Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| “case-book,” thirty-odd years ago; and added to his partner, “He ought to make his mark in the world but for the difficulty that he has a rich father”; so he told me after Roosevelt had become Governor. It was a difficulty,—is with too many to-day. It is not Roosevelt’s least merit that he has shown to those how to overcome it. But I own that my heart turns to him as the champion of his poorer brother, ever eager and ready to give him a helping hand. When I read, in the accounts of his journey in the West, of the crowd that besieged his train, and how he picked out a little crippled child in it, and took it up in his arms, then I knew him as I have seen him over and over again, and as I love him best. I knew him then for the son of his big-hearted father, to whom wrong and suffering of any kind, anywhere, appealed with such an irresistible claim that in his brief lifetime he became the greatest of moral forces in my city. |
| Then I see him as he stood that day on the car platform at Greenport, shaking hands with the school children that came swarming down just as the train was going to pull out. I see him spy the forlorn little girl in the threadbare |