On September 6, 1901, the radical Leon F. Czolgosz shot President William McKinley twice with a .32-caliber pistol in Buffalo, New York. One bullet bounced off a button on his chest, but the other lodged in his abdomen. The doctors couldn’t find it. They sewed him up and sent him to recover in his hotel. He seemed to improve, but then his wound turned gangrenous, and on Friday the thirteenth his fever spiked. Three hundred and fifty miles away, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt sat by Lake Tear of the Clouds, near the summit of Mount Marcy, the highest of the Adirondack High Peaks, in upper New York State, eating a sandwich.
The notion that a vice president would disappear into the wilderness without any security or way to communicate is absurd. Even in 1901 it was not the kind of thing most ambitious politicians would do, especially one with a suspect heart. But it was classic Roosevelt: brash, romantic, egocentric, and a bit manic. Alerted by a guide, the vice president scrambled down the rocky trail, made a reckless, thirty-five-mile dash aboard a two-seat buggy through the night, and arrived in Buffalo by train on September 14. By then McKinley was dead, and his assassination would foreshadow the carnage that racked the twentieth century. At 3:30 that afternoon, Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as the nation’s twenty-sixth president. He was forty-two years, ten months, and eighteen days old, America’s youngest chief executive yet.
A week later, Roosevelt—known as TR to friends, and Ted or Teedie to his family, but never Teddy (a nickname he loathed)—celebrated his first night in the presidential mansion over dinner with his sisters, Anna “Bamie” Cowles and Corinne Robinson. TR noted it was their father’s seventieth birthday, but Theodore “Thee” Roosevelt Sr. had died in 1878, at forty-six, of a gastrointestinal tumor. Nineteen at the time, TR said, “I feel as if I should go mad” with grief. Biographers have posited that his father’s early death had a profound psychological impact on Roosevelt. Ted knew Thee only as an idealized paternal figure, rather than as an imperfect man; the trauma of Thee’s death might have contributed to Ted’s boyishness (a wish to hold on to a happy, coddled childhood) and drive (a wish to please a missing father; a fatalistic desire to live life to the fullest before he, too, was extinguished). And it seems likely that the nature of Thee’s illness—the tumor made it painful to eat, causing him to waste away—contributed to Roosevelt’s ferocious appetite.
A week after TR arrived in Washington, his wife, Edith (Edie), and their six children, aged four to sixteen, and a bestiary that included dogs, cats, snakes, a duck, a kangaroo rat, a lizard, a badger, and a one-legged rooster, gusted into the White House. They overflowed its eight bedrooms and two bathrooms, lined the halls with trunks, trampled the gardens, snuck into the attic, and rode a pony through the mansion. It was as if a raucous summer storm had engulfed the musty building with constantly shifting periods of sun, rain, lightning, and rainbows. The family freshened up the old manse and made the president happy.
Theodore Roosevelt was a new kind of leader for a new century, a dynamo whose policies shifted from hard right to moderate left, and he was the first president to make food safety and land conservation priorities. Yet you would have been hard-pressed to predict his trajectory early on.
Born in 1858 to one of Manhattan’s wealthiest families, Ted was afflicted with life-threatening asthma, a weak heart, and nearsightedness. Worried he’d be bullied or infected, his parents homeschooled him at their East Twentieth Street mansion. TR maintained, “I am of a very buoyant temper,” and at Harvard he stocked his room with books, a tortoise, and lobsters and toughened himself by boxing, rowing, hiking, and swimming. Later, he turned himself into a swashbuckling outdoorsman, soldier, and hunter who was constantly out to prove, and improve, himself. In 1902, he gained the nickname Teddy by refusing to shoot a young, tethered bear in Mississippi (his guide shot the bear instead); the story inspired a Brooklyn couple to make toy teddy bears. Embarrassed by the incident, Roosevelt rejected the diminutive nickname, and preferred to be called “Colonel,” after his service in the Spanish-American War, or “Mr. President.”
Roosevelt married his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, known as Sunny, for her beauty and optimism in 1880, and four years later she gave birth to a daughter, Alice Lee Roosevelt. But on Valentine’s Day that year, Sunny succumbed to Bright’s disease (kidney failure), and Roosevelt’s mother was felled by typhoid fever in the same house on the same day. TR drew an X in his calendar and scrawled, “The light has gone out of my life.” Shut down by grief and rage, he housed baby Alice with his sister Bamie, abruptly quit New York politics, and lit out for the Badlands of North Dakota. There, he bought a ranch and a herd of cows, dressed in buckskin and trained as a cowboy, and shot endangered bison. When most of his herd was wiped out in the winter of 1886, TR returned east and married his second wife, Edith Kermit Carow.
Edie was raised in the same haut-bourgeois milieu as Roosevelt. A quietly determined woman, she had decided to marry Ted early on and patiently bided her time. Friends said she was “as calm and imperturbable as a Buddha,” a counterbalance to the impulsive Ted. She was gracious, schooled in the social arts, and like the swan that glides smoothly across a lake while furiously paddling beneath the surface, Mrs. Roosevelt made political socializing look easy—“Like a shuttle, keeping everything in harmony,” noted the military aide Archie Butt. Circulating White House parties, the First Lady paid attention to each guest, met with the wives of cabinet members every Tuesday, and ensured the household staff was well dressed and courteous. Edie was also a skilled horsewoman and had sound political instincts and a better head for money than her husband. “Whenever I go against her judgment I regret it,” TR noted. They had five children together—Theodore (Ted) III, Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin—and Edie raised Alice as her own. (Edie miscarried twice while in the White House, probably due to the stress, she’d say.)
