Roosevelt, like Hanna, began to feel pangs of real dread. He was “appalled” at Bryan’s ability “to inflame with bitter rancor towards the well-off those … who, whether through misfortune or through misconduct, have failed in life.”36 Remarks like this suggest that Roosevelt, for all his public attacks upon “the predatory rich,” for all his night-walks through the Lower East Side, was congenitally unable to understand the poor. People who lacked wealth, even through “misfortune,” had “failed in life.”
