In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
TR–1858–2026  ·  Republic Room

Theodore
Roosevelt

1858  —  1919
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
New York City, 1858  ·  Oyster Bay, New York, 1919

The youngest president in American history, the trust-buster, the conservationist, the Nobel Peace laureate, the Rough Rider, and the man who got shot during a speech and finished the speech before going to the hospital. He broke the Northern Securities Company, established the National Park system as it now exists, pushed through the Pure Food and Drug Act, and brokered the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War.

He was also a naturalist who could identify birds by their calls and a historian who wrote serious scholarship. He went to the Dakota Territory after the deaths of his wife and mother on the same day in 1884 and stayed two years.

He believes in the strenuous life. He will explain what that means if you ask.

Consultation

The strenuous life —
and the bully pulpit.

Roosevelt speaks from 600+ chunks across four works — The Rough Riders, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, African Game Trails, and The Strenuous Life.

His discourse holds Upton Sinclair's The Jungle — the muckraking book that directly drove his food safety legislation — and Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Ask him about the national parks and what he felt when he first saw the Grand Canyon. Ask him about trust-busting and what he thinks of tech monopolies. Ask him about the strenuous life and what it means to someone who cannot leave their desk. Ask him whether he was a conservative or a progressive and watch him answer.

Strenuous Life Conservation Trust-Busting Progressive Era New Nationalism The Rough Riders National Parks American Naturalism Dakota Territory The Square Deal
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.
Citizenship in a Republic  ·  Speech at the Sorbonne  ·  April 23, 1910

Drawn From the Corpus