The famous Whitehouse bath tub

"William Howard Taft is better known for his weight than for his presidency. The most corpulent president, he was 6-feet, 2-inches tall and weighed 330 pounds. A special bathtub was installed in the White House large enough to accommodate four average sized adults." Digital History, 2014

Conservation

"The United States was the first nation in the world to create wilderness parks. Theodore Roosevelt launched conservation as a national political movement. As president, he argued on behalf of conserving natural resources and preserving wild lands; he set aside the first national monuments and wildlife refuges. In 1906, he signed the Antiquities Act, which enabled a president to protect wild lands as national monuments. The Grand Canyon was among the places he protected under the act." -Digital History, 2014.

Theodore Roosevelt becomes president

Born in 1858, New York City, Theodore Roosevelt as a child suffered many fevers, asthma attacks and stomach pains. So much so that blowing out a bedside candle would only add to his frailties. However, he was determined to better his strength and stamina, so he hiked, boxed, weight lifted and swam.  Doing so, allowed Roosevelt to become the great and influential president that history books, mountain sides, and people remember him to be.  He was elected to the New York State legislature at the young age of 23. Then, just three years later, his wife and mother died in the same day. Roosevelt fled.  To get away from the tragedies that came upon him so suddenly, he traveled to a 25,000 acre ranch in North Dakota badlands, and resigned himself to the cowboy lifestyle, spurs and all.  He returned, however, to serve as a U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, and went on to be New York's crusading police commissioner, the assistant secretary of the Navy, and governor of New York, all beofre his election as Vice President in 1900.  With William McKinley's sudden assassination, Roosevelt became the youngest president in american history, at the age of 42.

    

President William McKinley and Leon Colgolsz.

On September 6th, 1901, President William McKinley walked along the lines of the well-wishers as the Pan American Exposition as Buffalo, N.Y.  Fifty secret service agents and soldiers roamed the area. A man in the crowd had his hand wrapped in a large white handkerchief, but underneath it was a 32 caliber revolver.  A secret service agent lay his hand on the man's shoulder, who's name was Leon Colgolsz, and suggested that he go to the first aid station.  "After I meet the President.  I've been waiting a long time." was Leon's reply, He approached the President and said: "Please excuse the left hand, Mr. President."  McKinley shook his hand and moved on, greeting others in the crowd, and Leon lunged for the President, and as a secret service agent tried to grab him, Leon shot twice in rapid succession.  "I done my duty!" Leon cried out, and the President died eight days later. 

Leon Colgolsz was a twenty-eight year old anarchist. (His last name is pronounced Chol-gots.) He didn't believe in marriage, voting, governments, or religion. He had written in confession that McKinley had been around the country proclaiming prosperity when there was no prosperity to be had for a working man.  McKinley's assassination is said to have marked the end of one era in National Politics, and the beginning of a new one.

The first Newsboys.

In the movies, 'newsboys' are portrayed as young boys, hollering at the top of their little lungs, trying to sell a newspaper for some spare change.  However, the picture Hollywood painted of little loveable boys running around the streets of New York city without a care in the world is very different from the reality of what really happened. 

Real newsboys first appeared in the mid 19th century, when a mass circulation of newspapers were on every street corner of New York. They were orphan children that usually didn't have shoes, coats or hats.  Charles Loring Brace, a reformer in 1866, described the homeless street children's condition in this way:

"I remember one cold night seeing some 10 or a dozen of the little homeless creatures piled together to keep each other warm beneath the stairway of The [New York] Sun office. There used to be a mass of them also at The Atlas office, sleeping in the lobbies, until the printers drove them away by pouring water on them. One winter, an old burnt-out safe lay all the season in Wall Street, which was used as a bedroom by two boys who managed to crawl into the hole that had been burned."

In 1872, a man named James B. McCabe Jr. wrote:

"There are 10,000 children living on the streets of New York.... The newsboys constitute an important division of this army of homeless children. You see them everywhere.... They rend the air and deafen you with their shrill cries. They surround you on the sidewalk and almost force you to buy their papers. They are ragged and dirty. Some have no coats, no shoes and no hat." 

