Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919). New York. 1906.
Page 266
| those who have influence over them. This influence is sometimes obtained by appeals to their prejudices and by the lowest art of the demagogue; sometimes it is obtained by downright corruption, sometimes it is obtained through the influence the local Tammany organizations exert on the social life of their neighborhoods. The District leaders are able in a hundred ways to benefit their followers. They try to get them work when they are idle; they provide amusement for them in the shape of picnics and steamboat excursions; and, in exceptional cases, they care for them when suffering from want or sickness; and they are always ready to help them when they have fallen into trouble with the representatives of the law. They thus get a very strong influence over a large class, the members of which are ordinarily fairly decent men, who work with reasonable industry at their trades, but who never get far ahead, who at times fall into want, and who sometimes have kinsfolk of semi-criminal type. These men are apt to regard the saloon as their club-house; often, indeed, the saloons are the headquarters of the District political organizations, and become in a double sense the true social centers of neighborhood life. |
| To the mass of citizens of this kind the local political leaders are not merely individuals of whose public actions they approve or disapprove |