Sublime

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck,

great crisis. Our lives have been marked with debate about great issues; issues of war and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the pur

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but by blood”—his last words before execution were recorded, and, as has often been noted, they were prophetic. But they were also only partly true. Certain crimes were ceased by the Civil War, but they have not been purged. Not yet. Harpers Ferry is

“Who, I ask, has suffered more for the Union than I have?”

At Chattanooga in 1863, George Thomas refused Grant’s order to attack until he was resupplied with draft horses to pull his artillery. Grant was furious, but Thomas was right and, by refusing to attack prematurely, he probably saved Grant’s career. Ridgway and Taylor were also correct, and may well have saved Ike from certain disaster.f

As president-elect he recruited a cabinet of frustrated first lovers or, as the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has called it, a “team of rivals.” They included his major competitors at Chicago—the indignantly disappointed Seward as secretary of state, the transparently ambitious Salmon P. Chase of Ohio as treasury secretary, the corrupt but politic

If Perkins, the Progressive turned New Dealer, spent her life addressing problems left behind by Greeley’s Civil War generation—corporate power, exploited labor, political corruption, poverty—Rustin spent his battling injustices that the New Deal generation didn’t address: racism, segregation, and the threat of militarism to world peace. No one in

“Black Codes.” One of those codes was the vagrancy law,