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Roosevelt is making no effort to be metaphorical, but this whole simple and beautiful passage may be taken as symbolic of his attitude to his country and the world. Father is Strength in the home, just as Government is Strength in America, and America is (or ought to be) Strength overseas. Mother represents Upbringing, Education, the Spread of Civilization. Children are the Lower Classes, the Lower Races, to be brought to maturity and then set free.

“We do not agree,” Roosevelt concludes, “… that there is a day approaching when the lower races will predominate in the world, and the higher races will have lost their noblest elements … On the whole, we think that the greatest victories are yet to be won, the greatest deeds yet to be done … the one plain duty of every man is to face the future as he faces the present, regardless of what it may have in store for him, turning toward the light as he sees the light, to play his part manfully, as a man among men.”49

ROOSEVELT WAS CERTAINLY playing his own part manfully when he wrote the above lines in the early spring of 1894. His intellectual activity was as intense as it had ever been. Having published, in late 1893, The Wilderness Hunter, the third of his great nature trilogy and arguably his finest book,50 he was now simultaneously at work on Volumes Three and Four of The Winning of the West, planning the never-to-be-written Volumes Five and Six, editing his second Boone & Crockett Club anthology (to which he also contributed scholarly articles), reading Kipling, and addressing a variety of correspondents on subjects ranging from British court procedures to arboreal distinctions between Northern and Southern mammalian species. In addition, he had recently begun a part-time career as a professional lecturer, and took frequent quick trips out of town to speak in New York or Boston on history, hunting, municipal politics, and “the subject on which I feel deepest,” U.S. foreign policy.51

There was a reason for all this activity, abnormal even by his standards. During the previous summer, Grover Cleveland had presided unhappily over the worst financial panic in American history—a crisis so severe as to make the plaster palaces of Chicago seem but hollow symbols indeed. The nation’s steady outflow of gold, caused by a steady rise in imports and monthly purchases of silver by the government (mandatory since the Silver Purchase Act of 1890), could only be stopped by drastic action, and Cleveland had summoned an emergency session of Congress on 7 August 1893. Despite violent opposition from his own party, the President managed to force the repeal of the controversial act on 28 August. He thus saved the nation’s credit, but transformed himself overnight into the most unpopular President since James Buchanan.52 Americans high and low felt the icy threat of bankruptcy that winter, and Roosevelt, still striving vainly to recover from his losses in Dakota, was no exception. His accounts showed a crippling deficit of $2,500 in December 1893; Edith, in her private letters, put the total nearer $3,000.53 Roosevelt complained that his ill-paid government job was “not the right career for a man without means.” The sale of six acres of property on Sagamore Hill, at $400 apiece,54 brought him temporary security, but Roosevelt knew he would still have to scrabble for freelance pennies during the next few years in order to save his home and educate his children. The birth of a son, Archibald Bulloch, on 10 April 1894, was further cause for concern. “I begin to think that this particular branch of the Roosevelt family is getting to be numerous enough.”55

Although he professed still to be enjoying his work as Civil Service Commissioner, and to “get on beautifully with the President,”56 an increasing restlessness through the spring and summer of 1894 is palpable in his correspondence. It would be needlessly repetitive to describe the battles he fought for reform under Cleveland, for they were essentially the same as those