Crossword Dictionary
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt, bynames Teddy Roosevelt and TR, (October 27, 1858- January 6, 1919) was the 26th president of the United States (1901–09) and a writer, naturalist, and soldier.
Roosevelt was born into a socially prominent family. He graduated from Harvard College in 1880 and studied briefly at Columbia Law School but soon turned to writing and politics as a career. In 1880 he married Alice Hathaway Lee, by whom he had one daughter, Alice. After his first wife’s death, in 1886 he married Edith Kermit Carow (Edith Roosevelt). They had five children: Theodore, Jr., Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin.
Roosevelt was elected to the New York legislature in 1882. After political defeats and the death of his wife, he went to the Dakota Territory to ranch. He returned to New York to serve on the U.S. Civil Service Commission and as head of the city’s board of police commissioners. A supporter of William McKinley, he served as assistant secretary of the navy. During the Spanish-American War, he resigned to organize a cavalry unit, the Rough Riders. He returned to New York a hero and was elected governor in 1899.
He took office as vice-president when McKinley was reelected, and became president on McKinley’s assassination in 1901. He won election in his own right in 1904. He created national forests and set aside mineral, oil, and coal deposits for conservation. He and secretary of state Elihu Root announced the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which reasserted the U.S.’s position as protector of the Western Hemisphere. For mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War, he received the 1906 Nobel Prize for Peace. He secured a treaty with Panama for construction of a trans-isthmus canal. Declining to seek reelection, he traveled in Africa and Europe. He ran for president again in 1912, under the Bull Moose Party. Though he lost the election, he secured 88 electoral votes—the most successful third-party candidacy in the 20th century. Throughout his life he continued to write, publishing extensively on history, politics, travel, and nature.