THE PRESIDENCY: Correspondence

When President Roosevelt closed his address to Congress on the State of the Union with a quotation from a "wise philosopher at whose feet I sat," he raised political campaigning to a metaphysical plane (TIME, Jan. 13). The quotation, an exhortation to loyalty to high ideals, came from Harvard's Professor Josiah Royce, who died in 1916. Little reason had Franklin Roosevelt to expect that a quotation from a philosopher long dead would awake echoes either philosophic or political. But even a fabulously absent-minded professor, who lived for 34 years in an oasis...

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