They got Senator Fairbanks to accept ... by showing him a picture of our great and noble president trying to jump a horse over a six-foot fence". The president's enthusiastic campaigning attracted Mr. Dooley's attention: "And when Theodore Roosevelt kisses a baby thousands of mothers in all corners of the land hear the report and the baby knows it's been kissed and bears the honorable scar through life. Twenty years from now the country will be full of young fellows looking as though they'd graduated from a German college." Slow decline, apparent ending and brief resurrection (1905–26) Dunne had never found the actual writing of the Dooley pieces difficult, once he got started—it was finding that initial inspiration, and putting himself in a suitable frame of mind to compose, that he found increasingly hard after 1905. Aware that the columns were reaching an audience of millions and would be reviewed by critics when placed in book form, Dunne was reluctant to release pieces he considered substandard, and defended his position strongly in correspondence with the syndicators. In 1906, he joined with Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens in forming The American Magazine, a project that occupied time and energy, especially since his regular column, "In the Interpreter's House", contained musings like Mr. Dooley's but without brogue or barroom. This allowed Dunne to make his points without tedious dialect. Thus, the Dooley columns continued only irregularly, occupying parts of each year from 1905 to 1915. When Mr. Dooley could be found behind his bar, his sayings remained at a high standard. Roosevelt remained a target, friend, and White House host, one who took seriously what Mr. Dooley said and corresponded with Dunne about it. In 1906, after the publication of Upton Sinclair's muckraking The Jungle, about the unsanitary horrors of the meatpacking trade, Dooley summed up the objections of the packers to the book, "if they had a blind man in the Health Department, a few competent friends on the Federal Bench, and [corrupt Illinois senator] Farmer Bill Lorimer to protect the cattle interests of the Great West, they cared not who made the novels of our country." In June 1907, Dooley and Hennessy speculated as to what Roosevelt would do when his term expired in 1909. Dooley stated that were he an ex-president, the publican would try to do something really hard and likely to take up the remainder of his