The Roosevelts enjoyed “coarse food and plenty of it,” Alice declared. It was a funny line and had the advantage of being somewhat true. But it was also part of the myth that TR wove about his supposedly humble tastes. A typical Rooseveltian repast might open with bouillon and move on to salt cod, chicken in rice, baked beans, fresh rolls, Bavarian cream, preserves, and cake. It was not fancy, but it was tasty and abundant.
The attorney Lloyd Griscom described TR at the table “stoking up prodigiously, as though he were a machine.” Roosevelt liked to eat the game he shot, the fish he caught, the greens like fiddlehead ferns that he foraged, and the asparagus he had shipped from his Long Island estate, Sagamore Hill. He enjoyed apples, pears, oranges, pineapples, and peaches, but not prunes, bananas, or avocados (a Mexican berry that was cultivated in Florida, California, and Hawaii). While TR occasionally indulged in gourmet items—such as the oysters, green turtle soup, crab flake Newburg, quail, and bread sauce salad at his forty-second birthday—he claimed he was equally happy with pork and beans, or “just a bowl of milk.”
Yet Roosevelt could be as dogmatic about food as he was about the importance of “the Strenuous Life,” the title of one of his most famous speeches. At breakfast he would order six, eight, or a dozen eggs, hard-boiled (not medium or soft-boiled), with homemade rolls (not store bought). Or he’d have a big bowl of hominy dressed with salt and butter—a taste he had acquired from his Georgia-born mother; he wasn’t afraid to serve them anytime, even at official functions, though at dinner he insisted grits be swamped with meat gravy.
The Rooseveltian lunch was often a mélange of meats, bread, fruits, and tea (he favored the smoky black Hu-Kwa from China, also a favorite of his cousins Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt and his enemy the financier J. P. Morgan). At dinner, TR was a devotee of grilled steak, wild game, and fried chicken. “The only way to serve fried chicken is with white gravy soaked into the meat,” he proclaimed. He had a sweet tooth, and his desserts tended to be lingering explorations of the confectionary arts.
Critics tried to paint Roosevelt as a boozer, and though he looked the part, with his thick body and bluff face, he was not especially fond of alcohol. The legend of his supposed bibulousness can be traced to a gold champagne coupe—a bowl-shaped glass mounted atop a foot-tall stem that held a pint of liquid. He called it “the King of Ultima Thule’s scepter,” and brandished it at family lunches and state dinners. Some charged that he filled it with whiskey, but TR drank nothing stronger than a spritzer of white wine mixed with sparkling mineral water. When a temperance group accused Roosevelt of being a drunk, he sued them and won. At times, Roosevelt could be charmingly clueless about alcohol. At President McKinley’s inaugural lunch, Edie recalled, the vice president “drank two glasses of champagne, thinking it was bad fizzy water….Happily, it took no effect whatever, which speaks volumes either for Ted’s head or the President’s champagne.” In fact, Roosevelt preferred to wash down his meals with black coffee (without cream) sweetened with up to seven cubes of sugar. Ted Jr. described his father’s mug as “in the nature of a bathtub.”
In truth, Roosevelt well understood the political utility of fine dining. He frequently used the table as a forum to commend or interrogate colleagues, float policy trial balloons, and launch into encyclopedic digressions on almost any topic imaginable. A prodigious reader, writer, and talker, he dictated letters by the paragraph, wore out stenographers, and shrewdly spun the press while lathered up in the barber’s chair. After meeting TR, one journalist observed, “you had to wring the personality out of your clothes.” And the English statesman John Morley observed, “I have seen two tremendous works of nature in America. One is Niagara Falls and the other is the President.”
It is a truism that a meal at the White House is unlike a meal anywhere else. The mansion carries enormous symbolic weight, and when a president invites a dignitary to dine with him, it confers mutual acceptance, if not parity, between host and guest. TR barked his shins on this essential fact just weeks into his administration, when he hosted a seemingly simple dinner.
On October 16, 1901—four days before the monthlong mourning period for McKinley ended, and with it a ban on official entertaining—the president heard that Booker T. Washington was in town. Born a slave, Washington had become an acclaimed author and the first leader of the Tuskegee Institute, “one of the most useful, as well as one of the most distinguished, of American citizens of any race,” Roosevelt said.
Impulsively, he invited Washington to dinner. TR knew it was unusual to invite a Black man to eat at the White House and had paused before doing so. African Americans had visited 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue before: a crowd of Black people attended Andrew Jackson’s crazed inaugural celebration in 1829; Abraham Lincoln signed Sojourner Truth’s autograph book, and Mary Todd Lincoln hosted a group of Black women; Rutherford B. Hayes invited Frederick Douglass to headline concerts by Black musicians in the East Room. But no Black leader had shared the president’s table as a putative equal. In 1901, the nation was still recovering from the Civil War and Reconstruction, former slaves were finding their way, and lynchings took place. Yet it felt natural to the president to “show some respect to a man whom I cordially esteem as a good citizen.”
At eight o’clock that night, Roosevelt, Washington, and Philip B. Stewart, a prominent Colorado businessman, shared a quiet dinner and discussed federal appointments in the south. The next day the Associated Press listed the president’s guests, as usual, only this time it ignited a political firestorm. Blacks and liberal whites praised Roosevelt, but many southerners and some northerners gushed hateful vitriol: “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that n—— will necessitate our killing a thousand n—— in the South before they will learn their place again,” jeered Senator Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman, a South Carolina Democrat. Headlines decried TR as “Coon-Faced” and “A Rank Negrophilist.”
