Flashback, March 1806: Jefferson Approves Bill for First National Road

Within a week of it reaching his desk after passage by the House of Representatives, Thomas Jefferson signed in late March 1806 a bill authorizing the construction of the first federally funded road in the history of the American republic.

Approval came at the end of a long, bitter debate about the expenses and forces involved with what came to be known as the Cumberland Road, or National Road. In fact, that controversy over what were then called “internal improvements” and now “infrastructure” has continued, albeit in different forms, down to the present day.

Construction would also be buffeted by factors that few debate participants would have considered at the time. By necessity, the War of 1812 consumed much of the nation’s attention. Even though building had reached Wheeling, Va., in 1818 and continued to expand west, it halted at Vandalia, Ill., by 1841, victimized by funding issues occasioned by the Panic of 1837.

Advocates for state supremacy got more of what they wished for at this point, with maintenance of completed portions taken out of the hands of the federal government and monetized through toll systems.

Still, from its Cumberland, MD starting off point, the road—or what was completed to that point—covered 620 miles and five states, and had become a major transportation link between the East and Midwest.

In the first few decades of the United States, what many Founding Fathers had in mind with the term “internal improvements” were roads and canals. What divided the two political parties of the time, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, was who would pay for these: the federal government or individual states.

The Federalists believed that improved modes of transportation facilitated national unity, so they wanted construction to be federally funded. But the Democratic-Republicans saw this as interfering with the prerogative of states, as well as a source of pork-barrel politics—or, as Jefferson put it in a March 1796 letter to James Madison, “boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends, and a bottomless abyss of public money.”

Once in power, however, Jefferson’s opinion on the federal prerogative was modified. Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin—who, while previously serving as state assemblyman from Pennsylvania’s Fayette County, had supported the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike and "every other temporary improvement in our communications."

He persuaded Jefferson to sign the Ohio Enabling Act, which provided that five percent of the proceeds from public land sales in Ohio would be saved for the future construction of a National Road.

Obstacles to travel were formidable because the lack of hard surfaces could plunge riders and their vehicles into ruts, and mountainous terrain could prove treacherous to negotiate.

At the same time, engineering in the early republic was still in its infancy, largely linked to military fortifications. The major boost to civil engineering, the Erie Canal, was still a decade away when the Cumberland Road was planned.

Construction, then, was still a matter of brawn and beasts, as described by the history The Cumberland Road:

“Burly axmen began the construction process by felling all trees along a clearing sixty-feet wide through the forest. They were followed by choppers, grubbers, and burners, whose work might take weeks to complete in heavily timbered sections…After grubbing, the road had to be leveled by pick-and-shovel wielding laborers. This earth-moving army cut into hillsides, flung tracks of fill across hollows, and hauled away excess earth and rock. Finally, the graders, stone crushers, and pavers laid the roadbed.”

Even as Jefferson and Gallatin looked to internal improvements as a means of fostering national unity, they encountered opposition from within the President’s own state. In his History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams assessed the ironic turn of events brought about by Jefferson’s second cousin, the choleric and contrarian Congressman John Randolph of Roanoke, Va.:

“To some extent the President, his Cabinet, and the Senate had become converted to Federalist views; but the influence of Randolph and of popular prejudices peculiar to Southern society held the House stiffly to an impracticable creed. Whatever the North and East wanted the South and West refused. Jefferson's wishes fared no better than the requests of the State and city of New York; the House showed no alacrity in taking up the subject of roads, canals, or universities. The only innovation which made its way through Congress was the Act of Feb. 10, 1807, appropriating fifty thousand dollars for the establishment of a coast survey, for this was an object in which the Southern States were interested as deeply as the Northern. Even the Senate's appropriation for beginning the Cumberland Road was indefinitely postponed by the House.”

Upon completion in 1825, the Erie Canal started a mania for canal building, and following the Civil War a similar frenzied construction phase began for railroads. It was easy to forget amid this transportation revolution how much the Cumberland Road represented in the beginning.

Major Eastern Seaboard cities like New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore could more easily transport goods to growing territories along the Midwestern frontier, which, in turn, now had more accessible outlets for their food. In between, a network of taverns to serve hungry and tired travelers sprang up.

Moreover, the Cumberland Road set a precedent for involvement of the federal government in transportation projects. A journey that could take anywhere from five to seven miles a day in the early 1800s increased to thirty miles a day by stagecoach four decades later.

In effect, the road also was the forerunner America’s interstate highway system. Initially the foundation for US Route 40 in the 1920s, it was absorbed and, at points, bypassed by Interstate 70 following the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. Stone and masonry from the original was replaced by modern asphalt and concrete.

In a sense, one thing hasn’t changed about America’s relationship to infrastructure: it remains a political football. Maintaining roads, bridges and tunnel costs money, and, despite frequent boasts about “Infrastructure Week” from 2017 to 2021, Presidential commitment has turned into a matter of funding threats and ego stroking over time.

