William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt were sworn in as President and Vice President in March, 1901. On September 6th the President was shot in Buffalo, New York, while attending the Pan-American Exposition. On September 14th, upon McKinley's death, Roosevelt took the Presidential Oath of Office. In October, Roosevelt welcomed the educator Booker T. Washington to Washngton. It did not pass unnoticed that here was the first black man or woman ever to enter the White House who was not a hired servant.

In December, two days before Christmas, Ellery Channing, eighty-five, died in the morning. I had first met Channing in the spring of 1845, Sanborn remembered. Our friendship continued unbroken, though sometimes interrupted by absence or caprice, until he died, at my Concord house.

At Channing’s passing, a weathered and reclusive Sanborn enjoyed regarding his own aging, enigmatic self, feeling confident the world would long remember this legacy: Here was Sanborn, the best friend of the country's best men.

Channing’s friends had been but few in his final years. For the most part, he had loved being out of sight, snugly ensconced away from the world up in his attic room. He had often contemplated this absence, placing a very high value on that, people wondering whatever in the world had come of the Concord poet. Channing’s children, when they learned of their father's death, felt tremendous relief. For the first time in years they could visit their eccentric, cranky father's hometown without being rebuffed by him. A few authentic mourners came to the funeral service, held at the Unitarian Church the day after Christmas, but many who attended seemed to have come mainly out of curiosity. Sanborn read an eulogy he had composed for the occasion and, after reading a few particular stanzas from two of Channing's poems, he helped bear away Channing's casket. He was buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetary, low on Author's Ridge. Higher up on the ridge were the graves of Emersons, Thoreaus, Hawthornes, and Alcotts. In death as in life, Channing would be close to his great neighbors, and set apart.

That summer a phonograph recording swept the nation, selling well over a million copies its first year, In the Good Old Summertime.

Channing's book on Thoreau was issued by C.E. Goodspeed, who likewise published Sanborn's Personality of Thoreau.

Channing's life of Thoreau did not treat of Emerson and his friend Thoreau together, except as they were introduced conversing in the chapters headed Walks and Talks, Sanborn explained in his recollections. These were in part the record of actual conversations in which Channing had a share, but were chiefly extracts from the diaries of Emerson and Thoreau, which had been in his hands for the purpose of editing those rambling conversations. The edition was made, though never published, and I have it. The journals were much in Channing's hands, during Thoreau's life and soon after his death; and a thousand extracts from them constitute the best part of the 1902 biography: literally 1,000.

It was also in 1902 that the Philadelphia firm of J.H. Bentley published William Ellery Channing: Poems of Sixty-five Years, edited by Sanborn, issued from Concord.

On November 21, 1902 Sanborn, as concerned for the welfare of John Brown's children and grandchildren as ever, typed a letter to his friend Higginson, sharing with him a scheme presented him by Brown's grand-daughters, Salmon Brown's daughters, Agnes and Nell. They'd struck on the idea of a road show, them traveling throughout the country, accompanied by Nell's fiance Grover, telling tales of their grandfather's exploits. -- They have all had experience in public performances, Sanborn assured Higginson. Nell, now about twenty-four years old, has been in the Salvation Army, and is a speaker and musician. Agnes thinks it will pay, and wants a loan of money to begin with. Last summer they held meetings in a number of Oregon towns, and say they were very successful. Their plan is to come East as far as New York.

Higginson would not be alone in declining to contribute to the cause. Sanborn would have no choice but to notify the Brown girls of his disappointment, him unable to assist them with their interesting plan.

Theodore Roosevelt's cowboy days in the Wild West had taught him plenty about the depletion of natural resources, versus conservation of them. Upon becoming President, he had appointed an ardent conservationist, Gifford Pinchot, to be head of the United States Forest. When Roosevelt surprised Congress by suddenly declaring millions of acres of American lands closed to business interests, he was accused of defying his powers as defined under the Constitution. When, in 1902, Roosevelt told Pennsylvania mine owners that if they did not settle a strike brought forward by an anthracite coal miner's union, he'd personally send in federal troops to settle it, an aide warned him that such intervention against big business by the government was unconstitutional, Roosevelt took the man by the collar and declared, The Constitution was made for the people and not the people for the Constitution.

