“He seemed obsessed with the idea that someone was trying to hide something from him,” Frank Maltby would recall. “ . . . He was continually pointing to some feature and asking, ‘What’s that? . . . Well, I want to see it.’ . . . he was continuously stopping some black man and asking if he had any complaint or grievance.” Everyone who tried to maintain his pace wound up exhausted and half-drowned. He walked railroad ties in Culebra Cut, leaped ditches, splashed through work camps, made impromptu speeches in the driving rain. “You are doing the biggest thing of the kind that has ever been done,”
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