January 6, 1919: Theodore Roosevelt dies of a blood clot in his lung, at Sagamore Hill, his home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York. The 26th President of the United States, not quite 10 years out of office, was 60, and had lived, to use a phrase he liked, enough "crowded hours" for any 10 men.
He had ridden his heroism in the Spanish-American War of 1898 to get elected Governor of New York that year, and Vice President with William McKinley in 1900. He became President upon McKinley's death from an assassin's bullet on September 14, 1901. He was elected to a term of his own in 1904; chose not to run again in 1908, setting William Howard Taft up to win, and left office on March 4, 1909. He then saw Taft diverting from his policies, and decided to run again in 1912, splitting the Republican Party, leading to the election of the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson. He had reluctantly supported the Republicans' 1916 nominee, Charles Evans Hughes, who nearly beat Wilson.
John Milton Cooper, a historian whose writing specializes on the early 20th Century, an era defined by TR and Wilson, has said, "Theodore Roosevelt hated Woodrow Wilson. He absolutely hated him." Roosevelt had told a friend in a letter, "I abhor Wilson." Particularly, Roosevelt was upset that World War I had happened on Wilson's watch, not his own, denying him his chance to be a victorious war President like McKinley and Abraham Lincoln. As Cooper put it, "It is not petty jealousy, it is grand jealousy. It is the jealousy of one great man for another."
When America got into the war on April 6, 1917, TR pushed for preparedness, and ripped Wilson for not getting America there soon enough, and for planning for peace before the war was even won. But when his son, Quentin Roosevelt, was shot down over France on July 14, 1918, it was an emotional blow from which "The Rough Rider" never recovered.
TR and Taft had reconciled before the former's death, and Taft tearfully attended the funeral. Wilson was in Europe, preparing for the postwar peace conference. He had been planning to run for a 3rd term in 1920, and was concerned that the Republicans might rally around TR, setting up the Presidential grudge match of all time. A reporter saw Wilson read the telegram telling him of TR's death, and saw him smile.
Unlike when a President dies in office, the death of a former President is usually not very consequential. The only previous time was in 1848, when John Quincy Adams, who had returned to the House of Representatives in 1830 after losing the Presidency in 1828, died of a stroke in the Capitol Building, taking his voice out of the anti-slavery movement. John Tyler died in 1862, having been elected to the Confederate Congress; and Andrew Johnson died in 1875, having been returned to the U.S. Senate; but neither was particularly consequential in the long run.
This time, the death of a former President was highly consequential. Cooper has insisted that, had he lived, TR would have been the Republican nominee for President in 1920. It's hard to argue against it, given that there was no obvious "heir to the throne":
* The 1920 election would have come just after TR's 62nd birthday, so he would hardly have been too old; and, as far as the general public knew until January 6, 1919, his health was not going to be an issue.
* TR's Vice President, Charles Fairbanks, had died in 1918.
* Taft had no desire to return to the Presidency: He hated the job.
* Taft's Vice President, James Sherman, had died right before the 1912 election.
* The top Republican in the East, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, showed no desire to be President. His grandson, also named Henry Cabot Lodge, ran in 1964.
* The top Republican in the West, Senator Hiram Johnson of California, was unpopular in the East.
* And TR's eldest son, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., would only have been 33 at the time of the 1921 Inauguration, and thus ineligible to serve; and had not yet served in any office, elective or appointive, at the time of his father's death.
Given that Wilson's stroke in late 1919 knocked him out of the running for an as-yet-unprecedented 3rd term, and that Senator Warren G. Harding clobbered Governor James M. Cox, both from Ohio, in the actual 1920 election, it seems likely that Roosevelt would also have beaten Cox in a landslide.
And then? Presuming TR lived and served that entire term, March 4, 1921 to March 4, 1925:
* He would not have filled his Administration with corrupt men like Harding's "Ohio Gang," so there would have been no Teapot Dome scandal, especially with TR's lifelong interest in the U.S. Navy.
* It is possible that his reconciliation with Taft might have led, as it did under Harding, to Taft finally receiving the job he really wanted: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
* It's highly possible that he would have built on his earlier "Square Deal" policies: His 1912 Progressive Party platform was a template for the "New Deal" of his distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
* More importantly in the long run, he wouldn't have appointed Andrew W. Mellon to be Secretary of the Treasury, which ultimately led to the stock market Crash of 1929, which means the Great Depression would have been avoided: There may still have been an economic downturn starting in or around late 1929, but it wouldn't have been as long, or as severe. In other words, while there would have been new labor laws and possibly even a national health care system going beyond even what we had 100 years later, there might not have been a need for the "alphabet agencies" of FDR's New Deal, things like the National Recovery Administration, which the Supreme Court struck down in 1935.
* More important in the even longer run, there is no way TR would have let the military machine Wilson built up be broken up after the war. He would have made sure that America was still, along with Britain, one of the world's two greatest military powers.
He would have set things up so that, whoever his successor turned out to be, he would have been a fool to break it up. So that, whoever was President in September 1938 -- FDR, as it turned out to be in the history we know, or somebody else -- he would have been in position to back up Britain and France, and, together, they could back up Czechoslovakia, so that, if there was a World War II a year earlier, Nazi Germany would have been defeated considerably sooner.
Instead, Wilson's stroke, and his succession by Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, meant that, from October 2, 1919 to March 4, 1933, America had a series of 4 weak Presidents, and fell behind -- economically, militarily, and diplomatically. Upon taking office on that latter date, FDR had a bigger mess to clean up than just the greatest economic crisis in the history of modern capitalism.
Whatever else he might have accomplished as the nation's 29th President in the early 1920s, Theodore Roosevelt, who loved to quote what he called an old African proverb, "Speak softly and carry a big stick," would never have allowed America to fall into such a condition. But he wouldn't be there to try.
Theodore Roosevelt made history many times. By dying, he did so for the last time.
In 2006, historian David Pietrusza published 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents. He told of how six men who had been, or would be, the President of the United States had an effect on the election:
1. Theodore Roosevelt, whose absence hung over the election like Banquo's ghost in Shakespeare's Macbeth.
2. Woodrow Wilson, the physically and politically paralyzed incumbent, who hung over the Democrats like the Sword of Damocles.
3. Warren Harding, the Republican nominee, and the eventual winner.
4. Calvin Coolidge, the Governor of Massachusetts, the Republican nominee for Vice President, and the successor to the Presidency upon Harding's death in 1923.
5. Herbert Hoover, whose work feeding the war's refugees led to both parties asking him to run for President in 1920, his refusal, Harding's appointment of him as Secretary of Commerce, and his own election as President in 1928. And:
6. Franklin Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the Democratic nominee for Vice President in 1920, and finally elected President in 1932.
(Despite serving as Chief Justice from 1921 until just before his death in 1930, Taft didn't really have an effect on the 1920 election.)
*
January 6, 1919 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. And while the NHL season was underway, no games were scheduled. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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