“And shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust of gain? Forbid it, Heaven." Washington himself could be a hard driving businessman, yet he found the rapacity of many vendors unconscionable. As he told George Mason,… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
In the 1920s, Wall Street was a world that was really dominated by professional speculators and stock pools. These people had a monopoly over information. — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
“In other words, Julia still believed in the beneficial effects of tobacco long after her husband had likely died from it. Even grimacing with… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
“Right before his inauguration, he received a Quaker delegation and asked them to nominate Indian agents from their members. “If you can make Quakers… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
“Grant roomed with Fred Dent, who also singled out Grant as “the clearest headed young man I ever saw . . . He always wanted to do… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
“Hamilton has often been extolled as the exponent of a rational foreign policy based on cool calculations of national self-interest. But his April 14… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
“While the folks at home embraced him as an improbable hero, Washington was denigrated in England as a reckless young warrior and in France… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
“the immorality of slavery became patently clear that spring. He had acquired from Colonel Dent the mulatto slave named William Jones who had worked… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
“As his life steadily unraveled, he pawned his gold watch and chain for $20 on December 23, 1857, to purchase Christmas presents for his… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
“Grant had overwhelmingly won the electoral vote, and had garnered the largest popular majority of the century, nearly 56 percent of the vote, the… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
“The chief quartermaster on the West Coast, Robert Allen, an old friend of Grant’s, learned he was holed up in a cheap miner’s hotel… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
“Returning to his Manhattan town house on Christmas Eve, Grant, sixty-one, pivoted to hand the driver a holiday tip when he slipped on the… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
“When he bet Julia that she wouldn’t dare to descend into the mine, located seventeen hundred feet below, it roused her fighting spirit and… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
“Consequential to the election outcome were the many private contacts in the capital between southern Democrats and Hayes’s northern Republican supporters. At Wormley’s Hotel… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
“The trial wasn’t the finest hour of American justice as the treatment of the prisoners seemed medieval in its barbarism. Almost all of the… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
“he warned that progressive accumulation of debt “is perhaps the NATURAL DISEASE of all Governments. And it is not easy to conceive anything more… — Ron Chernow Copy Share Image
