Word: errand
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Anyone who discusses Perry Miller and his work, it seems, turns sooner or later to his metaphor of the New England "errand run into the wilderness"; it fits the man almost as well as his material. Miller himself used the phrase to describe the Messianic impulse which characterized colonial America. His friends and colleagues, contributors to this memorial issue of The Harvard Review, employ it to catch something of the impression he made...
...errand into the scholarship of American history was perhaps as finally ambiguous as the earlier Puritan one, but it shared the same energy, and it expressed itself in a series of irreplacable books. Miller's abrupt inspiration on the banks of the Congo in 1926, what he called a "sudden epiphany," moved him--drove him, really--toward a surpassingly profound re-definition of the elusive American mind. In the process, in his New England "laboratory," he began to work out his own technique for the study of the history of ideas. As the legend grows, what he achieved...
...Admiration. In 1957 Lyndon Johnson tapped Mansfield as assistant Senate majority leader. Because Johnson was really his own whip, he needed nothing more than an agreeable errand boy, and Mansfield seemed to fit the bill. Mansfield accepted-but reluctantly, and only out of his personal admiration for Johnson (he supported L.B.J. against Kennedy for the 1960 presidential nomination...
...breaking point. Indeed, alarmed at the frequency with which British troops are dispatched to overseas trouble spots, the London Daily Telegraph harrumphed: "Officers who hold the Queen's Commission cannot be air-freighted without ceremony from their lawful appointments. British battalions cannot be whistled about like errand boys...
Before Johnson accepted the vice-Presidency, students of the Constitution had often criticized the parties for nominating nonentities for the office. Now they saw the other side of the coin; a man of Presidential qualities found his time wasted on errand-boy duties that others could as easily have performed...