Sublime

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.

John Gunther was to write about Roosevelt’s “worst quality,” a “deviousness,” a “lack of candor” that “verged on deceit.” Men who had known Roosevelt longer—when he had been Governor of New York—used stronger words; in Albany it had been whispered that a commitment from the Governor could not be trusted; New York City’s ordinarily mild-mannered leg

Thanks to the elective system, he avoided courses in philosophy and theory, which might have meant trouble. Throughout his life Roosevelt remained mystified by abstract thought, and Harvard did nothing to lessen that.

BEFORE THE WAR, Roosevelt’s New Deal had been constructed on the basis of specific authorization granted by Congress, but wartime urgencies required broader, less specific, authority. Congress quickly gave it to him—in two War Powers Acts granting the President enormous discretionary authority—and he quickly used it, and, in his role as wartime Com

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

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

A Congress dominated by southern conservatives may have given the President a free hand in running the war; on the domestic front, Roosevelt never got a single major domestic bill through Congress after the Court-packing fight.