Where McKinley had been cautious, slow-moving, and conservative, Roosevelt was a firebrand. Wall Street’s initial reaction to the new president was to warn of a stock-market crash if there was any change of course. To pacify the markets, Roosevelt pledged to carry on McKinley’s business-friendly programs “absolutely unbroken.”

He didn’t mean it. Despite his role as the face of the nation’s grief, Roosevelt found it impossible to contain his glee at his change of fortune. On his first day in the White House, he called in the press to inaugurate the kind of informal relationships he maintained in Albany and told reporters that he meant to be president – one who would “act in every word and deed precisely as if I and not McKinley had been the candidate for whom the electors cast the vote for president.” At dinner that night, William Allen White was “pop-eyed with wonder” as Roosevelt talked “with a kind of dynamic, burning candor” about his plans. The next day, the new president took White and Lincoln Steffens for an hour-long walk, during which he laughed about his luck, the rage of Boss Platt, and the impotent fury of Mark Hanna. Hanna could only sputter, “I told William McKinley it was a mistake to nominate that wild man. I asked him if he realized what would happen if he should die. Now look, that damned cowboy is President of the United States!”

Roosevelt and his family captured the public’s imagination. The six Roosevelt children brought life and charm to the White House. Edith set about repairing some of the damage time and neglect had done to the old building. But its floors threatened to give way when people walked on them, and Roosevelt was able to persuade Congress to dedicate $500 million for a renovation. By the end of 1902, the White House was sound, with a new West Wing housing the Oval Office, top presidential staff, and the press, which had a room of its own. Roosevelt no longer held regular press conferences, but reporters were welcome to ask questions while he sat more or less still for his daily afternoon shave. He was candid and forthcoming, but any reporter who violated an off-the-record confidence was banished to the Ananias club, named after the Biblical liar.

Before and after the rebuilding and redecorating, Edith worked to restore the White House’s place at the pinnacle of Washington society. Under her supervision, social functions became less garish, smaller, and more formal - until invitations were coveted. Leading performers appeared at her Friday evening musicales, including pianist Ignace Paderewski and cellist Pablo Casals.

Roosevelt’s furious energy and nonstop talk were tempered by his talent for laughing at himself; his daily walks through Rock Creek Park became endurance tests for the hapless aides and reporters who tried to keep up with him. In a critic’s grudging tribute, “While he is in the neighborhood, the public can no more look the other way than the small boy can turn his head away from a circus parade followed by a steam calliope.”

But for all his brio, Roosevelt’s tactics in pursuing his goals were anything but reckless. As he had done in New York, he reached out to party bosses who could block his bills. He asked Mark Hanna for advice, held conferences with his Cabinet members to discuss policy, and cultivated the Big Four, a group of senators who could pass or kill any proposed bill. Their undisputed chief was Nelson Aldrich of Long Island, a multimillionaire investor who was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and whose daughter Abby was married to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the son of Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. Roosevelt played to all of them as he slowly put together his first State of the Union speech.

Collision was inevitable. The bosses in both parties had close ties with the country’s major corporations; so did both Houses of Congress, but especially the Senate, whose members at the time were elected by state legislatures, responsive to campaign contributions, and sometimes to bribery.

In the year-and-a-half since Boss Platt had stymied Roosevelt’s efforts to regulate trusts in New York, Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan had assembled U.S. Steel, the world’s largest corporation. More than 1,000 corporate mergers took place nationwide. All too often, they were followed by higher prices, lower wages, miserable working conditions, and the corruption of state and local governments. Roosevelt knew that attacking the trusts would turn his party against him and doom any chance of progress. But he hoped to persuade the party that it could prosper in the long run by confronting and reforming the abuses of the trusts.

The State of the Union message was designed to achieve that goal. Roosevelt opened with a denunciation of McKinley’s anarchist assassin and went on to argue that only a program of moderate, reasoned reform could defeat the forces of anarchism, socialism, and demagoguery. He hailed the virtues of capitalism, industry, and free enterprise, but maintained that the evils they brought with them must be kept in check. He maintained it would be a mistake to strike indiscriminately at the trusts, but he insisted that they must be “supervised and within reasonable limits controlled.” He urged Congress to create a new Department of Commerce to carry out the government’s right to “inspect and examine” the finances of the nation’s companies to determine whether new regulations or taxes were required.

