U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt Elections and Terms

About the U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, a brief history of his elections and presidential terms.

FULL PORTRAITS OF SELECTED PRESIDENTS

26th President

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

PRESIDENCY

First Unexpired Term: Sept. 14, 1901 ...

Assured that the President was recovering quickly from bullet wounds sustained a week before in an assassination attempt, Roosevelt was mountain-climbing with his family in the Adirondacks when word came that McKinley was dying. After a dangerous descent down tortuous, pitch-black mountain roads, TR arrived in Buffalo, where the President lay dead. Roosevelt was sworn into office on Saturday, Sept. 14, 1901. He was only 42 years old--the youngest president to date. (John Kennedy was 43 when he took office, and won the distinction of being the youngest president ever to be elected in his own right.)

Election: Nov. 8, 1904 ...

Roosevelt had been nominated on the first ballot by the Republican National Convention, and Sen. Charles Warren Fairbanks of Indiana, a midwestern conservative, was chosen as his running mate to balance the ticket.

The Democrats had chosen Judge Alton B. Parker, a colorless conservative from upstate New York, as their presidential candidate in hopes of luring Republican voters who were disenchanted by Roosevelt's activist administration. For vice-president they nominated Henry G. Davis, a millionaire and former senator from West Virginia. Davis was one of the most bizarre candidates ever to grace a national ticket; he was 81 years old at the time of his nomination. The Democrats had hoped that he would use his personal fortune to finance the campaign, but they were disappointed. They were even more disappointed when the election results were in.

TR crushed his opposition with a popular vote of 7,628,831 (56.4%) to Parker's 5,084,533 (37.6%). The Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs, made a respectable showing with 402,714 votes (3.0%). Roosevelt carried every state outside the Solid South.

Second Term: Mar. 4, 1905 ...

Roosevelt used only 985 words in his inaugural address, one of the shortest inaugural speeches on record. Surprisingly, he was the only president who did not use the personal pronoun I even once in his address.

In his combined terms he vetoed a total of 82 bills, of which only one veto was overridden by Congress.

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