Which US president of the Progressive Era was most involved in Conservationism?

Theodore Roosevelt: Impact and Legacy

Theodore Roosevelt is widely regarded as the first modern President of the United States. The stature and influence that the office has today began to develop with TR. Throughout the second half of the 1800s, Congress had been the most powerful branch of government. And although the presidency began to amass more power during the 1880s, Roosevelt completed the transition to a strong, effective executive. He made the President, rather than the political parties or Congress, the center of American politics.

Roosevelt did this through the force of his personality and through aggressive executive action. He thought that the President had the right to use any and all powers unless they were specifically denied to him. He believed that as President, he had a unique relationship with and responsibility to the people, and therefore wanted to challenge prevailing notions of limited government and individualism; government, he maintained, should serve as an agent of reform for the people.

His presidency endowed the progressive movement with credibility, lending the prestige of the White House to welfare legislation, government regulation, and the conservation movement. The desire to make society more fair and equitable, with economic possibilities for all Americans, lay behind much of Roosevelt's program. The President also changed the government's relationship to big business. Prior to his presidency, the government had generally given the titans of industry carte blanche to accomplish their goals. Roosevelt believed that the government had the right and the responsibility to regulate big business so that its actions did not negatively affect the general public. However, he never fundamentally challenged the status of big business, believing that its existence marked a naturally occurring phase of the country's economic evolution.

Roosevelt also revolutionized foreign affairs, believing that the United States had a global responsibility and that a strong foreign policy served the country's national interest. He became involved in Latin America with little hesitation: he oversaw the Panama Canal negotiations to advocate for U.S. interests and intervened in Venezuela and Santo Domingo to preserve stability in the region. He also worked with Congress to strengthen the U.S. Navy, which he believed would deter potential enemies from targeting the country, and he applied his energies to negotiating peace agreements, working to balance power throughout the world.

Even after he left office, Roosevelt continued to work for his ideals. The Progressive Party's New Nationalism in 1912 launched a drive for protective federal regulation that looked forward to the progressive movements of the 1930s and the 1960s. Indeed, Roosevelt's progressive platform encompassed nearly every progressive ideal later enshrined in the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Fair Deal of Harry S. Truman, the New Frontier of John F. Kennedy, and the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson.

In terms of presidential style, Roosevelt introduced "charisma" into the political equation. He had a strong rapport with the public and he understood how to use the media to shape public opinion. He was the first President whose election was based more on the individual than the political party. When people voted Republican in 1904, they were generally casting their vote for Roosevelt the man instead of for him as the standard-bearer of the Republican Party. The most popular President up to his time, Roosevelt used his enthusiasm to win votes, to shape issues, and to mold opinions. In the process, he changed the executive office forever.

Roosevelt and big business. Roosevelt had a well‐deserved reputation as a “trustbuster.” During his administration (1901–09), 44 antitrust actions were filed against the nation's largest corporations, including the Northern Securities Company (a railway holding company). But the essence of the president's Square Deal — Roosevelt's approach to social problems, big business, and labor unions — was that he distinguished between “good” and “bad” trusts and strongly preferred to regulate corporations for the public welfare rather than destroy them. In the case of the railroads, for example, the practice of rebating was eliminated through the Elkins Act (1903), and the Hepburn Act (1906) allowed the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to set maximum railroad rates. The Hepburn Act also expanded the ICC's jurisdiction to include pipelines, ferries, sleeping cars, and bridges and made the ICC's orders on carriers binding, pending a court ruling.

Regulation meant protecting the interests of consumers as well as controlling the power of big business. The muckrakers had raised serious questions about such problems as the utility of the patent medicines sold to Americans and sounded the alarm that meat infected with disease or covered in rat droppings was processed and sold to the public. Congress reacted to these revelations by passing the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of food or drugs in interstate commerce that had been adulterated or fraudulently labeled. The Meat Inspection Act, which was enacted in the same year, sought to enforce sanitary conditions in the packing industry and authorized the Department of Agriculture to inspect meat sold through interstate commerce.