Reaction from the press and public was favorable, but the trusts and their allies in Congress took it for granted that Roosevelt’s program would gain no traction without a storm of public protest. They believed Roosevelt’s call for regulation of the trusts – along with his pleas for better working conditions, rail-rate reform, conservation measures, and a canal across Central America – would prove ineffective.

Then, Roosevelt took his big stick off his shoulder. He instructed Attorney General Philander C. Knox to file an antitrust suit against the rail and shipping conglomerate Northern Securities Company, a recently merged holding company linking the interests of J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, E. H. Harriman, the Rockefellers, James J. Hill, and Jay Gould. The giant trust was second only to U.S. Steel in revenues. It had tens of thousands of miles of railroad track and hundreds of ships; a person might travel, as journalist Ray Baker reported, “from England to China on regular lines of steamships and railroads” without leaving Northern Securities’ jurisdiction. Baker called the trust an “absolute dictator in its own territory, with monarchical powers in all matters relating to transportation.”

Before issuing his order, Roosevelt had asked Knox to assess the odds that prosecution under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 could succeed. Knox pondered the question for several weeks before concluding that he could win the case. Roosevelt told him to go ahead, without informing the rest of his Cabinet. The announcement shocked politicians, the public, and businesspeople. In its aftermath, Roosevelt had to deal with the market crash that many feared and predicted when he took office. Stocks fell as pundits predicted a wholesale war on industrial trusts.

J. P. Morgan, with a palpable air of grievance, hastily arranged a meeting with Roosevelt and Knox, saying, “If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up.” “We don’t want to fix it up,” Knox replied. “We want to stop it.”

After Morgan left, Roosevelt remarked that his attitude was pure Wall Street: “Mr. Morgan could not help regarding me as a big rival operator.”

With that, each side’s position was clear. Roosevelt didn’t care for the Sherman Act, which he saw as a blunt instrument; he would have preferred new laws permitting regulation of corporate excesses before they occurred. But with Congress refusing to act on his proposals, he would rely on the only tool at his disposal – and he followed the Northern Securities suit by telling Knox to file another case against the “Beef Trust,” in which giant meat packers, such as Armour and Swift, had divided territories and fixed prices across much of the nation. Roosevelt would go on to use the Sherman Act more than forty times during his presidency. It would take years for the suits to play out and pass Constitutional muster, but in attacking Northern Securities, the new president had served notice on big business and the Republican Party that he meant to use - and expand - the power of his office.

As midterm elections approached in 1902, Roosevelt launched a campaign to persuade voters that his proposal to regulate trusts was preferable to the Democrats’ plan to eradicate the trusts, which Roosevelt argued would destroy good and bad companies alike. He was campaigning in New England, enjoying fervent cheers and applause from large crowds, when calamity struck in Massachusetts: Traveling through Pittsfield, the horse-drawn carriage carrying Roosevelt and his party was struck by a trolley car. Three passengers, including the president, were thrown clear of the wreckage and escaped with minor injuries, but Roosevelt’s bodyguard, William Craig, was killed. Despite the loss, the president finished his day’s schedule, then rested at Sagamore Hill for a day before continuing his campaign. He had high praise for Craig, saying, “The man who was killed was one of whom I was fond and whom I greatly prized for his loyalty and faithfulness.”

 

FOR YEARS, REPUBLICANS had advocated high protective tariffs on imported goods and had credited the levies with producing the nation’s prosperity. But the tariffs had come under Democratic attack for raising consumer prices, and the issue was dividing Republicans, splitting those representing Eastern manufacturers, who depended on the tariffs, from Western legislators clamoring for lower prices on goods their constituents needed to run ranches, mines, and factories. Roosevelt favored lowering tariffs, but he knew the issue was explosive. When he called a group of prominent senators to Oyster Bay to discuss the problem, his ally Cabot Lodge could give him no reassurance when Aldrich and Hanna warned, “You will never touch a schedule of the tariff act.” Roosevelt bowed to what he saw as reality. “I do not wish to split my own party wide open on the tariff question,” he said, “unless some good is to come.”

The three-week trip through the West and Midwest, where the president spoke to uncharacteristically quiet crowds, was an uncomfortable journey because of more than party tensions. Roosevelt was suffering increasing leg pain due to the trolley accident in Pittsfield. When his physicians realized he had an abscess that required immediate surgery, Roosevelt refused anesthetic, underwent the operation, and was told to rest for several weeks. The trip west was cut short.

