line for political promotion was that of
Theodore Roosevelt, who was still under forty years of age, although he
had lived a keen, aggressive, and public life for nearly twenty years.
Just out of Harvard in 1880, Roosevelt entered the rough and tumble of
New York politics. He was a reform legislator when Cleveland was
governor, and an opponent of the nomination of Blaine in 1884. He did
not fight the ticket or turn Mugwump, for he had already formed a
political philosophy, that only those who stayed within the party could
be efficient in reform; but he dropped out of the ranks and took up
ranch life in the West. Harrison made him a Civil Service Commissioner
and supported him in a stern administration of the merit system. Before
he left this office in 1895, to become Police Commissioner of New York
City, the breezy and vigorous assaults of Roosevelt upon political
corruption had already marked him as a reformer of a new type, who
remained an active politician and a party man without losing his
interest in reform. As police commissioner he gained new fame and more
admirers. In 1897 he took the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy
and prepared for war. He had already found time to write many books on
the West, reform, naval history, and outdoor life. He resigned his post
in April, 1898, on the eve of war, raised a regiment of volunteers,
which the public speedily named the "Rough Riders," kept his men in the
center of the stage while there was fighting, risked and violated all
theories of discipline to attack the sanitary policy of the
Administration in the autumn, and in October received the nomination of
his party for Governor of New York, over the ill-concealed opposition of
Thomas Collier Platt.

During the campaign of 1898 Roosevelt carried his candidacy to the voter
in every part of the State. He spoke from rear platforms day after day.
Rough Riders, in uniform, accompanied his party and reinforced his
appeal to mixed motives of good government and patriotic fervor. He was
elected in November, and on the same day the Republican control of
Congress was assured. It was made possible for the party to fulfill the
last of the obligations laid upon it by the election of 1896.

A currency act, passed in March, 1900, was the result of Republican
success. It established the gold dollar by law as the standard of value,
legalized the gold reserve at $150,000,000, and made it the duty of the
Treasury to keep at a parity wit