I don’t remember Benjamin Harrison. McKinley was the first I was really conscious of.

Oh, yes, I remember that very well. I remember the fighting and so forth. And I remember being on Fifth Avenue—my father had moved from the house in which I was born, which was right behind St. Patrick’s cathedral, up to One East Fifty-fifth Street—and I was in that house at the time of the Dewey parade down Fifth Avenue. That’s Admiral Dewey, in case some of the uninitiated don’t know their history well enough to realize that Admiral Dewey was our great hero, having fought the Battle of Manila.

In the first place, he was religious. His father was a clergyman, and we all went to the little church at Arden [New York]. My father had very high ideals, in his behavior and also in his activities. He once told me what may seem a platitude now, but it was very moving at the time, along when I was perhaps fourteen years old or so—he died in 1909 when I was seventeen, just about to be eighteen—that he had tried to make everything with which he had contact better for that contact.

He took an interest in everything. He took an interest in good roads in Orange County when he lived down there. He took an interest in whatever was before him. In the railroad business, of course, he was very advanced. In 1898 he took over the Union Pacific. In 1903 he established the first pension plan, I think, on any railroad. I remember he established seventy years as the retirement age. It was a little old in those days; but when you think that today we are living much longer, it’s ridiculous for us to talk about sixty-two or sixty-five years old. Seventy, I think, has been established as right. He also established the first medical-care plan on any railroad.

Teddy Roosevelt started an investigation of my father’s railroads by the Interstate Commerce Commission. Roosevelt and my father had been great friends, but they broke because of a letter my father had written to a friend of his upstate whom he had known on Wall Street and who he wanted to keep in touch with things; his name was Sidney Webster. This Webster letter broke their relations, because in it my father said that Teddy Roosevelt hadn’t kept his promise. In the 1904 campaign my father had gone down to see Roosevelt and said, “I’m ready to support you and ready to end the row in the New York Republican party over Chauncey Depew, who was a senator, and raise fifty thousand dollars for your campaign, if you will make Depew an ambassador.” Roosevelt said he would. My father wasn’t interested in Depew; he was only interested in patching up the differences in the party. But Roosevelt did not keep his promise. So my father wrote to Webster explaining all this. The newspaper people had what they called the Ananias Club, consisting of people whom Teddy Roosevelt called “liars.” So the next morning my father was branded a “liar,” and that broke their relationship. Roosevelt was very vindictive and started this antitrust case, which was very farfetched at the time.

In any event, my father was a man of great integrity himself because of his religious background and training and his own personality. He expected a lot from people, and they gave it to him. He expected a lot from me, and that stimulated me.

Yes. And I remember meeting John Muir at that time. Do you remember him? He kept in touch with my mother after my father died, and I got very fond of him. He influenced me. He was a great naturalist, of course.