Theodore Roosevelt: An AutobiographyRoosevelt, Theodore
History
Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
Roosevelt, Theodore
Presidents -- United States -- Biography; Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
There were various measures to which he gave a grudging and querulous
assent without any break being threatened. I secured the reenactment
of the Civil Service Law, which under my predecessor had very foolishly
been repealed. I secured a mass of labor legislation, including the
enactment of laws to increase the number of factory inspectors, to
create a Tenement House Commission (whose findings resulted in further
and excellent legislation to improve housing conditions), to regulate
and improve sweatshop labor, to make the eight-hour and prevailing rate
of wages law effective, to secure the genuine enforcement of the act
relating to the hours of railway workers, to compel railways to equip
freight trains with air-brakes, to regulate the working hours of women
and protect both women and children from dangerous machinery, to enforce
good scaffolding provisions for workmen on buildings, to provide seats
for the use of waitresses in hotels and restaurants, to reduce the
hours of labor for drug-store clerks, to provide for the registration of
laborers for municipal employment. I tried hard but failed to secure an
employers' liability law and the state control of employment offices.
There was hard fighting over some of these bills, and, what was much
more serious, there was effort to get round the law by trickery and by
securing its inefficient enforcement. I was continually helped by men
with whom I had gotten in touch while in the Police Department; men such
as James Bronson Reynolds, through whom I first became interested in
settlement work on the East Side. Once or twice I went suddenly down to
New York City without warning any one and traversed the tenement-house
quarters, visiting various sweat-shops picked at random. Jake Riis
accompanied me; and as a result of our inspection we got not only
an improvement in the law but a still more marked improvement in its
administration. Thanks chiefly to the activity and good sense of Dr.
John H. Pryor, of Buffalo, and by the use of every pound of pressure
which as Governor I could bring to bear in legitimate fashion--including
a special emergency message--we succeeded in getting through a bill
providing for the first State hospital for incipient tuberculosis. We
got valuable laws for the farmer; laws preventing the adulteration of
food products (which laws were equally valuable to the consumer), and
laws helping the dairyman. In addition to labor legislation I was able
to do a good deal for forest preservation and the protection of our
wild life. All that later I strove for in the Nation in connection with
Conservation was foreshadowed by what I strove to obtain for New York
State when I was Governor; and I was already working in connection with
Gifford Pinchot and Newell. I secured better administration, and some
improvement in the laws themselves. The improvement in administration,
and in the character of the game and forest wardens, was secured partly
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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