Good with that time

Rating: 8/10 (3 January 2018)

I think it ok with that time
H's father was a profoundly conservative man, but with opinions surprising for a supposed Southern Democrat and which had nothing to do with economic orthodoxies. "The Democracy" meant to him as a young man William Jennings Bryan, and then FDR, and the radical but very odd, sometime Republican labor leader (he supported both Hoover and Willkie) John L. Lewis-that last at least an unexpected hero for a small businessman. "These damned fools around here don't know that if labor costs go up five percent, it's the owners who will grin and raise prices fifteen." When the Democrats selected Adlai Stevenson for the first time, he preferred Estes Kefauver of the coonskin hat. He was a populist, although without (H was pleased to note when he learned a bit more history) the nativist spite, anti-Semitism, and general small-town prejudices that often degraded populism. So, deficient in Oedipal rage, H had no great distance in feeling to travel when he went to college: reading of "the cross of gold," writing a paper on Henry George, devouring biographies of Eugene Victor Debs, writing for a card in Noman Thomas's Socialist Party-well on his way, through books not experience, to possession of the "proper" views for an academic before he knew he would become one. However, a big however, when he studied English history under a professor he'd discover many years later was a contributor to Russell Kirk's journal Modern Age, H always "pulled for" the Royalists rather than the Roundheads, admired the Tories rather than the Whigs. A kind of schizoid tendency was setting in.