Today was Election Day in 1904.
President Theodore Roosevelt won a full four-year term over his challenger, Alton B. Parker.
TR won pretty handily; he had 56 percent of the vote while Judge Parker only had 37 percent.
And the incumbent won more than twice as many electoral votes as the challenger.
But there was one other measure.
In terms of which candidates received ostriches as gifts in the election of ought-four, it was Roosevelt 2, Parker 0.
The birds came to the United States from what was then called Abyssinia; it’s known as Ethiopia today.
The Abyssinian emperor, Menelik II, had been exchanging gifts with the American president ahead of the election.
In 1903, Roosevelt reportedly sent him some guns and a typewriter, so in 1904, he sent several living gifts: a lion cub known as Joe and a hyena called Bill.
Newspaper reports back then said that the lion cub bit some of the crew on the ship that brought him to America and the hyena wouldn’t stop laughing.
Still, Menelik kept the gifts coming, and in the fall of 1904, he had an ocean liner bring over an even bigger group of animals that he hoped would arrive right as Roosevelt won the election: two lionesses (though only one survived the trip), a zebra, a couple of monkeys and two Somali ostriches.
These creatures got lots of attention as they arrived in New York and made their way to the National Zoological Park in Washington DC.
One of the ostriches lived for about five more years, but the other lived until 1930.
And according to a piece in Smithsonian Magazine in 2023, the specimens are still in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History.
So if you wanted to study the ostriches Teddy Roosevelt got during the 1904 campaign, you can actually do that.
Starting tomorrow near Haines, Alaska, it’s the Alaska Bald Eagle Festival.
There are expert speakers, birding workshops and activities for kids, but the main draw is seeing huge numbers of eagles head to the water to catch and eat salmon.
Sometimes there are thousands of eagles at a time!
In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt Won a Presidential Election…And a Pair of Ostriches (Smithsonian)
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Photo: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Jem Hom
