Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
Page 100
| Something had occurred in New York fit almost to wake the dead. Henry George had been nominated for Mayor, and the world that owned houses and lands and stocks was in a panic. The town was going to be sacked, at the very least. And, in wild dread of the disaster that was coming, men forsook party, principles, everything, and threw themselves into the arms of Tammany, as babies run in fear of the bogy man and hide their heads in their mother’s lap. Nice mother, Tammany!—even with Abram S. Hewitt as its candidate. He lived to subscribe to that statement. I have sometimes wondered what the town thought of itself when it came to, and considered Henry George as he really was. I know what Roosevelt thought of it. He laughed, rather contemptuously, married, and went abroad, glad of his holiday. |
| But he had contributed something to that campaign that had life in it. Long years after it bore fruit; but at that time I suppose people shrugged their shoulders at it, and ran on to their haven of refuge. It was just two paragraphs in his letter of acceptance to the Committee of One Hundred, the briefest of that kind of documents I ever saw. |