Frances Perkins on Theodore Roosevelt

“Like many people, I was an ardent admirer of Theodore Roosevelt. ...He had recommended to the people Jacob Riis's book How the Other Half Lives. I had read it, and Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural address of 1905, and had straightaway felt that the pursuit of social justice would be my vocation.”

“This was a period of confusion. The ancient concepts of the rights of man was in conflict with the expansion and needs of big business and mass production. ...[O]ur emotions were inevitably attracted by the dynamic quality of Theodore Roosevelt (whose attachments to the principles of social justice has never been sufficiently developed by his biographers) and by the qualities of leadership in social reform... being demonstrated on the political plane by Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson.”