Sublime

At home, Wilson’s racial policies disgraced the office he held.

Smith and Wagner exemplified the spirit of urban reform that characterized Tammany in 1911, though FDR had yet to recognize it.

THE SOUTHERN MANIFESTO and Herbert Brownell’s civil rights bill menaced—from opposite sides—Lyndon Johnson’s master plan. Manifesto and bill both threatened to add kindling to the civil rights issue on Capitol Hill. Johnson’s strategy for winning his party’s presidential nomination—to hold his southern support while antagonizing northern liberals a

Other political considerations which deterred the Mayor from interfering with Moses in the fields he had carved out for his own were the same reasons that had deterred a Governor—Roosevelt—from interfering: Moses’ ability to complete public works fast enough to provide a record of accomplishment for an elected official to run on in the next electio

What distinguished libertarians from mainstream pro-business Republicans—Mailer’s parade of delegates in Miami Beach—was their pure and uncompromising idea. What was it? Hayek: “Planning leads to dictatorship.” The purpose of government is to secure individual rights, little else.

The great political defect of Locke and his disciples, from a modern point of View, was their worship of property.

As assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt’s impact on the policies of the Wilson administration was minimal. But his duties in the Navy Department were significant, and, more important, his eight years in Washington provided a proving ground where he learned the realities of national politics.

The young idealist entered public service in the very year in which there came to crest a movement—Progressivism—that was based, to an extent greater perhaps than any other nationally successful American political movement, on an idealistic belief in man’s capacity to better himself through the democratic process.