ROOSEVELT, THEODORE (1858-), twenty-sixth president of the United States, was born in New York City on the 27th of October 1858. The Roosevelt family[1] has been prominent in the life of New York for many generations, and is of Dutch origin. Mr Roosevelt's mother, Martha Bullock, came from a family of Scotch-Irish and Huguenot origin equally prominent in Georgia. Each family may lay just claims to a history of more than ordinary social and political distinction. Although born in New York, Mr Roosevelt spent much of his boyhood at Oyster Bay, the country home of his father, on Long Island Sound, where he began with a distinct purpose, unusual among boys of his age, to build up a naturally frail physique by rowing and swimming in the waters of Long Island Sound, and by riding over the hills and tramping through the woods of Long Island. That his early outdoor life furnished a definite training for his after career is indicated by the fact that when he was about fourteen years of age he went with his father on a tour up the Nile as far as Luxor, and on this journey he made a collection of Egyptian birds found in the Nile valley, which is now in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. Mr Roosevelt was educated at Harvard University, where he graduated in the class of 1880;[2] his record for scholarship was creditable, and his interest in sports and athletics was especially manifest in his skill as a boxer. On leaving college he made a short visit to Europe, was elected to the London Alpine Club for climbing the Jungfrau and the Matterhorn, and returning to New York studied law for a brief period in the Law School of Columbia University and in the office of his uncle Robert B. Roosevelt. Determining to enter active politics, he gave up his legal studies without qualifying for the bar, and in 1881 was elected to the New York legislature as a regular Republican, although in opposition to the “boss” of the assembly district for which he was a candidate. He was elected again in 1882 and in 1883, and at the age of twenty-four was his party's candidate for Speaker of the Assembly. In 1884 he was a delegate of the Republican party to the convention in Chicago which nominated James G. Blaine for president. In the convention he opposed the nomination of Mr Blaine, and in a speech which attracted considerable attention for its vigour and courage advocated the nomination of Senator George F. Edmunds. After Mr Blaine's nomination, however, he supported him in the campaign as the chosen candidate of the party, in spite of the fact that an important wing of the Republican party “bolted” the nomination and espoused the candidacy of Grover Cleveland, who was elected president. In 1884, partly because his political life seemed at least for the immediate present to be at an end, partly on account of the freedom and activity of out-of-door life, he bought two cattle ranches near Medora on the Little Missouri river in North Dakota, where he lived for two years, becoming intimately associated with the life and spirit of the western portion of the United States.
In 1886 he was the Republican candidate for mayor of New York City, but was defeated by Abram F. Hewitt, the Tammany candidate, and received a smaller vote than Henry George, the candidate of the United Labor party. Mr Roosevelt, however, received a larger proportion of the total vote cast than any mayoralty candidate of the Republican party had previously received in New York City. In April 1889, on the accession to the presidency of Benjamin Harrison, Mr Roosevelt, then closely identified with the work of Civil Service reform, was appointed a member of the United States Civil Service Commission. In this office, until then one of minor importance, he served for six years. He made it not only nationally prominent, but instrumental in shaping the course of legislative and executive action by introducing into the work of the Commission an entirely new spirit and new methods. The annual reports, of which he was the chief author, became controversial pamphlets; he published bold replies to criticisms upon the work of the Commission; he explained its purposes to newspaper correspondents; when Congress refused to appropriate the amount which he believed essential for the work, he made the necessary economies by abandoning examinations of candidates for the Civil Service in those districts whose representatives in Congress had voted to reduce the appropriation, thus very shrewdly bringing their adverse vote into disfavour among their own constituents; and during the six years of his commissionership more than twenty thousand positions for government employés were taken out of the realm of merely political appointment and added to the classified service to be obtained and retained for merit only. In 1895 he resigned from the Civil Service Commission and became President of the Board of Police Commissioners for the City of New York. After a strenuous two years in this office, he was appointed by President McKinley in 1897 assistant-secretary of the navy. He was certain that war with Spain was inevitable, and he did much to prepare the navy for hostilities, framing an important personnel bill, collecting ammunition, getting large appropriations for powder and ammunition used in improving the marksmanship of the navy by gunnery practice, buying transports and securing the distribution of ships and supplies (especially in the Pacific) in such a way that, when hostilities were declared, American naval victories would be assured. He urged upon the administration the bold policy of protesting against the sailing of Cervera's fleet, on the ground that it would be regarded as a warlike measure not against the Cuban revolutionaries, who had no navy, but against the United States; and he advised that, if Cervera sailed, an American squadron be sent to meet him and to prevent his approach to America. At the outbreak of the war with Spain he resigned from the Navy Department and raised the first volunteer regiment of cavalry, popularly known as the “Rough Riders,” because many of its members were Western cowboys and ranchmen expert in the handling of the rough and often unbroken horses of the Western frontier. The regiment also included college athletes, city clubmen and members of the New York police force, every man possessing some special qualification for the work in view. Mr Roosevelt declined the colonelcy of the regiment, preferring to take the post of lieutenant-colonel under his intimate friend Dr Leonard Wood, who, while a surgeon in the United States army, had served
- ↑ Claas Martenszen van Roosevelt (or Rosenvelt) settled in New Amsterdam in 1649; his son Claas (or Nicholas) in 1700-1 was a New York alderman of the Leislerian party; in the next three generations, Johannes, Cornelius and Jacobus (James) were merchants and (in 1748-67, 1785-1801 and 1797-99 an d 1809, respectively) aldermen of New York; in the third generation the family became allied with the Schuylers. Isaac Roosevelt was a member of the Provincial Congress in 1775-77 and of the state Senate in 1777-86 and in 1788-92; in the state Assembly were James Roosevelt (1796-97), Cornelius C. Roosevelt (1803), James I. Roosevelt, jun. (1835-40), and Clinton Roosevelt (1837-40). James I. Roosevelt, jun. (1795-1875), was a Democratic member of the national House of Representatives in 1841-43, and a justice of the state Supreme Court in 1851-59. Nicholas J. Roosevelt (1767-1854), with John Stevens, Robert R. Livingstone and Robert Fulton, was prominent in the development of steam navigation. His brother, Cornelius van Schaik Roosevelt (1794-1871), was a founder of the Chemical National Bank of New York, and the grandfather of the president. The president's uncle, Robert Barnwell Roosevelt (1829-1906), was a New York lawyer, New York state fish commissioner in 1866-68, a member of the Committee of Seventy which exposed the corruption of Tammany in New York City, a Democratic member of the national House of Representatives in 1871-73, U.S. minister to the Netherlands in 1888, and author of works on American game birds and fish. R. B. Roosevelt's brother, the president's father, Theodore Roosevelt (1831-1878), was a glass importer, prominent in city charities, an organizer of the Union League Club, and the founder of the Orthopaedic Hospital. A cousin, James Henry Roosevelt (1800-1863), was founder of the Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. The president's mother, Martha Bullock, was of an old Georgia family of Scotch-Irish and Huguenot extraction; her grandfather was Archibald Bullock (1730-1777), first president (1776-77) of Georgia; and her brother, James Dunwoody Bullock, often compared by Theodore Roosevelt to Colonel Newcome, was in the Confederate navy, and equipped in England vessels (including the “Alabama”) as Confederate cruisers.
- ↑ In the same year he married Alice Hathaway Lee of Boston, who died in 1884 leaving one daughter. Later (in 1886) he married Edith Kermit Carow of New York City, and by this marriage had four sons and one daughter.
