Teddy Roosevelt used to love to say, “Bully.” But if you had seen him when he was a boy, you wouldn’t have guessed he would grow up to become one.
He was born into a powerful family, but he was a total wimp, asthmatic and sickly from the start. He probably had lots of servants who coddled him, tucked him into bed, and fed him lots of chicken soup. Apparently this really got under his skin, because he decided to toughen himself by lifting weights and doing pushups. He loved to get outside, breathe the fresh air, climb trees and explore nature. He collected bugs. He drew pictures of birds. Even when his family took trips to exotic places, he kept at it. “Geez Louise!” everyone would say. “Jumping jacks out on the deck of the ship? Collecting more butterflies? Doesn’t that boy ever stop?” He never did. And all that activity made Teddy tough.
He would need that strength a lot sooner than he expected. When he was a college kid at Harvard, he met a pretty girl from one of the richest families in Boston, and decided he would marry her. He wasn’t kidding around; he drove over to her house any chance he got, in a cart pulled by his dog. She must have been pretty impressed, because by the time of his graduation she had agreed to marry him and move down to New York. Soon after the wedding she was pregnant, and they had a baby. He studied law, became active in politics, and in his free time he finished his first book – he would eventually write over 40 of them – about American sea power in the War of 1812.
But then disaster struck. And not just disaster, this was super-duper-double-disaster. Roosevelt’s mother had caught typhoid fever. And his wife had problems with her kidneys, but her pregnancy had hidden the condition. Which all led to one horrible day. When he was just twenty-six, Roosevelt suffered the worst Valentine’s Day imaginable. His mother died in the morning, and his wife died in the afternoon. Leaving poor Teddy Roosevelt alone with a two-year-old baby daughter.
So what’s a broken-hearted guy to do? Well, here’s a wild idea: chuck the whole thing and go out to the frontier. That’s what he did. He handed his daughter over to his sister, and headed out, on his own, to the wild Dakota Territory.
When he got there, Teddy breathed deep, and took a good long look around. He fenced in some land, built a barn, and filled the place with a herd of beef cattle. He learned to rope and ride, and he earned the respect of the cowboys who worked for him. Perhaps his experience among these tough working folks gave him a greater appreciation for the common man, because for the rest of his life he had an amazing ability to understand everyday people and their problems, and to work his butt off on their behalf.
Unfortunately, it was a lesson that came with a big price, when life punched Teddy in the gut a second time – a killer blizzard blew through, caught all his cattle out in the fields, and destroyed his business. And just like that, Teddy’s days as a cattle man were suddenly over.
He bounced back a second time. He gave up his frontier dreams, came back to New York full-time, reconnected with a childhood sweetheart, got married and built his second family. Eventually he would have five more children. And now, with his focus completely on New York, he really started becoming a Bully. He won an election to be state senator and brought his frontier energy to big-city politics. When he made speeches, he would hop up on a box and bark out his words. “My goodness,” the people all said, “look at how he gnashes his teeth!” His wealthy ancestors had always defended the rights and privileges of rich families like his, but Teddy was having none of it. He said every person deserved what he called a ‘square deal.’ He fought for regulations that made things better and safer for the little guy, and he made all kinds of improvements to things like police and fire departments. He particularly hated corruption and was a thorn in the side of some of the most powerful men in the world.
In 1896 there was a presidential election. William McKinley was the Republican candidate, and Roosevelt was one of his loudest, most colorful supporters. Teddy jumped up on lot of boxes, he gave a lot of supportive speeches, and he gnashed his teeth a lot. McKinley was impressed, and he had also read Teddy’s book about sea power. So when McKinley won the election, and started handing out favors to those who had helped him, he brought Teddy to Washington and rewarded him with the job of Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
Wow, that sounds like a huge opportunity. But, truth be told, McKinley was probably just trying to get Teddy to shut up. The job was a bureaucratic position in a sleepy part of the government. But Roosevelt was restless as always. He kept banging on McKinley’s door, arguing that the country needed a stronger military, more soldiers, and more ships, so it could throw its weight around. “Sorry,” said the President, “nobody wants a bigger military when there’s no conflict.”
But then, as fate would have it, suddenly there was one, in the form of the Spanish-American War. Roosevelt resigned from his dead-end job and took command of a volunteer cavalry unit, which he called the Rough Riders. He shipped with them to Cuba and launched them at the Spanish at a place called San Juan Hill. Maybe he was gnashing his teeth as they rode up it, because his soldiers smashed the Spanish and won a huge victory.
Kaboom! Teddy Roosevelt was suddenly a national hero. And that’s when things really took off.
