The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
— Theodore Roosevelt, The Kansas City Star, 18 May 1918
Excerpted from “This I Remember” by Eleanor Roosevelt, published 1949.
“There are two kinds of snobbishness. That of the man who has had a good many opportunities and looks down on those who lack them is usually recognized by all. The other kind of snobbishness is rarely understood, yet it is real. It is that of the self-made man, who glories in his successes in overcoming difficulties and admires greatly people who have achieved the things he considers of importance. Governor Smith, for instance, had a great deal of respect for material success. He admired men who, like John Raskob, had made a success in business through their own efforts or who in some other way had made a name in the world in spite of modest beginnings. But he tended to look down on a man who had not met and conquered the situations he himself had – a man like Franklin, who was content not to make a great deal of money so long as he had enough to live comfortably. Franklin had always been moderately wealthy, but Governor Smith couldn’t believe that he could be as able as if he had been self-made. The fact that Franklin would spend money on a picture or on the first edition of a book but would economize on food and clothes and entertainment was hard for him to understand. Governor Smith always wore expensive clothes, because they indicated material success; he liked to eat in well-known restaurants; he liked good food and specially prepared dishes. When we went to Albany, [after Franklin was elected governor in 1929] the domestic staff in the Mansion was troubled because they felt they could not cater adequately for us. For instance, they had always had to make monumental desserts for the Smiths, and thought we would expect even grader dishes. They were greatly relieved when they learned that we ate very simple food- like our traditional scrambled eggs for Sunday-night suppers.
Franklin could see no sense in spending money in a restaurant when he had a home to eat in, and he had a lot of the little economies. For example, he never paid more than two dollars for a shirt, and boasted when he found he could get one for $1.50, and he never would buy more than two pairs of shoes, though he bought those and other things in England, as his father had. When we were first married, he asked me one day what I had done with a pair of shoes, and I said I had sent them to be soled. He thought I meant “sold” and was very angry. Not long ago, when I was cleaning out the big house after his death, I found a suit, which I gave to Jimmy, that his grandfather had bought in London and which had been kept all those years simply because it was ‘too good to throw away.’
Governor Smith did not understand that kind of economy. I always felt strongly that he had a defensive attitude, which arose, of course, from his consciousness that he lacked breadth of knowledge, for he was too intelligent not to know that he did not have a certain kind of cultural background. It often seemed to me that he said things which were contemptuous of academic knowledge simply to bolster his own sense of security.”
While there is some disagreement as to how the fire started, a likely theory is that in May 1962 Centralia, Pennsylvania’s firefighters, as they had done every year, set a controlled fire at the town’s landfill. In recent years the landfill had been moved to the site of an abandoned strip mine next to the Odd Fellows Cemetery. On May 27, 1962 the five firefighters set a controlled fire at the dump and allowed it to burn for some time, but unlike in previous years the fire was not fully extinguished. An unsealed pit in the abandoned strip mine allowed the fire to enter the labyrinth of abandoned mines the small borough nestled in the Appalachian foothills sits upon. The borough, by law, was obligated to install a fire-resistant clay barrier between each layer, but the project had fallen behind schedule and went uncompleted.
