Sublime

With the dawn of the new century, the public’s demand for an end to trusts and to the high protective tariff that was “the mother of trusts,” the tariff that robbed farmers and gouged consumers, and that had now been in place for almost fifty years—the demand, for legislation to ameliorate the injustices of the Industrial Revolution, that had begun

His famed Cross of Gold speech in 1896 resonated, and he ran for president several times but couldn’t win. Bryan was an advocate for the previous cycle, the one that had disappeared and was no longer relevant, even if he was still its powerful voice.

Twenty years before, Cohen told the author, he had considered young Representative Johnson “promising material.” Subsequently, he said, he had been somewhat put off by the “intensity” of Johnson’s ambition. But now, in 1957, talking to Johnson over lunch, he felt that the promise had been fulfilled: “He was a man with a mission”—to pass a civil rig

Walker soon became disgusted by Frémont’s self-promoting histrionics and rank cowardice in the field – a combination he found particularly loathsome. They

Central Park, most famous and beautiful of the city’s open spaces, “the most noble, the most praiseworthy, the most philanthropic of all our public works,” according to an 1876 New York Herald editorial, had been the creation of Calvert Vaux and the genius of urban landscape, Frederick Law Olmsted, who, in 1857—with Olmsted still an unknown young p