"Anyone Who Expects a Restoration of the Status Quo Ante 2017 May Be in for a Rude Awakening"

"Take, for example, three cherished institutions—White House press briefings, independent courts, respect for nonpartisan law enforcement agencies and a nonpartisan civil service. Their foundations are more young and shaky than you might think, and once altered, they may not be easily restored. Future presidents may regard newer precedents as more binding. A once-sturdy nonpartisan civil service and equally assured nonpartisan courts may be too weakened to enforce a return to prior norms. A public once conditioned to expect certain things of its presidents may have lost a critical amount of muscle memory."

Joshua Zeitz at Politico discusses more damage Donald Trump has done.

"Draw Their Lineage From Distinct Political Traditions"

"The short answer is that political figures and thinkers are more than the sum of their assorted policy positions. They have distinct, historically grounded worldviews that, once revealed, can both give us a better handle on their core beliefs and predict how they might act in shifting circumstances."

At Jacobin, Shawn Gude compares Elizabeth Warren to Louis Brandeis and Bernie Sanders to Eugene Debs.

And Win McCormick at The New Republic contrasts Brandeis and Herbert Croly.

"Tariffs Are Rigged Against Them"

"In the 1920s, Republicans returned to power and resumed their protectionist agenda, but when crop prices fell, Midwesterners again turned on the party. Chastened by Taft's experience, President Herbert Hoover promised to aid farmers by raising agricultural tariffs. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 did protect crops, but it also radically increased the duties on manufactured goods, provoking a trade war with Europe at the worst possible time. As the Great Depression spread misery across the country, voters blamed Hoover's tariff. In 1932, they elected FDR in a landslide and pummeled the GOP.
"Reduced to a perennial minority, Republicans finally abandoned their protectionist doctrine and embraced free trade. The ferocious tariff debate that had dominated American politics since the nation's founding slipped into the shadows, remembered only by historians and economists.
"Until Donald Trump."

At The Atlantic, Michael Wolraich discusses taxes on imported goods, past and present.

The Curse of Bigness

"Ideas, especially those born on the campaign trail, rarely turn out as planned. In the long view of history, Wilson's victory mattered not because his presidency bequeathed a regulatory regime so different from what Roosevelt would have overseen, but because progressivism itself prevailed. From one perspective, the most important fact about the outcome was that Taft, representing the stand-patters, finished third—the only incumbent ever to seek re-election and do so."

David Greenberg in Slate considers the differences between Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism and Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom during the 1912 election.

"Did You Have to Make the Chair so Large?"

"Ten presidents have signed the guest book, including Theodore Roosevelt, whose bodyguards were still nervous after the assassination of his predecessor, William McKinley. During Roosevelt's visit, the lights in the hotel suddenly went out, and when Miller came running to see what was wrong, he found Roosevelt lying on the ground for his own protection, ringed by guards, docent Mel Gutierrez said."

In the Los Angeles Times, Steve Harvey visits Riverside's Mission Inn, which dates back to 1876.

They Must Insist He's Not a Socialist

"No, it's tough these days because you've got politicians on the right, the same guys who just helped nationalize the banking system, derisively and inaccurately calling the presidential candidate on the left a socialist. That's enough to make Karl Marx harumph in his grave."

Rex W. Huppke in the Chicago Tribune interviews socialists who are shocked and saddened to hear John McCain claim that Barack Obama is one of them.

And in Slate, Timothy Noah points out how McCain is at odds with his supposed hero, Theodore Roosevelt.

Against "the Despoilers"

"'The truth of the matter is that Roosevelt today would be on the left,' said Mr. Brinkley, who is writing a biography of the former president titled 'The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt’s and the Crusade for America.'
"Roosevelt believed passionately in regulating industry and curbing the excesses of the great corporations. He favored the imposition of an inheritance tax and fought his party’s increasing tendency to cater to the very wealthy. And, of course, he was a ferocious protector of the environment."

In The New York Times, Bob Herbert argues that John McCain is no "Teddy Roosevelt Republican."