It was a harsh rebuke to the freshman president. According to the mores of the day, “ ‘Dining’…was really a code word for social equality. And the feeling was [that Roosevelt was] actually inviting [Washington] to woo his daughter,” explained Deborah Davis, the author of Guest of Honor, a book about the dinner. For the duration of his administration critics would point to that evening as Exhibit A of Roosevelt’s blithe arrogance. Even some in his inner circle were dismayed. “The president…mentioned the inviting of Booker Washington to a meal at the White House as a mistake,” a cabinet member confided. “Not in the action itself, but the effect on the South was injurious and misinterpreted.”
TR never invited another Black leader to dine at the White House. And in the racial reckoning of the twenty-first century, Roosevelt’s views on race were likened to Manifest Destiny, the belief that white settlers had the right and duty to expand across North America. In 2022, a statue of the president was removed from the American Museum of Natural History (which his family helped found) in New York because it depicted Black and Indigenous people as racially inferior.
But at the time Roosevelt remained defiant. “When I asked Booker T. Washington to dinner I did not devote very much thought to the matter one way or another,” he wrote. “I respect him greatly and believe in the work he has done. I have consulted so much with him it seemed to me that it was natural to ask him to dinner to talk over this work, and the very fact that I felt a moment’s qualm on inviting him because of his color made me ashamed of myself….As things have turned out, I am very glad that I asked him, for the clamor aroused by the act makes me feel as if the act was necessary.”
Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to use the mansion’s nickname, the White House, as its official description. (The name had been used informally since 1789, when the building’s sandstone walls were given a lime-based whitewash to protect them from moisture and cracking.) The building turned a century old in 1901 and was, the Army Corps of Engineers found, “dilapidated,” with sagging floors and a basement “coated with mold and infested with vermin.” The elevator spat sparks. The State Dining Room seated just sixty people. And the building’s Federalist style had been warped into what one visitor called “a cross between Neo-Classic and Mississippi River Boat.”
A renovation had been rumored for years. Chester A. Arthur wanted to tear the house down and start over. Benjamin Harrison wanted to expand it into a huge quadrangle. William McKinley planned to add large wings featuring columns and domes. But making any significant changes to the President’s House risked public outcry, and those ideas withered.
Enter Edith Roosevelt, who required all the charm, resolve, and guile she could muster to direct a remodeling, one of the most controversial aspects of TR’s first term. Edie turned to McKim, Mead & White, America’s foremost architects, for advice, and in June 1902 Congress appropriated $475,445 for renovations. To avoid raising hackles, the lead architect, Charles McKim, said he was “restoring” the White House and avoided incendiary words like “modernizing.”
James Hoban’s original architectural plans had apparently disappeared, and McKim took it upon himself to decide which elements of the structure were “original.” He pulled the building apart and recomposed it with a series of bold design choices. In the basement, he stripped layers of soot from the walls and built a modern kitchen, turned the boiler room into the Diplomatic Reception Room, and created a new public entrance in the East Wing. On the first floor he revamped the dining room to accommodate 120 guests. To house thirty staff members, miles of telegraph lines, and hundreds of visitors, McKim created a new West Wing—describing it as “temporary,” though its walls were hefty enough to support a second story, which was later added—and repurposed the East Wing into the family quarters. When the Roosevelts returned on November 4, 1902, the public generally applauded the restoration, and TR deemed anyone who dared criticize the First Lady’s work “a yahoo.”
With their house in order, the Roosevelts began to host official dinners catered by Charles Rauscher, a French chef who worked closely with Edie, drafted inventive menus, and charged $8 to $10 a plate. He was especially busy on holidays, which the First Family celebrated with uninhibited zeal. One Thanksgiving meal included an enormous turkey, a roast pig with an apple in its mouth, mounds of sugared sweet potatoes, spinach, boiled rice, pea soup, lettuce and alligator pear (avocado) salad, champagne, apple and mince pies, and ice cream molded in the shape of quails topped with liquefied brown sugar.
This was hardly simple fare. Yet when a magazine made the mistake of complimenting the president as a “gourmet,” Roosevelt fired back with characteristic bravado:
When anyone desires to make a widespread impression that the president and family sit down to a four or five course breakfast, a six or seven course lunch and a ten course dinner, the President feels that a denial is not inappropriate. Instead of a breakfast consisting of oranges, cantaloupes, cereals, eggs, bacon, lamb chops, hot cakes, and waffles, President Roosevelt insists that the regular White House Breakfast consists of hard-boiled eggs, rolls and coffee….President Roosevelt declares that when alone he always contents himself with a bowl of bread and milk. When Ms. Roosevelt or the children are present, the luncheon consists of cold meat, tea, cantaloupe in season, and bread. Instead of a ten-course dinner, the president declares that nine times out of ten a three-course dinner is served, and the other time a two-course dinner.
TR did not bother to mention that he was in the midst of a fierce battle to limit the robber barons’ exploitation of workers and resources and was straining to distance himself from any “gourmet” pretensions. This humble refrain is common among food-minded presidents—most recently Barack Obama, a man of sophisticated tastes who downplayed his worldly palate so as not to be labeled an elitist.
In the end, TR wrote to Kermit, “I don’t think any family has ever enjoyed the White House more than we have. I was thinking about it just this morning when Mother and I took breakfast on the portico and afterwards walked about the lovely grounds and looked at the stately historic old house. It is a wonderful privilege to have been here…and I should regard myself as having a small and mean mind if in the event of defeat I felt soured at not having had more instead of being thankful to have had so much.”
The mountains are calling and I must go….I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out til sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
—John Muir
On May 15, 1903, Theodore Roosevelt slept in a grove of sequoias, the tallest trees in the world, in the Sierra Nevada of Northern California. He was on a three-day camping trip in Yosemite Valley, a sylvan gem east of San Francisco, with the naturalist John Muir. Every night they fueled up on a hearty dinner over the campfire and delved into Socratic dialogue about how to preserve land for public use, a subject that was, and remains, a political lightning rod.
