Columbia University professor Raymond Moly wrote most of Roosevelt’s speech, and talked over his initial drafts with the president-elect. Several days before the inauguration, Moly delivered a typescript of his final draft to Roosevelt, who was staying at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. Roosevelt went over the speech then with Moly and copied it out in longhand. The line about “fear itself” was not in the speech at that point. Before leaving FDR’s hotel suite, Moly burned his typewritten draft in the fireplace.

The next day, former newspaperman and Roosevelt’s long-time close confidante, Louis McHenry Howe, arrived in Washington. According to Howe’s assistant Lela Stiles, a few days previously, Howe had talked with a newspaperman and friend about difficulties that the country faced, and during the conversation Howe told his friend, “I don’t care what else Franklin says in his inaugural address as long as he tells the people that the only thing they have to fear is fear.”

When Howe arrived in Washington, FDR gave him his handwritten draft of the speech. Howe made his own changes and additions and had a secretary type a new draft. One of Howe’s changes had been to add the line, “So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes the needed effort to bring about prosperity once again.” FDR liked Howe’s addition, but then, on the draft, changed the end of the sentence, from “to bring about prosperity once again” to “needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” These were the words he used when he delivered the speech several days later at the inauguration, on March 4, 1933.

Roosevelt’s revision of Howe’s sentence was in keeping with the revisions that he and Moly had made to earlier drafts. One of the guiding metaphors in the first versions of the speech had turned on comparing the country’s economic condition to a sickness, but Moly had ultimately decided that Roosevelt would be better able to inspire the nation to profound and wide-ranging action if he did not compare it to an invalid, but rather to an army preparing for war. The imagery of sickness in the early drafts yielded therefore to martial language in the last drafts. FDR’s change of Howe’s sentence followed along with this.

Nevertheless, the new version of the sentence still refers to fear and a rejection of being "paralyzed." Whatever else FDR conveyed to his listeners with this sentence, a message of reassurance about his own health was surely part of what they heard. Concerns about whether his polio had incapacitated him had sometimes surfaced during the election campaign and two weeks before the inauguration he had avoided the bullets of a would-be assassin.

Frances Perkins, who served as FDR’s Secretary of Labor, reminisced in 1946, more than a decade after the speech, about Roosevelt coming to terms with his having contracted polio in 1921. She wrote, “He learned in that period and began to express firm belief that the ‘only thing to fear is fear itself.’ He never displayed the slightest bitterness over his misfortune.” Perkins was a little unclear here about whether she was referring specifically to Roosevelt in the decade before he became president, and whether she really meant to place the exact phrase “the only thing to fear is fear itself” in his mouth during that time.

If Roosevelt had in fact often expressed those words, it is difficult to understand why his closest colleagues and even his wife Eleanor did not assume that he had thought them up himself and inserted them into the inaugural address, but looked elsewhere for the ultimate source of the expression. When FDR’s associate and sometimes-speechwriter Samuel Rosenman asked Eleanor about the expression, she ventured that her husband may have found something very much like it in a volume of Henry David Thoreau’s writings, which she thought he must have had with him in his hotel suite in Washington.

Thoreau had written the sentence, “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear,” in his journal entry for September 7, 1851, in passing, as part of his comment on his contemporaries’ criticisms of Harriet Martineau’s arguments for atheism in her just-published Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development. Ralph Waldo Emerson later quoted his young friend approvingly, and the phrase was indeed included in later collections of Thoreau’s writings.

Professor Moly, however, pointed directly at Louis Howe as the proximate source, and doubted that Howe—whose reading habits focused on detective novels—had found the Thoreau quote. He later told William Safire, “I do clearly remember that the phrase appeared in a department store’s newspaper advertisement some time earlier in February. I assume that Howe, an inveterate newspaper reader, saw it too. …" To Howe’s everlasting credit, he realized that the expression fully fitted the occasion.”

