Word: jefferson
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MULLING over the governmental structure of the newborn United States, Thomas Jefferson went on record as favoring "little or no diplomatic establishment." That wistful measure of the proper size for the U.S. State Department prevailed for more than a century. At the time when Secretary of State William Seward was boldly buying Alaska, he was head of an office with two assistants and 60 clerks. Secretary John Hay negotiated the Panama treaty and otherwise carried out Teddy Roosevelt's active diplomacy on a departmental budget of less than $190,000 a year. Before World War II, Cordell Hull used...
State is still no giant among bureaucracies-it is the second smallest department in personnel (after Labor) and budget (after Justice)-but it is now quite large enough to flabbergast Thomas Jefferson. From the seventh floor of a granite building of fluorescent-glaring corridors and scarred desks, Dean Rusk rules over 24,200 employees (down a bit from 1950) and a budget of $383,948,000. State has 110 embassies, two legations (Hungary and Bulgaria), 68 consulates general and 84 consulates. Reporting to Rusk are two Under Secretaries, George Ball and Tom Mann, two deputy Under Secretaries, and no less...
...Those honored: Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Buchanan, Lincoln, Grant, the two Roosevelts, Kennedy...
...nation that has staked much-and sometimes too much-on t he hallowed concept of the separation of church and state, the federal funding of projects and institutions with church ties has become commonplace. Whatever happened to the impregnable "wall of separation between Church and State" that Thomas Jefferson "contemplated with solemn reverence"? The answer is that the wall is still there, invulnerable as ever, but that reasonable men have found gates in it that can be opened, yet guarded. Says Presidential Press Secretary Bill Moyers, himself a Baptist teacher: "Separation of church and state meant one thing when government...
Even as law courts and legislators were slowly building Jefferson's wall, history created situations where the paths of church and state converged. During the 19th century, for example, the Government subsidized frontier preachers to help pacify-even as they tried to convert-warring Indian tribes. In the Reconstruction era, church agencies were given public grants to assist freed slaves. Moreover, the U.S. came to accept the right and duty of the churches to influence legislation when a moral issue was involved-happily, before the Civil War, in the case of Northern Protestants who fought for abolition, less...