With the 1904 election on the horizon, Roosevelt had launched on a fourteen-thousand-mile trip, the Great Loop Tour, aboard his private railcar Elysian. Careful not to call it a campaign swing, he spoke to Republicans and Democrats, attended countless political dinners, gave 265 speeches about the need for “a square deal,” and drew large crowds. In public TR thrilled to the hurly-burly of campaigning, but in private he itched to slip away into the wilderness with the legendary Muir.
The two were a contrast in styles. Roosevelt was a stout, bespectacled, mustachioed forty-five-year-old from Manhattan who had outfitted himself with a western costume from Brooks Brothers: a heavy Norfolk coat, baggy breeches, leather puttees and thick-soled boots, a cowboy hat, and a kerchief knotted around his neck. Muir was a spry sixty-six-year-old born in Scotland and raised in Wisconsin, with a long face, lively blue eyes, ginger hair, and a flowing gray beard. He dressed like a hobo banker, in a three-piece wool suit with a gold watch on a chain, boots, a battered felt hat, and a stout walking stick. Known as John of the Mountains, Muir called himself a “poetico-trampo-geologist-bot and ornith-natural, etc!-etc!-etc!” He was a geologist, policy wonk, essayist, president of the Sierra Club, and the leading authority on Yosemite Valley, which he described as “by far the grandest of all the special temples of Nature I was ever permitted to enter.”
The public had a keen interest in the “camping president’s” trip, but TR wanted to be left alone. On May 15, he, Muir, the guides Charlie Leidig and Archie Leonard, and an army packer arrived at the Mariposa Grove, a stand of massive sequoias. They posed for a photograph with a group of politicians, and then, with a quick “God bless you,” Roosevelt waved them away. “Pres. Roosevelt…is cut off from communication with the outside world,” a wire report sulked. “He is camping in big tree country and will remain secluded.”
They established camp near the Grizzly Giant, a sequoia that stands 209 feet tall and is estimated to be three thousand years old. At dusk, Leidig made a campfire, grilled steaks, and fried chicken. The party had been supplied with “the best kind of steaks and young broilers,” newspapers reported; they were “cooked over the coals, and they appealed strongly to the president.” TR gobbled up his dinner and washed it down with gallons of black coffee. Then, as the fire crackled and orange sparks streaked into the night sky, he and Muir dipped into the questions that had brought them together in the mountains.
TR had read Muir’s essays on how to “rough it” and was inspired. While he genuinely looked forward to a “bully” adventure, politics coursed through TR’s fibers like sap. Muir knew this, and on the verge of departing for Russia had changed his plans. “An influential man from Washington wants to make a trip to the Sierra with me,” he wrote his companions, “and I might be able to do some forest good and talking freely around the campfire.”
Both men held that God resided in nature, and both wanted to preserve land for the public good. But how? Muir believed Yosemite—“the sanctum sanctorum of the Sierras”—was under human assault and should be preserved. Roosevelt listened, pushed and pulled at Muir’s argument, and likely considered how a shift in land use policy would color his own legacy.
In 1864, President Lincoln created the Yosemite Grant, the first time that land was set aside by the federal government for public use. In 1889, Muir and others persuaded Congress to create Yosemite National Park. But control of the Mariposa Grove and Yosemite Valley remained with the state. California took a laissez-faire approach to stewardship, and by 1903 the valley’s bear and mountain lion were threatened by hunters, while ranchers, loggers, and farmers strained the ecosystem. In 1894, President Grover Cleveland had signed a bill protecting Yellowstone, Wyoming’s geothermal wonderland, as the first “national park.” Roosevelt was contemplating whether to apply similar protections to Yosemite, but his views on the stewardship of nature were mutable.
A proponent of economic growth, TR long believed nature existed to benefit man: conserved lands provided fish and game for sport, clean water for drinking and irrigation, timber and minerals for production. His Reclamation Act of 1902 led to economically beneficial but environmentally destructive irrigation projects in twenty states. But during the Great Loop Tour he was exposed to the desert, the Grand Canyon, and the Pacific coast forests, and came to believe that federal lands needed protection. “Conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem,” Roosevelt said. “Unless we solve that problem it will avail us little to solve all others.”
As the guides erected a “shelter half”—a half tent, with just the back side closed to the elements—and arranged a pile of forty blankets for TR (his gear required four mules to carry), Muir wrapped himself in a piece of cloth and slept on a bed of tree boughs. “We lay in the open, the enormous cinnamon-colored trunks rising about us like the columns of a vaster and more beautiful cathedral than was ever conceived by any human architect,” the president rhapsodized.
Rising at dawn, TR and Muir had a quick breakfast, then headed up the trail. Avoiding crowds eager to see “the camping president,” they posed for a photo at Glacier Point, a thirty-two-hundred-foot-high edifice backdropped by the spectacular Yosemite Falls, and forged through a blinding snow squall. That night, after a thirty-five-mile trek, the men slept in a rocky hollow a mile above Yosemite Valley. Said to have “the greatest view on earth,” the spot was later dubbed Roosevelt Point. Snowflakes fell as Leidig prepared a second round of chicken and steak, and the eco-philosophers bantered into the night, their words flowing back and forth, gushing, entwining, and tangling. On their third night the men camped, ate, and talked in a meadow beneath the magnificent cataract of Bridalveil Fall.
