![]() ![]() ![]() At night he falls asleep beneath the judge’s feet by the roaring library fire. ![]() ![]() At twilight he accompanies the judge’s lovely daughters on long rambles. Buck passes his days hunting with the judge’s sons. He lives in Judge Miller’s big house in the “sun-kissed” Santa Clara Valley, surrounded by poplar-shaded lawns and pastures, long grape arbors, orchards, a swimming tank, and berry patches-dog paradise, in other words. “Ignoble ease” is a good description of Buck’s life when The Call of the Wild begins. But it was not just the federal government that needed to man up: every American citizen should refuse to “shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil,” and strive for a life of “toil and effort, of labor and strife.” America, and Americans, should reject “the doctrine of ignoble ease” that had emasculated the nation. In the title speech of The Strenuous Life (1901), an essay collection published the year he succeeded the assassinated William McKinley, Roosevelt urged America to embrace its “manly and adventurous qualities.” The country, he argued, needed to build a larger army, compete for sovereignty of the seas, and engage in foreign nation-building, beginning with the Philippines, over which it had gained control during the Spanish-American War. The other person Buck sounds like is Theodore Roosevelt, who then was serving his first presidential term. ![]()
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