country has been living with the consequences ever since.
He was a sickly, asthmatic child from a rich New York family who built himself into a boxer, rancher, and hunter through sheer willed exertion, and never entirely stopped performing that transformation. He wrote some forty books, ran the New York City police, and served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, where he agitated for war with Spain and then resigned to go fight in it, leading the volunteer cavalry regiment known as the Rough Riders up the heights outside Santiago in 1898. New York made him governor. The party bosses shunted him into the vice presidency to get him out of the way, which worked for six months.
The domestic record
At home he was a Republican who broke with what his party had become. He sued to break up the railroad combination Northern Securities, and the Supreme Court agreed, establishing that the federal government would actually enforce antitrust law against the largest fortunes in the country. He intervened in a coal strike on terms the mine owners considered an outrage, pressed through federal food and drug inspection, and put roughly 230 million acres under public protection, creating national forests, monuments, and wildlife refuges on a scale nobody has matched. He called the program the Square Deal.
Speak softly and carry a big stick
Abroad he was blunter. His formula, borrowed from a proverb he liked, was to speak softly and carry a big stick. The stick was the Navy, which he expanded until the United States had one of the largest fleets in the world, and in 1907 he sent sixteen battleships painted white on a fourteen-month cruise around the globe, an unmistakable announcement of arrival.
He wanted a canal across Central America and Colombia would not give him acceptable terms, so in 1903 he backed a secession in the Colombian province of Panama, recognized the new republic within days, and signed a canal treaty with it two weeks later. He later remarked that he took the Isthmus. In 1904 he issued the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting that chronic misconduct in Latin America might require intervention by the United States as an international police power. It converted a doctrine originally framed as a shield against European meddling into a license for American meddling, and was used to justify customs takeovers and occupations across the Caribbean for the next thirty years.
He also played the older game of balance skillfully. He mediated an end to the Russo-Japanese War at Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 1905, calculating that neither Russia nor Japan should dominate northeast Asia, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for it, the first American to receive one.
The restless afterward
He left office in 1909, promptly regretted it, and in 1912 ran against his own handpicked successor on a third-party ticket, splitting the Republican vote and handing the presidency to Woodrow Wilson. He was shot on the way to a campaign speech in Milwaukee and delivered the speech anyway with the bullet in his chest. He spent his last years denouncing Wilson for keeping out of the First World War, and died in 1919 at sixty.
Roosevelt is the hinge between two Americas. Before him the United States was a large economy with a small foreign policy. After him it was a naval power with a doctrine of intervention in its own hemisphere and a habit of judging other governments' conduct. Every argument since about when Washington should reach into another country's affairs is, in some form, an argument with him.