Clinton Roosevelt


Clinton Roosevelt was an American politician and inventor from New York.

Early life

Roosevelt was born in New York City on November 3, 1804 and raised in Pelham, New York. The site of the house he was born in was later occupied by the Standard Oil building in New York. He was a son of Elbert Roosevelt and Jane Roosevelt. Among his siblings were Peter Curtenius Roosevelt and the Rev. Washington Roosevelt.
A member of the Roosevelt family, he was a great-grandson of Johannes Roosevelt, making him a distant cousin of U.S. Presidents Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Through his maternal grandmother, Catharine Goelet Curtenius, wife of New York State Auditor Peter Theobaldus Curtenius, he was also a member of the Goelet family. His grandfather was partners in business with his grandmother's brother Peter Goelet.

Career

Roosevelt was an early and prominent member of the Locofocos, or Equal Rights Party, a radical faction of the Democratic Party. He was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1836 and served one year. Roosevelt was an opponent of the monopoly banking system and cited bank paper currency as the cause of economic problems. After the Panic of 1837, when New York's economy worsened and the working population suffered, he changed his views, calling for a communist economic system with greater government involvement.
Roosevelt was also an inventor and an advocate of patent reform. In the 1850s, he invented a warship design, but neither the United States nor Russia were interested; he later proposed trade unions to increase the profits of inventors. Roosevelt was also a diplomat in Russia during the Crimean War, where he was the "herald who carried the official dispatches between St. Petersburg, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin."
In 1884, he gave a "rambling talk" at the People's Hall about "bulls and bears, the Stock Exchange, national banks, over-speculation, specie and paper currency, and financial depression."

Personal life

In New York City, Roosevelt had an office at 52 Exchange Place, and lived at 411 West 23rd Street.
Roosevelt, who never married, died on August 8, 1898, in his 94th year, at Fisher's Island, New York. His funeral was held at Christ Church in Pelham Manor, New York and he was then buried in Beechwoods Cemetery in New Rochelle, New York.

Works