Sublime

Year by year, Hill and his railroad organizations assembled an elaborate system of agricultural research and promotion.

“Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.”

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

Long stormed into the midst of the Mississippi delegation. He threatened. He cajoled. He bullied. He shook his fist in Governor Conner’s face: “If you break the unit rule, you sonofabitch, I’ll go into Mississippi and break you.”

intended beneficiaries of America’s precious promises.

He did this by activating three still amorphous clauses—the necessary-and-proper clause, the general-welfare clause, and the commerce clause—making them the basis for government activism in economics.

“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending,” Lincoln told the Illinois Republicans in 1858, “we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.”38 That required a compass, but Douglas’s aligned itself only with his own maneuvering.39 Too often looking back to cover his tracks, he fell too frequently into the thickets, sw