Quote of the Day (John Fowles, on Why Novelists Write)

“You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture-makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy’s back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live. We think we grow old, we grow wise and more tolerant; we just grow more lazy.” —English novelist, critic and poet John Fowles (1926-2005), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)

John Fowles was born 100 years ago today in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town in Essex, England. Four of his novels were adapted into movies: The Collector (1965), The Magus (1968), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), and, for TV, The Ebony Tower (1984).

Ironically, the one that did not was Daniel Martin (1977), whose title character is an English playwright who becomes a well-paid but dissatisfied Hollywood script doctor.

For nearly 20 years, Fowles landed on the bestseller lists with large novels best characterized as metafictional, psychological, and postmodern. But even during his lifetime attention to him receded (to some extent, probably hastened by a stroke suffered in 1988), and it has only grown more so in the two decades since his death.

The book of his that seems to have the best chance of being continually re-read is The French Lieutenant's Woman, which, like A.S. Byatt’s later Possession, is a historical romance set in the Victorian Era but with a modern narrative voice.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Knowing All Nature’s ‘Moods and Manners’)

“I seek acquaintance with nature to know all her moods and manners. Primitive nature is the most interesting to me. I take infinitive pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and, then, to my chagrin I hear that is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know the entire heaven and an entire earth. All the great trees, and beasts, fishes and fowls are gone.” —American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), journal entry for Mar. 23, 1856, in The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861 (2009)

PBS is giving Thoreau the same treatment it gave Ernest Hemingway a few years ago: a three-part documentary by Ken Burns, starting tonight. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this Transcendentalist as naturalist and protest figure.

Hailed by youth in the 1960s, Thoreau may be experiencing an even greater groundswell of interest now. Let’s hope so.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Bank Dick,’ With W.C. Fields on a Car Chase)

Egbert Souse [played by W.C. Fields]: [to bank robber, after narrowly missing the police during a car chase] “Seems to be a great deal of traffic here for a country road. Don't you think?”—The Bank Dick (1940), screenplay by "Mahatma Kane Jeeves" (pseudonym used by W.C. Fields), directed by Edward F. Cline

Quote of the Day (John Kenneth Galbraith, on an Ironclad Rule of Diplomacy)

“There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy, but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.”—Canadian-American economist and diplomat John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006), “The American Ambassador,” Foreign Service Journal (June 1969)

In December 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy sounded out John Kenneth Galbraith on chairing the Council of Economic Advisors in the new administration. The Harvard professor rejected that offer ("I didn't wish to come every day to the same discussion of the same questions around the same table mostly with the same people, not all of whom I wish to see").

But another position intrigued him: US Ambassador to India, where he could see firsthand how the principles of international development he had taught for the past decade might work in an emerging nation. And so, 65 years ago today, the economist was appointed to the post.

I was all set to include a quote from Galbraith’s 1969 book Ambassador’s Journal about the embassy staff in India, as well as the Nehru government’s suspicions of the U.S. assistance program.

In addition to the diary entries and letters to JFK published in that volume, he was still passing on what he learned in his two years on the subcontinent in The Nature of Mass Poverty (1979), which cautioned that the international economy could inadvertently maintain large populations in conditions of want.

But as soon as I saw the above quote, it resonated with me, as I think it might with so many other Americans today.

Over the last month, the public has grown accustomed to the White House offering assessments of the Iranian War that—how shall I say this?—may be prematurely optimistic, including President Trump’s claim that “very good and productive” talks have been held with Tehran over at least ending the regime’s stoppage at the Strait of Hormuz, and maybe even bringing the conflict as a whole to a close.

More and more people are experiencing nightmares of long, inconclusive conflicts that drain American money and lives—the kind associated with Iraq, the kind that candidate Trump vowed never to begin.

Ambassador Galbraith was a caustic critic of such adventurism. Within a month of his appointment, he was explaining to JFK how the Bay of Pigs fiasco appeared to his Indian hosts (not good), and before long he was warning, in no uncertain terms, that conditions in Vietnam were "far more complex, far less controllable, far more varied in the factors involved, far more susceptible to misunderstanding" than his military advisers were saying.

It’s nice to think of a time when a President had the patience to read an adviser’s memos on matters like improving the US Information Service rather than emasculating it; why it would be a good idea to avoid military involvement in a land that posed no security threat to America; and how an administration would be more inclined to cajole and persuade other countries to our positions rather than bullying them, springing from what the Declaration of Independence called “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. John Henry Newman, on the ‘First Shadowy Triumph’ of Palm Sunday)

