Sublime

In that sense Roosevelt was a natural. He was not especially gifted in any field except politics. But in politics he had no equal.

After Charles Murphy’s death, Tammany had returned to its old ways of doing business, and corruption was rampant in New York City. But Roosevelt relied on the votes of Tammany Democrats in the legislature to enact his program, and he was reluctant to call the organization to task.

The antimonopoly fervency in America traces back to Andrew Jackson and earlier. Hofstadter locates it in a culture of “farmers and small-town entrepreneurs—ambitious, mobile, speculative, antiauthoritarian, egalitarian, and competitive.”

The General Electric job was offered in May or June of 1935. On June 26, 1935, with Johnson about to accept the offer, President Roosevelt announced the creation of a new governmental agency. It would be called the National Youth Administration, its annual budget would be $50 million—and it would be administered in each state by a state director.

But of the fourteen presidents since William Howard Taft who have played golf while in the White House,a Eisenhower was clearly the most dedicated.

Four days after Franklin Roosevelt took the presidential oath on March 4, 1933, he paid a call on former Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was celebrating his ninety-second birthday. After Roosevelt left, Holmes famously opined: “A second-class intellect. But a first-class temperament.” Generations of historians have agreed with

When Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House, he confessed that if he could be right 75 per cent of the time, he would reach the highest measure of his expectation.

As an adult, Wilson shared none of Roosevelt’s lust for violent conquest. For his secretary of state he chose William Jennings…

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