On May 25, 1903, Concord formally celebrated the centenary of the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson, recorded in the formal proceedings, Under the Direction of The Social Circle of Concord, Printed at the Riverside Press for The Social Circle in Concord, June 1903.

The young people of the town were assembled to help celerate the day, the commemorative book recorded. To quote the correspondent of the Springfield Republican: The Social Circle could have done nothing better than by bringing the children into the event of the town, and making them perceive that it was also an occasion of the world, and that they had a proper and, indeed, a most important part in it.

In Boston, C.E. Goodspeed published a companion volume to Sanborn's earlier biography, The Personality of Thoreau. The new book, The Personality of Emerson, was harshly criticized for being much more about Sanborn than about Emerson, riddled through and through with incidental, rambling, untrustworthy recollections of Sanborn's conversations with the man.

In Washington, President Roosevelt put a halt to negotiations between Columbia and the U.S. regarding the right of way for a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, having learned Panamanian rebels were on the verge of declaring independence from Columbia. Marines were sent to Panama to suppress the revolution and, when the new Panamanian government agreed to let the U.S. proceed with the canal project, Roosevelt put the Army in charge of it.

In the summer of 1903, people waited in long lines out front of New Jersey theaters, eager to see a 12-minute movie, The Great Train Robbery. Near the end of the year, out in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two brothers named Wright got a contraption called Flyer to somehow lift magically from the ground.

In 1904 came the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, putting forward the conditions under which the United States would be compelled to intervene, diplomatically or militarily, in another country's affairs. Soon Russia and Japan were at war with one another, Roosevelt immediately inviting representatives from both countries to join him for peace talks aboard his private yacht.

In the course of the year, 1904, Sanborn released two new books. From C.E. Goodspeed came Sanborn's Biographical Tribute to President Langdon; from Houghton, Mifflin and Company came his New Hampshire: An Epitome of Popular Government.

In the 1904 elections, Roosevelt would overwhelmingly defeat his Democratic opponent, Alton Parker. In In 1906, Roosevelt would be the first American to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, having mediated the signing of the Russo-Japanese Peace Treaty at the Kittery, Maine Naval Shipyard in 1905. The settlement reached, the two Japanese envoys to the negotiations, Jihei Hashiguchi and K. Ochai, had accepted Sarah Jane Farmer's invitation to join her in Maine for a few days of peace and relaxation at her Green Acre estate.

In the meantime, according to The Bibliophile Society in 1905, a cult of the Simple Life was springing up, Henry Thoreau having inspired a Return to Garden Cities movement, the good Garden Citizens all armed with copies of Walden.

That news came with The Bibliophile Society’s publishing, in 1905, Thoreau's biographical notes on Sir Walter Raleigh, as well as The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau, edited, with abundant commentary, by F.B. Sanborn. Published in two volumes, The Journeys were proclaimed by The Society as being a valuable contribution to the literature of our country, and as a work that would arouse a lively interest among collectors of First Editions. There were 489 members of The Society, for whom the edition of 489 sets was printed.

Sanborn made no bones about the pleasure he took in bringing to light assorted of Thoreau's fragments and abandoned early drafts scribbled, as Sanborn noted, in boat or tent, afterwards written out more fully in his Concord home.

In mid-April, 1906, the San Francisco earthquake was worldwide news, as was the murder, late in June, of a celebrated New York architect by a New York millionaire on the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden. Stanford White, a a partner in the firm McKim, Mead & White, was shot three times, from behind, by Harry K. Thaw. Sitting next to the dying architect was his mistress, the pale and elegant actress and artist's model, Evelyn Nesbitt, Thaw's wife.

Also from New York that year came Lincoln Steffens' controversial book, The Shame of the Cities. Like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell, Steffins was denounced by Teddy Roosevelt as being among men he called muckrakers, a pack of men gone amuck in the growing slough of their own pessimistic outpourings.

The heat was turned up still a notch that year, with the publication of Upton Sinclair's outrageous, revelatory book, The Jungle. A fictional account of Chicago's meat-packing industry, Sinclair had laced his text with what his numerous political critics would label poison, which literary critics came to call Realism. To those of his readers who were revulsed by his revelations that occasionally working men fell into vats of red meat to be processed and packaged and shipped around the country, Sinclair insisted they had missed the point. He hadn't intended simply to turn their stomachs, he had hoped he could influence their minds. He had shown readers such despicable working conditions in expectation of ideological and political reform, hoping the lives of these exploited immigrant workers would be improved. In his fiery introduction to The Jungle, Jack London gave generous praise to the 28 year old Sinclair's grasp of proletarianism and the only other issue that mattered, the inevitable end of Capitalism as the march of Socialism advanced.

