Posts tagged plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose
Posts tagged plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose
9 notes &
In an impressive, nationwide campaign to remind voters of Crédit Mobilier, and to exploit any lingering questions about Garfield’s role in it, Democrats covered every available surface in every major city with the numbers 329—the amount of money Garfield had been accused of earning in stock dividends. The numbers were on sidewalks, buildings, streets, and barns. Somehow, they even made their way into the homes and offices of members of the incumbent Republican administration. When the secretary of war sat down to breakfast one morning, 329 was scrawled on his napkin. The secretary of the treasury found the numbers on a piece of mail addressed to him, the secretary of agriculture on a beet someone had placed on his desk, and the secretary of state on his hat and, incredibly, the headboard of his bed.
—-page 60 of Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard.
A beet! A BEET! THE HEADBOARD OF HIS BED! It is passages like this that have made me a fervent reader of presidential biographies.
It might also interest you to know that Garfield was our last president born in a log cabin.
4 notes &
Jay Gould had just then reversed the commercial morals of the United States. He had put a blight upon them from which they have never recovered, and from which they will not recover for as much as a century to come. Jay Gould was the mightiest disaster which has ever befallen this country. The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it. They had respected men of means before his day, but along with this respect was joined the respect due to the character and industry which had accumulated it. But Jay Gould taught the entire nation to make a god of the money and the man, no matter how the money might have been acquired.
