On September 13, 1901, high in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, a party of hikers paused for a picnic. For Theodore Roosevelt—rancher, sportsman, author, naturalist, and vice president of the United States—it was a welcome day of freedom. He had led his family on an energetic early-morning climb to the summit of Mount Marcy and now looked forward to a restful hour on the shores of Lake Tear of the Clouds. But, as the Roosevelts unpacked their lunch baskets, the peace of the autumn afternoon was shattered. A messenger, gasping for breath after his uphill run, brought grim news: The president of the United States was dying.
Seven days earlier, while visiting the Pan American Exposition in the burgeoning industrial city of Buffalo, New York, President William McKinley had been surrounded by a crowd of admirers, eager to shake the presidential hand. Yet among the crowd was one mentally unstable citizen who carried a gun concealed in a handkerchief. He shot McKinley at close range.
After the initial panic, the president's doctors had announced that, although the wound was serious, their patient would survive. They had reassured Vice President Roosevelt that there was no need to abandon his plans for a brief holiday in the Adirondacks. But they were wrong; McKinley was sinking fast, and by the time Roosevelt reached Buffalo, the president was dead. A few hours later, on the afternoon of September 14, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office, to become the twenty-sixth president of the United States.
Theodore Roosevelt gives a characteristically ebullient speech from behind a bench of scribbling New York reporters at a rally in 1911. With his political acuity and zest for life, Roosevelt embodied the virile spirit of the United States in the early twentieth century. As president from 1901 to 1909, he used his powers to force through social reforms, challenge the might of industry, and negotiate the Square Deal between labor and business. Roosevelt's foreign policy was equally vigorous: He shunned isolationism and involved the United States in world affairs as no president had done before.
The nation that Roosevelt received abruptly into his charge was in the throes of dramatic change. The men who had drafted the Constitution of the United States of America a dozen decades before could not have foreseen the transformation that awaited the tiny republic of farmers and frontiersmen. The thirteen original states along the Atlantic seaboard now represented a fraction of a continent-spanning behemoth, whose population of seventy-six million was growing by a million every year. Its wildernesses were tamed, its expanses trussed by the iron bands of the railways; its cities had burst their boundaries; its wealth had multiplied at a geometric rate; its industrialists not only waxed fat and powerful at home but gained an ever-greater share of markets overseas. From America's fields, mines, and wells now came half the world's cotton, wheat, copper, and oil, and one-third of its coal and gold.
By the time the new century began, the United States was reckoned the richest of nations: No other country on earth produced as much material wealth per capita. And no longer did this youthful giant look only inward: America had begun to flex its muscles and to pursue its own material interests by engaging in the power struggles of the world outside. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the nation would continue to transform itself at a staggering speed.
World History
