When he first arrived on the political scene in 1881 at the age of 23, Theodore Roosevelt gave no hint of the Progressive he would later become. In the various elective and appointive positions he held at the municipal, state, and federal levels during the 1880s and 1890s, Roosevelt considered himself nothing more (and nothing less) than an independent Republican reformer, following in the tradition of national-minded statesmen such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and, of course, Abraham Lincoln.
