Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| and sense of justice. That is, the men who ran the force had. The honest men on the patrol posts, the men with the night-sticks as Roosevelt called them when he spoke of them, had lost courage and hope. |
| This was the situation that confronted him in Mulberry Street, and with characteristic directness he decided that in the saloon was the tap-root of the mischief. The thing to do was to enforce the Sunday-closing law. And he did. |
| The storm that rose lives in my memory as the most amazing tempest—I was going to say in a teapot—that ever was. But it was a capital affair to those whose graft was at stake. The marvel was in the reach they had. It seemed for a season as if society was struck through and through with the rottenness of it all. That the politicians, at first incredulous, took the alarm was not strange. They had an interest. But in their tow came half the community, as it seemed, counseling, praying, beseeching this man to cease his rash upturning of the foundations of things, and use discretion. Roosevelt replied grimly that there was nothing about discretion in his oath of office, |