A dead seal at a market started Theodore Roosevelt's lifelong love of nature
At seven, Theodore Roosevelt saw a dead seal in a market, got hold of its head, and with his cousins opened the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History. That asthmatic boy became the youngest president at 42, protected vast tracts of land, and was the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize.
Roosevelt was born on October 27, 1858, at 28 East 20th Street in Manhattan, son of businessman Theodore Roosevelt Sr. and Martha Bulloch. Terrifying asthma attacks shaped his childhood, and doctors could offer no cure. Hiking in the Alps in 1869 showed him that exertion eased his breathing, and after older boys roughed him up he hired a boxing coach. By nine he had written a paper titled The Natural History of Insects, and his home schooling left him strong in history, biology and languages but weak in mathematics.
He entered Harvard in 1876, lost his father two years later and inherited $60,000, enough to live on comfortably for life. A published ornithologist before graduating magna cum laude in 1880, he dropped the idea of a science career, found Columbia Law School irrational and quit after winning a seat in the New York assembly. When his first wife Alice and his mother died at the same time, he retreated to a cattle ranch in the Dakotas.
As assistant navy secretary he helped plan the 1898 war against Spain, then resigned to lead the Rough Riders in Cuba. New York's party bosses, uneasy with him as governor, steered him onto William McKinley's ticket in 1900, and McKinley's assassination in 1901 made him president. His Square Deal targeted corporate trusts, regulated railroads and pushed for pure food and drugs. He created national parks, forests and monuments, began the Panama Canal, sent the Great White Fleet around the world and won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War.
Frustrated with his chosen successor William Howard Taft, he ran in 1912 on the Bull Moose ticket, splitting the vote and handing victory to Woodrow Wilson. A four-month Amazon expedition nearly killed him through tropical disease, and his offer to lead volunteers in France during World War I was refused. He died on January 6, 1919.
Source: Theodore Roosevelt
