Outer Banks people were still pretty “set in their ways,” Tate added. “We believed in a good God, a bad Devil, and a hot Hell, and more than anything else we believed that same God did not intend man should ever fly.
Free speech is a restraint on government; not an incitement to the citizen.
Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning – how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities of strengths of individual character had made the difference – the outcome seemed a little short of a miracle.
THE CAMPAIGN OF 1776 had ended with a second astonishing victory. Had Washington been born in the days of idolatry, declared the Pennsylvania Journal, he would be worshiped as a god. “If there are spots on his character, they are like the spots on the sun, only discernible by the magnifying powers of a telescope.
Harry Truman used to talk of Potomac Fever, an endemic disorder the symptoms of which were a swelled head and a general decline of common sense.
Recalling a line attributed to Wilbur – “Well, if I talked a lot I should be like a parrot, which is the bird that speaks most and flies least.” – Buist.
Bright but not distinctive as an undergraduate, he had gone to Harvard Law School and finished in the same class as Justice Holmes. But the law bored him – as it had Ferdinand de Lesseps, as it had Roosevelt – so he had decided to be an engineer, “that I may lead a good and useful life.
I pray heaven,” Adams wrote, “to bestow the best of blessings on this house, and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.
Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
The happiness of the people was the purpose of government, he wrote, and therefore that form of government was best which produced the greatest amount of happiness for the largest number. And since all “sober inquirers after truth” agreed that happiness derived from virtue, that form of government with virtue as its foundation was more likely than any other to promote the general happiness.
We must bear the atmosphere of the hour,” the President said. “It will pass away.” And like many of McKinley’s instinctive responses, it was the right one.
Later that same spring of 1872, in his own annual report, Roebling would write that most men got over their troubles either by suffering for a long time or “by applying the heroic mode of returning into the caisson at once as soon as pains manifested themselves.
They could imitate every movement of the wings of those gannets; we thought they were crazy, but we just had to admire the way they could move their arms this way and that and bend their elbows and wrist bones up and down and which way, just like the gannets.
For a West Point graduate to abandon his appointed task in the face of adversity or personal discomfort was all but inconceivable.
He always kept three books at hand – one scientific, one of classical literature or history, one light fiction – which he took up in turn, giving each exactly twenty minutes according to a pocket watch placed on the table beside his chair. In this fashion, he said, he was able to remember what he read.
The bicycle was proclaimed a boon to all mankind, a thing of beauty, good for the spirits, good for health and vitality, indeed one’s whole outlook on life. Doctors enthusiastically approved. One Philadelphia physician, writing in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children, concluded from his observations that “for physical exercise for both men and women, the bicycle is one of the greatest inventions of the nineteenth century.
Hardly a soul spoke a word of English. All this they had been forewarned about, but the difference between what one had been told and what one came to understand firsthand was enormous.
We’re all what we read to a very considerable degree.
Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind. For years Rush had been investigating the causes of and remedies for madness and other “diseases” of the mind. “The subjects of them have hitherto been enveloped in mystery,” he wrote to Adams. “I have endeavored to bring them down to the level of all other diseases of the human body, and to show that the mind and body are moved by the same causes and subject to the same laws.
Bicycles were proclaimed morally hazardous. Until now children and youth were unable to stray very far from home on foot. Now, one magazine warned, fifteen minutes could put them miles away. Because of bicycles, it was said, young people were not spending the time they should with books, and more seriously that suburban and country tours on bicycles were “not infrequently accompanied by seductions.