Mark

“[Warren] Harding diligently worked the knots of America's body politic from the moment he took office, soothing conservatives by resizing the federal government for peacetime and adopting a pro-business outlook, soothing his Republican base by raising tariffs and lowering taxes, soothing the left by releasing from prison the socialist icon Eugene Debs and other radicals rounded up during Palmer's Red Scare, soothing the battered farm belt with an emergency tariff and federal protection for farm cooperatives, soothing labor with public works programs to ease unemployment and by cajoling the steel industry into abandoning its inhumane practice of twelve-hour shifts. Harding soothed the isolationist and nativist majority in America with tighter immigration policies and a foreign policy emphasizing legitimate national interests over crusading idealism. He soothed international tensions by normalizing relations with Germany and other former enemy states, and by convincing the world's leading naval powers to reduce tonnage at his Washington Disarmament Conference, the first gathering of its kind and a remarkable, unexpected success.”
― Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times

“Sherman was a warrior, not a scholar, but he thought deeply about the issues posed by war. The Marches were to Sherman fundamentally a moral expression of Union military power, even a moral equivalent of battle. That is to say, they were designed to humiliate the South and especially secessionist leaders, to humble its swaggering warriors, and to leave them in a state of despair contemplating unavoidable defeat. As the South had been humiliated, Northern arms should henceforth be treated with respect. The Marches thus sought a propaganda or moral victory aimed at the Confederate military and civil will. They would reveal to the world, not only to the South, that a tremendous change had occurred in the Civil War's military balance. Despite its redoubtable resistance throughout 1864, any Confederate success would prove transient⁠—another road pointing to defeat.”
― Brian Holden Reid, The Scourge of War: The Life of William Tecumseh Sherman

“When the cry for 'a return to gold' goes up, as it sometimes does in the United States, it usually comes from folk who know little about the history of the subject.”
― Ian M. Drummond, The Gold Standard and the International Monetary System, 1900-1939

“In this ultimate sense Taft had fallen out of step with his times. Too much himself to soften his profile, he happened on the national scene at the same time that Franklin D. Roosevelt was demonstrating the magic to be wrung from the mass media. Myopic and somewhat disdainful about “image,” he struggled to prominence just as public opinion polling developed into a powerful tool for his opponents. Instinctively partisan, he tried for the presidency after the depression had helped the Democrats build an electoral coalition that forced Republicans to turn to Dewey and even to such unpartisan figures as Willkie and Eisenhower. Fearful of commitments abroad, he reflected broad currents of thought about foreign policy more suited to the 1920s – or even the late 1960s – than to the frightening years spanned by Hitler and Stalin. Like the two men who had affected him most, his father and Herbert Hoover, Taft had clung steadfastly to a set of assumptions about the world. Like them again, he had been swept aside while new men of destiny – Wilson, FDR, Eisenhower – came in to fill the void. When the delegates whispered “Taft Can’t Win,” they were talking not only about a man who lacked charisma but a figure who seemed uncomfortable with the world of 1952.”
― James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography Of Robert A. Taft