Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| being “hopelessly desolated by the enforcement of a tyrannical law surviving from the dark ages of religious bigotry”; and I ask myself how much of all the clamor for Sunday beer comes from the same pot that spewed forth its charges against Roosevelt so venomously. It may be that we shall need another emancipation before we get our real bearings: the delivery of the honest Germans from their spokesmen who would convince us that with them every issue of family life, of good government, of manhood and decency, is subordinate to the one of beer, and beer only. |
| Blackmail was throttled for a season; but the clamor never ceased. Roosevelt shut the police-station lodging-rooms, the story of which I told in “The Making of an American.” Greater service was never rendered the city by any man. For it he was lampooned and caricatured. He was cruel!—he who spent his waking and sleeping hours planning relief for his brother in distress. So little was he understood that even the venerable chairman of the Charter Revision Committee asked him sternly if he “had no pity for the poor.” I can see him now, bending contracted brows |