Moly's reference to department store advertisements sounds like the campaign used by Wanamaker’s. During the first few months of 1933, Wanamaker’s department store placed large display ads in The New York Times. The ads included a small box with inspirational messages of business and commercial platitudes or sentiments “from the founder’s writings,” those of John Wanamaker, who sometimes quoted people like Benjamin Franklin or George Washington. I do not see any of ads for the first two months of 1933 in which Wanamaker quoted Thoreau or anyone else expressing precisely the statement about “fear itself,” nor do I see a quote of Wanamaker venturing the phrase himself. However there are many platitudes there about confidence, cheerfulness, a positive attitude, persistence, honesty, and integrity. Perhaps Professor Moly saw an ad that I have been unable to locate.

The phrase “The only thing to fear is fear” did have some currency at the time among businessmen. Julius Barnes, the Chairman of the Board of the National Chamber of Commerce, for example, gave a news conference in early February announcing the organization’s effort to promote efforts to stabilize business suffering during the depression. The conference was reported by The New York Times on February 9. One of the subheadings of the article was “Fears Most Fear Itself,” and quoted Barnes as saying, “In a condition of this kind, the thing to be feared most is fear itself. Confidence, tempered with prudence, is necessary to the operation of even the most perfect business mechanism. The retarding effect of a sense of insecurity is promptly communicated from worker to consumer, from consumer to producer and the whole machine stalls, and the anticipated evil becomes.”

Many in the business community were in fact convinced that the country was suffering from a kind of psychic sickness, caused not by systemic problems in industry or banking, but by the nation’s irrational lapse into fear, which had caused an economic paralysis. It was the fear itself that needed to be exorcised. FDR’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, also often spoke in this way.

By this metaphor, the nation was an invalid who had been afflicted with a mental problem, a paralysis of action. Its thinking somehow had to be turned around, toward a positive confidence. By changing the patient’s thinking, his body would naturally recover his mobility. The nation needed a mental healer.

This sounds rather like the frame of reference of the quasi-religious “New Thought” or “Mind-Cure” or “Mental Science” Movement that blossomed in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As William James described it in his 1929 work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, “The leaders of this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind.” The movement was defined not so much by an organizational form as by the common assumptions and themes of a group of writers who specialties included what we would today called “alternative medicine,” speculative psychology, and inspirational literature. Their writings are dominated by perorations on healing and success. The business community, then as now, had a fondness for “motivational” speaking and writing, especially as it might make a sales force more effective. It is likely not an accident, therefore, that the head of the Chamber of Commerce would be diagnosing the chief of the nation’s problems as fear.

In fact, the precise phrase, “The only thing to fear is fear,” occurs in the 1908 book, Thought Vibration; or, the law of attraction in the thought world, written by New Thought writer William Walker Atkinson. He counseled, “Remember, the only thing to fear is Fear, and—well, don’t even fear Fear, for he’s a cowardly chap at the best, who will run if you show a brave front.” In 1918, Atkinson wrote The Power of Concentration under the pseudonym of Theron Q. Dumont, in which he declared, “There is no justification for the loss of courage. The evils by which you will almost certainly be overwhelmed without it are far greater than those which courage will help you to meet and overcome. Right, then, must be the moralist who says that the only thing to fear is fear.”

Another “New Thought” writer, the “naturopathic doctor,” Henry Lindlahr, wrote in his 1919 book, Practice of Natural Therapeutics, “Avoid fear in all its forms of expression; it is responsible for the greater part of human suffering. The only thing to fear is fear.”

Businesses had invoked these precise sentiments around the time they were published, during the domestic economic pinch prevalent during World War I, for example. On the 4th of July, 1917, the musical instrument firm of Edward Droop and Sons in Washington, D.C., paid for a large display ad in The Washington Post, under the large headline, “The Only Thing to Fear Is Fear.” The firm’s ad continued:

We refuse to be perturbed by the alarmists, the pessimists and by the timid who see things at night. As prophets in the past they have a batting average of about .001. The only times they have hit the truth is when they themselves created the conditions they feared by fearing them. Our slogan during these earnest times is “Keep Business Going.” We shall retrench in nothing, cancel nothing, fear nothing. Our faith in the existing and eternal prosperity of the United States of America is immovable. … We believe that this is the very time of all times that you should buy what you want—whether it be in our line or in any other. The only way to stop your business is to stop the other fellow’s. The only thing to fear is fear.

The phrase “The only thing to fear is fear” and its variants, therefore, were demonstrably “out there” in circulation within the business community during the first few decades of the 20th century. William Safire makes the point that it does not really matter where the phrase came from because it was FDR that used it during his speech to inspire the nation and it was he, therefore, who transmuted the linguistic coin into rhetorical gold.