“I stuffed him pretty well regarding the timber thieves…and other spoilers of the forest,” Muir said. “Camping with the president was a remarkable experience. I fairly fell in love with him.” The feeling was mutual. After Roosevelt’s return to civilization, The San Francisco Call noted, “The crisp mountain air seems to have given him a new lease on life….The president also remarked on the amazing appetite he had and how good everything tasted in the woods. He suggested that [Leidig] should be a famous restaurateur.”
Back at the White House, Roosevelt launched an unprecedented initiative to preserve federal lands and redrew the nation’s map, which provoked a fight that continues today. Declaring, “The rights of the public to the natural resources outweigh private rights,” TR protected Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove. Then he set aside Pelican Island, Florida—where egrets and pelicans were being decimated for feathers to adorn ladies’ hats—as the first of fifty-one federal bird sanctuaries. He preserved the Tongass Forest in Alaska, Native American ruins in New Mexico, and elk and bison rangeland in Yellowstone. He founded the U.S. Forest Service and signed the Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to protect forests, mountains, water sources, and public lands (a step toward the creation of the National Park Service in 1916). He created eighteen national monuments, five national parks, and 150 national forests.
In total, Theodore Roosevelt conserved 230 million acres, a tract larger than the state of Texas. It was his most enduring legacy, a feat that labeled him “the Conservationist President.” His nightly debates with Muir over fire-licked chicken and steak in Yosemite were hailed as “the most consequential camping trip in American history.”
There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms…and thousands of rats would race about on it….[T]he packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together….[T]here were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.
—Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
One morning in 1906, President Roosevelt was reading Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, and as he tucked into his eggs, he eyed a sausage link glistening on his plate. With a look of disgust, he picked the sausage up like a dead mouse and tossed it out the window. This account, written by the newspaper humorist Finley Peter Dunne, was apocryphal, though some believed it because it encapsulated the nation’s revulsion at Sinclair’s disclosures about the Chicago meatpacking industry.
Sinclair was a twenty-seven-year-old “muckraker,” as TR derisively labeled the new breed of investigative journalists, who had spent six months undercover in Chicago meat plants and had intended his thinly veiled fiction as a damning critique of capitalism. It was the heyday of the Progressive Era, when American corporations were agglomerating into “trusts” that dominated oil, steel, banking, and tobacco, and the “little man” felt like a cog in a crushing machine. With graphic scenes—of men falling into vats and being rendered into sausage, the butchering of diseased cattle, the use of dyes to disguise rancid ham—The Jungle revealed the inner workings of meat production, one of the largest and least regulated businesses in the country.
Sinclair hoped to spotlight the plight of workers, foment a revolution, and turn America toward socialism. But readers focused on the nauseating details of the slaughterhouses run by the Big Four meatpackers—Swift, Armour, Morris, and National Packing—instead. Revolted, the public’s appetite for beef, pork, and poultry fell an estimated 50 percent. “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” Sinclair wrote, ruefully.
President Roosevelt was a longtime ally of big business who once advocated shooting the leaders of the Populist Party. But in his second term he grew concerned about public health and recognized that the Republican Party’s main challenge was to convince voters that “we do stand squarely for the interests of all of the people.” Less well known was that TR had a personal connection to the issue of food contamination. When his Rough Riders seized Cuba from the Spanish in 1898, thousands of his troops were sickened by contaminated meat produced in the United States, and several hundred of them died from food poisoning, more than were killed in combat.
The Jungle laid bare the unintended consequences of huge, systemic changes under way in the American food system. As rapid industrialization and urbanization led to a greater use of canned and preserved foods, food producers used shortcuts and corruption to get their way. At the same time, the rise of yellow journalism and advertising-dependent newspapers opened the door for patent medicine hucksters to make false claims about “miracle” elixirs.
Exposés of fruits colored with poisonous red dye, and alcohol distilled with chemical fillers, prompted a second wave of outrage. The “sheer fraud” these snake oil salesmen perpetrated with their “nostrums, salves, appliances, poisons, [and] magic” was “the most wretched and disgraceful evil” encountered by Harvey Wiley, chief chemist of the Agriculture Department. Wiley was an early proponent of “food and drug purity” and pushed for consumer protections. He was effective, but with an ego as grandiose as Roosevelt’s, Wiley alienated powerful allies. Yet, despite pushback from industrial food producers and the Speaker of the House, “Uncle Joe” Cannon—an Illinois Republican secretly in league with the meat men—Congress created laws to prevent “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs or medicines and liquors.”
Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act on June 30, 1906. These were the nation’s first laws to make it a crime to mislabel or doctor meat, create new guidelines for food manufacturing, limit additives, require accurate labeling, and impose legal and financial penalties on violators. The Pure Food and Drug Act also took aim at “addictive” or “dangerous” drugs, such as opium, morphine, cannabis, and alcohol. The acts marked the first time the federal government asserted its responsibility for the health and safety of America’s foods and drugs.
In 1930, Wiley’s Bureau of Chemistry was renamed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). By 2019, the FDA had 17,599 employees and an annual budget of $5.7 billion and oversaw some $2.6 trillion worth of food, tobacco, and medical products, including 77 percent of the nation’s food supply. Bad actors persist in the food industry, and scandals regularly pop up. The FDA has sometimes struggled to keep pace, but has generally been an effective guardian of public health and is one of the largest, most important, and least understood arms of the federal bureaucracy.
The Twenty-Seventh President March 4, 1909–March 4, 1913
What he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick
As the election of 1908 hove into view, Theodore Roosevelt was a shoo-in for reelection but decided he’d had enough of the presidency. One evening, he invited Secretary of War William Howard Taft and his wife, Helen (Nellie), to dinner at the White House. Over their meal, TR muttered clairvoyantly, “There is something hanging over his head….At one time it looks like the presidency. Then again it looks like the chief justiceship.”
