Untitled - the Digital Library of Georgia

CHAPTER II.
President Roosevelt's Georgia Ancestors,
THE biographers of President Roosevelt, with the
best intentions, no doubt, have done the President
an injustice. Genealogically speaking, they have
made him stand on one limb. For, almost without excep
tion, they have been content to trace his lineage along the
paternal branch of ancestry. They have brought him into
the world only half made up. And, with such an outfit, it
is safe to say that he could never have mounted his
charger at San Juan or won the race which has landed
him on Pennsylvania Avenue! Lacking, too, the balance-
wheel of an intellectual dynamo in stable equilibrium, he
could never have settled so adroitly the dispute between
Japan and Russia or adjusted so satisfactorily to young
collegians the great game of American football! So far
as the biographers have gone, they have rendered an ex
cellent service to his Dutch forebears; but, engaging
though it is to wander through the portrait gallery of the
sturdy Knickerbockers, the fact remains that the ancestral
fabrics of the Chief Executive pardon the mixed meta
phor were not all spun in the looms of Holland.
Such an exclusive derivation, besides making the Presi
dent stand on one limb, is otherwise well calculated to
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