Word: fishes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...HAMILTON FISH; THE INNER HISTORY OF THE GRANT ADMINISTRATION - Allan Nevins-Dodd, Mead...
...March 11, 1869 tall, stately, curly-haired Hamilton Fish at home in Manhattan received a laconic letter from President Grant saying: "I will have to make another selection of Cabinet officer from New York. I have thought it might not be unpleasant for you to accept the port folio of the State Dept." The week before the 61-year-old Fish had read the list of Grant's amateurish Cabinet selections with alarm, noting that one choice was plainly illegal, others were determined by the President's desire to aid his old friends from Galena...
...Fish had virtually retired from political life. He had been a capable but undramatic Congressman, Senator and Governor of New York, a party leader of the Whigs at the time of their collapse, a studious and cultivated man for whom retirement held no terrors. He discussed Grant's letter with his wife, wired back: "I cannot." But Grant had made such a mess of his first appointments that he was determined to have Fish in the Cabinet, sent his nomination to the Senate and said he had not received the New Yorker's refusal until too late. Fish...
Last week Allan Nevins, whose biography of Grover Cleveland won him the Pulitzer Prize for 1932, offered a full-length portrait of the Secretary that clarified the disorder of Grant's regime, revealed aspects of U. S. political life of which few voters have been aware. Fish was an excellent choice as central figure for such a study. Unchangeable, incorruptible, with his prejudices, political views and limitations firmly fixed by the time he took office, he served as a standard of consistency against which the dishonesties and irresponsibilities of his colleagues could be measured. Hamilton Fish: The Inner History...
Author Nevins devotes five chapters to Fish's early career, divides the remainder of this fat volume between accounts of foreign affairs and domestic scandals, quotes copiously from Fish's factual, objective diary. Born in 1808, the son of a distinguished Revolutionary officer, Fish's first 60 years were relatively uneventful. In the next eight he packed a lifetime of effort into the negative task of preventing trouble. He kept his head while around him plotters, many of them with Grant's support, worked for war with England and Spain, the annexation of Santo Domingo...