Assembly voted not to take up his "loose charges." It looked like
ignominious defeat. But the next day the young firebrand was back
to the attack again, and the next day, and the next. For eight
days he kept up the fight; each day the reputation of this
contest for a forlorn hope grew and spread throughout the State.
On the eighth day he demanded that the resolution be voted on
again, and the opposition collapsed. Only six votes were cast
against his motion. It is true that the investigation ended in a
coat of whitewash. But the evidence was so strong that no one
could be in doubt that it WAS whitewash. The young legislator,
whose party mentors had seen before him nothing but a ruined
career, had won a smashing moral victory.

Roosevelt was not only a fighter from his first day in public
life to the last, but he was a fighter always against the same
evils. Two incidents more than a quarter of a century apart
illustrate this fact. A bill was introduced in the Assembly in
those earlier days to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in
tenement houses in New York City. It was proposed by the
Cigar-Makers' Union. Roosevelt was appointed one of a committee
of three to investigate the subject. Of the other two members,
one did not believe in the bill but confessed privately that he
must support it because the labor unions were strong in his
district. The other, with equal frankness, confessed that he had
to oppose the bill because certain interests who had a strong
hold upon him disapproved it, but declared his belief that if
Roosevelt would look into the matter he would find that the
proposed legislation was good. Politics, and politicians, were
like that in those days--as perhaps they still are in these. The
young aristocrat, who was fast becoming a stalwart and aggressive