Sublime

Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation.

The outcome was never in doubt. The turnout, almost 40 million, was the greatest in American history. The GOP suffered a crushing defeat. Roosevelt received 22,825,016 votes to Hoover’s 15,758,397 and carried forty-two states with 472 electors.46 The result was as much a repudiation of Hoover as it was a triumph for FDR.

When Johnson took a fresh swipe at Kennedy on foreign affairs, declaring that “the forces of evil… will have no mercy for innocence, no gallantry for inexperience,” they prepared a fact sheet on Lyndon Johnson’s limited understanding of foreign affairs compared to Kennedy’s travels, knowledge, and experience. Kennedy volunteers took up a vigil over

He had written on the statute books of New York such a sweep of social welfare statutes that Oscar Handlin could say that they “made the most difficult state the best-governed one in the Union…[and] awakened the conscience of the nation to the needs of the urban working people.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, as President, was to say that “practically all

THE BATTLE OVER THE SUPREME COURT, like the battle over the Treaty of Versailles, ended in victory for the Senate—and the victory reverberated far beyond the issue itself. Franklin Roosevelt, who by his political genius and his popularity had stripped the Senate of its power, now had inadvertently, by his arrogance and miscalculation, handed that p

In the County Courthouse, one of the committee members, B. M. Brownlee, was unfolding the tally sheets and reading off the totals. The totals for the first twelve precincts were the same as those that had been reported on Election Night. Then Brownlee unfolded the tally sheet for Salas’ Precinct 13. This total was not the same. The figure for Johns

Surely Woodrow Wilson does not need their flattering omissions, after all. His progressive legislative accomplishments in just his first two years, including tariff reform, an income tax, the Federal Reserve Act, and the Workingmen’s Compensation Act, are almost unparalleled. Wilson’s speeches on behalf of self-determination stirred the world, even

“The tragic irony of Lyndon Johnson is that the lowering of the presidency, not the Great Society of which he dreamed, is his most obvious legacy.”