There's a beginning of a mass movement against large-scale consolidate corporations. Many people feel they have a strangle hold on the country and they're starting to -- they'd always been a problem for the laborer, for the common laborer, but now, large-scale monopolies and the trust movement, that whole movement is beginning to affect the middle class as well through the pricing policies of the corporations. And William Jennings Bryan is running for the Presidency in 1900, and he's running hard on this anti-monopoly campaign. And, of course, McKinley is seen as the epitomization of this movement represented by and supported by large-scale industrial capitalists like Morgan, who's connected with Mark Hannah and what-not.

There had always been large gaps between the rich and the poor, but they were dramatically highlighted in 1900 by a series of reporters and novelists and muckrakers who put a searching light on these problems and problems that had begun to affect also the middle class as well. The huge slums in cities begin to spread and with them, a whole series of diseases. A whole series of social diseases and social problems begin to afflict the entire city, and the very question arises at this time, for the first time, are American cities livable places? Can they be improved? Can they be transformed? Can they be changed? And so this mood of unease and crisis is co-mingled with a mood of optimism. I think Theodore Roosevelt best represents that. He's concerned and brings attention as a President to these social problems, the first President to do this literally in the 19th century.

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