Word: roosevelted
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Teddy stays with us because he seems so much like one of us. Although he was born in 1858, it's the 20th century he decidedly belongs to, the century he brought America into on his terms. Roosevelt's years in the White House were one of those hinges upon which the whole of American history sometimes turns. When he arrived there, he already understood the energies that had been building in the U.S. for decades after the Civil War: the explosion of its industrial power, the ineluctable impulse to expand. He used his presidency to discharge those energies...
Where was his impact the greatest? Start with the economy. When Roosevelt first came to the presidency, after the assassination of William McKinley, the U.S. was emerging as one of the world's wealthiest nations. It was first in the world in its output of timber, steel, coal, iron. Since 1860 the population had doubled, exports had tripled. But that bounding growth had brought with it all the upheavals of an industrial age--poverty, child labor, dreadful factory conditions. Year after year, workers faced off against bosses with their fists clenched...
...Roosevelt came to believe that government had the right to moderate the excesses of free enterprise. Although his exercises of power seem modest to us now--the breakup of monopolies, the Pure Food and Drug Act, the meat-inspection and industrial-safety laws--it was a shock to the system at the time. Roosevelt--a Republican!--insisted that one of the things government must govern is the economy. Today, when the Justice Department goes after Microsoft or Enron, when the Environmental Protection Agency adjusts mileage standards or the Fed tweaks the prime, somewhere his ghost is smiling...
...home, so in the world: in all places Roosevelt was an activist. He was the first President to urge wholeheartedly that the U.S. accept its role as a global power. God knows, he accepted it. He looked at the U.S. the way we now understand the universe, as a thing that began expanding the moment it was born. (It tells you something that he never got over the habit of casting covetous glances toward Canada.) But not until just before he reached the presidency had the nation finally burst through its continental confines. In 1898 the Spanish-American...
...right, of course. Roosevelt sounded the first chords of the American Century. But the Spanish-American War was a quick and easy victory. Although it was followed by a bloody anti-American insurgency in the Philippines, one that dragged on through Roosevelt's presidency, for the most part he did not live to see the lethal predicaments a global power can face. We can't know what he might have thought about Vietnam, much less Iraq. His expansionist impulse had its idealistic side; he too talked about spreading democracy. And you could see its legacy in developments after his death...