Word: strode
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sweating uncomfortably under the incongruous TV lights, Britain's nobly dressed bishops, judges, peers and politicians jammed the House of Lords last week as Queen Elizabeth arrived in a glass coach and took her seat on a gilded throne. Up strode a graceful man in a wig, damask robe and black velvet breeches. Kneeling, he handed the monarch her speech. Kneeling, he took it back after Elizabeth had read it - thus opening Parliament with a rit ual that has scarcely changed at all since the first Elizabeth performed it 400 years...
...that moment the candidate's boyish face, drawn in a tight smile, appeared amid the tangle of pipes and levers. Pulling fiercely on his broad nose, he hopped over a conveyer belt laden with chocolate drops, strode quickly to a nearby worker, tapped the elderly lady on the shoulder, executed a brisk mannerly bow, brought forward his cupped right hand, grinned very very hard and blurted: "Howaya, howaya. I'm Governor John A. Volpe, Howaya...
Partisan View. The book is clearly partisan, and Strode, who is emeritus professor of English at the University of Alabama, frankly admits that he is presenting "the Southern viewpoint." He obviously believes that Davis was correct in his fundamentalist reading of the Constitution, that the South was justified in seceding, and that the Civil War was a close parallel to the American Revolution, in that it, too, was a war for independence. His references to slaves almost invariably mention their great loyalty and contentment. This, the third and last volume, bears the title Jefferson Davis: Tragic Hero, and Strode writes...
Near Treason. But Davis is remembered because he was President of the Confederacy. Strode, listing his achievements, writes that he was "perhaps the only political chief in history who successfully organized a new nation in the course of pursuing a mighty war." But did he? Davis' constitution, with its emphasis on states' rights, left it up to the individual Governors to contribute troops and supplies only as they felt inclined. The Governors of Georgia and North Carolina particularly were obstructive to a degree that, in a more centralized nation, would have been treason. Governor Joseph E. Brown...
...course, a remarkable achievement for Davis to have imposed as much order as he did on a military situation in which the odds were almost always poor. But Strode, perhaps in an effort to make up for all of the wrongs done to Davis in those times and since, asks that he be listed among history's great chiefs. He was neither a great chief nor a tragic hero, and a more measured appraisal would have done him more justice...