Word: rooseveltism
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When the Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox last played in a game that meant something, Teddy Roosevelt was President and SOS had just been adopted as the universal distress signal. Most sportswriters thought the White Sox, known as the Hitless Wonders, needed to send out just such a call against the Cubs, who had won a record 116 games behind the poetic double-play relay of Tinker to Evers to Chance. But funny things happen in baseball, and the Southsiders won the fourth World Series ever played, four games...
BOOKS . . . RAGE FOR FAME: THE ASCENT OF CLARE BOOTHE LUCE: She may be only one of history?s footnotes now, but in her heyday Clare Boothe Luce was, after Eleanor Roosevelt, the most talked-about woman in America. TIME Critic John Elson writes that Boothe seemingly had it all: she was a headlining journalist (for Life and the original Vanity Fair); a successful playwright (?The Women?); a two-term Congresswoman from Connecticut; and later U.S. ambassador to Italy. She had a merciless wit and stunning looks to go with her smarts. Drawing on interviews with family, friends and Luce herself...
Each successive scene tells the story of another assassin in a similar way. The assassins' stories are fictitiously intertwined: Charles Guiteau, who eventually assassinated James Garfield; Leon Czolgosz, who killed William McKinley; Guiseppe Zangara, who attempted to assassinate Franklin D. Roosevelt; would-be Gerald Ford assassins Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and Sara Jane Moore; Sam Byck, who plotted to kill Nixon; and John Hinckley, who shot Ronald Reagan. The time gap separating each of the assassinations (or attempted assassinations) is given no heed: placing these disparate events side by side allows them to interact in a kind of fantastic sphere that...
...vote for reticence. The current statue--F.D.R. in his wooden kitchen chair with casters, a great cape hiding the tiny wheels from all but the most observant visitor--captures perfectly Roosevelt's cloaking of his disability. At a time when our politicians are "stricken with self-pity and given to sniveling" (to quote Mary McGrory), what a balm is Roosevelt's attitude of defiant and dignified denial...
Such is the style of the '90s. Fine. But who dares argue that it can match Roosevelt's for nobility? It is not just that we have no right to impose our sensibility on Roosevelt. We should be ashamed...