Reagan campaigned on the promise to cut taxes and reduce the size of government. He believed that growing business would have a beneficial effect on the entire economy, or, as he put it, "A rising tide lifts all boats."

When he became President in 1981, the main economic problem he faced was a high rate of inflation, or, as he described it, "too many dollars chasing too few goods." The "supply side" policy he adopted was to stimulate the non-government portion of the economy, which was the goods-producing portion, while not trying to solve the problem simply by reducing the money supply, the traditional way for the government to combat inflation. Reagan meant to allow business to expand and lower consumer prices and consequently lower unemployment and increase the growth of wealth in the private sector. The theoretical means to reach that goal were:

1. Reduce the growth of government entitlement programs.
2. Reduce government discretionary spending, which meant shrinking government agencies.
3. Reduce the public debt by cutting deficit spending and tightening the money supply, which was meant to strengthen the dollar and reduce inflation. Having the Federal Reserve tighten the money supply was not, strictly speaking, a "supply-side" technique, however.
4. Reduce the cost of doing business by lowering capital gains taxes, thereby increasing manufacturing output (the "supply" in "supply side").
5. Increase the amount of money in the hands of consumers by lowering income taxes.
6. Reduce the cost of doing business by reducing regulation, which was also intended to promote business competition, ultimately lowering consumer costs.
7. Reduce or eliminate government guarantees, subsidies, and price supports, which was meant to allow the free market to determine the cost of doing business and businesses to thrive or fail without interference.

In practice, however, not all of this occurred. Some of this was impossible to achieve for political reasons and some of it did not produce the anticipated effects.

The rate of inflation was cut in half. But economists disagree about how much to attribute that to Reagan's policies and how much to attribute it to other causes, such as the lessening of oil prices.

Also, total government revenues did increase, despite the fact that the top marginal rate of tax in the U.S. fell from 70% to 28%, beginning with the Kemp-Roth Tax Cut of 1981. Some "supply-siders," proposing what their opponents called "Voodoo economics," hoped that cutting taxes drastically would, in and of itself, increase the government's revenues by more than the amount it would lose from the rate reduction. Economists generally agree that that did not happen and attribute some or most of the rise in government revenue after the era's tax cuts to other causes.

Critics also point out that the government's budget deficit rose dramatically during Reagan's term in office. The government's overall discretionary spending was cut, but defense spending grew, as did non-discretionary spending, such as for Social Security. Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, a "supply-sider" in general, believed that just cutting tax rates would not help balance the government's books, and that it was at least as important to cut government expenditures, such as agricultural subsidies, Social Security payments, and even the defense budget. He was disappointed that these cuts were politically impossible to make.

I often watch Dirty Jobs. The episode on fishing for slime eels off the coast of Maine has to have been some of the most weirdly compelling television ever. Unfortunately, I did not see the episode about safety, "Safety Third," episode 05x18, which was first aired November 24, 2009.

Poking about the blogosphere for comments on that episode, I see that several people refer to the Roosevelt quote, and mention that it was from a letter that Roosevelt wrote to his son. The quote they refer to, however, is not from a letter to Roosevelt's son. It is part of a letter that Roosevelt wrote to Solomon Stanwood Menken, the head of the National Security League and the chairman of its Congress of Constructive Patriotism, on January 10, 1917. Roosevelt's younger sister, Mrs. Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, read the letter to a national meeting of the organization on January 26, 1917. The quote is in bold below, with more of the letter reproduced for context:

Americanism means many things. It means equality of rights and, therefore, equality of duty and of obligation. It means service to our common country. It means loyalty to one flag, to our flag, the flag of all of us. It means on the part of each of us respect for the rights of the rest of us. It means that all of us guarantee the rights of each of us. It means free education, genuinely representative government, freedom of speech and thought, equality before the law for all men, genuine political and religious freedom and the democratizing of industry so as to give at least a measurable equality of opportunity for all, and so as to place before us as our ideal in all industries where this ideal is possible of attainment, the system of cooperative ownership and management, in order that the tool users may, so far as possible, become the tool owners. Everything is un-American that tends either to government by a plutocracy or government by a mob. To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American. All privileges based on wealth, and all enmity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American—both of them equally so. Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood—the virtues that made America.The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

