Quotes from H. Paul Jeffers

The procession was led by Vice President Thomas Marshall, whose lasting contribution to American history is his opinion that "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.

He suggested that all lieutenants, captains, and inspectors be fit to walk ten miles a day on three consecutive days, or in some cases that they ride thirty miles a day for the same period. Fourteen years later, as Mayor La Guardia went on the radio to read "Dick Tracy" to "the kiddies" during a newspaper strike, he offered an aside to Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine, wondering why Dick Tracy was slim and trim and so many New York police detectives were fat.

The rapid elevation was the result of his proven flying ability and the recognition by the army of the prospective advantages of having a member of Congress in its officer corps. However, being both congressman and army officer, and getting paid twice from government coffers, were impermissible in federal law. Consequently, La Guardia's compensation from both jobs was cut off, leaving him without money.

That left him the Republicans. Its bastion in La Guardia's neighborhood was the Madison Republican Club, whose membership the Democratic boss George Washington Plunkitt once derided as "dudes who part their names in the middle.

While debate raged over the size of an army (it was settled at half of Wilson's idea) and the proper place of the United States on the world stage (the U.S. Senate decided that American security was better preserved by two oceans than a seat in the League of Nations),

A man who once asserted "one drink never hurt nobody" was now wholeheartedly enlisted in the ranks of Prohibitionists who had been fighting for decades against "demon rum" and "John Barleycorn" in the belief that bad private behavior should be restrained by federal statute.

Representative Fiorello La Guardia responded, "I maintain this law will be almost impossible of enforcement. And if this law fails to be enforced-as it certainly will be, as it is drawn-it will create contempt and disregard for law all over the country.

In the spring of 1919 La Guardia found himself still way down on the seniority list in a Congress described by muckraking editor H. L. Mencken as "petty lawyers and small-town bankers" and a "depressing gang of incompetents." All La Guardia could do was rail at "outrages" in speeches that few people paid attention to and cast votes that changed nothing. Not even the "progressives," such as Robert La Follette and George Norris, took him seriously.

Those who said they would do so only in return for a greased palm, got a little money.