From “Madman” to Mount Rushmore
Theodore Roosevelt's journey to the presidency began with a controversial v.p. nomination
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(Any day now, Donald Trump will be announcing a running mate to join him on the GOP’s 2024 ticket. Over the past weeks, we’ve been looking at the politics of vice presidential selections, and at a few consequential or surprise choices throughout American history. Previous pieces considered how choices are impacted by the politics of the moment, and at the v.p. selections of Harry Truman, Chester Arthur, and Andrew Johnson. Today’s post looks at how Theodore Roosevelt’s controversial vice presidential nomination in 1900 kicked off his journey to the White House.)
Roosevelt’s somewhat unexpected journey to prominence
Theodore Roosevelt is one of the most iconic and popular presidents in American history. He’s one of four presidents on Mount Rushmore, right there with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Ironically, though, when Roosevelt was chosen to be William McKinley’s running mate in 1900 there were officials in his own party who feared he was too impulsive and too much of a maverick to be anywhere near an executive office.
In fact, the Republican Party made Roosevelt its vice presidential nominee not to elevate his career but rather to shut him up and bury him in what at the time seemed to be an inconsequential position.
It’s true. It’s also true that Roosevelt’s journey to national prominence happened in a flash, and so few people could have predicted he’d become president at all, never mind how noteworthy his presidency would turn out to be. Nevertheless, Roosevelt found himself in the White House a mere four years after accepting his first job in Washington, D.C., as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897. He’d previously served in the New York state legislature, written books, toiled as a rancher in the Dakota badlands, and been a New York City police commissioner.
From Rough Rider to Vice President
The event that triggered Roosevelt’s rise to fame, and eventually to the presidency, was the Spanish-American War of 1898. One year after starting his job as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he resigned in order to join the war effort, helping to form a cavalry regiment that became known as the Rough Riders. Roosevelt led this regiment on a celebrated charge against Spanish troops during the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba, a moment that gave him national recognition as a war hero.
The celebrity Roosevelt gained from the brief war against Spain soon catapulted him into the governor’s office in New York. GOP officials in the state weren’t all that enthralled with Roosevelt, preferring a governor they could manage, but they knew his popularity as a war hero made him a strong candidate. So, less than two years after moving to D.C. and just months after seeing combat in Cuba, Roosevelt in 1898 was elected governor of New York.
Once in office, the new governor set out to reform state politics. He fought corruption, resisted party leaders who wanted to control patronage appointments, spoke out about corporate responsibility, and raised taxes on corporations. Roosevelt’s reformist crusade became such a thorn in the side of New York Republican leaders that party officials soon began scheming for ways to rid themselves of the governor. Fate intervened when Vice President Garret Hobart died of heart disease, opening up a spot on President McKinley’s ticket for the election of 1900.
With the economy humming and McKinley’s popularity at its height, the president was a strong favorite to win re-election. Republicans nominated him by acclamation for a second term, so the biggest intrigue at the GOP convention that year was over who should be the president’s new running mate.
New York Republicans saw an opening and practically begged McKinley to take Roosevelt off their hands by making him vice president. They saw it as a way of banishing him to a less visible office, and perhaps sinking his career. At the same time, though, GOP delegates were captivated by Roosevelt and his swashbuckling image. They broke out in chants of “Teddy, Teddy, Teddy” on the convention floor.
It was this weird synchronicity of events that made Roosevelt the party’s vice presidential candidate. On the one hand, delegates who were entranced by Roosevelt and, on the other, state officials who wanted him out of the governor’s office.
From McKinley’s perspective, it was a way to add a popular governor and war hero to his ticket, but he received pushback from national GOP leaders. Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio, Chairman of the Republican National Committee and a key figure in McKinley’s 1896 campaign, opposed the idea of giving Roosevelt the nomination. “Don’t any of you realize,” said Hanna, “that there is only one life between that madman and the White House?”1
When the convention moved in Roosevelt’s direction, however, Hanna finally bowed to the inevitable. But he fatefully told President McKinley: “Now it is up to you to live.”2
The youngest president in history
Roosevelt himself wasn’t thrilled by the possibility of becoming vice president, also believing it wouldn’t be a good move for his future political prospects. Even after being elected, he suggested that it meant his “political death.” But he threw himself into the role and proved to be a great campaigner.
At the time, it was still unusual for presidential candidates to campaign for themselves, but the Democrat William Jennings Bryan had broken all norms four years earlier with an enthralling barnstorming tour. Bryan was nominated a second time by Democrats in 1900, and when he embarked on another speaking tour Roosevelt decided to go blow-to-blow with him, giving hundreds of speeches in 24 states. The McKinley-Roosevelt ticket rolled to an easy victory, taking the popular vote by 52-48% and the electoral tally by 292-155.
Then, six months into McKinley’s second term, the president was assassinated. On September 6, 1901, he was shot by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. McKinley initially seemed to survive the shooting, but in the aftermath he became critically ill from gangrene and blood poisoning and died September 14.
Roosevelt was on a camping trip in the Adirondacks at the time because he’d been told McKinley was recovering. When the president’s health plummeted suddenly, a park ranger was sent to track down Roosevelt near the summit of Mount Marcy. The vice president raced back to Buffalo, a journey that began with a hair-raising carriage ride along a twisting precipice in the middle of the night. A New York Herald headline described the trip as: “That Wild Ride Down the Mountain Side.”3
McKinley died that night. Roosevelt arrived in Buffalo by train the next day. There, surrounded by teary-eyed cabinet members, he took the oath of office in the parlor of a local home. At 42-years-old, he was the youngest president in history.
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The 26th president and his legacy
Once he was in the White House, Roosevelt’s exuberant style, willingness to take decisive stands, and use of the “bully pulpit” (a term he coined), helped him craft an identity that seized the public imagination. He was also responsible for a torrent of reforms and legislation, from taking antitrust action against monopolies and creating 23 new national parks and monuments to persuading Congress to pass laws to protect food and medicine, provide for inspections of meat plants, regulate railroad rates, and reform campaign finance.
Voters thrilled to Roosevelt’s accomplishments and his brash style. He won an easy re-election victory in 1904 and would have been an overwhelming favorite again in 1908 had he not declined to run for another term in the belief that limits on presidential power were necessary in order to limit the allure of authoritarianism.
After his presidency, he embarked on an African safari, where he collected specimens for the Smithsonian; toured Europe, ran for president again in 1912 as the leader of a new Progressive Party, survived an assassination attempt that saw a bullet lodge near his heart, joined a scientific and surveying expedition to the Amazon jungle in Brazil, and was considering another presidential run in 1920 before passing away unexpectedly at 60 years old from a blood clot in his lungs.
Roosevelt’s life was a whirlwind of activity and accomplishment, and he is consistently ranked by historians as one of the five best presidents in American history. And yet, his presidency might never have happened were it not for the unusual intersection of events and impulses that led Republicans to make him the vice presidential nominee in 1900, ostensibly to bury his career.
It’s yet another example of the sometimes unintended consequences that flow from vice presidential nominations. Sometimes, you get a disaster such as Andrew Johnson or a middling figure such as Chester Arthur, but every once in a while history gives you a Harry Truman or a Theodore Roosevelt.
This essay was written for Substack, but parts of it were adapted from my book, Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America (Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
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Aida D. Donald, Lion in the White House: A Life of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 125.
Stefan Lorant, The Glorious Burden: The History of the Presidency and Presidential Elections From George Washington to James Earl Carter, Jr. (Lenox, Massachusetts: Authors Edition, 1976), 456.
Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 230.
So many great lessons about perseverance, tenacity, character and self-empowerment