Roosevelt reveled in the relief from his daily flood of visitors, but his recuperation was cut short by a strike of 140,000 Pennsylvania coal miners - the country’s worst-ever industrial deadlock. The five-month strike had caused little damage over the summer, but by the end of September, due to the shortage of coal, schools began closing, with hospitals and government buildings preparing to follow suit. In some cities, mobs plundered coal-carrying railroad cars. Clashes between striking miners and non-union replacements were growing more violent. By the mine owners’ count, hundreds of non-striking miners had been killed for breaking the strike line and continuing to work.

The mine owners represented a coal trust, which had emerged after coal-carrying railroads began buying mines and using their control over freight rates to put independent coal operators out of business. Before the strike, the union, the United Mine Workers of America, offered to accept a wage increase of 5 percent, which would have cut $3 million from the industry’s profit of $75 million. The owners refused. The union president, John Mitchell, had offered to take the dispute to arbitration, but the owners’ spokesman, George Baer of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, refused to meet Mitchell. If the strike continued, Baer calculated, public outcry and demand for coal would crush the union and drive the miners back to work.

Roosevelt said he was “at my wits’ end how to proceed.” He had no responsibility for the emergency and no authority to take a hand in it. But knowing the public would demand presidential leadership, he invited the owners and Mitchell to the White House to discuss the crisis.

Mitchell was one of the most popular and charismatic labor leaders in the country’s history. It was said that on the day McKinley was assassinated, coal miners gathered in furious mobs, only to go home peaceably when they received news Mitchell was safe. At the White House meeting, he again offered to submit to arbitration and abide by an impartial panel’s decision. Baer said he would refuse “any proposition advanced by Mr. Mitchell.” Roosevelt was furious but managed to control his temper. So did Mitchell, and both felt vindicated when Roosevelt released a transcript of the meeting to the press, and public opinion swung to the miners’ side.

If the impasse had lasted, Roosevelt was ready with his own solution. “Don’t hit till you have to,” he was fond of saying, “but when you do hit, hit hard.” To end the strike, he planned to defy the petty constraints of the Constitution by sending a hand-picked general and 10,000 Army troops to take over the coal mines, with orders to ignore any court orders or instructions from anyone except himself as commander in chief. General John Schofield, a Civil War veteran who had served as commanding general of the army and secretary of war, had agreed to lead the campaign.

Fortunately, Roosevelt’s war secretary, Elihu Root, appealed to J. P. Morgan to intervene in the dispute. Despite his own anger at Roosevelt over the Northern Securities antitrust suit, Morgan agreed, and he called on the mine owners to submit to a presidential arbitration panel, almost exactly as Mitchell had proposed. The owners consented but refused to allow any union representative to sit on the panel. The owners would “heroically submit to anarchy rather than have Tweedledum,” he wrote, “yet if I would call it Tweedledee they would accept with rapture.” So Edgar E. Clark, head of the Order of Railway Conductors, was seated on the panel in the guise of an “eminent sociologist.” With that, Mitchell led his men back to work in the mines, and three months later, the panel gave the miners a retroactive wage increase of 10 percent – twice what they would have taken before the strike – along with a cut in their work day from ten hours to nine.

The settlement of the coal strike reinvigorated the Republican Party; against most predictions, the party survived the midterm elections of 1902 with control of both houses of Congress intact. Roosevelt’s popularity rose as well. When, on a hunting trip to Mississippi, he refused to shoot a small bear members of his party had tied to a tree to ensure the president had a successful hunt, the nation’s cartoonists drew the bear smaller and smaller until it was a cub. Toymakers took the opportunity to market stuffed bears honoring the president, and the Teddy bear was on its way to becoming a fixture in every child’s bedroom.

But none of this gave Roosevelt the political muscle to get bills regulating trusts through Congress – and he knew it. In his second State of the Union message in December 1902, Roosevelt repeated his call for a Commerce Department, but in measured tones. To prove his orthodoxy, he defended the accumulation of wealth and even argued against lower tariffs. Reformers lamented that it was “a very lame message” from a president who had been intimidated by “the vested interests of the country.” But Roosevelt was being pragmatic, trying to steer a course between the reformers and obstructionists in his party. “I pass my days in a state of exasperation,” he wrote his son Kermit, “first, with the fools who do not want any of the things that ought to be done, and second, with the equally obnoxious fools who insist on so much that they cannot get anything.” He knew public anger toward the country’s vested interests, still only simmering, was the key to compelling lawmakers to take action. Until then, he would have to wait.

