Sublime

From their seats in the spectator galleries high up over the Assembly Chamber, the reformers could see him roaming the narrow aisles between the legislators’ desks, pleading, cajoling, threatening, bargaining, dealing, trading votes—using every trick he had learned in his years of working for Tammany.

By February 10, when the civil rights bill arrived in the Senate, the most valuable hostage, the tax cut bill, was out of the South’s clutches, “locked and key” in the storm cellar of completed legislation, and so were the appropriations bills. And Johnson made sure that no other bills would wander onto the battlefield to be captured and held hosta

Humphrey organized liberal Democrats, and the few liberal Republicans, into rotating platoons so that only once during the entire filibuster were the liberals unable to muster a quorum. To respond on the floor to southern attacks on the substance of the bill, he appointed floor captains, each with a team of four or five senators under him, to defen

On each civil rights vote, he would use the minimum number of westerners necessary to accomplish his purposes, not requiring the others to vote with the South. But the fundamental nature of the deal is what Johnson said it was—in return for southern votes for Hells Canyon, “I got the western liberals to back the southerners” on civil rights. While,

The public-interest standard is more than a legal principle. It’s an ethical principle. It ensures the people’s right to have a say in the workings of the institutions and systems that shape their lives, a right fundamental to a true democracy and a just society. The vagueness of the standard is necessary for a simple reason: in a pluralistic socie

He drove wedges, too. In his 1935 budget request, he asked the Board to allocate $3,600,000 for construction projects in Jacob Riis, Fort Tryon, Pelham Bay and the two Marine parks. The Board did, and the thin edge of the wedge was in. Year after year, thereafter, he returned to the Board for new allocations which he said were necessary to make the

Reform was in the air when Murphy took control of Tammany, and he put the organization at the head of the parade. As he saw it, reform had too many ramifications to be left to the reformers. Under Murphy, Tammany became the most potent force for effecting economic and social change in New York.

A curb on the practice was enacted in 1917, after President Wilson had added a phrase to the American political lexicon by denouncing “a little group of willful men” (actually eleven senators, including La Follette and his fellow liberal George Norris) who had talked to death Wilson’s proposal to arm American merchantmen against German submarine at