ured that a State judge
had been guilty of improper, if not of corrupt, relations with certain
corporate interests. This judge had held court in a room of one of the
"big business" leaders of that time. He had written in a letter to this
financier, "I am willing to go to the very verge of judicial discretion
to serve your vast interests." There was strong evidence that he had
not stopped at the verge. The blood of the young Roosevelt boiled at the
thought of this stain on the judicial ermine. His party elders sought
patronizingly to reassure him; but he would have none of it. He rose in
the Assembly and demanded the impeachment of the unworthy judge. With
perfect candor and the naked vigor that in the years to come was to
become known the world around he said precisely what he meant. Under the
genial sardonic advice of the veteran Republican leader, who "wished to
give young Mr. Roosevelt time to think about the wisdom of his course,"
the 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,