By some weird coincidence of impulse and information, I ended up getting from the library The President Makers: The Culture of Politics and Leadership in An Age of Enlightenment 1896-1919 by Matthew Josephson.  I just read the first few pages of “The Golden Years of McKinley and Hanna” and feel like I have just taken the Red Pill.

Is trying to decipher the problems in American history always like pulling up a weed and finding the root is so long that it never pulls free?