Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| Blaine. He was strongly in opposition, and fought hard to prevent the nomination. The outcome was a sore thrust to him. Some of his associates never forgave him that he did not bolt with them and stay out. Roosevelt came back from the far West, where he had gone to wear off his disappointment, and went into the fight with his party. His training was bearing fruit. “At times,” I read in one of his essays, “a man must cut loose from his associates and stand for a great cause; but the necessity for such action is almost as rare as the necessity for a revolution.” He did not join in the revolution; the time had not come, in his judgment, to take the isolated peak. |
| There came to me just now a letter from one of his classmates in college who has heard that I am writing about Mr. Roosevelt. He was one of those who revolted, but I shall set his testimony down here as quite as good an explanation of Theodore Roosevelt’s course as Mr. Roosevelt could furnish himself. |
| “He was,” he writes, speaking of his college friend, “next to my own father, the purest-minded man I ever knew.… He was free from any tinge of self-seeking. Indeed, he |