had left him enough money to take care of that. But he had no
intention or desire to live a life of leisure. He always believed that
the first duty of a man was to "pull his own weight in the boat"; and
his irrepressible energy demanded an outlet in hard, constructive work.
So he took to politics, and as a good Republican ("at that day" he said,
"a young man of my bringing up and convictions, could only join the
Republican party") he knocked at the door of the Twenty-first District
Republican Association in the city of New York. His friends among the
New Yorkers of cultivated taste and comfortable life disapproved of his
desire to enter this new environment. They told him that politics were
"low"; that the political organizations were not run by "gentlemen,"
and that he would find there saloonkeepers, horse-car conductors,
and similar persons, whose methods he would find rough and coarse and
unpleasant. Roosevelt merely replied that, if this were the case, it
was those men and not his "silk-stocking" friends who constituted the
governing class--and that he intended to be one of the governing class
himself. If he could not hold his own with those who were really in
practical politics, he supposed he would have to quit; but he did not
intend to quit without making the experiment.

At every step in his career Theodore Roosevelt made friends. He made
them not "unadvisedly or lightly" but with the directness, the warmth,
and the permanence that were inseparable from the Roosevelt character.
One such friend he acquired at this stage of his progress. In that
District Association, from which his friends had warned him away,
he found a young Irishman who had been a gang leader in the
rough-and-tumble politics of the East Side. Driven by the winter wind
of man's ingratitude from Tammany Hall into the ranks of the opposite
party, Joe Murray was at this time one of the lesser captains in "the
Twenty-first" Roosevelt soon came to like him. He was "by nature as
straight a man, as fearless, and as staunchly loyal," said Roosevelt,
"as any one whom I have ever met, a man to be trusted in any position
demanding courage, integrity, and good faith." The liking was returned
by the eager and belligerent young Irishman, though he has confessed
that he was first led to consider Roosevelt as a political ally from the
point of view of his advantages as a vote-getter.

The year after Roosevelt joined "the governing class" in Morton Hall,
"a la