Word: virginias
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Gradual Shift. The opportunity for the Republicans envisaged by Dan Evans is based on more than the Democrats' problems. There is a pitch of political questioning in the land that goes beyond anything felt since the Depression. People challenge the system. Virginia's Democratic Senator Harry Byrd Jr., for one, last week declared that conventions are a "political carnival that should be abolished." More seriously, many ask whether the present ramshackle setup, from confused nominating procedures all the way up to the archaic Electoral College, can really be relied on to represent the majority will. Of more immediate interest...
Even so, the very profusion of selection methods brings every imaginable type to the conventions. Some are expectable: the two conventions will muster most of the 50 state Governors, and a predictably high proportion of U.S. Senators and Congressmen. Equally expectable types include the pretty, enthusiastic Republican matron from Virginia who has given four to eight hours a day, five days a week, to her local party headquarters to earn her vote in Miami; or the Negro athlete whose name adds luster and racial balance to the California Democratic delegation...
...hotel is a repository of Americana. In February 1861, representatives of North and South met there to try to negotiate a peaceful settlement of their differences. Later that year, after a visit to the front in Virginia where she heard Union soldiers singing John Brown's Body, Julia Ward Howe returned to the Willard and wrote out the lines of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. After the Union defeat at the first Bull Run, Willard's put on 30 extra bootblacks to scrape the red Virginia clay from the boots of returning officers. Walt Whitman watched...
...Pennsylvania Avenue. Within a decade, he made his hostelry the city's social and political clubhouse -partly because there was nothing better, partly because of the Lucullan table he set. At an 1859 banquet for the departing British ambassador, Willard's offered up pheasants, venison, prairie hens, Virginia hams, lobsters, partridges and some 30 other dishes...
...first major mistake in the career of George Armstrong Custer was his promotion to major-general during the Civil War: he flailed through Virginia with a cavalryman's flair that killed as many of his own men as those of the Rebels. After the war, as a brevet brigadier. Custer was assigned to Indian Territory and left part of his troop to canter back to his wife for "home leave." Two of his men were slaughtered en route. His final error occurred on the Little Big Horn, when Custer led more than 200 men to their deaths...