Though Roosevelt claimed to despise muckrakers, their crusade effectively influenced public opinion, putting pressure on him to bring immediate, reforms. Beyond backing the Hepburn Act, which enabled the Interstate Commerce Commission to set maximum rates for railroads, President Roosevelt pressed Congress to pass a Pure Food and Drug Act, via which the meat-packing and related industries would be regulated.

A flambouyant, red-faced, white-haired, wide-mustachioed Thomas Wentworth Higginson, apparently much influenced by the ebullient warrior-President, wrote early in July to Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of The Century Magazine. Declaring his remorse only for not having urged the deployment of what he called More Practical Terror in the days prior to the raid on Harper's Ferry, he summarized the botched insurrection: We did what we did. In the end, we were trying to do right. And I believe, in the greatest measure, that we did do right. The result of the attack at Harper's Ferry, the hastening of inevitable disunion and civil war, was good, healthy, positive. My one perennial wish, however, is that we would have achieved that end without the sacrifice of Brown. I persist in the belief that I, at least, could and should have realized the need to protect John Brown from himself. I should have recognized how incapable he was. I should have perceived the madness that dwelled within him, the insanity that sat stealthily beside his great, selfless nobility. A counter-proposal to his Harpers Ferry scheme should have been made: something that would have both attracted and protected Brown. In retrospect, I think the bombing of a few fine southern buildings, or a few famous southern men, with notes crediting the blasts to some choice northern abolitionist groups, would have done the job. Such action would have brought disunion quickly, and without risk to any from our side. The Russian revolutionists, who were so efficient in making the tyrant Tsar Alexander II explode, have much to teach us about practical terror.

Higginson, once a sturdy and energetic runner, boxer, and weight-lifter, felt himself cast in the same mold as the toughest Rough Rider, a crusader among the best of them, ever in fervent pursuit of righteous justice, even in old age. He wrote, in 1906, that if ever he found himself again in such circumstances as had confronted him in 1859, he again would take the law into his own hands. Had such combustibles as were now available in 1906 existed in 1859, he said, the sins of the slave-holding states would have been purged by blood far more strategically, efficiently, successfully, and anonymously. He regretted that in the 1800s he could not do what in the1900s seemed to him so easy: he would have saved John Brown from martyrdom.

Sanborn has turned every great man he's ever met into a book, Higginson grumbled in mid-August. What he wouldn't do to have another Emerson, another John Brown. My poor friend has run out of genuine heroes with which he has been personally acquainted. But still his rent must be paid. Now he is reduced to writing of himself. Soon he may sink so low as even to take me for a subject.

In 1891 Sanborn had completed his biography of his friend and mentor Samuel Gridley Howe who, after joining in the war for Greek independence from Turkey in the late 1820s, had become the foremost American advocate for prison reform and care of the feeble-minded. He had been the venerable head of the Perkins Institute for the Blind from 1832 until his death, at 75, in 1876. Immediately Sanborn had begun, as was his habit, to learn all he could about Howe’s successor at the Institute, Michael Anagnos. The American educator, born in Epirus, Greece in 1837 and graduated from the University of Athens, had arrived in America in 1867. He’d been in charge of the Perkins Institute from 1876 until his death, at 69, in 1906. It had been Anagnos who’d persuaded Sanborn to make his two 1890s pilgrimmages to Greece and Europe. Now, in 1907, Sanborn’s exhaustive biography of his obscure professional associate and friend, Anagnos, very quietly appeared.

In 1908, in the midst of Sanborn's preparing a final draft of his reflections on his own life, published the following year, there came three new Sanborn tomes: a Reminiscence and Tribute to Hawthorne and His Friends; a remembrance of The Founders and Hinderers of Dartmouth College; and Bronson Alcott at Alcott House , England, and Fruitlands, New England,1842-1844.

