Word: jeffersons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After graduating from a St. Louis, Mo., high school where she was one of very few blacks, Elizabeth Johnson wanted to "try something different." She enrolled at Lincoln University, a historically black college founded by African-American Civil War veterans in Jefferson City, Mo. But Johnson was in for a shock when she arrived at her first class. "I was the only black face in the room," recalls the 19-year-old sophomore...
...weeks later, when the rivals met again at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in Iowa, a gathering of 3,000 Democrats, Gore was even more aggressive. Again Bradley spoke first, lamenting the state of politics and wondering why he and Gore couldn't be more like home-run rivals Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, "pushing [each other] to be the best we could be." When it was Gore's turn, he called Bradley a quitter--Bradley left the Senate while Gore "stayed and fought"--and then neatly turned the tables on his reform-minded rival. "I listened carefully to what...
...through Gore, so he assumed that voters would see through him as well. But there was more to Gore than Bradley believed; voters liked what they saw in the Vice President. He wasn't charming, but he worked hard and came to play. A Bradley strategist calls the Jefferson-Jackson dinner an early-warning sign that the campaign ignored. Bradley should have come roaring back, he says, because "there was absolutely a window open." But at the dinner, the window began to close. The same quality that had fueled Bradley's rise--his high-minded detachment from the game...
William Cobbett is a pompous English import who bloviated in his Porcupine's Gazette on behalf of Hamilton and his law-and-order Federalists. His rival in vitriol is James Thomson Callender, wanted for sedition in his native Scotland. He was Jefferson's hit man who, when slighted by the Sage of Monticello, spread informed innuendo about his arrangement with slave and lover Sally Hemings. Public reaction to the disclosure makes the Clinton-Lewinsky affair look like a casual game of spin the bottle...
What will cause this elite to fade in the next two or three decades is that the rest of the country doesn't seem to accept these people as our "natural aristocracy," to use a phrase of Thomas Jefferson's much loved by Conant. Their generally liberal politics don't set the tone for the country. They are the object of populist resentment more than of admiration; they're the "cultural elite" that politicians like to use as a foil. Oddly enough, the members of the old Wasp elite, though their high positions weren't as hard-earned, didn...