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May 28 - August 10, 2019
When my eyes shall be turned for the last time on the meridian sun, I hope I may see him shining brightly upon my united, free and happy Country. I hope I shall not live to see his beams falling upon the dispersed fragments of the structure of this once glorious Union. I hope that I may not see the flag of my Country, with its stars separated or obliterated, torn by commotion, smoking with the blood of civil war. I hope I may not see the standard raised of separate State rights, star against star, and stripe against stripe; but that the flag of the Union may keep its stars and its stripes
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“Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power,”
“the major interest might under sudden impulses be tempted to commit injustice on the minority.”
“Justice, ’tho it may be an inconvenient restraint on our power, while we are strong, is the only rampart behind which we can find protection when we become weak,”
Calhoun had resigned the vice presidency, and Hayne had resigned his Senate seat, so that Calhoun, named by the South Carolina Legislature to succeed him, could present the South’s case himself,
“The Philippines are ours forever,” Beveridge said, And just beyond the Philippines are China’s illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either.… We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustees under God, of the civilization of the world.… God has marked us as his chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.… He has made us adept in government that we administer government among savages and senile people.
Gross
The vote on the treaty was very close. Fifty-six of the eighty-four votes would be necessary for ratification, and the vote, taken in February, 1899, was 57 to 27. That was the vote—a vote in the Senate—that set the stage for the American Century.
Suddenly, with that treaty, the United States was no longer merely a nation but an empire—an empire with colonies stretching from the Caribbean to the China Sea. The oceans were no longer broad moats that protected and insulated an infant republic and let it grow strong, but lakes over whose surface sped the Republic’s powerful fleets, lakes on the far side of which were the Republic’s colonies and coaling stations, sources of its raw materials, markets for its industries, lakes dotted with islands—Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, other, smaller Pacific islands—vital to
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as Schlesinger summarizes, “whatever the nuances of arguments, limitations were evaporating. The executive was becoming habituated to the unconstrained deployment of American forces around the world, and Congress chose not to say him nay.”
At the end of the Taft Administration in 1913, as at the end of the Roosevelt Administration in 1909, a supposedly representative republic had not come to grips with concentrated economic power, or with the impact of that power on the human condition.
At the turn of the century, with the onset of the Progressive Era, the tide became a wave—a great wave of conscience, of anger over injustice, of demand for a cleansing of government and for a mobilization of government to meet the needs of its people. The wave of Progressivism and reform washed across America, through statehouses and city halls, even through the White House. When the wave crashed against the Senate, it broke on the Senate, the waters falling away from it as they had been falling away for half a century. The Senate stood as it had been standing for so long—a mighty dam
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“We have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost … of our industrial achievements.… The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.”
he saw various innovations in Russia—vacations with pay, still relatively rare in America; improved working conditions for children—as significant social advances. By reducing child labor, he wrote in 1926, Russia “leads the world in its attempt to guarantee every child a chance to flower.”
We pretend any encroachment on capitalism is communist or Socialist, but looking back on Progress reveals how many advances we wouldnt dare relinquish today
We cannot allow great corporations to dominate the commissions which have been created to regulate them.”
In Johnson’s unending, silent calculations about the best way to further his career, it was the Alvin Wirtzes and the Herman Browns who were the key figures, not some powerless black leaders,
