The United States Since the Civil War

by Charles Ramsdell Lingley

Frank Norris, The Octopus, and The Pit; Winston Churchill, Coniston and Mr. Crewe's Career; and Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, are illustrative fiction.

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[1] The shrinkage of the value of these securities caused the "rich men's panic" of 1903. Consult Noyes, Forty Years, 308-311.

[2] The word originated in 1906 with President Roosevelt, who likened certain sensational journalists to the man with the Muck-Rake in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Annual Register, 1906, 442.

[3] Cf. pp. 94-96 above.

[4] I have drawn largely at this point upon Dr. W.J. Tucker's article "The Progress of the Social Conscience" in the Atlantic Monthly, Sept., 1915, 289-303. The clearest idea of the transition from laissez faire to public interest is gained by reading the biography of M.A. Hanna by Croly, and La Follette's and Roosevelt's autobiographies.

[5] Usually cases involving the Fourteenth Amendment have also involved other parts of the Constitution. The main reliance, however, in such cases has been the Amendment mentioned.

CHAPTER XX

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Seldom, in times of peace, is the personality of a single individual so important as that of Theodore Roosevelt during the early years of the twentieth century. At the time of his accession to the presidency, he lacked a month of being forty-three years old, but the range of his experience in politics had been far beyond his age. In his early twenties, soon after leaving Harvard, he had entered the Assembly of the state of New York. President Harrison had made him Civil Service Commissioner in 1889, and he had been successively President of the Board of Police Commissioners of New York City, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, an important figure in the war with Spain, and Governor of New York. He had been known as a young man of promise—energetic, independent and progressive—and in addition to his political activities he had found time to write books on historical subjects, see something of life on a western ranch and develop a somewhat defective physique into an engine of physical power.