Having taken to heart the substantial criticism he and Professor Harris had received upon publication of their collaborative biography of Alcott, Sanborn had resolved he'd try it again, this time on his own. He had rummaged through every Alcott-related paper pile he had on hand, searching for even the least loose paper scrap. These had been put into specific anecdotal or chronological relationships with his other notes, and quotes from Alcott's journals. Obvious chinks or gaps had been filled in from memory. The critics howled when the book came out, saying it gave them exactly what they'd come to expect, another Sanbornian jumble of occasional truths adrift amid much exuberant, idolotrous invention.

At home and abroad Harry Houdini was thrilling audiences with his marvellous flair for theatrics. His stunts and escapes filled the newspapers daily. Whether handcuffed and locked in a box dropped in a river, or strapped in a straitjacket and hung upside-down from a flagpole at the top of a skyscraper, Houdini got free and people loved him.

The Westinghouse Company brought out electric irons and toasters the year President Roosevelt kept his pledge not to seek re-election. It came as no surprise to anyone when, in 1908, he threw his support to his 300 pound Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, who handily defeated his opponent, William Jennings Bryan.

Having put the Emerson house up for rental, Ellen traveled to Hot Springs, Virginia in hopes of her bad knee being healed. In the spring, 1908, she visited the Forbes family in Milton, joining them in the summer when they went to Naushon. She remained at Naushon through the autumn, and on into winter. On January 11, 1909, she slipped into unconsciousness. She died on the 14th, in the morning.

On December 15, 1908, Sanborn put to rest his intention to write a book telling of his more than 30 years in charitable work and Social Science. That story may be told hereafter, and other matters may be dealt with, Sanborn wrote in the preface to his Recollections of Seventy Years, notifying readers that the two-volume autobiography before them would deal chiefly with the life and times of himself from his birth through his fortieth year.

Upon the 1909 publication of the Recollections, a granddaughter of one of Mrs. Thoreau's borders leveled with Henry Salt, saying she wished Salt could have had access to material bought by Bixby of St. Louis and Wakeman of New York, and that H.G.O. Blake had willed his Thoreau's manuscripts to Elias Harlow Russell in order to assure that Sanborn wouldn't get them, probably stemming from the ongoing influence of Sophia Thoreau's animus toward Sanborn.

On the heels of Sanborn's Recollections came his Boston Bibliophile Society edition of Thoreau's Walden. Sanborn had learned of the existence of some 12,000 words, in manuscript scraps, culled from Walden by Thoreau himself through eight years of re-organizing, revising, and simplifying. Having got his hands on the snippings, Sanborn immediately set his sights on restoring them. In this 1909 edition of Walden,, even Thoreau's final arrangement of chapters was rejected, Sanborn having discovered a much improved accomodation for the restored material.

That summer the National Negro Committee came into being, backed by the much publicized philanthropist millionaire, Andrew Carnegie. Among thos who could offer only their moral support was the venerable Franklin Sanborn. From what he'd heard, he had every reason to feel confidence in the bright young man from Great Barrington, by Springfield, William Edward Burghard DuBois. Among the Directors on the Board were the white reformers Jane Addams and John Dewey. There was only one black on the board: W.E.B. DuBois.

In August came a small change in the nation that was noticed throughout the world. The United States Mint began to issue the Lincoln Head Cent in lieu of the Indian Head Penny.

The fiftieth Anniversary of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry was commemorated at Sanborn's riverside home on October 17, 1909. He was seventy-seven. The commanding Thomas Wentworth Higginson, his high forehead shining, his eyes still twinkling, was now eighty-six. When Sanborn took his elbow to lead his old friend into the sitting room, Higginson pulled his arm away, insisting he needed no assistance. Sanborn could see the elegant cane he leaned on was not just for show or decorum, but was something of which Higginson was now needful. Still, he stepped aside, and the Colonel entered the room.

Sanborn had set out chairs for each of the members of the so-called Secret Six, Captain John Brown's northeastern support group: Theodore Parker, Gerritt Smith, George Luther Stearns, Samuel Gridley Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Franklin Sanborn. Of these, only Higginson and Sanborn were among the living.

On entering the room, Higginson was delighted to see in the chair reserved for Mr. Howe the familiar sweet smile of his cherished poetess-reformer friend, the now ninety year old Julia Ward Howe. She did not get up, but remained sitting, a shawl wrapped over her shoulders. When he took the seat next to Mrs. Howe, she reached over and gently placed her hand on Higginson's.