“All that is bright and beautiful, even on the surface of this world, though it has no substance, and may not suitably be enjoyed for its own sake, yet is a figure and promise of that true joy which issues out of the Atonement. It is a promise beforehand of what is to be: it is a shadow, raising hope because the substance is to follow, but not to be rashly taken instead of the substance. And it is God's usual mode of dealing with us, in mercy to send the shadow before the substance, that we may take comfort in what is to be, before it comes. Thus our Lord before His Passion rode into Jerusalem in triumph, with the multitudes crying Hosanna, and strewing His road with palm branches and their garments. This was but a vain and hollow pageant, nor did our Lord take pleasure in it. It was a shadow which stayed not, but flitted away. It could not be more than a shadow, for the Passion had not been undergone by which His true triumph was wrought out. He could not enter into His glory before He had first suffered. He could not take pleasure in this semblance of it, knowing that it was unreal. Yet that first shadowy triumph was the omen and presage of the true victory to come, when He had overcome the sharpness of death. And we commemorate this figurative triumph on the last Sunday in Lent, to cheer us in the sorrow of the week that follows, and to remind us of the true joy which comes with Easter-Day.”—English theologian, educator, memoirist, and Roman Catholic convert St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890), “The Cross of Christ the Measure of the World,” sermon preached Apr. 9, 1841, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 6

The image accompanying this post, The Entry Into Jerusalem (ca. 1305), was created by the Italian painter and architect Giotto (c. 1267-1337).

Quote of the Day (Daniel Radcliffe, on Being Quoted Harry Potter Lines)

“The bad thing about Harry Potter being quoted to me is that it has now been long enough [i.e., 15 years this July since the last movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2] that unless it is a really easy quote to remember, I’ve probably forgotten the context or who said it. So sometimes Harry Potter fans will come up to me and say something, and I will look at them blankly. I can see them look disappointed, and I’m like, ‘I’m so sorry.’”—English film and stage actor Daniel Radcliffe quoted by Lane Florsheim, “My Monday Morning: Daniel Radcliffe,” WSJ. Magazine (the magazine of The Wall Street Journal), Issue 170 (Spring 2026)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Friends,’ on Joey’s Value as ‘Ministertainer’)

Joey Tribbiani [played by Matt LeBlanc]: [explaining why he’d be particularly great in performing the Chandler-Monica wedding] “...'Cause in Joey Tribbiani, you get a minister, and you get an entertainer. I'm a ‘ministainer!’ There's no one better, there's no one greater!”—Friends, Season 7, Episode 20, “The One with Rachel's Big Kiss,” original air date Apr. 26, 2001, teleplay by Shana Goldberg-Meehan and Scott Silveri, directed by Gary Halvorson 

Quote of the Day (Roger Kahn, on Pitchers and ‘Competitive Intelligence’)

"Pitchers, of all ball players, profit most from competitive intelligence. It is a simple, probably natural thing to throw. A child casts stones. But between the casting child and the pitching major leaguer lies the difference between a boy plunking the piano and an artist performing." —American sportswriter Roger Kahn (1927-2020), The Boys of Summer (1972)

Thank God the baseball season is upon us now and we can be (temporarily) diverted from polarizing issues.

Today isn’t the first time I’ve pondered the question of pitchers’ intelligence. Late last summer, some readers might recall, I analyzed it briefly in the case of Hall of Fame hurler Greg Maddux.

But today, I’d like to nominate another pitcher as having keen intelligence, along with a fierce integrity that fully matched his fierce competitiveness: New York Giant hurler Christy Mathewson.

“Matty” (dead a century ago now) wasn’t content to overpower hitters with speed; he unsettled them, with pinpoint control of a variety of pitches. He might not have been the first pitcher to analyze batters’ tendencies and tailor his approach to exploit these, but he made it an art form and passed his wisdom down in a book, Baseball in a Pinch.

You couldn’t ask for more different people than the gentlemanly, college-educated Mathewson and the fiery John McGraw, but the Giants skipper knew he could rely on his ace when the game was on the line.

As for integrity? Much was and still is made of the deeply religious Mathewson not pitching on Sundays. But, as manager of the Cincinnati Reds, he also suspended Hal Chase for intentionally throwing games and correctly sized up that that the Chicago White Sox were doing the same thing in the infamous “Black Sox” scandal of 1919.

Surviving footage of this mound master is scant and grainy, but his legend endures, as does his place in the baseball pantheon, with his 373 career victories still ranking third all time.

Quote of the Day (Helen Hayes, on Egocentrics and Inept People)

“Egocentrics are attracted to the inept. It gives them one more excuse for patting themselves on the back.”—Actress and “First Lady of American Theater” Helen Hayes (1900-1993), On Reflection: An Autobiography (1968)

Everybody who reads this has a nominee for an egocentric. One seems paramount to me. If you want to know who I’m thinking of, feel free to contact me offline. My answer won’t be a surprise. 

(My only complaint about Hayes' comment is that she doesn't account for what happens when an egocentric himself is inept. But then, that's the case of this fellow I have in mind.)

(The image of Helen Hayes that accompanies this post, taken Jan. 21, 1948, appeared in the Toronto Star and comes courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.)

Oooh, Cage Fight! Or, the Great Mullin-Paul Confirmation Faceoff

“What is so appealing to men about a cat fight?” Elaine asked on a famous episode of Seinfeld. Just the use of the term is enough to make her friend Kramer stop in his tracks and exclaim, “Oooh, cat fight!”

