Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| off the exorbitant demands.” And in my soul I said amen, and was glad that with such problems to solve the President had found such friends to help. |
| Many times, during the anxious days that followed, I thought with wonder of the purblind folk who called Roosevelt hasty. For it seemed sometimes as if the insolence of the coal magnates were meant to provoke him to anger. But no word betrayed what he felt, what thousands of his fellow-citizens felt as they read the reports of the conferences at the White House. The most consummate statesmanship steered us safely between reefs that beset the parley at every point, and the country was saved from a calamity the extent and consequences of which it is hard to imagine. Judge Gray, the chairman of the commission that settled the strike, said, when it was all history, that the crisis confronting the President “was more grave and threatening than any since the Civil War, threatening not only the comfort and health, but the safety and good order of the nation.” And he gave to the President unstinted praise for what he did. The London “Times,” speaking for all Europe |