The conservative wing of the Republican Party had hoped to put Teddy Roosevelt and his progressive politics to pasture when they offered him the opportunity to become William McKinley's Vice President in 1900. They never considered the possibility that Roosevelt could one day become President, which is exactly what happened after anarchist Leon Czolgosz gunned down the President in September 1901.
The cover of The Jungle
Although he promised to continue McKinley's politics, Roosevelt soon began to follow his own course. In 1902, he filed his first trust-busting suits. When the nation became collectively sickened by the revelations about the Chicago meatpacking plants in Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, Roosevelt helped push through the Pure Food and Drug Act to clean up the industry. A lifelong conservationist, Roosevelt also helped preserve millions of acres as national forests.
On the heels of the Spanish-American War, the United States became the leading player on the world stage. It helped settle China's Boxer Rebellion in 1901. Roosevelt was also instrumental in bringing an end to the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. When the United States decided it was in its interests to have a canal built in Central America, it helped engineer a rebellion against Colombia, which gave Panama and subsequently the United States control of the isthmus.
Domestically, racial tensions rose dramatically. Race riots in Atlanta forced the governor to declare martial law in 1906. Two years later, a false claim of rape sparked a race riot in Springfield, Illinois, that forced some 2,000 African-Americans to leave the city. The Springfield riots had one positive result -- the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
In response to the relative conservatism of Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World was organized in 1905. Its leader, Big Bill Haywood, was soon set up on a murder charge. In one of the decade's most important criminal trials, Haywood was vindicated in August 1907, when he was acquitted of all charges following a brilliant defense led by Clarence Darrow.
Other major events of the decade included the worst natural disaster in the nation's history: the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, the invention of wireless telegraphy and the further development of the automobile, the airplane and motion pictures. The decade was also an age of discovery with Ernest Shackleton's travels to the South Pole and Robert Peary, literally his polar opposite, to the North.
In 1908, Roosevelt declined to run for re-election and instead endorsed the candidacy of William Howard Taft, who coasted to an easy victory over perennial Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan. Severely disappointing his mentor, however, Taft steered the country toward a more conservative course. His subsequent feud with Roosevelt sowed the seeds of defeat for both men in the next election.
The 1890s
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