|
|
||
America's Long Home Walk: Revisiting the Campaign of 1908 Date published: 7/18/2008
WASHINGTON --After years of deficit spending, economic turmoil, and occupation wars abroad, which have all hollowed and dispirited the nation, we are stumbling into the most important presidential election campaign in decades.Across the country, a dazed citizenry--shell-shocked with mortgage foreclosures and soaring gas and grocery bills--searches the political landscape for a moral compass, leadership with integrity: something to grasp, to hold our nation together. When the Democrats head to Denver for their nominating convention in late August after a grueling, divisive primary season, some echoes from a century ago will undoubtedly resonate. Then, as now, the Republicans controlled the White House albeit with the popular "rough riding" Teddy Roosevelt, but "TR" had pledged to not seek a third term. The country had just weathered a severe financial crisis with rampant speculation, a stock-market plunge, and the failure of major lending institutions in the Panic of 1907. American forces were deployed abroad, fighting a protracted, increasingly unpopular war occupying the Philippines (a holdover from the Spanish-American War 10 years earlier). In 1908, more than 36 percent of our population was living in rural areas and working on farms, but America was coming of age in ragtime. The Great White Fleet of new battleships had circumnavigated the globe, announcing U.S. naval power. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly, the railroads, and J.P. Morgan's trusts dominated the industrial era. It was still the dawn of the automobile. Few rural households had electricity or a telephone. Populism, which had peaked as a rural, farmer-led political movement more than a decade earlier, was still a force--and the Democrats decided their standard-bearer would be a 48-year-old former two-term Nebraska congressman and lawyer--William Jennings Bryan. He was a spellbinding orator who cast himself in the role of a crusading, romantic evangelist. THE GREAT COMMONER
Read more stories about Fredericksburg Date published: 7/18/2008
He hated being called Teddy. Edmund Morris wrote about 1700 pages if you want to learn all the gory details about Theodore Rex. We're lucky to have Jim Webb as our Senator. He's as close to TR as I've seen in my life.
|
|
||||||||||||||