Preparedness must be of the soul no less than of the body. We must keep lofty ideals steadily before us, and must train ourselves in practical fashion so that we may realize these ideals. Throughout our whole land we must have fundamental common purposes, to be achieved through education, through intelligent organization and through the recognition of the great vital standards of life and living. We must make Americanism and Americanization mean the same thing to the native-born and to the foreign-born; to the man and to the woman; to the rich and to the poor; to the employer and to the wage-worker. If we believe in American standards, we shall insist that all privileges springing from them be extended to immigrants, and that they in return accept these standards with whole-hearted and entire loyalty. Either we must stand absolutely by our ideals and conceptions of duty, or else we are against them. There is no middle course, and if we attempt to find one, we insure for ourselves defeat and disaster.

The National Security League was founded by Menken and General Leonard Wood (the Army Chief of Staff) in December 1914. It emphasized the need for American "preparedness" in the face of challenges around the world. A swirl of various worries contributed to its rapid growth. Roosevelt echoed some of them here, including a conviction that American character had grown weak and soft, and so its ability to resist challenges had been dangerously reduced. Its young men had been "mollycoddled" by parents, especially mothers, who doted on them. The League's idea was to keep America at peace by keeping it strong. It formed the Military Training Camps Association of America, which operated summer camps for boys, the most successful one at Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain in upstate New York.

The League also heavily promoted (along with the American Legion and the American Red Cross) a 1915 movie, "The Battle Cry of Peace," starring Norma Talmadge in her first leading role, in which American pacifists, used as dupes by foreign agents, successfully lobby against defense spending. America is then invaded and New York and Washington are destroyed and enslaved. Admiral George Dewey and General Wood both played themselves in the film.

The challenges that the League had in mind were not only direct confrontations with foreign powers, which appeared to be looming in dark political clouds throughout Europe and Asia, but also more indirect confrontations within American society between democracy and its foes: an elite, moneyed oligarchy from the right, and a violent, fracturing anarchism from the left, both of which were popularly seen as being unnatural, foreign importations into America.

Among other efforts to promote American preparedness, the League proposed universal athletic and military training for young men, which would not only prepare them for possible battles, but also increase the general "vigor" of the population, and contribute to the assimilation of immigrants into the mainstream. Despite the League's early popularity across the spectrum of political allegiances, after a few years it lost most of its membership when it veered off into a form of xenophobic nativism that encouraged the formation of paramilitary units among youth.

Roosevelt, as is well known, was a firm believer in the virtues of physical exercise and adventures that tested and developed one's courage and inner resources. It is no surprise that he should criticize "safety-first instead of duty first." But he placed duty above physical prowess as well.

President Roosevelt wrote to his son Kermit, who was at Groton Academy, on October 4, 1903:

I am delighted to have you play football. I believe in rough, manly sports. But I do not believe in them if they degenerate into the sole end of any one's existence. I don't want you to sacrifice standing well in your studies to any over-athleticism; and I need not tell you that character counts for a great deal more than either intellect or body in winning success in life. Athletic proficiency is a mighty good servant, and like so many other good servants, a mighty bad master. Did you ever read Pliny's letter to Trajan, in which he speaks of its being advisable to keep the Greeks absorbed in athletics, because it distracted their minds from all serious pursuits, including soldiering, and prevented their ever being dangerous to the Romans? . . .. A man must develop his physical prowess up to a certain point; but after he has reached that point there are other things that count more.

On September 27, 1905, he wrote:

Have you started at your football? I think this is important, too, although of course it must be sacrificed to your studies if necessary. But it would be good for you to have the bodily development that comes from football, and it unquestionably has some effect in helping you with the other boys.

Roosevelt was very fond of football, of all organized team sports. But during 1905, his older son, Ted, played football on the freshman team at Harvard, and during the Harvard-Yale game, the young man appears to have had his nose broken deliberately by the Yale players, who laid him out on the field three times and kicked him in the face. It was all of a piece with an escalation of violence in college football that caused many schools to consider banning the sport. On October 9, 1905, the President wrote to Kermit:

To-day I see the football men of Harvard, Yale and Princeton, to try to get them to come to a gentleman's agreement not to have mucker play.