He ran for Governor of New York, and won. He took his ideas and his teeth up to Albany, where he drove his opponents crazy with his energy and annoyed the rich greedy folks with his cockamamie reform ideas. And wouldn’t you know, right at that time McKinley’s first term was finished and he needed a new running-mate in the election. Somebody suggested he add the now-famous Teddy Roosevelt to the ballot. McKinley was no fool, he put the national hero on his ticket. And just like that, when McKinley won in a landslide, Teddy Roosevelt was suddenly the Vice President of the United States.
Pretty impressive. But also – just like all the other twists and turns in Roosevelt’s remarkable life – it was also pretty temporary. As McKinley began his second term, with the frontier tamed and connected by railroads, he wanted to get out there, talk to a lot of folks, meet a lot of business leaders, and shake a lot of hands. His tour of America brought him to an exposition in Buffalo, where he gave a speech to a crowd of 50,000 people. The next day, as McKinley met a long line of admirers, schmoozing with the people that filed past, a man stepped up with a handkerchief in his hand. Concealed in that handkerchief was a gun. The man pointed it, fired, and shot President McKinley in the guts. Twice.
At first it seemed that everything was going to be OK, McKinley was operated on immediately, and a telegram was sent alerting the world that he was going to survive. The Vice President left to join his family on a much-needed vacation. And, as it turns out, this particular summer, they were enjoying some time in the wilderness. They were in the Adirondacks. At the Tahawus Club, in the famous McNaughton Cottage along the Opalescent River. Perhaps to take his mind off of McKinley, and to burn off some excess energy, Teddy rounded up a guide and headed up into the high peaks, with a plan to climb Mount Marcy. The party had just reached Lake Tear of the Clouds when they heard noise coming up the trail behind them. It was an exhausted runner, yelling for Roosevelt and waving another telegram. Teddy instantly knew that McKinley was dead.
Teddy hot-footed it down off the mountain as fast as he could. He made it out to Tahawus by nightfall. When he got there the staff told him he’d have to wait until dawn to drive the 35 miles down the dangerous road to the train.
“Nonsense,” said Roosevelt, “I’m going to the station right now.”
He hitched up the horses … he headed out in darkness … he drove through the night and arrived before dawn … he jumped the first train to Buffalo … he raced across town … he paid his respects to McKinley’s family … he and some cabinet members crammed into a small private library … he took his oath of office … he signed it.
It all happened so fast that nobody even took a picture. He had been Vice President for all of six months. He was only forty-two years old. Which meant Theodore Roosevelt was now the youngest President in the history of the United States.
By the time he made it back to Washington and sat down in the Oval Office, Teddy’s head must have been spinning. And everybody around him was pretty sure what was gonna happen next. As McKinley’s VP, Roosevelt would certainly continue McKinley’s policies and open the west for big business. The time had come for mining and drilling and plowing and lumbering.
“Mr. President,” the businessmen all said to the new chief executive, their eyes wide with greed, “let’s start carving this stuff up.”
But everybody was sorely mistaken. They underestimated the young man, they didn’t understand Teddy’s love of the wild places, or his will to do whatever he thought was right. And so they were all probably flabbergasted by what he did next. Roosevelt took a look at the country’s few nature preserves – like Yosemite and Yellowstone – and declared that he wanted many more. He gnashed his teeth and made more speeches, and he pushed Congress to create a whole bunch of new ones. Soon the list of national parks had doubled. But that wasn’t good enough, Teddy wasn’t satisfied, not nearly. The pace of approvals was too slow, Congress kept getting in his way. So he figured out a way to just go around them. Roosevelt signed into law a funny thing called the Antiquities Act. On paper, it was designed to protect Native American sites. But in reality, it gave the President authority, with the swipe of a pen, to create national monuments from public lands.
It was a very big stick, and the Bully started swinging it. In the first six months of the Act, Roosevelt established four national monuments. He used it to protect most of the Grand Canyon. He created over a dozen more natural areas, more than 100 national forests and bird and game preserves. He created so many parks and monuments and nature preserves and memorials that the country could barely manage them all. And he kept at it right until the end of his presidency, so that the momentum would continue long after he was gone.
By 1916 – seven years after Roosevelt finished his second term and three years before he finally ran out of energy and died – the American government realized that the time had come to make all of his environmental efforts totally official. And so they created a huge new department to take care of it all.
It’s a pretty cool thing that today we call the United States Park Service.
Whew! Can you believe all that? That’s the breathless story of how a skinny runt from the city grew up to be a frontier cowboy, a courageous soldier, a tough mountain man, and the President of the United States. How he wouldn’t let any disaster get the better of him. How he never slowed down. How he didn’t take no for an answer. How he betrayed his rich family friends and fought for hard-working folks. How he made regulations and policies that made things better for the little guy.
And how one fateful night in the Adirondacks led this Bully to protect hundreds of millions of acres of magnificent American wilderness.