Beginning with former president Theodore Roosevelt’s return in 1910 from his African safari, Chace brilliantly unfolds a dazzling political circus that featured four extraordinary candidates. When Roosevelt failed to defeat his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, for the Republican nomination, he ran as a radical reformer on the Bull Moose ticket. Meanwhile, Woodrow Wilson, the ex-president of Princeton, astonished everyone by seizing the Democratic nomination from the bosses who had made him New Jersey’s governor. Most revealing of the reformist spirit sweeping the land was the charismatic socialist Eugene Debs, who polled an unprecedented one million votes. Wilson’s “accidental” election had lasting impact on America and the world. The broken friendship between Taft and TR inflicted wounds on the Republican Party that have never healed, and the party passed into the hands of a conservative ascendancy that reached its fullness under Reagan and George W. Bush. Wilson’s victory imbued the Democratic Party with a progressive idealism later incarnated in FDR, Truman, and LBJ. 1912 changed America.

Learned Hand, by general consent, is one of the most distinguished living Americans. It seemed to Irving Dillard, editor of the editorial page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1949-57), that Judge Hand's non-legal addresses and papers ought to be available in volume form -- and this book is the result. Here, in speeches and articles covering a time-span of sixty-five years, is one of the truly liberal, incisive, and human voices of American life. On such subjects as justice, tolerance, democracy, liberty; on such men as Holmes, Brandeis, Cardozo, Stone, and Hughes; on the preservation of personality, the existence of a common will, the meaning of Americanism -- Judge Hand's living words are creative words with profound and enduring significance. Irving Dillard has supplied an Introduction that is a tribute to Learned Hand, and has prefaced each one of the forty-one addresses and papers with an informative note. The Spirit of Liberty is a heartening book for all Americans.