In fact, he invited two representatives from all three universities to the White House and voiced his concerns to them about the unsportsmanlike aura of unbridled violence that had come to be a feature of college football. Partly as a result of the publicity from this meeting, the college football association agreed the following year to a series of rule changes to the game that were meant to reduce pointless violence.

After Roosevelt left office and war broke out in Europe, he became heartsick at what he regarded as Woodrow Wilson's attempts to keep America out of the war despite German outrages on American lives and property. He attempted to raise a volunteer force to fight for the Allies and, defending the effort, Roosevelt wrote:

Let us pay with our bodies for our souls' desire. Let us, without one hour's unnecessary delay, put the American flag at the battle-front in this great war for Democracy and civilization, and for the reign of justice and fair-dealing among the nations of mankind.

He used his considerable influence to place his sons (with their eager permission) at the very front of the fighting when American forces were sent. He had already written the justification back in 1905, in an address he entitled "The Strenuous Life":

If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at the hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world.

Andrew Johnson, the 17th president of the United States, became the first to be impeached when the House of Representatives on February 24, 1868, overwhelmingly passed an impeachment resolution and in the next few days approved 11 articles of impeachment for the Senate to consider. Following an 11-week trial, the Senate vote for conviction fell one short of the two thirds required by the Constitution to remove a president from office. That failure, some historians believe, may have had an adverse impact on the fate of Congressional Reconstruction and influenced the orientation of the Republican Party.

Johnson, a member of the Democratic Party, and the Republicans who controlled Congress differed greatly concerning Reconstruction. Johnson wanted the South to remain, in the words of his biographer, historian Hans L. Trefousse, a “white man's country,” while Republicans believed that blacks deserved civil rights. Through its Reconstruction legislation, Congress had empowered the army to carry out its policies in the South, but Johnson, as the army's commander-in-chief, had obstinately blocked their execution.

Factions within the Republican Party itself differed concerning Reconstruction policies. Radical Republicans, many of whom had been leaders of the abolition movement, envisioned Reconstruction as inaugurating fundamental change. Their ideology, as Eric Foner has written, “was the utopian vision of a nation whose citizens enjoyed equality of civil and political rights, secured by a powerful and beneficent national state.” Radicals believed that blacks should have the same opportunities for employment as whites and some supported land confiscation of the South’s ruling class in order to grant homesteads to former slaves. Mainstream Republicans opposed confiscation and feared policies that might lead to inflation and inhibit economic growth. They generally favored fiscal responsibility and the establishment of a coalition between “enlightened planters, urban business interests, and black voters, with white propertied elements firmly in control,” Foner asserts.

Although radicals began to talk of impeachment as early as October 1865, moderates in the party agreed to use it only as a last resort after their efforts at Reconstruction had been stymied repeatedly by the president's resistance and Democrats had achieved key victories in 1867 elections. Moderates joined radicals in their belief that the Democrats would gain the presidency in 1868 if Reconstruction was not successfully achieved. Trefousse contends, “A majority of the Republican party had become convinced that Reconstruction could not be completed successfully as long as Johnson occupied the White House.”

Yet impeachment carried with it grave risks for the Republicans. Its failure “would be interpreted as a stunning defeat for radicalism,” Trefousse writes. “Reaction would be revived in the South, and the foes of Reconstruction would be reassured and strengthened.” Trefousse views the failure to predict this outcome as “one of the greatest mistakes the radicals made.”

The specific impeachment charges drawn up by moderates in the House dealt for the most part with Johnson's removal from office of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, an act allegedly in violation of the Tenure of Office Act that Congress had passed to keep Johnson from dismissing underlings without Senate approval. Whether the law applied to Stanton, an ally of the Congressional Reconstruction effort, was debatable, however. Seven moderate Republican senators voted for acquittal after deals were made with Johnson to ensure that he would not interfere with Congressional Reconstruction and would appoint a new secretary of war agreeable to the moderates.