Last week, instead of the female hair-pulling contests that, Elaine noted in exasperation, turn on so many men, our nation’s capital was transfixed by a male variant involving two U.S. Senators from the same party: Rand Paul of Kentucky and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, the Trump Administration’s nominee to replace the late, unlamented Kristi Noem (nom de guerre “ICE Barbie”) as Homeland Security Secretary.

Trust me, I have seen more examples than I’d like of heated confrontations between our nation’s representatives and individuals testifying before them, but nothing even remotely like this.

Yes, it’s the Capitol Hill answer to the cage fight, those Ultimate Fighting Championships, with contests unapologetically brutal, in an enclosed area to prevent participants from going out of bounds.

Mullin first came across the radar screen of many of us in 2023, when he sparred at a Senate committee hearing with Teamsters head Sean O’Brien, challenging him to “stand your b—t up” over a social media post. 

Matters got so heated between the two that Senator Bernie Sanders, the panel’s chair, had to remind the two would-be gladiators to maintain Senate decorum. (Nice to know that the two men have apparently since reconciled.)

Senator Paul brought up that exchange in his own face-off with Mullin, and added to it. The background to this—and the resulting anger and bitterness on Paul’s part—are worth quoting in full:

Paul: Senator Mullin, if you have time to listen, you were confronted by constituents that were angry because you voted against my amendment to stop all funding for refugee welfare programs. Instead of explaining your vote to continue these welfare programs for refugees, you decided to transfer the blame. You told the media that I was a freaking snake and that you completely understood why I had been assaulted. I was shocked that you would justify and celebrate this violent assault that caused me so much pain and my family so much pain. I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force.

You might argue you were mad and upset about being confronted by your constituents, but Senator Mullin, your constituents are justifiably upset with you. By now, most of America knows that the Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota stole over $9 billion. But instead of defending your vote, you took to continue the vote to continue these refugee welfare programs, you chose to lash out at me. You went on to brag that you had already told me to my face that you completely understood and approved of the assault. Well, that's a lie. You got a chance today. You can either continue to lie or you can correct the record.

You have never had the courage to look me in the eye and tell me that the assault was justified. So today you'll have your chance. Today I'll give you that chance to clear the record. Tell it to my face. If that's what you believe, tell it to me today.

Tell the world why you believe I deserve to be assaulted from behind, have six ribs broken, and a damaged lung. Tell me to my face why you think I deserved it. And while you're at it, explain to the American public why they should trust a man with anger issues to set the proper example for ICE and Border Patrol agents. Explain to the American public how a man who has no regrets about brawling in a Senate committee can set a proper example for over 250,000 men and women who work at the Department of Homeland Security.

Did Mullin apologize, let alone “explain,” as Paul demanded? See what you think.

Mullin: I think everybody in this room knows that I'm very blunt and direct to the point and if I have something to say, I'll say it directly to your face. If you recall back in your back in my house days, we actually did have this conversation because of remarks that I made. You were in a room. I simply addressed that I said I could understand because of the behavior you were having that I could understand why your neighbor did what he did. As far as my terms, the snake in the grass, sir, I work around this room to try to fix problems. I've worked with many people in this room. Seems like you fight Republicans more than you work with us. I did address those remarks. I did explain your gimmicks by the amendment you put forth. And as far as me saying that I invoke violence, I don't think anybody should be hit by surprise. I don't like that. But if I do have something to say, everybody in this room knows. I'll come straight to you. I'll say it publicly and I'll say it privately, but I'll never say it behind your back. So for you to say, I'm a liar, sir, that's not accurate. And I got proof to say that because you have spent millions of dollars in my campaigns against me because we just don't get along.

However, sir, that doesn't keep me at all from doing my job. I can have difference of opinions with everybody in this room, but as Secretary of Homeland, I will be protecting everybody, including Kentucky, as much as I will my own backyard in Oklahoma. It's bigger than the partisan bickering that we have. It's bigger than the political differences we have. The truth is I have a job to do and I don't like to fail at anything at all. So I can set it aside if you're willing to set it aside. Let me earn your respect. Let me earn the job. I won't fail you. I won't back down from a challenge.

You have to ask, as MS-NOW’s Joe Scarborough did: Why didn’t Mullin just apologize? 

He was certainly risking his confirmation, as demonstrated by Paul’s committee vote against forwarding the nomination to the full Senate. Mullin was lucky to squeak by in committee, courtesy of a “yea” vote by (take your pick) maverick/renegade Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. Despite their experience with this feisty colleague, the Senate approved the nomination last night, 54-45.

It’s just another example of Congress letting Trump having his way with them. Back in 1989, the Senate rejected one of their own (and the hoary tradition of “senatorial courtesy” with it), John Tower, when George H.W. Bush nominated him for Defense Secretary. 

There were concerns about the nominee's past experience with alcohol intake and hitting on women--issues also raised about Pete Hegseth for the same post in the second Trump administration, but not enough to sideline him. 