Conservation of natural resources. Outdoorsman, hunter, and naturalist in his own right, Roosevelt was the first president to actively promote the conservation of the country's natural resources. Under his administration, millions of acres were set aside as national forest lands; coal and oil reserves as well as hydroelectric power sites were placed in the public domain; and the national park system was enlarged. For Roosevelt, conservation meant wise use, and this was the theme of the White House Conference on Conservation (1908) that brought together members of the Cabinet and Congress as well as the governors of most of the states. The president's utilitarian approach was championed by the head of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, and was reflected in such legislation as the National Reclamation Act of 1902, which directed that proceeds from the sale of public lands be used to finance irrigation projects in the West.

Taft as a progressive. After the 1904 election, Roosevelt stated that he would not run for president again. Four years later, William Howard Taft, his handpicked successor, easily defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan in his third and final run for the White House. Although Taft had never held elective office, he did have years of public service behind him. He had been a prosecutor and judge, U.S. solicitor general under President Harrison, the first civilian governor of the Philippines, and Roosevelt's Secretary of War. Although more conservative than his predecessor, Taft filed twice the number of antitrust suits as Roosevelt, and the Supreme Court upheld the breakup of Standard Oil under the Sherman Antitrust Act (1911) during his administration. Through the Mann‐Elkins Act (1910), the authority of the ICC was again expanded to cover regulation of telephone, telegraph, and cable companies. The act also enabled the commission to suspend rates set by railroads pending investigations or court actions. Taft actively supported both the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments (which provided for the federal income tax and direct election of senators, respectively) and established new agencies, such as the Bureau of Mines, which set standards of mine safety, and the Federal Children's Bureau.

Despite his strong reform record, the president lost support within the Republican Party and among Progressives. Taft ran into trouble with a group of Progressive Republicans in Congress known as the Insurgents, led by Senator Robert La Follette. Although the president wanted lower duties on imports, he was unable to stop the conservative Republicans from pushing through the Payne‐Aldrich Tariff (1909) which kept rates on some products high over the objections of the Insurgents. Taft sided with Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon in his struggle to hold on to his power against congressional reformers. When the Speaker's authority was weakened through changes in the House rules, the president also lost influence. In the meantime, a dispute over conservation policy between the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service ultimately caused Taft to fire Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt's close friend and the man who epitomized the federal government's commitment to the environment. Early into Taft's term a major split in Republican ranks between conservatives and progressives became apparent. Whatever other goals they had, the Progressive Republicans were determined to gain control of the party and deny Taft's nomination for a second term. Roosevelt began to seriously consider running again when he returned from a safari in Africa in 1910, and LaFollette was clearly a candidate in 1911.

The election of 1912. Roosevelt indicated early in 1912 that he would accept the Republican nomination if it was offered to him. Even though the former president won several primaries and carried a number of state conventions, Republican conservatives controlled the nominating convention and made sure Taft was chosen to run for a second term. Roosevelt and his supporters bolted and formed the Progressive Party, whose platform called for presidential primaries, direct election of senators, the vote for women, greater regulation of the trusts, and a ban on child labor. The Democrats selected the past president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, as their nominee. Although put into the State House by the Democratic bosses, Governor Wilson had proved himself to be a reformer, pushing through a direct primary law, workmen's compensation, and public utility regulation.

The election of 1912 was a contest between Roosevelt and Wilson and their respective progressive philosophies. Roosevelt campaigned for his New Nationalism, which maintained that large corporations were an integral part of modern industrial society. The responsibility of the federal government was to regulate, not to destroy, business combinations while protecting the interests of the underprivileged. Wilson's New Freedom called for restoring competition through elimination of the trusts and lowering tariffs. Although recognizing that federal power was necessary to accomplish these goals, he was just as concerned with big government as big business; any expansion of authority from Washington he considered to be only a temporary expedient. With the Republican vote split between Roosevelt and Taft, Wilson won with the largest electoral majority of any presidential candidate up to that time.