The wait wasn’t long. The January 1903 issue of McClure’s magazine galvanized the country with three sensational, but meticulously documented, exposés of corruption in America. The first was Ida Tarbell’s story of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil trust and the predatory tactics it used – including espionage, bribes, and harassment of small businessmen – to monopolize the oilfields. Next came Lincoln Steffens’ piece on Minneapolis Mayor Albert Alonzo “Doc” Ames and his plundering of the city’s treasury. Finally, Ray Baker exposed the brutality of the coal miners’ vengeance on 17,000 strikebreakers who had continued to work through the dispute. The issue sold out immediately.

Tarbell’s Standard Oil series would go on for twelve installments, making her a household name and the most influential journalist in the nation. Steffens would write fourteen articles and two books on “The Shame of the Cities,” documenting civic corruption. And Baker’s piece on coal miners was the first of a string on labor and capital – stories that, while uniformly sympathetic to unions and unionism, never flinched from uncovering wrongs on both sides.

Under publisher and founding editor S. S. McClure, McClure’s had been pursuing investigative journalism for years, but this issue marked the beginning of what became known as the muckraking era. Middle-class voters who had been only vaguely aware of economic and political corruption could now see evidence of the abuses and harm they inflicted on the public. Sensing a change in the political climate, Theodore Roosevelt took action.

The president supported three bills in Congress. The first would outlaw the secret rebates on freight rates that railroads had been giving favored trusts, which the trusts could use to raise their profits or lower prices to drive competitors out of business. The second would make it easier and faster to prosecute companies under the Sherman Antitrust Act, giving them precedence on court calendars. The third, closest to Roosevelt’s heart, would establish a Cabinet-level Department of Commerce and Labor, with a Bureau of Corporations that would have the power to investigate the finances and operations of corporations conducting interstate commerce. The bureau could publicize its findings, which the president thought was the “first essential” effort in fighting corporate abuses ranging from unfair competition and stock-price manipulation to false advertising and bribery of public officials. The proposed bureau would have the power to subpoena records and force witnesses to testify.

Ida Tarbell’s first Standard Oil story had shown how Rockefeller used freight rebates to “corner the oil interests of the country.” Roosevelt told a friend, “No respectable railroad or respectable shipping business can openly object to the rebate bill.” Moreover, there were other ways the trusts could strike favorable deals from the railroads. With token resistance, the ban on rebates passed both houses of Congress. When Roosevelt signed it, he proclaimed “the highways of commerce open on equal terms to all who use them.” Similarly, the rising public resentment of monopolies overwhelmed opposition to the bill to expedite antitrust suits. Congressmen who had opposed the law now “rather sullenly acquiesced” to it, Roosevelt wrote, and the measure passed with little debate.

But large businesses and their Congressional compatriots remained opposed to federal oversight or regulation of commerce. As The Wall Street Journal explained, the leaders of the likes of Standard Oil saw antitrust laws as basically harmless, though annoying, “but publicity hurts. And the company will always, at all times, and in all ways, fight publicity.”

Roosevelt employed every possible stratagem to pass the bill. He risked offending his allies in Congress by tracking every stage of its progress through committee and floor debate. Knowing Hanna and Aldrich could muster a majority of Republican votes against him, he cultivated Democrats.

Roosevelt wasn’t above one maneuver that probably sealed the bill’s passage. On February 7, 1903, as it was heading for a vote, he called in a select group of reporters to leak the story that John D. Rockefeller had sent telegrams to six senators, giving them “peremptory” instructions that the bill “must be stopped,” since Standard Oil was “unalterably opposed” to it.

The president did not name the six senators or show the reporters a copy of the telegram; even if the wires were sent, the signature may have been not Rockefeller’s but his son’s. But there were no denials from Standard Oil, and the press reaction was predictably indignant. One newspaper said the message was clear: “We own the Republican Party, and it must do our bidding.” That should be no surprise, said another editorial: “It is pretty much his senate, anyway. Most of the members of the once-august body were elected on a pro-trust understanding . . . [Rockefeller is just] claiming the privileges he paid for, nothing more.”