Mullin, then, is not even the worst nominee that Trump has sent up to Capitol Hill. All the President’s major nominees have been confirmed. Why should Mullin be any different?

Mullin is an example of a notable trend of the second Trump term: facho, or fake macho. As the Iranian War began, Secretary of War Hegseth vowed “No stupid rules of engagement,” before a US military-guided weapon struck school building, killing 168 people, including over 100 children. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. went shirtless with Kid Rock in a bizarre workout video.

Not to be outdone, Mullin glories in his past as an undefeated professional mixed martial arts fighter. Like his new boss, he doesn’t so much stand his ground as dirty the ground beneath him. He sees an apology as groveling rather than a grace note and confuses rudeness with candor.

No question: cage fights like Mullin’s make for great spectacles. They don’t make for good, let alone great, government.

Quote of the Day (J. William Fulbright, on ‘The Arrogance of Power’)

“The ‘arrogance of power’…[is] a psychological need that nations seem to have to prove that they are bigger, better or stronger than other nations. Implicit in this drive is the assumption that the proof of superiority is force—that when a nation shows that it has the stronger army, it is also proving that it has better people, better institutions, better principles—and, in general, a better civilization.”—J. William Fulbright (1905-1995), U.S. Senator from Arkansas and chair, US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, “Address Delivered at Johns Hopkins University,” May 5, 1966

In 1966, unable to receive straight answers from the Johnson Administration about the course of the Vietnam War, J. William Fulbright helped give wide public currency to a phrase that had been gaining traction among Washington observers: a “credibility gap” covering the distance between what officials said and the reality on the ground.

In the decades since then, presidents and their advisers have certainly trimmed the truth. But aside, perhaps, from the Watergate era, I’m not sure that “credibility gap” has been used much. It is certainly time to bring that phrase back, as well as another one that Senator Fulbright popularized: “the arrogance of power.”

In Lyndon Johnson’s college days, biographer Robert Caro revealed, the future President’s friends nicknamed him “Bull Johnson” because, as one classmate said, he “just could not tell the truth.” But LBJ’s mendacity has been exceeded thoroughly by Donald Trump, who can barely move his lips without uttering an untruth.

Trump’s secret sauce as a liar? Lie so fast, so often, so much, without fear that one day’s statement might contradict an earlier one, that it will be impossible to keep up and eventually inure the public to what he says.

Trump voters could console themselves, based on the lack of new military commitments abroad in his first term, that his deceptions were at least not putting service personnel at risk. That assurance is now gone.

Trump’s credibility gap is a necessary precondition for aggrandizing not just America’s power but his personal sway. He couldn’t get the correct synonym for the invasion of Iraq (it’s “incursion”), but for him it might as well be an “excursion,” a holiday from history and truth.

Throughout these first few weeks of the war, it’s been bad enough that he hasn’t been able to offer a consistent rationale for the invasion, but he simply lied about the nature of the threat posed by Iraq. While it was true that Iraq’s stockpile of weaponry posed a threat to Israel, it in no way endangered the United States.

The “arrogance of power” and “the credibility gap” have particular consequences in matters of war and peace, not only because of lives endangered but also because of violations of international law that endanger order between and even within nations through shredding human rights. 

(See, for instance, Marc Weller’s mid-January analysis for the London-based think tank Chatham House, which explains why, despite Trump’s second-term disregard for the concept, without international law, “The aim of predictable and stable relations, and clear pathways for international transactions, would be destroyed.”)

In his book The Arrogance of Power, Fulbright offered a defense of international law that has, sadly, been forgotten over the past decade:

Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations. As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations. Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations. When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests.

Song Lyric of the Day (Gilbert and Sullivan, on ‘Little Errands for the Ministers of State’)

“Oh, philosophers may sing
Of the troubles of a King;
Yet the duties are delightful, and the privileges great;
But the privilege and pleasure
That we treasure beyond measure
Is to run on little errands for the Ministers of State.”— “Rising Early in the Morning," from The Gondoliers: or, The King of Barataria (1889), libretto by W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911), music by Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900)

The image accompanying this post shows Rutland Barrington and Courtice Pounds as Giuseppe and Marco, the title characters in the 1889 production of The Gondoliers. 

Times have changed greatly since then, but it seems like all over the world, there’s still no shortage of people ready to run “little errands for the Ministers of State.” Only they're called bureaucrats rather than gondoliers.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Mary Karr, on Prayer ‘In Times of Pressure or Anxiety’)

“In times of pressure or anxiety—like when Mother was dying—I’ll do a daily rosary for everybody. Or I’ll light candles and climb in the bathtub, try to put my mind where my body is—the best prayers are completely silent. Otherwise, I do a lot of begging. I just beg, beg, beg, beg like a dog, for myself and those I love. And I do the cursory, ‘If it’s your will . . .’ but God knows that I want everything when I want it…. The real prayer happens when I’m really desperate, like when I was going through a period of illness last year. Amazing what power there is in surrender to suffering. Most of my life I dodged it, or tried to drink it away—'it’ being any reality that discomfited me.”—American poet, songwriter, essayist, memoirist—and Roman Catholic convert—Mary Karr, “The Art of Memoir No. 1,” interviewed by Amanda Fortini, The Paris Review (Winter 2009)

