why should young men born to wealth and social position strive to thrust themselves in between the captains of industry and their political representatives? Possessing at the start the objects of the race, why should they contend? Politics was generally described as dirty and uninspiring; why should they subject themselves to its soil and fatigue? How some of them were answering such questions, Jacob Riis revealed in his life of Roosevelt:
They were having a reunion of his [Roosevelt's] class when he was Police Commissioner, and he was there. One of the professors told of a student coming that day to bid him good-bye. He asked him what was to be his work in the world.
"Oh!" he said, with a little yawn, "really do you know, professor, it does not seem to me that there is anything that is much worth while."
Then came the impact upon the national character of the Rooseveltian personality, persuaded that there are a hundred more interesting things than making money, all "worth while:" hunting grizzlies, reforming, exploring, writing history, traveling, fighting Spaniards, developing a navy, governing men, reading Irish epics, building canals, swimming the Potomac with ambassadors, shooting lions, swapping views with kaisers, organizing new parties, and so on forever. Under the influence of this masterful force the unimaginative plutocratic
