Theodore Roosevelt

Roosevelt was a sickly, asthmatic child who built himself a different body on purpose, and the same stubbornness marked his politics. As president from 1901 he turned the government against the great combinations that had been treated as forces of nature — the railroad trust, Standard Oil — and intervened in a coal strike on the side of arbitration rather than troops, which no president had done. He pushed through federal inspection of meat and drugs after reading a novel about the Chicago packing houses.

His most durable act was to place some 230 million acres in public hands: five national parks, eighteen national monuments, and the first fifty-one bird reserves, several created by executive order when Congress would not act. He was shot in the chest before a speech in 1912, found the bullet had been slowed by his folded manuscript and a steel spectacle case, and spoke for ninety minutes before going to hospital. He died in his sleep at sixty, at his house above Oyster Bay, and was buried on the hillside below it rather than in any national shrine.