Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| their testimony, while savings-banks recorded increased deposits and pawn-shops hard times; when poor mothers flocked to the institutions to get their children whom they had placed there for safe-keeping in the “wide-open” days—then we knew what his victory meant. |
| These were the things that happened. They are the facts. Living in this cosmopolitan city, where, year after year, the Sunday-closing law turns up as an issue in the fight for good government,—an issue, so we are told, with the very people, the quiet, peace-loving Germans, upon whom we, from every other point of view, would always count as allies in that struggle,—I find myself impatiently enough joining in the demand for freedom from the annoyance, for a “liberal observance” of Sunday that shall rid us of this ghost at our civic banquet. And then I turn around and look at the facts as they were then; at that Sunday which Roosevelt and I spent from morning till night in the tenement districts, seeing for ourselves what went on; at the happy children and contented mothers we met whose homes, according to their self-styled defenders, were at that very time |