A few facts about President Theodore Roosevelt

This autumn, I am doing a six week (five session) evening class at London’s City Lit on the subject of “American Political Institutions” and our lecturer is Malcolm Malcolmson. This week, the third of our lectures looked at the election, responsibilities and powers of the President.

As a bit of homework, at the end of the previous lecture, each student had to pick a slip from a bag of the names of all the US presidents. Then, for the one we selected, we had to find out a few interesting facts and one quirky detail.

My selection was Theodore Roosevelt who served as president from 1901-1909.

My interesting facts were:

  • He took office unexpectedly after the  assassination of William McKinley in 1901 and then won a second term in his own right.
  • He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his negotiations to end the Russo- Japanese War.
  • Although he was a Republican, he founded a new Progressive Party (known as the Bull Moose Party) and ran for president unsuccessfully as head of this party (but he did obtain 27% of the votes).

My quirky fact was:

  • The Teddy Bear is named after him. This comes from his refusal to kill a captured American black bear while on a bear hunting trip [more information here].

 




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