In the short term, Congressional Reconstruction did not seem to be affected adversely by Johnson's acquittal. Most of the new state governments in the South were controlled by Republicans, the Fifteenth Amendment was passed and ratified, and blacks were elected to federal, state, and local offices. Trefousse contends, however, that the acquittal offered “a tremendous moral boost for the conservatives” and “demoralized the radicals.” Moderates subsequently gained power within the Republican party, and during the 1868 convention nominated Ulysses S. Grant over Benjamin F. Wade, the congressman who had been in line to become president had Johnson been impeached and an ally of the radicals.

Reconstruction's success in the long run, Trefousse asserts, was impossible without strong presidential support to stop reaction from setting in. “Had Johnson not been as persistent and had the impeachment succeeded,” he concludes, “it is conceivable that the outcome might have been different.” Johnson's latest biographer, Annette Gordon-Reed, concurs with Trefousse, quoting his statement that as a result of the acquittal, Johnson “preserved the South as a white man's country.”

Some reviewers of Trefousse’s monograph on the impeachment have taken issue with his conclusion. Michael Perman criticizes Trefousse for “grossly exaggerating Johnson's impact by suggesting . . . . that his acquittal helped Alabama Conservatives return to power six years later in 1874.” Richard H. Sewell contends that “recent studies . . . . , make it appear doubtful that ‘a real social revolution in the South would have occurred in these years whatever Johnson might have done.”

Of the 159 nominations for Supreme Court Justice that presidents have submitted to the Senate for confirmation, the Senate has rejected only 12. The first rejection was George Washington's nomination of John Rutledge to be Chief Justice in 1795; the last, Ronald Reagan’s nominee for Associate Justice, Robert H. Bork, in 1987.

In addition to rejecting nominees, the Senate has failed to approve 24 additional nominees by postponing confirmation, taking no action, or by acting in ways that have encouraged nominees to withdraw from consideration, as with Harriet Miers in 2005.

Nearly 60 percent of rejections have occurred when the president and a majority of senators have been members of opposing political parties. Nearly half of the failed conferrals were nominated in a president’s final year in office. One-third of failed appointments were nominations by presidents who had not been elected to office.

“Senatorial courtesy,” whereby senators will vote against a nominee if the nomination is opposed by one of the nominee’s home state senators, when that senator is a member of the same party as the president, also has been a factor in some rejections.

Political science professor P. S. Ruckman, Jr., has argued that in “critical” instances in which a significant shift in the Court’s makeup has been predicted, nominees have been rejected nearly as many times as confirmed. When nominations have not been considered critical, confirmation has been 12 times more likely.

Following an uneventful first 20 years of Senate confirmations, in which all but one of 19 nominees were approved quickly, the confirmation process went through a turbulent 80 years during which the Senate rejected more than one-fourth of nominees. Law Professor Richard D. Friedman concluded, “. . . the probability of a nomination’s rejection peaked in the years surrounding the Civil War, with a dip during the war itself. The probability of rejection then declined gradually, and by 1910 it was close to zero.”

During Reconstruction, Senate opposition to nominees became “politically reputable,” Friedman surmised, as Justices were understood to be politically motivated in their rulings, and Senators thus believed that they had the right and responsibility to vote to insure political reliability and geographical dispersal. (George Washington had established a long-lasting precedent of attempting to have a geographically balanced Supreme Court.)

From 1894 to 1968, only one nominee was rejected (President Hoover’s nominee, North Carolina Circuit Court of Appeals Judge John J. Parker). Beginning in 1968, confirmation battles began again in earnest, as three nominees were rejected between 1968 and 1970. In 1987, Judge Bork was rejected in a politically charged atmosphere, heightened because the voting behavior of the resigning Justice (Lewis F. Powell), had determined a number of important 5-4 decisions.

A 2008 study argued that at present a nominee’s “ideological compatibility” with that of Senators “now takes precedence” over all other factors with regard to their confirmation.

This version of Young George and the Colt is attributed to Horace E. Scudder.

There is a story told of George Washington's boyhood—unfortunately there are not many stories—which is to the point. His father had taken a great deal of pride in his blooded horses, and his mother afterward took pains to keep the stock pure. She had several young horses that had not yet been broken, and one of them in particular, a sorrel, was extremely spirited. No one had been able to do anything with it, and it was pronounced thoroughly vicious as people are apt to pronounce horses which they have not learned to master.

