As one 1935 study put it, boys and girls who were 15 or 16 in 1929 when the Depression began are no longer children; they are grown-ups – adults who had never, since they left school, had anything pro...
We of the South,
On the rare occasions on which a movie was shown, there was as much suspense in the audience over whether the electricity would hold out to the end of the film as there was in the film itself.
Old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, that they possess a sagacity that could be obtained only through experience— a saga...
We have talked long enough ... about civil rights,' Lyndon Johnson had said. 'It is time ... to write it in the books of law' - to embody justice and equality in legislation.
Quietly, dispassionately, Russell would make sure the senator understood not only the reasons why he should take the same position on the bill that Russell was taking, but the reasons why he should ta...
And, of course, the sentences would often be strung together in stories, many of them set in the Hill Country. They were about drunks, and about preachers—there was one about the preacher who at a rur...
With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet. Roy Wilkins
The enormous power held by each of the southern committee chairmen individually was multiplied by their unity, by what White called a oneness found nowhere else in politics. The symbol was the legenda...
Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans; Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that...
Dignity was a luxury in a fight with Lyndon Johnson, a luxury too expensive to afford.
When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know you have come into the presence of fire; that it is best not incautiously to touch that man; that there is something that makes it dangerou...
When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,
Union and Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable!
Once Lyndon replied that My doctor says Scotch keeps my arteries open. They don’t have to be that wide open, she said with a smile.
A newcomer could ascertain the identity of a town's true leaders – which storekeeper was respected, which farmer was listened to other farmers – only through endless hours of subtle probing of reticen...
Determining the essence of different points of view (what Lyndon Johnson called listening),
The roar of the Twenties was only the faintest of echoes in those vast and empty hills—a mocking echo to Hill Country farmers who read of Coolidge Prosperity and the reduction in the work week to fort...
The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward
In 1918, anti-German hysteria was sweeping Texas. Germans who showed insufficient enthusiasm in purchasing Liberty Bonds were publicly horsewhipped; bands of armed men broke into the homes of German f...