Theodore Roosevelt the Citizen was published by the Outlook Company in 1904, during Roosevelt’s presidency, and it is less a biography than a testament of friendship — the story of a political partnership between a journalist and a politician who shared the same reforming vision.
Riis first met Roosevelt in the early 1890s, when Roosevelt was a New York State Assemblyman who had just read How the Other Half Lives. Roosevelt appeared at Riis’s office with a card reading simply “I have read your book and I have come to help.” The friendship that followed shaped both men’s careers: Roosevelt used Riis’s knowledge of the slums to inform his political positions, while Riis used Roosevelt’s political power to advance the reforms he had been advocating for years.
The book traces Roosevelt from his privileged origins through his career as police commissioner (when he and Riis spent nights walking the slums together, checking on police behaviour and documenting conditions), through his governorship and vice-presidency, to the presidency. Riis’s Roosevelt is not the militarist or the imperialist but the reformer: the man who cleaned up the police department, who enforced the housing laws, who fought the machine politicians, and who believed that government had a duty to protect the weak against the strong.
Collecting Theodore Roosevelt the Citizen
First edition (Outlook Company, New York, 1904): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, good condition: $25–$60
- Later editions: $8–$15