Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and United States Secretary of War Elihu Root. 1900 Congressional campaign Late in the campaign of 1900, Storey seriously pondered running for president on a third-party ticket but decided against it as impractical. Instead, he ran a losing, but spirited and high-profile campaign for Congress as an independent anti-imperialist candidate. Other planks in his platform included support for the gold standard and free trade. Champion of civil rights One of Storey's favorite quotes was from his dear friend, Irish lawyer Lord Russel, which stated that the definition of civilization was that "Its true signs are thoughts for the poor and suffering, chivalrous regard and respect for woman, the frank recognition of human brotherhood, irrespective of race or color or nation or religion, the narrowing of the domain of mere force as a governing factor in the world, the love of ordered freedom, abhorrence of what is mean and vile, ceaseless devotion to the claims of justice." Storey used this quotation as inspiration for both his political career and his championship of civil rights. Storey consistently and aggressively championed civil rights, not only for blacks but also for American Indians and immigrants. He opposed immigration restrictions, and supported racial equality and self-determination. "When the white man governs himself, that is self-government," he declared, "but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government–that is despotism." Storey was the first president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), from its founding in 1909 until his death in 1929. According to his biographer Hixson, he "launched and maintained the effective campaign to achieve the total destruction of the legal embodiment of white supremacy." He guided NAACP's legal challenges to discriminatory laws that violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, especially related to disenfranchisement and segregation of blacks in the South, and led several important NAACP legal victories. Most notably, he was lead counsel before the United States Supreme Court in Buchanan v. Warley (1917). In that case, the Court unanimously overturned a Louisville law that racially segregated blacks by specific city blocks. The Court's opinion reflected the jurisprudence of property rights and freedom of contract as embodied in the earlier precedent it had established in Lochner v. New York. On February 17, 1916, he testified in opposition to the nomination of Louis D. Brandeis to the United States Supreme Court. Storey