Teddy Roosevelt

Roosevelt wrote to the western artist in 1897 from Washington. After the death of his wife Alice Lee in 1884, Roosevelt moved temporarily to the Bad

Lands in the Dakota Territory, where he owned two cattle ranches. In 1888,

Century Magazine published a series of articles about the West written by

Roosevelt and illustrated by Remington. In a May article, Roosevelt told the story of his daring capture of three thieves who had stolen a boat from his Elkhorn Ranch. Remington depicted their capture in this painting.

Jacob Riis was a valuable friend and source of information for

Roosevelt when he became a New York City police commissioner in the spring of 1895. As a police reporter for the New York Evening Sun, Riis understood the reforms needed within the police department, as well as the evils in the slums, which he frequented to gather stories. Riis was successful in awakening public awareness to the plight of New York's tenement population, especially the children, in several books, including his classic How the

Other Half Lives. In 1904 Riis published a biography of his good friend, with whom he used to walk the streets of New York, titled Theodore

Roosevelt: The Citizen.

I have "developed a playmate in the shape of Dr. Wood of the Army, an

Apache campaigner and graduate of Harvard, two years later than my class,"

Roosevelt wrote from Washington in 1897. "Last Sunday he fairly walked me down in the course of a scramble home from Cabin John Bridge down the other side of the Potomac over the cliffs." Theodore Roosevelt and Leonard Wood liked each other from their first meeting that spring. Both were robust and athletic, and both, from the vantage points of their respective jobs—Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the navy, and Wood as an army officer (and the physician of President and Mrs. William McKinley)—took a belligerent attitude toward Spain with respect to Cuba. When Roosevelt was offered the chance to raise a regiment of volunteer cavalry, he in turn recruited the more experienced Wood to be the regiment's colonel and commander. After the war in Cuba, Wood remained as military governor of

Santiago, and shortly thereafter was appointed to administer to the affairs of the entire island.

John Singer Sargent painted this portrait of Wood in 1903, when he went to

Washington to do the official portrait of President Roosevelt. Sargent recalled then that the two veteran Rough Riders enjoyed competing against each other with fencing foils.

After his return from the war in Cuba, Colonel Roosevelt posed for this photograph at Montauk, Long Island, shortly before his First Volunteer

Cavalry Regiment was mustered out of service in September 1898. Later, in a letter to sculptor James E. Kelly—who like Frederick MacMonnies sculpted a statuette of the Rough Rider upon a horse—Roosevelt described in detail how he looked and dressed in the war. Unlike his image here, he said, "In Cuba

I did not have the side of my hat turned up."

Theodore Roosevelt emerged from the Spanish-American War a national hero.His military fame now enhanced his reputation as a reform politician in his home state of New York, where he was nominated to run for the governorship that fall of 1898.

This cartoon appeared in Judge, October 29, 1898, just prior to Roosevelt's successful election, and predicted his ultimate political destiny, the

White House.

President William McKinley represented the status quo for most Americans at the turn of the century. By and large, they were comfortable with him in the White House. As the standard bearer of the Republican Party, he was an unassuming bulwark of conservatism. He stood for the gold standard, for protective tariffs, and of course for a strong national defense during the

Spanish-American War. McKinley's personal attributes were affability and constancy, not dynamism and originality. Politically he was a follower and not a reformer, like Roosevelt. If the idea of having TR on the ticket as