Sublime

Congress, one observer was to write, had given Carl Vinson “a blank check to operate as a one-man committee” on naval matters; on that committee, only one voice mattered: the chairman’s soft Georgia drawl. Lyndon Johnson’s voice, in other words, would not matter until he became chairman. Vinson’s arrogance was not unique. Most of the great Standing

Even while Congress was still debating the tariff bill, Wilson had summoned it into a second joint session, at which he called for the creation of a system of regional banks controlled by a Federal Reserve Board (its seven members would be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate) that would end Wall Street’s control of

Once again, however, the opportunity for financial innovation was provided by war.

Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante write in Panic: The Betrayal of Capitalism by Wall Street and Washington, “The ideology of modern finance replaced the capitalist’s appreciation for free markets as a context for human creativity with the worship of efficient markets as substitutes for that creativity. The result was a divorce of entrepreneurial

Like many nineteenth-century reformers, what Carlyle wanted was not a world in which everyone was financially equal, but one in which both the elite and the poor would merit their inequalities. ‘Europe requires a real aristocracy,’ he wrote, ‘only it must be an aristocracy of talent. False aristocracies are insupportable.’ What Carlyle wanted – tho

Did Johnson spend as much as $50,000 in San Antonio? “I wouldn’t be surprised,” John Connally said recently. But then he added that while that figure might be correct for the Kilday organization, “Then, of course, there was Valmo Bellinger”—the black boss in San Antonio; he had an organization, too. “Valmo had to have some help.” Huge sums of Johns