The Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt

Despite his caution, Roosevelt managed to do enough in his first three years in office to build a platform for election in his own right. In 1902 he resurrected the nearly defunct Sherman Antitrust Act by bringing a lawsuit that led to the breakup of a huge railroad conglomerate, the Northern Securities Company. Roosevelt pursued this policy of “trust-busting” by initiating suits against 43 other major corporations during the next seven years. Early in his term, he also sought the creation of an agency that would have the power to investigate businesses engaged in interstate commerce (though without regulatory powers); the Bureau of Corporations was formally established in 1903.

In 1902 Roosevelt intervened in the anthracite coal strike when it threatened to cut off heating fuel for homes, schools, and hospitals. The president publicly asked representatives of capital and labor to meet in the White House and accept his mediation. He also talked about calling in the army to run the mines, and he got Wall Street investment houses to threaten to withhold credit to the coal companies and dump their stocks. The combination of tactics worked to end the strike and gain a modest pay hike for the miners. This was the first time that a president had publicly intervened in a labor dispute at least implicitly on the side of workers. Roosevelt characterized his actions as striving toward a “Square Deal” between capital and labor, and those words became his campaign slogan in the 1904 election.

Once he won that election—overwhelmingly defeating the Democratic contender Alton B. Parker by 336 to 140 electoral votes—Roosevelt put teeth into his Square Deal programs. He pushed Congress to grant powers to the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate interstate railroad rates. The Hepburn Act of 1906 conveyed those powers and created the federal government’s first true regulatory agency. Also in 1906, Roosevelt pressed Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection acts, which created agencies to assure protection to consumers. The “muckrakers,” investigative journalists of the era, had exposed the squalid conditions of food-processing industries.

Roosevelt’s boldest actions came in the area of natural resources. At his urging, Congress created the Forest Service (1905) to manage government-owned forest reserves, and he appointed a fellow conservationist, Gifford Pinchot, to head the agency. Simultaneously, Roosevelt exercised existing presidential authority to designate public lands as national forests in order to make them off-limits to commercial exploitation of lumber, minerals, and waterpower. Roosevelt set aside almost five times as much land as all of his predecessors combined, 194 million acres (78.5 million hectares). In commemoration of Roosevelt’s dedication to conservation, Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota and Theodore Roosevelt Island in Washington, D.C., a 91-acre (37-hectare) wooded island in the Potomac River, were named in his honor.

Foreign policy

Roosevelt believed that nations, like individuals, should pursue the strenuous life and do their part to maintain peace and order, and he believed that “civilized” nations had a responsibility for stewardship of “barbarous” ones. He knew that taking on the Philippine Islands as an American colony after the Spanish-American War had ended America’s isolation from international power politics—a development that he welcomed. Every year he asked for bigger appropriations for the army and navy. Congress cut back on his requests, but by the end of his presidency he had built the U.S. Navy into a major force at sea and reorganized the army along efficient, modern lines.

Several times during Roosevelt’s first years in office, European powers threatened to intervene in Latin America, ostensibly to collect debts owed them by weak governments there. To meet such threats, he framed a policy statement in 1904 that became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. It stated that the United States would not only bar outside intervention in Latin American affairs but would also police the area and guarantee that countries there met their international obligations. In 1905, without congressional approval, Roosevelt forced the Dominican Republic to install an American “economic advisor,” who was in reality the country’s financial director.

Quoting an African proverb, Roosevelt claimed that the right way to conduct foreign policy was to “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Roosevelt resorted to big-stick diplomacy most conspicuously in 1903, when he helped Panama to secede from Colombia and gave the United States a Canal Zone. Construction began at once on the Panama Canal, which Roosevelt visited in 1906, the first president to leave the country while in office. He considered the construction of the canal, a symbol of the triumph of American determination and technological know-how, his greatest accomplishment as president. As he later boasted in his autobiography, “I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me.” Other examples of wielding the big stick came in 1906 when Roosevelt occupied and set up a military protectorate in Cuba and when he put pressure on Canada in a boundary dispute in Alaska.

Roosevelt showed the soft-spoken, sophisticated side of his diplomacy in dealing with major powers outside the Western Hemisphere. In Asia he was alarmed by Russian expansionism and by rising Japanese power. In 1904–05 he worked to end the Russo-Japanese War by bringing both nations to the Portsmouth Peace Conference and mediating between them. More than just to bring peace, Roosevelt wanted to construct a balance of power in Asia that might uphold U.S. interests. In 1907 he defused a diplomatic quarrel caused by anti-Japanese sentiment in California by arranging the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement, which restricted Japanese immigration. In another informal executive agreement, he traded Japan’s acceptance of the American position in the Philippines for recognition by the United States of the Japanese conquest of Korea and expansionism in China. Contrary to his bellicose image, Roosevelt privately came to favor withdrawal from the Philippines, judging it to be militarily indefensible, and he renounced any hopes of exerting major power in Asia.

During his second term Roosevelt increasingly feared a general European war. He saw British and U.S. interests as nearly identical, and he was strongly inclined to support Britain behind the scenes in diplomatic controversies. In secret instructions to the U.S. envoys to the Algeciras Conference in 1906, Roosevelt told them to maintain formal American noninvolvement in European affairs but to do nothing that would imperil existing Franco-British understandings, the maintenance of which was “to the best interests of the United States.” Despite his bow toward noninvolvement, Roosevelt had broken with the traditional position of isolation from affairs outside the Western Hemisphere. At Algeciras, U.S. representatives had attended a strictly European diplomatic conference, and their actions favored Britain and France over Germany.