Sublime

“The Republican party,” he wrote, “must be known as a progressive organization or it is sunk. I believe that so emphatically that I think that far from appeasing or reasoning with the dyed-in-the-wool reactionary fringe, we should completely ignore it and when necessary, repudiate it.”

Douglas MacArthur is one of those blips in history, an idiosyncratic figure who, for reasons hard to satisfactorily explain, acquired far more power than he had any reason to. In the United States in the mid-twentieth century, there were three such men, each operating on a different scale. On the level of the city, there was Robert Moses, who someh

He, more than any other individual, knew which of the tens of thousands of administrative positions in that government were crucial to his purposes, and after a quarter of a century of power in the state, he had “Moses Men” in most of these posts.

of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

Daniels and Roosevelt made an odd couple. Yet they served together harmoniously for virtually the entire eight years of Wilson’s presidency. The strengths of one complemented the weaknesses of the other, and FDR learned from Daniels the folksy art of Washington politics.

Nowhere in the state was support for the President more firm than in the Tenth District, whose Hill Country counties had been the stronghold in decades past of the People’s Party (the birthplace of the Farmers’ Alliance, the Party’s precursor, was, of course, the Hill Country town of Lampasas, a bare two miles north of the district line). An Austin

Smith and Wagner exemplified the spirit of urban reform that characterized Tammany in 1911, though FDR had yet to recognize it.

The White House would “often” call him about “something we hadn’t even asked about. I think that Mr. Roosevelt had put the word out to do anything possible” to help Lyndon Johnson “within reason … and sometimes beyond reason.… He [Roosevelt] wanted Mr. Johnson to win so bad.”