Theodore Roosevelt the Citizen.

RIIS, Jacob A. [Theodore Roosevelt].

$1,500.00

Item Number: 145330

New York: The Outlook Company, 1904.

First edition of Riis’s campaign biography of President Roosevelt. Octavo, original publisher’s cloth with gilt titles to the spine, gilt titles and decoration to the front panel, beveled edges, top edge gilt, tissue-guarded frontispiece of Theodore Roosevelt President of the United States drawn by George T. Tobin, illustrated with seventeen plates of black and white photographs. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “William Loeb Jr. with the friendly regards of Jacob A. Riis Washington April 7 1904.” The recipient, William Loeb Jr., served as assistant secretary to the President under Theodore Roosevelt from 1901-1903 and then succeeded George B. Cortelyou as Secretary to the President in 1903, where he remained the Roosevelt’s right-hand-man for the rest of his time in office. In very good condition with some rubbing to the hinges and extremities, bumping to the spine and top of the front panel. Rare and desirable signed and inscribed.

Considered one of the fathers of photography, Danish-American social reformer and social documentary photographer Jacob Riis was one of the first photojournalists to use his talents to expose the living conditions of the poor to encourage social reform. Through his candid photographs of impoverished New Yorkers at the turn of the 20th century, he attempted to alleviate these unbearable living conditions, which he himself experienced, by exposing them to the middle and upper classes. Upon his 1895 appointment to the presidency of the Board of Commissioners of the New York City Police Department, Roosevelt asked Riis to show him nighttime police work which led Roosevelt to close the police-managed lodging rooms in which Riis had suffered during his first years in New York. For his part, Riis wrote a authored the present campaign biography of Roosevelt.