Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| the cabinet of his dead chief and set up for himself. But this President did not let the day pass, upon which he took the oath, without asking McKinley’s advisers to stay and be his, all of them. It was politically wise, for it allayed the unrest. But it was something beside that: it was the natural thing for Roosevelt to do. He knew the cabinet, and what they could do. |
| “You know well enough,” he said once, when we were speaking of it, “that I am after the thing to be done. It is the fitness of the tool to do the work I am concerned about, not my inventing of it. What does that matter?” |
| He found in Attorney-General Knox, for instance, a corporation lawyer whose very experience as such had made him see clearly the unwisdom, to look at it merely from the point of view of their own security, of the arrogance that lay ill concealed at the bottom of the dealings of organized wealth with the rest of mankind. And splendidly has he battled for the rights of us all—theirs and ours. The utter mystery to me is that corporate wealth has not long before this made out that there can be no worse misfit and no greater peril to itself in a |