Henry George, the father of the Single Tax doctrine, who had been
nominated by a conference of some one hundred and seventy-five
labor organizations. Roosevelt fought his best on a personal
platform of "no class or caste" but "honest and economical
government on behalf of the general wellbeing." But the
inevitable happened. Tammany slipped in between its divided
enemies and made off with the victory.

The rest of the four years he spent partly in ranch life out in
the Dakotas, partly in writing history and biography at home and
in travel. The life on the ranch and in the hunting camps
finished the business, so resolutely begun in the outdoor
gymnasium on Twentieth Street, of developing a physical equipment
adequate for any call he could make upon it. This sojourn on the
plains gave him, too, an intimate knowledge of the frontier type
of American. Theodore Roosevelt loved his fellow men. What is
more, he was always interested in them, not abstractly and in the
mass, but concretely and in the individual. He believed in them.
He knew their strength and their virtues, and he rejoiced in
them. He realized their weaknesses and their softnesses and
fought them hard. It was all this that made him the thoroughgoing
democrat that he was. "The average American," I have heard him
say a hundred times to all kinds of audiences,"is a pretty good
fellow, and his wife is a still better fellow." He not only
enjoyed those years in the West to the full, but he profited by
them as well. They broadened and deepened his knowledge of what
the American people were and meant. They made vivid to him the
value of the simple, robust virtues of self-reliance, courage,
self-denial, tolerance, and justice. The influence of those
hard-riding years was with him as a great asset to the end of his