Original and Selected Miscellany [excerpt]

     Brave and thoughtful to the last, our President was true to his soldier’s training.

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     “A nation rebuilt” may almost be the description of what was done under Mr. McKinley’s administration.

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     It should not escape attention that of all the long line of illustrious Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the first to be born and brought up in a great city. Other Presidents have passed over to cities, and so have become more or less identified with city conditions and city life, notably Presidents Arthur, Cleveland and Harrison; but Mr. Roosevelt is the first President to represent and to reflect in his every fiber the cosmopolitanism of the great modern city, and that city—New York.

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     Theodore Roosevelt is the first president of New York birth. He is also the youngest man that ever reached the presidency, being now only 43. He was born at a time of tremendous political excitement, the year previous to Lincoln’s election, when the nation was con- [526][527] vulsed with that great question which so soon led to the Civil War. The Roosevelts are one of the oldest New York families and the first directory contains Isaac Roosevelt and Son, sugar refiners, No. 152 Queen street, now Pearl. Isaac Roosevelt was the first president of the Bank of New York, the first bank ever started in that city, and since then the family has been noted as solid business men whose wealth was alike free from vanity or vice and who sought no public distinction. It was a good stock to spring from and one which might naturally produce such a man as our new chief magistrate.