I Love Paul Revere, Whether He Rode Or Not by Richard Shenkman

Author:Richard Shenkman [Shenkman, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-062-10597-4
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

*Mr. Bloom (falsely) credited Washington with inventing ice cream.

*As a result of his plan the United States accumulated a mountain of debt, making our current debt almost puny in comparison. Then the government owed more than $50 million. Now, it owes $3 trillion. But in proportion to the government’s revenues, Hamilton’s debt today would total $10 trillion, more than three times as large as our own. (John Steele Gordon, ‘The Founding Wizard,” American Heritage [July-August 1990], p. 42.)

* Kennedy used the image in a speech before the General Court of Massachusetts in 1961. It was a time when Massachusetts politics were notoriously corrupt. Instead of denouncing the corruption outright, which would have been risky—and for Kennedy, out of character—he slyly and cleverly confined his remarks to an ironic review of the state’s glorious tradition of integrity. “We must always consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us,” he told the legislators, using the quotation from John Winthrop. “For of those to whom much is given, much is required.” (Theodore Sorensen, ed., “Let the Word Go Forth” [1988], pp. 56–58; Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People [1965], p. 65n.)

† Others, of course, had different motives for coming here. Some came for freedom, some for riches, some just to be able to earn a living.

* See page 183.

* It is somewhat misleading to refer to these as new and old claims. Woodrow Wilson advanced both. In the presidential campaign of 1912, he said the founders were on his side. In World War I, he claimed God was on his side. Wilson being Wilson, he never seems to have asked himself if he was on either the founders’ or God’s side.

* Or thought they knew. Actually Jefferson was far more willing to use government to meet social needs than people realized. See page 55.

* Taken at his word, Jefferson not only opposed running annual budget deficits but any deficits. More precisely, he was against any national debt that could not be paid off during the lifetime of the generation that incurred it. Fundamental to his vision of a “just society” was the belief that no generation should bind any that follows: “The earth belongs to the living generation.” Thus if politicians today really meant to take Jefferson seriously, they would not only insist on yearly balanced budgets but on the elimination, over say the next twenty years, of the billions upon billions of dollars of debt accumulated in the lifetime of their generation. (See Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801–1805 [1970], pp. 100–06.)

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