Can't Live in a Tenement Yard

"He pursued his campaign with evangelical zeal. Riis believed that defective character led to poverty and that conscience-driven capitalism was the best solution. Although he pitied them, his reform crusade 'ascribed little or no role at all to tenement dwellers themselves,' Czitrom writes. This brand of noblesse oblige perhaps anticipated the public housing failures of Riis’s 20th-century admirer Robert Moses."

Matthew Power in The New York Times reviews Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom's Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York.

Home on the Mall

"Before Teddy Roosevelt's time, cowboys had a nasty reputation, thanks to Billy the Kid and other violent outlaws who ran roughshod over the frontier. Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows and late-19th century dime novels combined to recast the cowboy's image as an Anglo-Saxon hero and heir to the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table.
"The curators argue that presidential cowboys have since been perceived as wearing either black or white hats; the ascendant color often correlated with the success or failure of their policies."

In the Los Angeles Times, Irene Lacher reviews "Cowboys and Presidents," a new exhibit at the Autry National Center.

The First Task of the Statesmanship of the Day

"Unable to deny the progressive impulse or the democratized primaries their legitimacy, and equally unable to benefit from them himself, Taft wondered if Roosevelt and his followers suffered messianic delusions, asking, 'Can he usher in the millennium?' Such drama poorly suited the normally grave Taft, who lost one primary after another. Under the pressure, Taft wept in an interview when he thought of his rejection by his former friend--and his party's voters."

Eric Rauchway in The New Republic compares the Democrats of 2008 to the Republicans of 1912.

Democracy's Discontent

"A century ago, a generation of progressive men and women balked at the narrow self-interest and rapacious greed that had characterized the Gilded Age. Disgusted by the outright corruption that pervaded late-nineteenth-century politics, progressives organized to miminize the pernicious influence of money in politics and to wrest control of the government from the powerful corporate 'Trusts.' They set up new political systems and institutions to regulate Big Capital and to make government more responsive to the will of the people. Recognizing for the first time the importance of the social environment in individual development, they struggled to improve living and working conditions for all Americans, and began to reemphasize the civic fabric that binds us--farmer and worker, rich and poor, laborer and capitalist, black and white, native and immigrant--all together."

Kevin C. Murphy of Ghost in the Machine has created a new site as a clearinghouse for civic progressivism: Small-R Republic.

Let's Put the "x" in Sox

"Near the turn of the century, advocacy groups like the Spelling Simplification Board pushed for spelling reform with renewed vigor; they argued that millions of dollars were wasted on printing useless letters. The editor of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill, supported the idea. Medill stripped final 'e's from words like 'favorite' in the pages of his newspaper and even suggested more wholesale changes that would have made written English look something like e-mail spam."

In a 2005 Slate article, Daniel Engber explains why the Chicago White Sox and the Boston Red Sox spell their names so oddly.

The Priest or the Warrior?

"Democratic professionals often describe this sorting as a competition between upscale "wine track" candidates and blue-collar "beer track" contenders. Another way to express the difference is to borrow from historian John Milton Cooper Jr.'s telling comparison of the pugnacious Theodore Roosevelt and the idealistic Woodrow Wilson. Cooper described the long rivalry between Republican Roosevelt and Democrat Wilson as a contest between a warrior and a priest. In modern times, the Democratic presidential race has usually pitted a warrior against a priest."

Ronald Brownstein in the Los Angeles Times discusses where Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton fit into these archetypes.

In an October 2007 New York cover story, John Heilemann describes experiences in law school as preparing Obama and Clinton for their later campaign roles.

George T.R. Bush

"A glance through T.R.'s biography makes it clear that, while the forty-third president has little in common with the twenty-sixth when it comes to reining in big business, embracing the environment, or reading and writing in voluminous amounts, he bears a strong resemblance to the angry, increasingly conservative Roosevelt who remained a major national figure well after his Bull Moose presidential run in 1912."

In The New Republic, Michael Currie Schaffer connects George W. Bush and the World War I-era views of Theodore Roosevelt.