In a seventh chair sat a prim young news reporter, Katherine Mayo, appointed for this assignment by her boss, Oswald Garrison Villard, a grandson of William Lloyd Garrison. Villard was then wrapping up work on his own biography of John Brown. His instructions were clear: Miss Mayo was to write down with complete accuracy everything Mrs. Howe, Higginson, and Sanborn said. The raconteur Higginson waved his hand from chair to chair, illuminating the grand lives and times of men and women now dead and gone, yet so present among them, still. Higginson flourished, delighting in the bright, spellbound face of the privileged young reporter, who sat riveted at the edge of her chair, rapidly filling her notebooks with squiggles, getting it all down on paper.

When he'd first got news of the plans for this meeting, Higginson hadn't wanted any part in it, but Sanborn had urged him to reconsider, saying this might well be their last interview and final opportunity to set the record straight for posterity. Remembering Sanborn's botched attempts to write Brown's life, Higginson cringed, agreeing at last to meet with Miss Mayo, expecting she and Mr. Villard might get the story straight, portraying Brown, Higginson, and company more accurately.

Though proud of his close association with John Brown, Higginson still felt deep shame, pain, even rage, remembering the contemptible way he and others who claimed to be among Brown's nearest friends had abandoned the great man in his darkest hour. The elegant emphatic Higginson pulled no punches, making it clear to Miss Mayo that he and his friends had been entirely aware of Brown's intent to incite a slave rebellion in Virginia, and that they'd been likewise aware that his plan was as much an invitation to disaster as to success or mere defeat. They'd nevertheless stuck to their guns, so to speak, believing that Brown, even if he met with defeat, would hasten the country to civil war, the only thing any of them could see that would actually, finally, bring an end to slavery.

The writer, reformer, and women's suffrage leader, Mrs. Howe, who hadn't had a lot to say at the gathering, struggling to hear with her ear trumpet whatever was being asked or said, died the following year, 1910. Sanborn's essay, The Development of Reformatory Discipline, was published, as was Oswald Garrison Villard's formidable biography, John Brown, Fifty Years After.

My book about Brown was the biography for our generation, Sanborn had written to Higginson. Villard's is a biography for the new generation, a biography for the next thirty years.

When the cocoa brown book came out, heavier than a walkway brick, Sanborn was more than startled. Villard had portrayed Brown as a quarrelsome religious fanatic, a wandering, cold-blooded renegade madman who'd failed in everything he'd ever undertaken, excepting mayhem, murder, and massacre. His backers in the north were treated as aristocratic New England Brahmans who had come under the hypnotic influence of the Kansas terrorist and a New York philanthropist friend who, soon after Brown and his troops were either hanged or imprisoned, had committed himself to an insane asylum. Sanborn was livid.

At the end of August, 1910, Teddy Roosevelt, fresh from an extended African safari, rubbed salt into the recent wounds of abolitionists, condemning their ever having received what he called hysterical praise. Speaking at the dedication of the John Brown Battlefield at Osawatomie, Kansas, Roosevelt declared: The abolitionists are undeserving of praise. They have been credited with deeds done by other men whom they in reality hampered and opposed, rather than aided. Much of what they did was positively harmful to the cause for which they were fighting.

The former President took advantage of the bully opportunity presented him at the dedication of the Osawatomie Battlefield, Roosevelt calling for a New Nationalsim, a stronger federal government giving people a Square Deal, putting human rights before property rights. He was now at the helm of a new third party, the Progressives, having withdrawn his support of William Taft, his own handpicked successor to the Presidency. -- When I say that I am for the Square Deal, he declared, -- I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.

The N.A.A.C.P., the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people, was founded on May 1, 1910, rising from the ashes of the National Negro Committee, which had been founded the previous summer. In November came the debut of the new Association's official journal, Crisis. We intend to show the danger of race prejudice, DuBois announced, and to stand for the rights of men and women irrespective of color or race.

