This article is a part of our series From Lighthouses to Electric Chargers: A Presidential Series on Transportation Innovations

President Theodore Roosevelt’s characteristic vigor extended to the realm of transportation policy. Indeed, the President had a longstanding personal interest in transportation innovations. He was the first president to fly in an airplane, ride in an electric car, and travel in a submarine. During and beyond his Presidency, Roosevelt traveled extensively, including throughout the American West and in tours of Europe and Egypt.

Moving into the White House in 1901, Roosevelt focused on preservation, conservation, and recreation domestically, and advanced a hawkish foreign policy abroad. For Roosevelt, transportation served as a vital infrastructural means to achieving his ambitious policy goals.  

Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin writes about how Roosevelt’s concern for conservation and the environment was influenced by American naturalists including John Muir. Additionally, Roosevelt’s understanding of conservation and forest management was informed by his Chief of Forestry, Gifford Pinchot, who had himself recently returned from firefighting during Idaho’s “Big Burn.” In coordination with many individuals and advocacy organizations, the Roosevelt Administration was responsible for legislation establishing new national parks in Oregon, South Dakota, North Dakota, Colorado, and Oklahoma. (Ed. Note: Gifford Pinchot was the nephew of the Eno Center’s founder and namesake, William P. Eno.)

Roosevelt also signed the Antiquities Act in 1906, which allowed the federal government to declare historic landmarks, historic or prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest as national monuments. As part of this broader paradigm related to conversation, Roosevelt also signed the Newlands Act of 1902 (also known as the Reclamation Act), which funded irrigation projects from the proceeds of the sale of federal lands in the West.  

The Newlands Act led to the creation of the Inland Waterways Commission in 1907 which studied the relation of rivers, soil, forest, hydropower development, and water transportation. The commission assessed more than 25,000 miles of navigable waterways in the United States, including the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River (which was dredged to become navigable for barges and freight through a system of locks.) President Roosevelt saw waterway travel as a natural check against railroads’ monopolies, and an infrastructural innovation for moving bulk cargo like wheat, coal, and timber. In line with this larger vision, the Newlands Act also supported the National Conservation Commission of 1909, which was charged with drawing up long-range plans for preserving and conserving natural resources.  

Teddy Roosevelt (on left) and Gifford Pinchot on a barge on the Mississippi River, along with members of the Inland Waterways Commission. Source: Library of Congress.  

Internationally, the U.S. had gone to war against Spain in 1898 following the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana, Cuba. The U.S. subsequently intervened in the Cuban War of Independence, and battles in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and across the Asia–Pacific. During this time, Roosevelt justified the need for a canal across the Americas (either through Nicaragua or through the Isthmus of Panama) for naval protection. Roosevelt served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1897 to 1898 and was an aggressive supporter of a trans-isthmus canal. His ideas were bolstered by his friend and colleague Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a leading naval theorist at the time.   

Roosevelt became the first sitting U.S. president to travel abroad, on official business, when he visited the Panama Canal Zone construction site in 1906. The New York Times headline stated, “His Voyage Violates the Traditions of the United States for Over a Hundred Years.” As Roosevelt’s yacht left the Navy Yard, his parting words were, “Goodbye. I am going down to see how the ditch is getting along.”  

The Panama Canal provided an essential link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, allowing ships to avoid a long and arduous journey around the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn at the bottom of South America, and speeding up global supply chains significantly. To date, the U.S. remains the canal’s largest economic beneficiary: the U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that in 2022, 72% of all Panama Canal transits were coming to or from U.S. ports, with $12.5 billion in trade between the U.S. and Panama alone.  

Yet aspects of the canal’s construction were mired in controversy. Brooklyn-based writer Alex Gendler argues that the Panama Canal project was a boondoggle; it cost $287 million in part because the U.S. built massive steel gates and raised the sea up to the elevation of the mountain instead of cutting it down to sea level. Over nine years, 22,000 workers, mostly Black Caribbean migrants, lost their lives due to accidents and diseases. Many of the workers were poorly treated with relatively few labor protections.  

President Roosevelt advocated for a staffing shakeup and John Stevens, engineer behind the Pacific Northwest’s Great Northern Railroad, began to lead the project in 1905. He eradicated diseases and built schools and hospitals for canal workers. President Roosevelt’s 1906 trip to the canal zone was an opportunity to bolster support for the ongoing project, meet with the project’s new construction leadership, and monitor labor conditions.  

Roosevelt and the Panama Canal. Source: New York Herald.  

Finally, Roosevelt used transportation policy for progressive domestic policy aims. Although President Grover Cleveland signed the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, Cleveland was ultimately skeptical about using federal regulatory authority to halt railroads’ business practices. Roosevelt, by contrast, had no qualms regulating railroads so that they charged “reasonable and just” transportation rates to Americans.  

In 1902, Roosevelt’s administration filed a lawsuit against a railroad monopoly called the Northern Securities Company. Thereafter, Roosevelt initiated and signed two pieces of regulatory legislation, the Elkins Act in 1903 and the Hepburn Act in 1906. The Elkins Act gave federal courts the power to end rate discrimination by railroad companies, and the Hepburn Act further strengthened the Interstate Commerce Commission’s power to regulate railroads.  The latter law also gave the federal government its first regulatory authority over a new transportation mode – liquids by pipeline (part of the larger pushback against the power of Standard Oil). 

By the end of Roosevelt’s two terms in office, the purview of America’s transportation infrastructure was global in scope, inseparable from military-industrial ambitions, and more balanced away from railroads’ monopoly power.  

Stefan Chavez-Norgaard, PhD, is a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Denver. He conducts research on the intersection of urban politics, planning, and development.