About the data
Between September 14, 1901, when he took the oath in Buffalo, and March 4, 1909, Theodore Roosevelt signed well over a thousand executive orders and proclamations. They created national forests and the first federal bird reservations, set aside national monuments, ran the Panama Canal Zone, reshaped the civil service and proclaimed days of thanksgiving. This index gathers all of them in one place, with the best available text and a note on where every fact comes from.
What's here
Each document has its own page with its date, type and number, a plain-language summary, the subjects and places it touches, who countersigned it, links to its published sources, and its text when one is available. Many also belong to a story that explains the background and what happened next.
For about 530 documents the page also says what happened next: how people reacted at the time, what changed in Congress, the courts or the field, what became of the place later, and which other documents enlarged, cut, renamed or revoked it. Then and now gathers the national parks, forests, wildlife refuges and other places today that trace back to a Roosevelt order. Every point comes from the Library's research on that document and names its source; what the research has not settled is marked “still being researched.”
- Executive orders were instructions to the executive branch: exempting a clerk from a civil-service exam, transferring land to the Navy, setting rules for the Canal Zone.
- Proclamations were addressed to the public: creating or changing a forest reserve or monument, opening Indian lands to settlement, announcing a trade agreement, setting Thanksgiving.
- Unnumbered orders were issued before the government numbered every executive order, or simply never received a number. They survive in other records and were listed by the historian Clifford L. Lord in 1943.
How the counts add up
Counting a president's orders is harder than it sounds. Numbering began after the fact, some numbers carry letters or fractions, and older lists overlap. Here is how this index arrives at its totals.
| Group | Documents | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Numbered executive orders | 1,006 | Nos. 141–1050 in the official series, including suffixed numbers such as 389-A and 288½, and one number left blank in the official file |
| Unnumbered executive orders | 105 | Distinct orders from Lord's list (see below) |
| All executive orders | 1,111 | |
| Numbered proclamations | 407 | Nos. 465–871, as numbered by the American Presidency Project |
| Other proclamations | 3 | Trade agreements with Portugal (1907), Great Britain (1907) and the Netherlands (1908), printed in the Statutes at Large but outside that numbered series; still to be checked against the State Department's register |
| All proclamations | 410 | |
| All documents | 1,521 |
Lord's list. Clifford L. Lord's List and Index of Presidential Executive Orders: Unnumbered Series (1943) has 126 entries for Roosevelt. Checking each one against the numbered series showed that 21 describe documents that already have a number, sometimes under a different date. Those 21 are kept as cross-references, linked to the numbered order they match, and are not counted twice. That leaves 105 distinct unnumbered orders.
Where the texts come from
- Proclamations: the text printed in the United States Statutes at Large (volumes 32–35), from the Government Publishing Office's digitization on GovInfo. Each page links to the scanned printed page.
- Numbered executive orders: volunteer transcriptions on Wikisource, where one exists.
- Unnumbered orders: Lord's one-line description, with his citation to where the order was printed.
- Checked texts: where a story's research compared a full text word for word with a named printing (usually the Statutes at Large page image), that text replaces the machine version and is labeled as collated against the printed page, with any abridgment noted.
Proclamation numbers, dates and titles follow the American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara. Numbered executive orders follow Wikipedia's list of Roosevelt's executive actions, which records the official numbering.
About the titles. Most proclamations carried no title when they were issued; the Statutes at Large print them with only a number and margin notes. The titles here are the American Presidency Project's captions, or the official list's wording where a caption was wrong. Where the research found a title that misdescribes its document, misspells a name or carries a typo, the title is corrected and the document page says what it was before and why.
What to keep in mind
The texts have not been proofread. Machine digitizations misread characters, and volunteer transcriptions can slip. Every text is labeled with where it came from and marked “not yet verified” until someone has checked it against the printed page. Before quoting a document, open the page image and read it there. When a story's research has checked a full text against the printed page, that text replaces the machine version and says so.
Some dates are uncertain. A few orders are known only to the month, one is undated, and sources sometimes disagree by a day. Where they do, the document page explains.
Summaries, subjects and weights are the Library's. Each summary is new writing based only on the document's title, text and printed margin notes. The weight scale (individual action, routine, substantive, notable, landmark) is a guide for browsing, not a historical verdict.
About 280 numbered executive orders, and most unnumbered ones, have no text here yet. For those, the page gives the title or Lord's description and whatever citation is known, so the original can be tracked down.
Use it, and cite it
The data is free to use under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. The texts of the orders and proclamations themselves are works of the United States government and in the public domain. The site's code is MIT licensed. See the API and downloads.
Please cite it as:
Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, Theodore Roosevelt's Executive Orders and Proclamations, https://executiveactions.labs.trlibrary.com (accessed [date]).
For a single document, add its number and page address. Every document page has a ready-made citation.
Spot something off?
If a date, a number or a transcription looks wrong, write to hello@trlibrary.com with the document and what you found. Corrections are logged and published with the data in corrections.json.
Looking for what else Roosevelt was doing on the day he signed something? Every dated document links to Day by Day, the Library's record of every day of his life.