George was determined to ride this colt, and told his companions that if they would help him catch it, he would ride and tame it. Early in the morning they set out for the pasture, where the boys managed to surround the sorrel, and then to put a bit into its mouth. Washington sprang upon its back, the boys dropped the bridle, and away flew the angry animal.

Its rider at once began to command. The horse resisted, backing about the field, rearing and plunging. The boys became thoroughly alarmed, but Washington kept his seat, never once losing his self-control or his mastery of the colt. The struggle was a sharp one; when suddenly, as if determined to rid itself of its rider, the creature leaped into the air with a tremendous bound. It was its last. The violence burst a blood-vessel, and the noble horse fell dead.

Before the boys could sufficiently recover to consider how they should extricate themselves from the scrape, they were called to breakfast; and the mistress of the house, knowing that they had been in the fields, began to ask after her stock. "Pray, young gentlemen,'' said she, "have you seen my blooded colts in your rambles? I hope they are well taken care of. My favorite, I am told, is as large as his sire.''

The boys looked at one another, and no one liked to speak. Of course the mother repeated her question. "The sorrel is dead, madam,'' said her son, "I killed him.'' And then he told the whole story. They say that his mother flushed with anger, as her son often used to, and then, like him, controlled herself, and presently said, quietly: "It is well; but while I regret the loss of my favorite, I rejoice in my son who always speaks the truth.''

Historians have not put much credence in the sorrel colt story. Washington's biographer Marcus Cunliffe identified the story as having appeared in print for the first time in an article written by Washington's step-grandson (the grandson of Martha Washington), George Washington Parke Custis, that was published in the United States Gazette on May 13, 1826, some twenty years after the cherry tree anecdote had first been included in the fifth edition of Rev. Mason L. Weems's The Life of Washington. Custis's article subsequently was reprinted in additional publications of the time, including the January 1827 issue of Casket (available online in the ProQuest subscription database "American Publications Series"), where it was entitled "The Mother of Washington" and identified as taken from the "'Recollections of Washington,' a new work by George W. P. Custis." That work, however, would not be published in book form until 1860, three years after Custis's death.

Custis, Cunliffe surmised, "did more than anyone to propagate the cult of the Mother of Washington. . . . [but] he does not carry conviction as a historian." Although the story was repeated in numerous accounts of Washington's life—a version sans didactic ending was reproduced as fact in a biography published as late as 1997—a few authors even in the 19th century expressed reservations about the story's veracity. Caroline M. Kirkland, in her Memoirs of Washington, published in 1857, cautioned, "The story of his having ridden to death a fiery colt of his mother's . . . sounds a little too much like a modernized version of Alexander's taming Bucephalus; so we shall not repeat it here." In his 1889 two-volume biography, Henry Cabot Lodge discounted the tale, commenting, "How Mr. Custis, usually so accurate, came to be so far infected with the Weems myth as to tell the colt story after the Weems manner, cannot now be determined."

Horace E. Scudder (1838–1902), a biographer, author of children's books, compiler of stories, and also the editor of Atlantic Monthly, was one of the many 19th- and early 20th-century authors who related the story, especially in books intended to educate children. David Ramsay dedicated his 1807 book on Washington to the "Youth of the United States," while John Corry offered his 1809 biography to "the Youth of America." James K. Paulding included the colt story, while omitting that of the cherry tree, in his 1835 biography of Washington dedicated to "the pious, retired, domestic MOTHERS OF THE UNITED STATES. . . . for the use of their children."

Historian Barbara Welter has noted that according to the dominant domestic ideology of the time, "mothers must do the inculcating of virtue [in children] since the fathers, alas, were too busy chasing the dollar." During the Revolutionary era, mothers especially were urged to instill virtue in their sons. In his biography of Washington that was published as part of the "Riverside School Library," Scudder asserted that Washington "owed two strong traits to his mother—a governing spirit and a spirit of order and method." The mother of the father of our country, Scudder related, "taught him many lessons and gave him many rules; but, after all, it was her character shaping his which was most powerful. She taught him to be truthful, but her lessons were not half so forcible as her own truthfulness." While Washington himself honored "my revered Mother; by whose Maternal hand (early deprived of a Father) I was led from Childhood," historians have found no evidence with which to validate the truth of the sorrel colt story.