Word: williams
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...whaleships' masters aboard their unarmed vessels had little choice but to comply with the Confederates, who that day and for the past few weeks, had stubbornly refused to believe the reports that had reached them of the war's end. Indeed, the master of the William Thompson, one of the captured whalers, recalled that a Confederate officer "exultantly stated that he did not believe Lee had surrendered...
...with good reason--America's business élite was wary of Roosevelt from the start. He turned out to be the first President to aggressively use the powers of government to set rules for the headlong U.S. economy and the men he called "malefactors of great wealth." When President William McKinley chose T.R. as his running mate in 1900, Ohio Senator Mark Hanna, the business-friendly G.O.P. power broker who had engineered McKinley's rise, was horrified. "Don't any of you realize," Hanna raged at fellow Republicans, "there's only one life between this madman and the presidency...
...happens, Roosevelt's outlook was not entirely different. He didn't dispute the benefits of large-scale capitalism, and he thought of huge enterprises as an inevitable development of the industrial age. He understood the idea of economies of scale. Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette and William Jennings Bryan, the perennial standard bearer for the common man, might have wanted to dismantle everything bigger than a hardware store. What Roosevelt wanted was simply to regulate the big outfits. For starters, he wanted to compel them to open their books. Quarterly reporting in the corporate world was still a novelty...
Where was his impact the greatest? Start with the economy. When Roosevelt first came to the presidency, after the assassination of William McKinley, the U.S. was emerging as one of the world's wealthiest nations. It was first in the world in its output of timber, steel, coal, iron. Since 1860 the population had doubled, exports had tripled. But that bounding growth had brought with it all the upheavals of an industrial age--poverty, child labor, dreadful factory conditions. Year after year, workers faced off against bosses with their fists clenched...
Saltonstall Professor of History Charles S. Maier '60, who was a member of the Gang of Five, said that outgoing Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby was right to choose fresh faces for this summer's committee...