Nellie Taft, a slim, intense woman who had dreamed of living in the White House since visiting as a girl (her father was Rutherford B. Hayes’s law partner), perked up: “Make it the presidency.”
“Make it the chief justiceship,” rumbled her husband, an amiable three-hundred-and-thirty-two-pound legal scholar who aspired to the Supreme Court.
By that point, Roosevelt had transformed himself from an arch capitalist into a defender of workers’ rights, a shift that alienated many of his Republican brethren, who considered him a “mad messiah.” But TR kept a tight grip on the levers of power and used the dinner to gauge Taft’s willingness to continue his antitrust, anti-tariff, pro-conservation agenda. That night, Taft convinced his mentor he would make a worthy successor.
Taft’s opponent in 1908 was the fiery Nebraska Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who was making his third bid for the White House. Taft was a genial Ohioan who found the hustle and bustle of stumping “uncomfortable.” To inject energy into his run for office his team created “spectacle politics,” including free food at campaign stops. It is an age-old tactic that reliably draws crowds, and usually features pancake breakfasts or rubber-chicken dinners. But at one stop things got weird.
When Taft arrived at Fargo, North Dakota, in September, he was greeted by several thousand people who had traveled hundreds of miles to see the candidate in the flesh. A “surging meaningless crowd” escorted him by torchlight to a woodlot, where Taft gave a quick speech and local pols orated before dinner was served in a “natural amphitheater.” There, bonfires created “a weird light and smoke effect,” papers reported. Taft was a large man with a booming voice, yet it was the spirit of Roosevelt that animated the crowd, as if TR’s meaty face, with its pince-nez glasses and bushy mustache, were grinning toothily from the smoke like the Wizard of Oz.
The barbecue feast included ten steer and twenty mules, which symbolized the Democratic Party. Two large black bears fattened on walnuts were also scheduled to become part of the menu, but a debate broke out about the wisdom of roasting animals that symbolized Roosevelt. The New York Herald claimed Taft “ate bear meat with as much gusto as any of the thousands of enthusiastics” gorging on the free dinner—the implication being that Taft was happy to feast on TR’s largesse. But that account was fanciful. As The New York Times wrote, “It would never do to have the candidate eat up the ‘real Teddy bear.’ ” Other papers noted the animals were not eaten but chained under a banner reading, “We Are Real Teddies.” The confusion over the bears’ fate was emblematic of the challenge of linking Taft to Roosevelt while presenting the candidate as worthy in his own right. Having ridden in on TR’s coattails, Taft would find it difficult to dismount.
Taft was inaugurated the twenty-seventh president in 1909. He was fifty-one, a rotund man with an expressive bushy mustache, big cheeks, cheerful lidded eyes, and brown hair parted in the middle. While his wife, Helen (Nellie) Herron Taft, was “inexpressibly happy” to become First Lady, the new president was less enthusiastic about the White House, which he’d later call “a prison,” and “the loneliest place in the world.”
Influenced by Nellie—the first First Lady to smoke cigarettes, ride in an inauguration parade, lobby for safety standards for federal workers, publish her memoirs, and drive a car—Taft expanded the West Wing and built the first Oval Office on the White House’s south side. (Franklin D. Roosevelt would further expand the West Wing and move the Oval Office to the building’s southeast corner, where it remains.)
Even before he took office there were rumors of tension between Taft and his mentor, Roosevelt, and though Taft assured TR there was not “the slightest difference between us,” his views skewed to the right over time. He later described an inauguration eve dinner together as “a funeral,” while gossips said Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Taft “gave each other precise courtesy.” The military aide Archie Butt disputed that, and said the men had spent a pleasant evening cursing Congress. But the fault lines were real, and spreading.
Taft stood about six feet tall, and his weight yo-yoed between 270 and 354 pounds, making him the heaviest president in history. He “liked every sort of food with the single exception of eggs,” said Elizabeth Jaffray, the Tafts’ acerbic Canadian-born housekeeper. “He really had few preferences but just naturally liked food—and lots of it.”
The president would begin his day with a “physical culture man” (a personal trainer) followed by a breakfast worthy of a medieval king. His primary nourishment was steak, which he liked cooked medium, sprinkled with salt and pepper, and smeared with butter. “He wanted a thick, juicy twelve-ounce steak nearly every morning,” Jaffray recalled, along with two oranges, toast, and a torrent of coffee with buckets of cream and sugar. But he was just as happy to start the day with a pile of waffles or a haunch of venison, or both. On a visit to Savannah, Georgia, he gorged on grapefruit, potted partridge, broiled venison, grilled partridge, waffles with butter and maple syrup, bacon, hominy, hot rolls, more venison, and a pond’s worth of coffee.
Taft would often have steak for lunch and dinner, too. If not beef, then he might tackle a menu that progressed from bouillon to smelt with tartar sauce, lamb chops, Bermuda potatoes and green peas, raspberry jelly with whipped cream, bonbons, and more coffee.
His dinner often featured prodigious quantities of seafood, including salmon, terrapin (turtle) soup, or lobster Newburg—a rich dish of lobster, butter, cream, cognac, sherry, eggs, and cayenne pepper popularized by Delmonico’s, New York’s finest restaurant. One of Taft’s favorite repasts was the mussel soup called Billy Bi (or Billy By), a dish created in Paris for the expat American businessman William B. Leeds, known as Billy B. (Some say the patron’s surname was Brands or Beebes.) Leeds didn’t want his friends to suffer the indignity of wrenching mussels from their shells, so the chef at Chez Maxim’s served just the cooking liquor—a luxurious broth made of fish and mussel stock, white wine, heavy cream, butter, onion, celery, and thyme. It’s a dish I recommend, albeit with the mussels included with the broth.
