Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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there is in man, sturdy, courageous, splendid types of American manhood, however they differ. And though they do differ, Cleveland gave Roosevelt his strongest backing in the civil service fight, while the younger man holds the ex-President, even though his political opponent, in the real regard in which one true man holds another. And I who write this have had the good luck to vote for them both. The Republic is all right.
But I was speaking just now of the western land he loved; whether in the spring, when “the flowers are out and a man may gallop for miles at a stretch with his horse’s hoofs sinking at every stride into the carpet of prairie roses,… and where even in the waste places the cactuses are blooming,… their mass of splendid crimson flowers glowing against the sides of the gray buttes like a splash of flame”; when “the thickets and groves about the ranch house are loud with bird music from before dawn till long after sunrise and all through the night”; or in the hot noontide hours of midsummer, when the parched land lies shimmering in the sunlight and “from the upper branches of the cottonwoods comes
