I picked up the first volume of Arthur Schlesinger's "A Life in the 20th Century" and was pleasantly surprised by how savorful it is. Many interesting asides I didn't know such as this snippet concerning the debate on entering WWII:
...the argument between interventionists and isolationists grew each week more savage and despairing. There have been a number of fierce national quarrels in my lifetime - over communism in the later Forties, over McCarthyism in the Fifties, over Vietnam in the Sixties - but none so tore apart families and friendships as the great debate of 1940-41...In the spring of 1940 Stuart, joined by Gerald Ford, later of the White House, and Potter Stewart, later of the Supreme Court, circulated a petition that concluded starkly: 'We demand that Congress refrain from war, even if England is on the verge of defeat.'I'd imagined those old Boston brahmin were almost all pro-British, but there were long passed-down familial memories of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 that caused ill-will towards England. Also the following caught my eye, inasmuch as Saddam Hussein could've controlled the whole of the Middle East:
But the critical question in 1940 was whether the United States had a vital interest in preventing Hitler's conquest of Europe. On this point I like to quote Jefferson. "It cannot be to our interest," the France-loving, peace-loving Jefferson observed when Napoleon bestrode the continent, "that all Europe be reduced to a single monarchy." America would be forever in danger should "the whole force of Europe [be] wielded by a single hand."But even more interesting is how the conservative and liberal tides are a somewhat natural phenomenon:
In December 1939 my father had predicted in a Yale Review article...that "the revolt against conservatism which began in 1931 will last until 1947 or 1948." Shortly after FDR's third inaugural in 1941, Jim Rowe gave the president my father's article with a cover memorandum reminding FDR of his own observation that the tides between conservative and liberal rule changed about every eight years. "Schlesinger argues the periods of alternation are about fifteen years..I think the third-term election proves Schlesinger right and you wrong." (I might add that my father's article also predicted that, after a conservative interlude, "the next turn of the tide [towards liberalism] will then be due in the neighborhood of 1963.")One might say that the liberal tides seem a whole heckuva lot more powerful and enduring in terms of policies enacted than the conservative ones. The conservative "tide" is more of the ripple caused by a stone thrown in a river. It's easier to loosen a law during a period of liberalism, such as allowing unfettered abortion, than to reverse it when conservatism returns. Similarly with huge entitlements like Social Security and Medicare - once you get them passed, they are there forever or until national bankruptcy, whichever comes first.
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