Aldrich, leader of the Senate’s Big Four, read the situation accurately. When three lawyers from Standard Oil arrived in Washington to help draft a crippling amendment to the bill, Aldrich said they would only “inflame the agitator element” and sent them away. The bill passed. The president, careful to share credit, congratulated House Speaker David B. Henderson for “a record of more substantial achievement for the public good” than any other Congress had achieved in recent years. Roosevelt also credited Tarbell and McClure’s for giving the trusts a public face, explaining their abuses, and mobilizing the public behind the issue.

 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S PRESIDENCY left many enduring landmarks, including national parks, dams, and reservoirs, but none made a greater mark on the landscape than the Panama Canal. The maneuver he made to acquire the canal was devious, self-righteous, and high-handed; as California Senator S. I. Hayakawa was to say seven decades later, “We stole it fair and square.” The president called the acquisition “by far the most important action I took in foreign affairs.”

The advantages of a canal had been obvious for years, but an earlier French attempt to build one had been defeated by disease and the sheer difficulty of the job. At the turn of the century, two routes seemed possible, one across Nicaragua and the other through the Isthmus of Panama, which was then a province of Colombia. Early in 1903, Roosevelt’s secretary of state, John Hay, negotiated a treaty with Colombia giving the United States a perpetual lease on a canal zone across Panama. But when the Colombian senate refused to ratify the agreement, Roosevelt switched tactics to support Panamanian rebels who wanted to secede from Colombia. U.S. warships blocked Colombian troops on their way to suppress the rebellion, and Washington promptly recognized Panama as an independent nation. In turn, the government of Panama signed the treaty Colombia had rejected, giving the United States the Canal Zone for $10 million and annual lease payments of $250,000 for ninety-nine years.

The deal was dubious at best, often called a classic example of U.S. gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, and Colombia wouldn’t recognize Panama until Washington paid Bogota another $10 million in 1921. Construction of the canal began in 1904 and would go on for a decade through dense jungle, unstable mountain terrain, the perils of malaria and yellow fever, and the carping of critics.

Roosevelt had other problems at home. In 1903, when the Northern Securities antitrust case was grinding through the courts toward a Supreme Court test of constitutionality, Roosevelt had two chances to improve the odds of a victory. Two seats on the court opened up, and he quickly filled one with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes – the liberal chief justice of Massachusetts known for decisions favoring labor. For the second seat, the president tried twice to persuade William Howard Taft to give up his job as governor general of the Philippines and return to Washington, but Taft, despite his desire for a seat on the high court, maintained he was needed to preside over the islands’ transition from a Spanish colony to an independent nation. Roosevelt reluctantly yielded and named William R. Day, a former colleague of Taft’s on the Ohio bench.

But Roosevelt insisted Taft leave the Philippines when his most trusted cabinet officer, Secretary of War Elihu Root, announced plans to leave in the fall of 1903. Taft became Roosevelt’s trusted man-of-all-work, handling every job the president gave him with aplomb. As one early assignment, he organized the Panama Canal Commission to run the Canal Zone and supervise the giant construction project. Later, Taft was widely regarded as “acting president” when Roosevelt was away. Ultimately, Roosevelt would choose Taft as his successor.

When the Supreme Court finally ruled on the Northern Securities case on March 14, 1904, it was a triumph for the president. Justice John Marshall Harlan’s majority opinion said “no scheme or device” could suppress competition more effectively than the massive railroad trust, and Harlan invoked the specter of a “universal merger” that could bring the nation’s transportation system under a single man’s control. Roosevelt’s ability to regulate business was confirmed, and his image as a trust-buster would endure – though he stressed that the government would not “run amuck” and go after any company just because it was large.

There was a problem: Although Roosevelt’s appointee William R. Day had voted with the five-justice majority, Oliver Wendell Holmes filed a stinging dissent, arguing that the Sherman Act didn’t cover such cases. Roosevelt was as furious as he was surprised. “I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that,” he stormed.

