Sublime

For Secretary Hurley, MacArthur, and George Moseley, the Bonus Army was a ragtag assortment of radicals, aliens, criminals, and social misfits led by a Bolshevik cadre intent on storming the American equivalent of the Winter Palace. For the Army’s high command, overthrow of the government lay just around the corner.57

As, that winter, farmers began to march in what might have been the prelude to revolution, as the nation’s great banks began to close, Washington still did nothing substantive. A great nation was collapsing, and its government, of which the Senate had once been a pillar, seemed paralyzed, utterly unable to prevent the collapse. Senators came to the

Andrea Toma-celli, who had used Boldrino to help him restore order in the Papal States, decided that he would anticipate Boldrino’s next desertion and win popularity with the local inhabitants by having him murdered at a dinner party in Macerata. Bold-rino’s company is said to have carried the body of their murdered leader with them for two years

And there was no end to his rash promises of debt relief (one of the most despicable forms of radicalism in the eyes of the Roman landed classes) or to his bold threats to take out the leading politicians and to put the whole city to flames.

Had his arrogance been merely intellectual, he could have disciplined himself—this man with a will strong enough to discipline himself to a life of unending toil—for the few weeks necessary to give him a chance at the Governorship. But his arrogance was emotional, visceral, a driving force created by heredity and hardened by living, a force too

as Weygand writes, “the quintessential aristocrats of mendicancy” (a fancier-sounding and less racially loaded version, perhaps, of the contemporary image of the “welfare queen”).