Quote of the Day (Len Deighton, on What Led Him to Write Spy Fiction)

“I was 10 when World War II started. My parents were servants. We lived in a tiny mews house in central London. Our neighbor Anna Wolkoff was the daughter of a czarist admiral. We knew her. My mother sometimes cooked for her dinner parties. I remember her arrest, late at night. The police came. I watched out the window with my parents. We learned she was a spy. Antisemitic. A Nazi sympathizer. My dad fought the Germans in the trenches in World War I. In 1939 he commanded a civilian first-aid post. Anna’s betrayal had a profound effect on my family.”—British novelist Len Deighton (1929-2026), quoted in “By the Book: Len Deighton,” The New York Times Book Review, June 25, 2023

Like fellow spytale spinner John le Carre, Len Deighton—who died earlier this week—found in the genre a vehicle for exploring his childhood memories of trauma. In le Carre’s case, the trauma was inspired by his con man father, a cause of such embarrassment to the son, even into middle age, that it inspired his novel A Perfect Spy.

For Deighton, as indicated by the quote I’ve used, personal betrayal and the trauma it came from Anna Wolkoff. I couldn’t read about her case without seeing this as a British version of the spy-next-door cable drama of the 2010s, The Americans, starring Keri Russell.

Deighton might be known best for several espionage trilogies (e.g., the “Harry Palmer” books and the so-called “Game Set Match” sequence) that, like le Carre, de-romanticized the business of spycraft set out in Ian Fleming’s James Bond tales.

But the nightmare possibility created by Wolkoff—what if she and others like her had helped pave the way for a Nazi takeover of Britain?—may have inspired his 1978 foray into speculative fiction, SS-GB.

That novel is part of a small but intriguing genre of alternative history in which the Nazis remained in control of Europe, including:

*The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick;
*Fatherland, by Robert Harris; and
*Dominion, by C. J. Sansom.

Quote of the Day (Keith Richards, on How Records Represented ‘The Emancipation of Music’)

“I’ve learned everything I know off of records. Being able to replay something immediately without all that terrible stricture of written music, the prison of those bars, those five lines. Being able to hear recorded music freed up loads of musicians that couldn’t necessarily afford to learn to read or write music, like me. Before 1900, you’ve got Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, the cancan.  With recording, it was emancipation for the people. As long as you or somebody around you could afford a machine, suddenly you could hear music made by people, not set-up rigs and symphony orchestras. You could actually listen to what people were saying, almost off the cuff. Some of it can be a lot of rubbish, but some of it was really good. It was the emancipation of music. Otherwise you'd have had to go to a concert hall, and how many people could afford that?”—English rock ‘n’ roll guitarist and songwriter Keith Richards, Life (2010)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Woman of the Year,’ As a Sportswriter Introduces His Date to the Game of Baseball)

Tess Harding [A sophisticated foreign correspondent played by Katharine Hepburn]: [In the stands at a major-league ballpark, observing the large crowd in attendance] “Are all these people unemployed?”

Sam Craig [A sportswriter, played by Spencer Tracy]: “No, they're all attending their grandmother's funeral.”— Woman of the Year (1942), screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr., Michael Kanin, and John Lee Mahin, directed by George Stevens

A lovely hat that Miss Harding is wearing, isn’t it? Except that it blocks the view of the large, angry-looking fellow behind her.

Oh, well—with the help of Sam, she’ll learn about not just the balls and strikes that affect the players, but appropriate attire for spectators like herself! 

This Day in New York History (Bill O’Dwyer Withers Under Questioning at Kefauver Crime Hearings)

Mar. 19, 1951—The Kefauver Committee hearings on organized crime, in the middle of a 14-city media road show, had already reached a crescendo upon arriving at New York's Federal Courthouse within the prior week, particularly with testimony by reputed mobster Frank Costello.

But now, in the first of two successive days, the nation would be transfixed by more testimony unfolding through the emerging medium of television: William O’Dwyer, the current US Ambassador to Mexico and the former mayor of New York City, crumbling under hostile committee questioning, was experiencing the effective end of his public career.

Costello, nicknamed the “Prime Minister of the Underworld,” would be sentenced to 18 months in prison for contempt of Congress when he broke off his testimony. O’Dwyer, more cooperative, saw his reputation shrivel, a judgment formalized in the committee’s final report that took him to task for allowing organized crime to fester under his watch while he was Brooklyn District Attorney and New York’s Mayor.

But the hearings' importance lay beyond destroying O’Dwyer or the intrigue surrounding the appearance of Costello, who worked out an agreement with the five-man committee to allow only his hands to be seen by TV viewers.

Indeed, the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, which held hearings in 14 cities, demonstrated the corrosive effects of organized crime at the city and state levels, marked a cultural watershed, positioned chairman Estes Kefauver for presidential and vice presidential bids, and set the stage for deeper investigations into mob influence.