1899 was the year when several thousand newsboys (who made about 30 cents a day) called a strike.  They refused to handle newspapers of William Randolph Hurst and Joseph Pulitzer.  The New York Tribune quoted what Kid Blink (named for being blind in one eye)  had said to 2,000 strikers:

"Friens and feller workers. Dis is a time which tries de hearts of men. Dis is de time when we'se got to stick together like glue.... We know wot we wants and we'll git it even if we is blind."

"The lot of newsboys began to improve as urban child-welfare practices took root, and publishers began competing for newsies by giving them prizes and trips." -Digital History, 2015.

Theodore Roosevelt Quote

"We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not so. The mineral wealth of the country, the coal, iron, oil, gas, and the like does not reproduce itself, and therefore is certain to be exhausted ultimately; and wastefulness in dealing with it today means that our descendants will feel the exhaustion a generation or two before they otherwise would."

The Mother Of Birth Control

"A woman cannot call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother."

In the year of 1916, Margret Sanger, a former nurse, contributed to the changes America started to undergo during the beginning of the Progressive era. She coined the phrase "birth control" and eventually convinced the courts that the Comstock Act did not stop doctors from distributing birth control devices and information. She was the founder of Planned Parenthood, and helped in the making of the birth control pill, which was came into availability in 1960.

Jane Addams Quote

“Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.” 

The life expectancy in 1900

During the year 1900 the life expectancy for White American was just 48 years, and the African Americans only 33.  Today, American's average life span is 74 for a man and 79 for a woman.  If a woman had four children, there was a fifty-fifty chance that one of those children would die before age .

The Philippine American War

At the beginning of the 20th century, the United States was involved in a bloody war in the Philippines, fought from February 1899 to June 1902.  The Philippine American war is almost forgotten, it claimed 250,000 lives.  Few People remember the war, it is said that is was a sequel to the Spanish American War in 1889, when Cubans were fighting for their independence.  On February 4th in the year 1899, a fight broke out between the Americans and the Philippines., leaving 59 Americans and 3,000 Filipinos dead.  During an incident of the war, in which General Jacob W. Smith ordered his men to kill anyone over the age of ten on Samar Island, more than 4,000 American Soldiers and the estimated number of 20,000 Filipino fighters died.  About 200,000 Filipino civilians died through the Philippine American war, mostly of disease and hunger.

The Philippines were finally granted their independence in 1946.

The Panama Canal

On December 31st, 1999, The Untied States of America willingly gave up the Panama Canal after 85 years of controlling it.  The Panama Canal was 51 feet long, with $3.1 billion in infrastructure and bases.  The Canal links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.  The need of the canal, however, faded with time.  In World War II, the U.S,. stationed 65,000 troops in the Canal to guard it. But, by the end of the 20th century, the Panama Canal was no longer necessary for America's economical and strategic interests.  Many vessels and aircrafts couldn't fit through the Canals' locks.

The Canal's construction started in 1879.

In the next 20 years, it is estimated that from somewhere between 16,000 and 22,000 workers died from yellow fever, malaria, typhoid, snake bites and accidents.  Rain averaging 200 inches per year washed away much of the work.  The Canal was finished in the face of medical, political and technological obstacles.  The Isthmus of Panama was located in Columbia, and when the U.S. proposed to build a canal, they rejected the proposal.

"You could no more make an agreement with them than you could nail current jelly to the wall."
-Theodore Rosevelt.

By 1913, the number of workers was 44,000.  25,000 and more worked as canal diggers.  200 trainloads of dirt had to be dug and hauled away every day.  In Decemeber of 1908, 22 tons of dynamite had exploded unexpectedly, killing 23 workers. During the construction, William Gorgas, an army physician, oversaw the building of the Canal, and the draining of the swamps.  His intention was to reduce the number of deaths by getting rid of the mosquitoes, which were the cause of yellow fever and malaria. It took $387 million dollars over the course of 10 years to build the Canal.

"The Panama Canal was a declaration of America's coming of age in the world." -Digital History.