Theodore Roosevelt stumps for votes, 1912.

This classic 1912 picture of Theodore Roosevelt on the stump originally appeared in the New York Times, though the photographer is unknown. Roosevelt was trying to regain the White House, as he split from the Republicans and formed the Bull-Moose Party. His efforts, of course, failed.

With the upturned hat on the table, Roosevelt gives the impression of a magician. Some critics, however, wanted the politician and his domineering personality to disappear. Mark Twain was one such detractor, and he wrote the following text in 1908 when Roosevelt was exiting the White House:

“Astronomers assure us that the attraction of gravitation on the surface of the sun is twenty-eight times as powerful as is the force at the earth’s surface, and that the object which weights 217 pounds elsewhere would weight 6,000 pounds there.

For seven years this country has lain smothering under a burden like that, the incubus representing, in the person of President Roosevelt, the difference between 217 pounds and 6,000. Thanks be we got rid of this disastrous burden day before yesterday, at last. Forever? Probably not. Probably for only a brief breathing spell, wherein, under Mr. Taft, we may hope to get back some of our health – four years. We may expect to have Mr. Roosevelt sitting on us again, with his twenty-eight times the weight of any other Presidential burden that a hostile Providence could impose upon us for our sins.

Our people have adored this showy charlatan as perhaps no impostor of his brood has been adored since the Golden Calf, so it is to be expected that the Nation will want him back again after he is done hunting other wild animals heroically in Africa, with the safeguard and advertising equipment of a park of artillery and a brass band.”

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Silent clip of Roosevelt with some fellow Rough Riders: