Michael L. Cooper by Theodore Roosevelt

Author:Theodore Roosevelt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Juvenile Nonfiction, Presidents & Heads of State, Theodore, Presidents, 20th Century, Presidents - United States, Roosevelt, General, United States, Historical, Biography & Autobiography, Juvenile Literature, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780670011346
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-07-09T05:00:00+00:00

Roosevelt with prominent naturalist John Muir in Yosemite Valley, California, 1903.

8

ON SEPTEMBER 5, 1901, while President McKinley was attending the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York, a man named Leon Frank Czolgosz stepped out of the crowd and shot him at nearly point-blank range. The bullets tore through his stomach and colon and lodged in the muscles in his back. Nine days later McKinley died, making Vice President Theodore Roosevelt the twenty-sixth president of the United States.

“It is a dreadful thing to come into the Presidency this way,” TR wrote to Senator Lodge. “But it would be a far worse thing to be morbid about it. Here is the task, and I have got to do it to the best of my ability; and that is all there is about it.”

On President Roosevelt’s first evening in the White House, Edith and the children were still at Sagamore Hill, so he invited Bamie and Corinne to come to Washington for dinner. It was September 23, Thee’s birthday. He would have been seventy. “I feel that it is a good omen that I begin my duties in this house on this day,” Theodore told his sisters. “I feel as if my father’s hand were on my shoulder, and as if there were a special blessing over the life I am to lead here. What I would not give if only he could have lived to see me here in the White House.”

Whatever awkwardness the president felt after McKinley’s death quickly disappeared. “Now that I have gotten over the horror of the circumstances under which I came to the presidency,” TR wrote to one of his uncles, “I get real enjoyment out of the work.”

That was obvious to anyone who saw him. “His offices were crowded with people, mostly reformers, all day long, and the president did his work among them with little privacy and much rejoicing,” the journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote. “He strode triumphant around among us, talking and shaking hands, dictating and signing letters, and laughing.”

Theodore pledged “to continue absolutely unbroken the policies of President McKinley.” He began by insisting that the men in McKinley’s cabinet such as Secretary of War Elihu Root and Secretary of State John Hay keep their jobs. But, not surprisingly, the new president had his own ideas about what needed to be done.

High on Theodore’s to-do list was to get himself elected president in his own right in 1904. His biggest obstacle was an Old Guard Republican named Mark Hanna, a U.S. senator from Ohio. Hanna, sixty-three years old, was a rich industrialist who had managed McKinley’s ascent to the presidency. Soon after Theodore became president, Hanna reportedly exclaimed, “I told William McKinley that it was a mistake to nominate that wild man… . Now look, that damned cowboy is President of the United States!” And the senator later told Theodore straight out, “Theodore, do not think anything about a second term.” Many people assumed Hanna, who was popular with businessmen and labor leaders alike, wanted the nomination himself.

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