Roosevelt, Theodore

26th president of the USA 1901–09, a Republican. After serving as governor of New York 1898–1901 he became vice president to McKinley, whom he succeeded as president on McKinley's assassination in 1901. He campaigned against the great trusts (associations of enterprises that reduce competition), while carrying on a jingoist foreign policy designed to enforce US supremacy over Latin America. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1906 for his mediation at the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904.

As president, Roosevelt became more liberal. He tackled business monopolies, initiated measures for the conservation of national resources, setting aside 190 million acres for national forests, coal and water reserves, and wildlife refuges. Other highlights of his domestic policy were the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which established the Food and Drug Administration, and the Hepburn Act of 1906, which enhanced the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission. In 1904, he announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, to the effect that the USA assumed responsibility for intervening in Latin America when countries displayed ‘chronic wrongdoing or impotence’ (the Monroe Doctrine declared that European intervention in Latin America would be regarded as a threat to the USA).

Alienated after his retirement by the conservatism of his successor W H Taft, Roosevelt formed the Progressive or ‘Bull Moose’ Party. He unsuccessfully ran for the presidency in 1912. During World War I he strongly advocated US intervention.