skopia
I have little interest in streamlining government, Goldwater declares, for I mean to reduce its size. A hundred pages of refusal that dragged the Republican Party rightward and made Reagan's presidency thinkable.
An asthmatic Manhattan boy remakes himself as a Dakota rancher, a Rough Rider, and the youngest president in American history. Morris swept the major prizes for this volume alone.
Intelligence solves problems and Americans admire it. Intellect questions them, and Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning history tracks the resentment it draws through frontier revival preaching, business self-help, and a century of fights over the schools.
Hofstadter strips the myths off American statesmen from Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt and finds one propertied creed underneath. The Emancipation Proclamation, he writes, had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.