Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay, New York, on January 6, 1919. A blood clot had reached a lung. He was sixty. Born in a brownstone on East Twentieth Street in New York on October 27, 1858, a frail asthmatic child who forced himself into a strong man, he packed several lives into one: rancher, police commissioner, Rough Rider, governor, accidental president, Nobel laureate, and the man who split his own party rather than sit still. McKinley's assassination put him in the White House at forty-two. He sued the Northern Securities trust, sat labor and capital in the same room after the anthracite strike, and took the canal at Panama with a haste that still argues. He reserved more than two hundred million acres — forests, birds, the Grand Canyon — because he thought a democracy that spent its land would spend its future. He invited Booker T. Washington to dinner and then spent years explaining himself to men who wanted the invitation unsent. He left in 1909, hunted in Africa, ran again in 1912 as a Progressive, was shot in Milwaukee and finished the speech with the bullet in him. Four sons went to the First World War; Quentin was killed in the air over France. The old roar got quieter after that. Sagamore Hill was the house he had built for a family, not a shrine. He is buried in Youngs Memorial Cemetery, a short, steep walk above Oyster Bay. The stone faces the water he rowed as a boy.