Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| another, and an engineer besides, who knew how. |
| As to the share he wanted me to take in it, we had it out at the time over that; and, though we had little tugs after that, off and on, it was settled then that I should not be called upon to render that kind of service—to Mayor Strong’s rather bewildered relief, I fancy. I think, to the end of his official life he did not get quite rid of a notion that I was nursing some sort of an unsatisfied ambition and reserving my strength for a sudden raid upon him. I know that when I asked him to appoint an unofficial Small Parks Committee, and to put me on it, it took him a long time to make up his mind that there was not a nigger in that woodpile somewhere. He was the only man, if I am right in that, who ever gave me credit for political plotting. For when, afterward, as I recorded in “The Making of an American,” I marched the Christian Endeavorers and the Methodist ministers to the support of Roosevelt in the fight between him and his wicked partners in the Police Board, that was not plotting, though they called it so, but just war; a |