Teddy Roosevelt, Детальна інформація

In the fall of 1876, Roosevelt entered Harvard University. By the time he graduated magna cum laude, he was engaged to be married to a beautiful young lady named Alice Lee. The wedding took place on Roosevelt's twenty- second birthday. Amid the intense happiness he experienced during his first year of marriage, he laid the foundations of his historic public career. "I rose like a rocket," he said years later. Ironically, when he chartered his own path for public office--the White House in 1912--he failed bitterly.

When others had selected him--as they did for the New York Assembly in

1881, for the governorship in 1898, and for the vice presidency in 1900-- his election was almost a foregone conclusion. Politics aside, Roosevelt shaped and molded his life as much as any person could possibly do. He could not control fate, however. On Valentine's Day, 1884, his mother died of typhoid fever and his wife died of Bright's disease, two days after giving birth to a daughter, Alice Lee. Amidst this personal trauma,

Theodore Roosevelt was on the verge of becoming a national presence.

Between 1882 and 1884, Theodore Roosevelt represented the Twenty-first

District of New York in the state legislative assembly in Albany. An 1881 campaign broadside noted that the young Republican candidate was

"conspicuous for his honesty and integrity," qualities not taken for granted in a city run by self-serving machine politicians. This was the start of Roosevelt's long career as a political reformer.

Roosevelt's political alliance with Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts began in 1884, when the two were delegates to the Republican National

Convention in Chicago. In time, both men would become leaders of the

Republican Party. Their extensive mutual correspondence is an insightful record of shared interests and American idealism at the turn of the twentieth century. After serving in the United States House of

Representatives for six years, Lodge became a senator in 1893 and retained his seat for the rest of his life. Like Roosevelt, Lodge was an advocate of civil service reform (he recommended Roosevelt to be a commissioner in

1889), a strong navy, the Panama Canal, and pure food and drug legislation.

A specialist in foreign affairs, Lodge acted as one of Roosevelt's principal advisers during his presidency. Yet Lodge did not support many of

Roosevelt's progressive reforms—women's suffrage, for instance—and he refused to endorse his friend in the Bull Moose campaign of 1912.

Love of adventure and the great outdoors, especially in the West, were the bonds that sealed the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and

Frederic Remington. "I wish I were with you out among the sage brush, the great brittle cottonwoods, and the sharply-channeled barren buttes,"

Roosevelt wrote to the western artist in 1897 from Washington. After the death of his wife Alice Lee in 1884, Roosevelt moved temporarily to the Bad

Lands in the Dakota Territory, where he owned two cattle ranches. In 1888,

Century Magazine published a series of articles about the West written by

Roosevelt and illustrated by Remington. In a May article, Roosevelt told the story of his daring capture of three thieves who had stolen a boat from his Elkhorn Ranch. Remington depicted their capture in this painting.

Jacob Riis was a valuable friend and source of information for

Roosevelt when he became a New York City police commissioner in the spring of 1895. As a police reporter for the New York Evening Sun, Riis understood the reforms needed within the police department, as well as the evils in the slums, which he frequented to gather stories. Riis was successful in awakening public awareness to the plight of New York's tenement population, especially the children, in several books, including his classic How the

Other Half Lives. In 1904 Riis published a biography of his good friend, with whom he used to walk the streets of New York, titled Theodore

Roosevelt: The Citizen.

I have "developed a playmate in the shape of Dr. Wood of the Army, an

Apache campaigner and graduate of Harvard, two years later than my class,"

Roosevelt wrote from Washington in 1897. "Last Sunday he fairly walked me down in the course of a scramble home from Cabin John Bridge down the other side of the Potomac over the cliffs." Theodore Roosevelt and Leonard Wood liked each other from their first meeting that spring. Both were robust and athletic, and both, from the vantage points of their respective jobs—Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the navy, and Wood as an army officer (and the physician of President and Mrs. William McKinley)—took a belligerent attitude toward Spain with respect to Cuba. When Roosevelt was offered the chance to raise a regiment of volunteer cavalry, he in turn recruited the more experienced Wood to be the regiment's colonel and commander. After the war in Cuba, Wood remained as military governor of

Santiago, and shortly thereafter was appointed to administer to the affairs of the entire island.

John Singer Sargent painted this portrait of Wood in 1903, when he went to

Washington to do the official portrait of President Roosevelt. Sargent recalled then that the two veteran Rough Riders enjoyed competing against each other with fencing foils.