Historian's Progress or the Quest for Sancta Sophia

Abstract

FIFTY YEARS after the event, Historicus could vividly remember seeing, as a child of about ten, the great Theodore Roosevelt go down the main street of his home town in an open, horse-drawn carriage-top-silk hat, pince-nez, bushy, toothy smile, and all. He could remember the occasion, during the election of 1908, when he was jostled off the sidewalk by a noisy group of young Republican electioneers in a town that was about ninety per cent Democratic, for Taft with small metal gadgets which, when pressed, emitted a hoarse, croaking noise. He could clearly remember reading the newspaper accounts of the Democratic party convention of 1912, when he been stirred by the longdrawn-out battle for the nomination between Champ Clark and that knight in shining armor, that Galahad who had the strength of ten because his heart was pure, Woodrow Wilson. Historicus was now sixteen, and his first great living hero was Woodrow Wilson. And when Wilson visited his home town to make the famous Mobile Speech in 1913, he played hooky from his $i.oo-a-week job in the drugstore and slipped into the Lyric Theatre without a ticket to hear the great man speak. Three months after he turned twenty-one, the United States entered the First World War-the vastest and most destructive and, it may be, the most critical and decisive that the world, up to that time, ever seen.