By 1911, President Taft had tipped the scales at 332 pounds, though Jaffray sniped that he “looks as if he actually weighs 400.” Concerned, Nellie Taft instructed the president (via Jaffray) to slim down. Hearing his wife’s edict, Taft grumbled, “I tell you, it’s a sad state of affairs when a man can’t even call his gizzard his own.” But he agreed to replace his usual twelve-ounce breakfast steak with an eight- or six-ouncer. Though Taft complained about his “terrible sentence,” Jaffray wrote, “Somehow, he really didn’t take off any great amount of weight.”
He suffered from sleep apnea, snoring, and grogginess and was notorious for dozing off at cabinet meetings. “While I was talking to him…his head would fall over on his breast and he would go sound asleep,” recalled the Indiana senator James Watson. “He would waken and resume the conversation, only to repeat the performance.” Nellie dubbed him “Sleeping Beauty.”
It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that a person’s weight was considered an indicator of the vitality and self-discipline desirable in a chief executive. In the 1950s the word “corpulence” was replaced by “obesity” and was identified as a medical problem. Since then, obesity has been traced to poor nutrition and a lack of exercise and associated with heart disease, diabetes, joint problems, and high cholesterol. Taft’s struggle resonates today, when obesity is considered a chronic disease that afflicts nearly half the American population.
When he was forty-eight and weighed 314 pounds, Taft wrote to the British diet expert Dr. Nathaniel E. Yorke-Davies, who advised him to lose 70 pounds. To do so, Taft would start his day with a cup of hot water flavored with lemon juice, Gluten biscuits, and a mere six ounces of lean grilled steak. Later, he’d heap his plate with vegetables and snack on stewed prunes. He weighed himself daily, kept a food diary, played golf, and rode horses (apologizing to the animals). He’d send Yorke-Davies weekly updates, including notes on his bowel movements. In April 1905 he weighed 255 pounds—a loss of 59 pounds—no longer suffered from “acidity of the stomach,” and felt “excellent,” he announced. In fact, Taft had fudged how many pounds he’d shed and confided that he was “pretty continuously hungry.”
While campaigning, he packed the weight back on, and ballooned to as much as 354 pounds. A rumor held that Taft was so big that he became stuck in a bathtub. It sounded vaguely plausible but wasn’t true, though he did have a custom bathtub installed in the White House. Stretching seven feet, eleven inches long, by forty-one inches wide, it weighed a ton, could fit four regular-sized men, and was said to be the largest tub ever made for an individual.
Like Jack Sprat and his wife, Taft was large and jovial, while Nellie was thin and zealous. She was ahead of her time in many ways, and would have made a fine chief executive herself. The First Lady was more interested in politics than the president was, and silently monitored his meetings then offered advice in private. Channeling her energy, Mrs. Taft landscaped the Washington Mall, and in March 1912 planted 3,020 cherry trees donated by Japan. (In 1965, Japan donated an additional 3,800 trees, which were planted by Lady Bird Johnson.) When it came to household management, Nellie was either an efficiency expert or a holy terror, depending on your perspective. She replaced the male cooks with three Irishwomen and frequently dropped into the kitchen to make “helpful” suggestions. One cook quit in frustration and another left to get married (they were quickly replaced). Nellie had a passion for technology and installed a twelve-foot-long Imperial French Coal Range, a forty-quart Peerless Ice Cream Freezer, and an electric silverware buffer in the kitchen.
To organize menus and cleaning, she dispensed with the traditional male stewards and installed Elizabeth Jaffray as the first White House housekeeper. “I wanted a woman who could relieve me of the supervision of such details as no man, expert steward though he may be, would ever recognize,” Nellie explained. “The White House…has to be more vigilantly watched [than a normal home]. Dust accumulates in corners; mirrors and picture glasses get dim with dampness; curtains sag…floors lose their gloss; rugs turn up at the corners…things get out of order generally; and it is a very large house. Kitchen helpers…neglect their shining copper pots and pans and kettles…they need a woman’s guidance and control.”
Nellie kept a gimlet eye on her food budget, reducing it to just $868.93 a month by ordering wholesale, nixing pricey or out-of-season goods, and using fresh milk from their cow Pauline Wayne (the last bovine to board at the White House). They paid for state dinners and official functions from Taft’s $75,000 salary. But Mrs. Jaffray objected to their “butter by the tub, potatoes by the barrel, fruit and green vegetables by the crate.”
Mrs. Taft fulfilled her childhood dream by managing the president’s social schedule, and in the winter of 1909–10 she invited eighty people for dinner one night, seventy the next, and hosted a reception for two thousand guests the day after that. She hosted teas, and the president committed to at least four large receptions a year. But just three months into their administration, the First Lady collapsed from a stroke, at forty-seven. Her faced drooped; she suffered aphasia, struggled to speak, and wore a veil. Her family managed to keep her condition secret, and though she recovered she’d never be the same dynamic woman she had been. One evening, Nellie sat alone in a small room adjacent to a roaring state dinner. Elegantly dressed in a new gown and jewelry, she sat at a table set for one, with fine linen, silver, and a floral centerpiece; she ate what her guests ate and listened in on their conversations through a door cracked slightly ajar. It must have been an exquisite torture for someone who had waited a lifetime for that moment.
