Sorry. Your starting point/president is half a century late. Try Lincoln, who also wanted a "strong central government", and went to war to get it. TR was only emulating the first Republican president.
Different philosophies involved. Lincoln could be described as a “classicalist”, best described by the Lincoln scholar Harry V. Jaffa, in ‘Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates’ (1959)(a very good read, btw):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_V._Jaffa
Whereas T. Roosevelt was strongly Progressive. H.L. Mencken, at their height of T. Roosevelt’s popularity, wrote a vanity press book, just for his friends, that could have gotten him into serious trouble. On one page, it had a transcript from speeches by TR, opposing it, translated (by Mencken himself) text from Friedrich Nietzsche; clearly demonstrating that TR had plagiarized Nietzsche wholesale.
In that Nietzsche’s greatest influences have been in the subjects of existentialism, nihilism and postmodernism, this casts some very peculiar lights onto TR’s beliefs and actions.