David on Theodore Roosevelt

“[A] great American statesman whose vision and superb courage I had always admired—Theodore Roosevelt.”

“There was something about him which frightened the timid and the conventional and the men who in their walks, never stray from the well-trodden and dusty paths of party platitudes. The commonplace thought him violent, the pedantic thought him unprincipled, the correct thought him undignified, the kind of stern party men that treat the party headquarters as if they were the temple of their faith thought him simply wicked. But the common people heard him gladly, and they thronged to greet him and to listen to his speeches.”

“The Republican Party, then as always, was more economically and ethnically homogenous than the Democratic Party, but it too, in the manner of mass-based, ‘‘catch-all’’ American parties, contained its own conflicting elements. Under Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership in the century’s first decade, the Republicans had bid for a brief season to recapture their birthright claim to be the party of reform. But TR had shepherded his progressive followers out of the Republican fold and into the third-party ‘‘Bull Moose’’ schism of 1912. He thereby ensured the election of Wilson and contributed as well to the consolidation of conservative rule in the GOP. Some former Bull Moosers, like Chicago reformer and future New Deal secretary of the interior Harold Ickes, became Democrats in all but name; others, like Nebraska’s Senator George Norris, were relegated to an impotent minority in party councils during the triumphal conservative ascendancy of the 1920s.”