A century of political tradition was shattered in July 1932. Until Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood before his party's dele- gates that year in Chicago, no Democratic nominee had ever addressed a national convention. By custom, the candidate had remained at home for the duration, feigning surprise and delight when party officials called upon him several weeks later to "notify" him of his victory. Roosevelt had no patience with such niceties. He flew to Chicago, walked into the sweltering...
shows that it reshaped American institutions and gave material suste- nance to millions of people who had been thrown out of jobs and into various states of misery by the Depression. The greatest lift probably came from FDR himself. Of his predecessor in the White House, one observer remarked, "If you put a rose in Hoover's hand, it would wilt." Roosevelt, by contrast, radiated confidence. "Never was there such a change in the transfer of a government," New York Times columnist...
, not excepting the present incumbent.
Each of FDR's successors has, in different ways, had to cope with the question of how to comport himself with respect to the Roosevelt tradition. Much of America's political history since 1945 is a reflection of their responses.
On April 12, 1945, as World War I1 neared its end, Vice President Harry Truman was presiding over a dull Senate de- bate on a water treaty. When it ended, shortly before sunset, he made his way to the office of the Speaker of the...
his distant cousin, Theodore, a vigorous leader who told Franklin during one of his infrequent visits to the White House that "men of good background and education owed their country public service."
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked that FDR had a "second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament ." James MacGregor Burns reaches the same conclusion in his highly readable, two-volume biography, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, 1956, cloth; 1963, paper)...
All mathematics is divided into three parts. Roughly, these parts are the study of number systems, called algebra; the study of geometrical spaces, called
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topology; and the study of functions, called analysis. There are also a few islands-number theory and set theory, for example -and two vast continents that have broken off from the mainland and are drifting -
\ill,,!lcolktll,lll ' out to sea: computer science and statistics.
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A legend in Trinidad has it that God created the islands of the Caribbean by shaking loose from his fingers a fistful of earth and letting it fall into the waters below. Geologists are less fanciful. Of the many thousands of islands in the 1.5-million- square-mile Caribbean Sea, almost all are the summits of par- tially submerged volcanoes strung like vertebrae in a gentle arc from Florida to Venezuela. The vegetation is lush, the soil fertile enough in places for a few crops, the rainfall abundant-30...
A legend in Trinidad has it that God created the islands of the Caribbean by shaking loose from his fingers a fistful of earth and letting it fall into the waters below. Geologists are less fanciful. Of the many thousands of islands in the 1.5-million- square-mile Caribbean Sea, almost all are the summits of par- tially submerged volcanoes strung like vertebrae in a gentle arc from Florida to Venezuela. The vegetation is lush, the soil fertile enough in places for a few crops, the rainfall abundant-30...
Knight's estimate). Many of the smaller islands, such as Bar- bados and Antigua, were not perma- nently settled any of the three local Indian groups-the primitive Ciboney; the proud and fierce Carib; or the sophisticated and peaceable Taino Arawak.
The Arawak were farmers and fishers who organized their villages around ceremonial ball courts. They worked gold, turned pottery, fashioned sculpture, and domesti- cated at least one animal, a type of dog. "They do not carry arms, nor know them,"...
public agencies and private institutions
"Cruise Missiles: Technology, Strategy, Politics."
Brookines Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
612 pp. $32.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.
Editor: Richard K. Betts
The small, slow, 1500-mile range cruise missile has emerged as the major current U.S. military innovation-a descendant of the crude German V-l buzz bombs used against England during World War 11. It was first pushed Pentagon civilians as a strategic weapon, r...
In one of those perfect antitheses that The second, published a year later, seem more natural to literary criti- was Hawthorne's depiction of con-cism than to literary history, Haw- temporary Salem life (with flash- thorne's earliest major novels, The backs into the pasts of his fictional Scarlet Letter and The House of the Pyncheon and Maule families) -a Seven Gables, represent the opposite picture that Hawthorne had hoped to poles of his divided genius. finish with all the minute detail of a
The...