Empire Statesman

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Empire Statesman (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

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Alfred Emanuel Smith, Jr., is unquestionably the hero of this highly favorable biography of a political leader the author believes has been underestimated and unjustly forgotten. Slayton asserts that Smith’s major claim to fame was his role in expanding American democracy. America in the 1920’s, Slayton contends,

was a nation torn apart, split between an older, rural society and the modern, urban age. In a period of intolerance and ignorance, marked by the Ku Klux Klan and the Scopes trial, no other politician at this high a level did more to demand that the new generation of...

[The entire page is 1993 words long]

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