What follows in this past is based on research for a biography of O’Dwyer’s faithful younger brother Paul that I wrote with Rob Polner, An Irish Passion for Justice.

Accusations had already appeared in the New York press related to what O’Dwyer’s interim replacement as DA, a Republican, called his “laxity” and “maladministration” of his district attorney’s office. The mushroom cloud of these questions led to his hurried 1950 resignation from City Hall and appointment by President Harry Truman as ambassador to Mexico.

Then Truman gave his blessings to Kefauver—a colorful Tennessee politician who had made a coonskin cap his trademark in his successful 1948 Senate race—to examine mob infiltration of city and state governments and summon their leaders, many of them fellow Democrats, by request or subpoena.

Understanding the environment surrounding the hearings can bewilder contemporary readers unless they keep in mind these factors:

*Television: An estimated 30 million Americans tuned in to watch the live proceedings in March 1951. By the time the committee, its staff, and attendant cameras rolled into New York, the hearings had become a sensation. Suddenly, “Kefauver block parties” became the rage, and Broadway attendance took a nosedive as viewers found the real-life drama on their small screens at home even more fascinating and entertaining than what they would normally see on the Great White Way.

*Cold War pressures: Just as communists sought to erode the international appeal of democracy following World War II, so the mob world’s money was subverting democracy from within, the new zeitgeist went.  For that reason, Bill would be regarded not simply as someone who may have pulled punches on behalf of shadowy figures believed to have underworld connections, but rather as a supporter of an “alien” conspiracy fomented by Italian American criminals who were destabilizing the American experiment from within.

*A focus on gambling: Though the committee’s understanding of “organized crime” encompassed “protection,” prostitution, murder, blackmail, and gambling, according to the committee’s mission statement, it was the last that consumed the lion’s share of its attention. Gambling was, Kefauver claimed, "the life blood of organized crime," so the committee went to the areas where the activity was most likely to flourish: cities, which were often controlled, as in New York, by Democratic political machines.

Paul O’Dwyer, an attorney normally with a heightened awareness of his clients’ rights and interests, long afterward regretted having strongly urged his brother to testify, even though Bill’s doctor had cautioned about the physical strain created by the hearings:

“I felt his [Bill’s] appearance was imperative because he should not let his detractors say they had frightened him from coming to a town over which he had presided with such distinction for five years. It was immature reasoning, and in retrospect, I believe I would not have given that advice to a client not related to me but otherwise under the same circumstance.”

Bill’s testimony, frequently non-specific, struck many as evasive. Moreover, the normally self-confident pol who had been twice elected Gotham’s mayor had been replaced by am energy-drained witness who, battling the flu and mopping his perspiring brow, reacted with annoyance to his inquisitors rather than his customary charm. He did little to hide, for instance, his scorn of Republican Charles Tobey of New Hampshire as a hypocrite:

Tobey: “Why did [O’Dwyer aide James] Moran go to the apartment [of Frank Costello, in 1942] with you, to carry a bag or what? Was he an errand boy, a companion, an advisor?”

O’Dwyer: “Senator, if the answer is intended to be anything other than sarcastic, I will answer it.”

Tobey: “When you were there, were you conscious that he was a gangster?”

O’Dwyer: “I was conscious that he had a reputation as a very big book-maker.”

Tobey: “It seems to me you should have said about Costello, ‘Unclean, unclean!’ And that you should have left him alone, as if he were a leper. But instead you trotted up to his place—”

O’Dwyer: “I had business with him. They say there is a lot of it in your home state of New Hampshire—30 million dollars a year… I wonder who the bookmakers in Breton Woods support for public office in New Hampshire?”

Tobey: “I hate a four-flusher!”…

When Bill was back at his hotel room after concluding his testimony, family and friends quickly sensed that he had lost his old elan, as described later in an oral history interview by Brooklyn Eagle reporter Clifford Evans:

“Suddenly he looked old. Suddenly this very proud man . . . who had gone from bartender here in N.Y. all the way up to being the No. 1 citizen as Mayor, and then during the war, had become a General and had been given the rank in our State Department of minister—a man who, single handedly, on assignment from Roosevelt, had negotiated with dollars and in secrecy for the saving of thousands of Jews from Hitler’s Germany—a man who had done so much to make us feel good, and suddenly, everything just crashed. The grayness about him and the open window there— it was kind of a difficult moment.”

Now in his early 60s, Bill finished out his term as ambassador a year and a half later. Any possibility of a further diplomatic, or even political, career, let alone influence at any local or national level, was over. Though he was never charged as a result of the multiple investigations into his time as prosecutor and mayor, he also was never able to dispel the miasma of doubt about his conduct until his death in 1964.

City Hall reporters recalled that, only a generation before, a prior New York Democrat, the dapper “Beau James” Walker, had also departed Gracie Mansion in haste as a corruption scandal erupted. More than seven decades would pass before another mayor would see his time in office end prematurely.

