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charged up San Juan Hil into the governorship of the Empire State;

but after the fighting, volunteers warcorrespond-ents magazinewriters began to want to go home; it wasn't bul y huddling under puptents in the

tropical rain or scorching in the morning sun of the seared Cuban hil s with malaria mowing them down

and dysentery and always yel owjack to be afraid of.

-144-T.R. got up a round robin to the President and asked for the amateur warriors to be sent home and

leave the dirtywork to the regulars

who were digging trenches and shovel ing crap

and fighting malaria and dysentery and yel owjack

to make Cuba cosy for the Sugar Trust

and the National City Bank.

When he landed at home, one of his first inter-views was with Lemuel Quigg, emissary of Boss Platt who had the votes of upstate New York sewed into the lining of his vest; he saw Boss Platt too, but he forgot about that

afterwards. Things were bul y. He wrote a life of

Oliver Cromwel whom people said he resembled. As

Governor he doublecrossed the Platt machine (a

righteous man may have a short memory); Boss Platt

thought he'd shelved him by nominating him for the

Vice-Presidency in 1900;

Czolgocz made him president.

T.R. drove like a fiend in a buckboard over the

muddy roads through the driving rain from Mt. Marcy in the Adirondacks to catch the train to Buffalo where McKinley was dying.

As President

he moved Sagamore Hil , the healthy happy

normal American home, to the White House, took

foreign diplomats and fat armyofficers out walking in Rock Creek Park where he led them a terrible dance

through brambles, hopping across the creek on stepping-stones, wading the fords, scrambling up the shaly banks, and shook the Big Stick at malefactors of great wealth.

-145-Things were bul y.

He engineered the Panama revolution under the

shadow of which took place the famous hocuspocus of juggling the old and new canal companies by which

forty mil ion dol ars vanished into the pockets of the international bankers, but Old Glory floated over the Canal Zone

and the canal was cut through.

He busted a few trusts,

had Booker Washington to lunch at the White

House,

and urged the conservation of wild life.

He got the Nobel Peace Prize for patching up the

Peace of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese

war,

and sent the Atlantic Fleet around the world for

everybody to see that America was a firstclass power. He left the presidency to Taft after his second term leaving to that elephantine lawyer the congenial task of pouring judicial oil on the hurt feelings of the money-masters and went to Africa to hunt big game. Big game hunting was bul y.

Every time a lion or an elephant went crashing

down into the jungle underbrush, under the impact of a wel placed mushroom bul et the papers lit up with headlines;

when he talked with the Kaiser on horseback

the world was not ignorant of what he said, or

when he lectured the Nationalists at Cairo tel ing them that this was a white man's world. He went to Brazil where he travel ed through the

Matto Grosso in a dugout over waters infested with the tiny maneating fish, the piranha, shot tapirs,

jaguars,

-146-specimens of the whitelipped peccary.

He ran the rapids of the River of Doubt

down to the Amazon frontiers where he arrived

sick, an infected abscess in his leg, stretched out under an awning in a dugout with a tame trumpeterbird beside him.

Back in the States he fought his last fight when

he came out for the republican nomination in 1912 a progressive, champion of the Square Deal, crusader for the Plain People; the Bul Moose bolted out from under the Taft steamrol er and formed the Progressive Party for righteousness' sake at the Chicago Colosseum while the delegates who were going to restore demo-cratic government rocked with tears in their eyes as they sang

On ward Christian so old gers

Marching as to war

Perhaps the River of Doubt had been too much for

a man of his age; perhaps things weren't