As early as 1903, Roosevelt was well into planning for the election of 1904, which he counted on to legitimize his presidency. “I’d rather be elected to that office than have anything tangible of which I know,” he wrote. But he knew that the Republican bosses – “Hanna and that crowd” – were determined to deny him the nomination. It wasn’t just his antitrust policy or his intervention in the coal strike that rankled conservatives in his party. Some called him a traitor to his class for empathizing with working men and the poor; others disliked his ebullient personality, imperious streak, and constant need for action. In the South, Roosevelt’s efforts to include blacks in party affairs triggered resentment, and he had never been forgiven for inviting black educator Booker T. Washington to dine in the White House. As South Carolina Senator Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman fulminated, “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place.” Hanna was likely to control delegations from the South at the GOP convention.

In the early days of the twentieth century, it was considered unseemly for presidents to campaign for themselves. But a president could legitimately tour the country to stay in touch with the voters. Soon after the triumph of passing his antitrust bill early in 1903, Roosevelt set out on the longest journey ever taken by a president. In a luxurious train furnished by the Pullman Company, he spent nine weeks covering 14,000 miles across twenty-four states and territories.

He was in full campaign mode, with spacious quarters for guests, stenographers, and the press, and a platform at the rear of his private car from which he could speak to crowds at stations along the way. Vast numbers turned out to see him, listening to his speeches and presenting him dozens of odd gifts: a gold inlaid saddle, an infant badger, a horned toad, a foot-high silver loving cup that could hold sixteen pints of beer (“Great heavens and earth!” he said). Roosevelt was tireless, giving speech after speech lining out his policies, navigating through jostling crowds to banquets and bandstands, and popping out to his platform to wave to groups gathered along the tracks. He was having lunch one day when the train passed a small schoolhouse where the teacher had brought her students outside to wave to the president. Clutching his napkin, he ran to the platform to wave back. Returning to the table, he explained: “Those children wanted to see the President of the United States, and I could not disappoint them. They may never have another chance.”

The crowds cheered what the press called “Roosevelt gems,” pithy aphorisms of common-sense wisdom. Among them: “No law can make a fool wise or a weakling strong or a coward brave.” “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” “When you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on.” “No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” “I do not like hardness of heart, but neither do I like softness of head.” He began talking about “the square deal,” which would be the slogan for his domestic program as a whole, calling for “a square deal for every man, great or small, rich or poor.” He proposed a square deal for Native-American and black soldiers who had fought with him in Cuba and for wage earners and capitalists alike.

Naturalist John Burroughs traveled with the presidential party, and the farther west Roosevelt went, the more he talked about his passion for conservation. In a victory, he considered as important as his antitrust achievements, he had pushed the Reclamation Act through Congress in 1902, which made the first federal funds available to build dams, reservoirs, and irrigation systems in the West. America’s land, Roosevelt told the crowds, must “be distributed among many men, each of whom intends to make him a home on the land.” To make that possible and prevent land speculators from taking advantage of the projects, the law banned federal money for irrigation of plots larger than 160 acres.

At Yellowstone, Roosevelt left the press behind to spend two weeks in the woods with Burroughs, watching birds and observing game rather than hunting it. He also camped at Yosemite with John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club; marveled at the Grand Canyon, which he resolved to preserve as a national park; and got his first glimpse of California’s giant sequoias, which he said should not be desecrated by turning them into lumber. “There is nothing more practical, in the end,” he said, “than the preservation of beauty, than the preservation of anything that appeals to the higher emotions in mankind.” But he argued that conservation had a practical goal: to stop the degradation of the forests and guarantee “a steady and continuous supply of timber, grass, and above all, water.” During his presidency, he would create five national parks, four national game preserves, eighteen national monuments, fifty-one bird sanctuaries, and 150 national forests.

After the trip, Roosevelt returned to Washington eleven pounds heavier than when he left and opted for healthier pursuits during a vacation at Oyster Bay. “It was as lovely a summer as we have ever passed,” he wrote. The family was united except for nineteen-year-old Alice, who was spending her summer at Newport, Rhode Island. Roosevelt worried about her, telling a friend that he understood how a young girl might be attracted to such people, “but I do not think anyone can permanently lead his or her life amid such surroundings and with such objects, save at the cost of degeneration in character.” Ted, Jr., fifteen, and Kermit, thirteen, were home from Groton School; Ethel, eleven, kept a close eye on her younger brothers, Archie and Quentin, eight and five. For all of them, and for Edith, Sagamore Hill was the “great good place” for picnics, sailing, hiking, and adventures in the woods.