The rise and fall of Eric Adams eerily echoed O’Dwyer’s. As ex-cops from Brooklyn, they ascended the political ladder largely based on their crime-fighting reputations. The Irish emigrant and African-American tapped into the fierce pride of marginalized groups that, by the time the politicians reached middle age, had become crucial cogs of the city’s Democratic coalition.

In the end, they could not maintain their political base. Party leaders prevailed upon Truman to appoint O’Dwyer as ambassador. Adams, despite the Trump Administration’s decision to drop federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations, was forced to withdraw his independent bid for reelection as mayor in the fall of 2025.

The Kefauver hearings demonstrated the power of televised congressional hearings to lift or lower individual politicians’ reputations. Ironically today, bipartisan investigations of important national issues—a hallmark of Congress at least since the Teapot Dome scandal— are in abeyance. They’ve all but disappeared from contemporary politics since the election of Donald Trump to a second term.

That is a striking if rarely commented-on development, especially considering that Capitol Hill panels have shed light on government waste and misconduct through the eras of Jim Crow, Joe McCarthy, the Vietnam war, Watergate, rampant FBI and CIA abuses, 9/11, and Wall Street recklessness. The nationally televised hearings focused on the January 6 US Capitol attack were the last of any magnitude.

New rounds of televised hearings are painfully overdue—inquiries unrelated to the dangers once posed by organized crime, but to organized money and its similarly pernicious effect on the functioning of democratic government.

As the line between private and public interests has gone from blurred to all-but erased, the survival of a balanced two-party system hinges, at least in part, on the willingness of Congress to examine enormous conflicts of interest and alleged corruption in Washington. 

Quote of the Day (Alexander Karn, on ‘Willingness to Confront Our History’)

“The road to a ‘more perfect Union,’ which is enshrined in the Constitution, runs through the past, and it depends on our willingness to confront our history in an honest and thoroughgoing way.”— Colgate University historian Alexander Karn quoted by Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore, “Trump’s War on History,” Mother Jones, March-April 2026

(The image accompanying this post shows a detail from an anti-slavery almanac of the 1840s.)

Quote of the Day (Erin Kendall Braun, on How Memory Operates)

“Most people think that their memory operates like a video recorder, replaying events as they originally happened. But memories aren’t static and objective like a recording. Instead, they’re associative: our brains link together the relevant details of experiences to store and later recall.”— American cognitive neuroscientist and memory expert Erin Kendall Braun, quoted by Julia Joy, “Ask an Alum: Why You Can’t Always Trust Your Memory,” Columbia, Winter 2025-26

Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on How Ireland Affected ‘The Vital Strings of British Life and Politics’)

“Great Empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world, but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world. That says a lot for the persistency with which Irish men on the one side or the other are able to pursue their controversies. It says a great deal for the power which Ireland has, both Nationalist and Orange, to lay their hands upon the vital strings of British life and politics, and to hold, dominate, and convulse, year after year, generation after generation, the politics of this powerful country.” —Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), then Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, “House of Commons Speech on the Ireland Situation,” Feb. 16, 1922

For those of us of Irish descent, St. Patrick’s Day should be not only for celebration but for remembrance of trauma, struggle, and resilience.  

With all due respect to the poet W.H. Auden when writing his great tribute to William Butler Yeats, it wasn’t simply the case that “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” It was Great Britain that had made Ireland mad in the first place. Among others who forgot this was Winston Churchill.

As long as freedom exists, he will be remembered for rallying Britain against the Nazi menace. His skill as a wordsmith is evident even in this short passage above.

But his not inconsiderable blind spot was arch-imperialism, and it shows here by what he doesn’t mention. British politics and government had been affected through much of his lifetime not so much by quarreling Nationalist and Orange factions in Ireland, as he suggests, but by that government’s fatal decision in the 16^th and 17^th centuries to sponsor plantations on the island, through land confiscated from Catholics and given to Protestant settlers from Scotland.

The most enduring of those plantations was in Ulster, the center of “Orange” opposition not just of independence but of home rule.

Moreover, for all the future Prime Minister’s worship of his father, it was Lord Randolph Churchill who had encouraged longstanding tensions between Protestant and Catholic in Ireland for blatantly political reasons.

When Prime Minister William Gladstone came out in the 1880s for Home Rule, Lord Churchill told a friend that long before he had decided if that came to pass, “the Orange card would be the one to play.” The prospect of armed Orange agreement to any grant of self-determination bothered him little as well: “Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right.”

Arguing for the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Churchill may have felt he was removing the Irish question from British politics once and for all.

It turned out to be anything but, because of issues related to gerrymandering and systematic discrimination of the Catholic minority in Ulster that neither the Liberal nor Conservative governments in which Churchill served as minister moved to alleviate them. 

Those issues lay at the heart of the civil-rights movement launched by Catholics in the late 1960s, sparking a predictable reaction from the descendants of Orange opponents of the prior centuries—and now (with the toxic presence of British troops added to the mix) the nearly three-decades “Troubles” were launched.