In the summer of 1911, Sanborn undertook a speaking tour, attempting to purify the lately darkened and much marred historical record concerning the great good deeds of John Brown and His Friends. In Bellingham, Massachusetts he spoke before the Mendon Historical Society, naming the members of the so-called Secret Six, boasting of his own having been among them even as he admitted his, and their, failings: These persons aided Brown's plans with money and active support, although none of them perhaps, except Higginson, had entire confidence in their earthly wisdom or success.

In the meantime, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a meticulous, industrious, and calculating white man, Frederick W. Taylor, had declared himself the Father of Scientific Management, which consisted of careful observation of individual laborers, eliminating from any task or operation the least moment of wasted time, weeding out any and every repetitive or unnecesssary motion. Bethlehem Steel bosses praised the many gains Taylor's principles had brought them, announcing they'd successfully cut millions of dollars from their operating budget.

On January 11, 1912, Polish mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts quit their looms in protest of cuts to their wages which Lawrence mill owners had unilaterally set as a result of a workers' strike that had successfully achieved a two hour reduction of their workday. Italian workers from the American Woolen Company joined the stirke the next day, parading parallel to the Merrimack River, marching from mill to mill. By evening, there were some 10,000 chanting strikers. By month's end their numbers had swollen to 50,000. Fife and drum bands accompanied the picketers as they joined their hands, circling the mills. The radical head of the Industrial Workers of the World, Big Bill Heywood, stirred the men into a furor, even as Mother Jones brought the women to pitch heat. On March 13th, the textile mill workers celebrated a jubilant victory, achieving the demanded pay increase as well as improvements in their working conditions.

The oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller mourned the Supreme Court's having ordered, under authority of the Sherman Ant-Trust Act, his Standard Oil Company's divestation of its holdings in some 300 assorted firms, the Socialist Party's Presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, toured the country, telling a crowd gathered in Chicago in May, 1912: Every capitalist is your enemy. Every workingman is your friend.

On June 18, 1912, Republican gathered in Chicago for their National Convention, nominating President William Howard Taft for reelection, with James Schoolcraft Sherman of New York as his running mate. An infuriated Teddy Roosevelt marched out of the Convention hall, followed by his equally indignant supporters, who formed their own third party, The Progressive Party, on August 5th. They took the Bull Moose for their emblematic mascot, a proud, ferocious, and tenacious animal they equated with their stirring presidential nominee, the toothy, grinning, winning T.R.

Near the close of his campaign, the fervent Roosevelt had been shot in the chest as he walked out of a Milwaukee hotel to make a speech. He refused to see a doctor, instead going right on ahead with delivering his speech. Revealing to the assembled throng the blood on his shirt and hands, he proceeded to regale the shocked crowd for well over an hour, after which he let himself be treated. Due to an eyeglass case and notes for his speech which he had placed in his vest pocket, the bullet had only chipped a rib, only narrowly missing his heart.

For all that, the vivacious Roosevelt had split the Republican party, and he would lose the election, as would the incument, the once bouyant President Taft.

The Democrats met in Baltimore from late June into early July, finally settled on Woodrow Wilson as the man to lead their party into what they expected would be certain victory. In the staunch Republic state of Massachusetts, Democratic Party leaders dragged a reluctant 80 year old Sanborn out of political retirement, challenging him to shed the burden of being an old guard Republican, inviting him to shine again, to be what he'd so devotedly been in the beginning, a Democrat.

In his 1909 Recollections, Sanborn had proclaimed his having been, at the age of 13, a leader among local Independent Democrats. He had written affectionately of his affiliation with what he called the party of youth, recalling how he'd received from his friends, schoolmates, and their families much encouragement in his rising aspirations as an anti-slavery Democrat. Now, in 1912, local Democrats had taken the old man at his word.

What with war erupting overseas, Americans saw in Wilson an elegant, peace-loving gentleman. Going to war with some tiny distant European country, which to Teddy Roosevelt was plainly rousing, was to most Americans then unthinkable. Though Sanborn's friend Colonel Higginson was adamant in his his support of T.R., the big man again seeking America's bulliest pulpit, Sanborn was only too happy to put distance between himself and Bull Moose New Nationalism as well as the half-baked Republican status quo. He came forward, endorsing the intellectual, Wilson, and his party's New Freedom philosophy.

The state of Massachusetts would swing round to Wilson in the end, trailed by Roosevelt, with just a few exceptional oddball enclaves clinging to the incumbent, Taft. Concord, for example.