After steak, Taft’s favorite dish was roasted possum (or opossum), North America’s only marsupial. Possum was a sought-after comestible then, and in 1909 hunters in Texas sent a “large white possum” to the White House by express mail. At a Thanksgiving, Taft paired a twenty-six-pound “monster” possum with a thirty-pound turkey and a fifty-pound mince pie. In Georgia, a waiter lifted the cover from a silver platter to reveal a live, tethered possum; the animal bared its teeth and hissed at Taft, but “it was the reproachful look which left the lasting impression,” The New York Times reported. When an eighteen-pound “Billy Possum and taters” (sweet potatoes) were served with persimmon beer, the president quickly reduced the dish to “a shattered wreck,” a guest recalled. A doctor sitting nearby cautioned that possum was rich, greasy, and unhealthy. “Well, I like possum,” Taft replied. “I ate very heartily of it….Not only am I very fond of possum, but that possum is very fond of me.”
As an alternative to the Roosevelt-inspired teddy bear, Taft’s operatives tried to market a stuffed “Billy Possum” toy. But real possums rifle through garbage and eat ticks, snakes, and the skeletons of dead animals (for calcium). Billy Possum didn’t capture the public imagination.
Today the big-eyed, gray-haired, pink-nosed marsupial is no longer a popular menu item, though it remains an apt political metaphor. Possums famously pretend to be dead—playing possum—when threatened. It’s an involuntary action, like fainting, in which the animal’s eyes close while it emits a foul-smelling odor and foams at the mouth. But eventually the “dead” possum will twitch its ears and come to. Taft played political possum, as it were: at first he followed Roosevelt’s lead, but like a possum twitching its ears, the true Taft slowly came to life and wandered off in his own direction.
In a telling moment, TR cautioned Taft not to mention his love of golf in public because it would color him as a privileged man of leisure. “It is just like my tennis,” TR said. “I never let a photo of me in tennis costume appear.” But Taft argued that golf was “a game for people who are not active….When a man weighs 285 pounds you have got to give him some opportunity to make his…muscles move.” People in western states condemned Taft’s golfing as immoral, but many more applauded his pastime, which inspired a golf boom that doubled the number of players on public courses.
The tennis/golf divide symbolized the ways that Roosevelt and Taft, the somewhat progressive and increasingly conservative wings of the GOP, drifted apart. Roosevelt worried that his protégé’s antitrust policy targeted U.S. Steel, a company TR considered a “good trust,” and he felt betrayed when Taft fired Gifford Pinchot, TR’s head of the U.S. Forest Service. “Yes, Taft carried out TR’s policies—carried them out on a shutter,” Senator Jonathan Dolliver of Iowa acidly noted.
In 1910, Roosevelt began to openly attack Taft, while Taft claimed his former mentor was “the most dangerous man in American history…because of his hold upon the less intelligent voters and the discontented.” Two years later, Roosevelt announced he would run for a third term and deemed Taft a “puzzlewit.” Taft called him a “honeyfugler,” and said, “I have been a man of straw long enough; every man who has blood in his body and who has been misrepresented as I have is forced to fight.” To which TR’s boosters countered: Taft “has too big a paunch to fight or have much of a punch, while a free-for-all, slap-bang, kick-him-in-the-belly, is just nuts for the chief.”
The 1912 Republican convention in Chicago was bedlam. Roosevelt ran as an independent candidate of the Bull Moose Party, comparing himself to a raging bull moose ready for a fight. It was a battle of mutually assured destruction. In the end they both lost to Woodrow Wilson, who became the first Democratic president since Grover Cleveland in 1892.
Roosevelt and Taft did not talk to each other for years. But they managed to reconcile in 1918, at a chance meeting in a Chicago hotel. TR was fifty-nine by then and, at 237 pounds, had swelled to Taftian dimensions. He had less than a year to live. Taft lived until 1930, when he died at age seventy-two of heart failure. At that point, he weighed a relatively feathery 280 pounds and was the only person to have served as both president and chief justice.
In 1909, three weeks after Taft’s inauguration, Roosevelt embarked on an industrial-scale African safari under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, which gave it a zoological gloss. TR and his son Kermit, assisted by three scientists and 250 African porters, gun bearers, and guides, killed 512 large animals and collected 23,151 specimens—which was more than they were allowed. While condemning “game butchery” as “wanton cruelty,” Roosevelt defended his killing as scientifically important and called his critics soft in the head. After felling a bull elephant, Roosevelt fondly recalled, “I toasted slices of elephant’s heart on a pronged stick before the fire, and found it delicious; for I was hungry, and the night was cold.”
Friends like John Muir struggled to reconcile the Roosevelt they admired—the conservationist president—with his amoral doppelgänger, the “boyish” man who rashly shot a neighbor’s dog, rushed to kill endangered bison, and culled the docile giraffe he supposedly admired. Like modern tech bros such as Mark Zuckerberg (who ate only the animals he killed himself for a year), TR saw himself as a predator who lived by his wits and the primal code of life and death. Roosevelt’s discordant relationship with nature seemed to belong to two different people, and in a way it did. An analysis by the Duke University Medical Center found that 8 percent of presidents showed signs of bipolar disorder, most notably Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
When faced with the loss of loved ones, some people, like Thomas Jefferson, lose their appetite, while others eat superabundantly. Roosevelt was of the latter persuasion. A sickly child who was despondent over the death of his parents and his first wife, TR grew to five feet ten and bulked up to well over two hundred pounds. Gifford Pinchot observed that TR “ate nearly twice as much as the average man,” and the economist Irving Fisher added, “The president is running his machine too hard….[F]riction…will probably increase to almost a stopping point.” Roosevelt acknowledged that “I eat too much,” but that did not slow his consumption.
A fatalist who did not expect to see old age, TR was determined to see his children turn twenty-one. He did, and on January 6, 1919, he died in his sleep, at sixty. Medically speaking, a blood clot had lodged in his lung and stopped his breathing, but you could say that Theodore Roosevelt burned so brightly that he snuffed himself out. Or, more elementally, that he ate himself to death.