Breaking with Tradition.

As the off-year elections got under way, the new president, Theodore Roosevelt, planned to make a series of speeches. Roosevelt's active participation in the campaign was an innovation, and to quell criticism that a sitting president was supposed to be above party politics, the White House told reporters that while his speeches would be "along Republican lines, so far as they may relate to politics, they will not be political speeches." Yet it came as no surprise that Roosevelt's speeches were indeed political. As he did for his entire presidency, Roosevelt avoided the tariff issue almost completely in these speeches and concentrated on the trust issue. While touring New England, where he spoke of the use of publicity as a way to control the trusts, he narrowly escaped death when a trolley struck his horsedrawn carriage in Pittsfield, Massachusetts...