Happy birthday, Teddy Roosevelt

(A documentary, perhaps a school project, by Ian Rapoport who nicely captures TR's presidency.)

by Frank James

It's the 150th anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt's birth, the energetic president who re-invented the American presidency, modernizing the institution in ways that still linger. It's accurate to say that he's the president most of his successors in the office have most wanted to emulate.

It was Roosevelt, the 26th president, who confronted the business interests of his day -- the railroad, oil and financial trusts -- placing government regulation on them through use of the antitrust laws, leading to his being called the Trust Buster..

He signed the laws that paved the way for the Food and Drug Administration and meat inspection by the Agriculture Department.

A force of nature, he was a force on nature as well, creating the Panama Canal.

The White House actually got the name we know it by during his presidency, having been called the Executive Mansion beforehand. He also created the extension of the president's house that later came to be called the West Wing.

He believed in projecting American power, coining the phrase "speak softly but carry a big stick." it was Roosevelt, the former Navy secretary turned president, who ordered the Navy's Great White Fleet to cruise around the world to demonstrate the reach of American military power.

He put Abraham Lincoln on the penny.

Though he disliked the nickname Teddy, after he refused to shoot a captured bear, bear dolls were given his name and are still called "Teddy Bears."

A conservationist, he placed millions of acres under federal protection to preserve them for future generations. The national park system is part of his legacy.

He outraged white southerners by being the first president to invite a black person to dinner in the White House, Booker T. Washington, then viewed as black America's leader, He also the first president to ride in an automobile, to travel outside the country as president. TR was the first of his nation to win a Nobel Prize for his efforts to end a war between Russia and Japan.

He uttered the throwaway phrase "good to the last drop," after enjoying some coffee during a visit to the South and the company selling the coffee trademarked the comment. He spoke of the White House as a "bully pulpit," some of his supporters as the "lunatic fringe" and announced he was running again in 1912 by saying he was throwing his "hat in the ring," creating phrases with us still.

He was a prolific writer and speech giver. Among the many words he committed to paper was a paen to men of action. (He was a man of his time, he didn't really think of women of action.) It's from a speech he gave shortly after leaving office, called "Citizenship in a Republic." Politicians especially like the passage. It goes:

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, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

It's hard to imagine American without TR So it's worth taking a moment today to consider the continuing influence of one of the most remarkable men to ever have inhabited the White House.