Truman by David McCullough

• "After three years on the farm, he joined the Masons...Harry was elected to receive degrees at the Belton Lodge on January 30, 1909. By March, having  become 'letter perfect' in the ritual, he passed to Master Mason." - 78
• "It is a race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America." - Harry S Truman, 86
• "To succeed financially a man can't have any heart. To succeed politically he must be an egoist or a fool or a ward boss tool." - HST, 90
• "At Angers[, France], to his total surprise, he learned he had been made a captain months earlier. No one had bothered to tell him. He only found out when he saw it reported in The New York Times." - 116
• "Harry had been ordered to take up a position about a mile closer to the German lines and prepare to fire a gas barrage. So his first action would be to shell the enemy with poison gas." - 121
• "He had been more at home in the older era. He never learned to like the telephone, or daylight saving time, an innovation adopted during the war. He tried to use a typewriter for a while, but gave it up." - 141
• as presiding judge of Jackson County[, Missouri], "He would build the best roads in the state, if not the country, he vowed, and see they were built honestly." - 176
• during his 1934 Senate campaign, "He talked of the capitalist domination of government in bygone Republican times, praised the determination of FDR to end the 'rule of the rich' and give the average American a chance." - 206
• "he voted with the Democratic majority time after time, helping to pass some of the most far-reaching legislation in the history of Congress. He never once spoke for a measure, never took part in debate. He just voted" - 218
• December 20, 1937: "Senator Truman delivered the second of his assaults on corporate greed and corruption...he attacked the power of Wall Street and the larger evil of money worship, sounding at times not unlike his boyhood hero, William Jennings Bryan." - 231-2
• "It is a pity that Wall Street, with its ability to control all the wealth of the nation and to hire the best law brains in the country, has not produced some statesmen, some men who could see the dangers of bigness and of the concentration of the control of wealth. Instead of working to meet the situation, they are still using the best law brains to serve greed and self interest. People can stand only so much and one of these days there will be a settlement." - HST, 233
• "There is no indispensable man in a democracy...When a republic comes to a point where a man is indispensable, then we have a Caesar." - HST, 244
• "Truman was by now a member of both the Military Affairs Committee and the Military Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee. In September [1941] he had voted for the first peacetime draft." - 254
• "Its formal title was the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, but from the start it was spoken of almost exclusively as the Truman Committee." - 259
• "If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances." - HST, 262
• "Again at Chicago [during the DNC in 1944], as so consistently through the Truman career, it had been the system of politics, the boss system, that counted in deciding his fate." - 321
• "Stimson [Secretary of War] told Truman what the committee had stressed, and what all his senior military advisers were saying, that it was the 'shock value' of the weapon that would stop the war. Nothing short of that would work." - 395
• "'I am anxious to bring home to you that the world is no longer county-size, no longer state-size, no longer nation-size...It is a world in which we must all get along.' On July 2, he went before the Senate to urge the ratification of the United Nations Charter: 'It comes from the reality of experience in a world where one generation has failed twice to keep the peace.'" - 402
• At Potsdam, "He, Churchill, and their combined Chiefs of Staff decided that Vietnam, or Indochina, would, 'for operational purposes,' be divided, with China in charge north of the 16th parallel and British forces in the southern half, leaving little chance for the unification or independence of Vietnam and ample opportunity for the return of the French." - 452
• "He asked for national compulsory health insurance to be funded by payroll deductions. Under the system, all citizens would receive medical and hospital service irrespective of their ability to pay." - 473-4
• July 25, 1947: "Congress passed Truman's sweeping National Security Act, legislation he had sent to the Hill in February and that would mean mammoth change for the whole structure of power in Washington. Its primary purpose was to unify the armed services under a single Department of Defense and a single Secretary of Defense...It also established the Air Force as a separate military service, set up a new National Security Council, and gave formal authorization to the Central Intelligence Agency." - 566
• "He had faced the pressures of the Palestine issue, the increasing threat of war over Berlin, watched his popularity disintegrate in the polls, seen himself portrayed in the press as inept and pathetic. His party was broke. And now the New Dealers were abandoning him, and noisily. No President in memory, not even Herbert Hoover in his darkest days, had been treated with such open contempt by his own party." - 633
• "If you can't stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen." - HST, 633
• "Truman liked to move fast. Roosevelt, because of his infirmities, had preferred a smooth, easy pace of no more than 35 miles an hour when travelling in the [Ferdinand] Magellan[, the presidential train car]. Truman liked to go about 80." - 656
• "Republicans in Washington have a habit of becoming curiously deaf to the voice of the people. They have a hard time hearing what the ordinary people of the country are saying. But they have no trouble at all hearing what Wall Street is saying." - HST, 661
• introducing the Point Four Program, "The material resources which we can afford to use for assistance of other peoples are limited. But our imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible....Democracy alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world into triumphant action, not only against their human oppressors but also against their ancient enemies -- hunger, misery, and despair." - HST, 731
• "as Winston Churchill noted in a speech in London, the full allied force of twelve divisions in Western Europe faced a soviet threat of eighty divisions. The NATO allies were exceedingly concerned lest the United States become too involved in distant Korea." - 790
• "If 'victory' in Korea meant risking a world war -- a war of atomic bombs -- Truman would settle for no victory in Korea. That was the line he had drawn. There was a substitute for victory: it was peace. And he would stand by his policy of limited war for that specific objective." - 856
• 1969: "His books became his life more and more...What would her father's idea of heaven have been, Margaret would be asked years later. 'Oh,' she said, 'to have a good comfortable chair, a good reading lamp, and lots of books around that he wanted to read.'" - 986
• "Born in the Gilded age, the age of steam and gingerbread Gothic, Truman had lived to see a time of lost certainties and rocket trips to the moon. The arc of his life spanned more change in the world that in any prior period in history." - 991

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present by Michael B. Oren

• 1625: "the earliest documented attack [on New World merchants] occurred...when Moroccan corsairs captured a merchant ship sailing from the North American colonies." - 19
• "French leaders were keen to promote their own Mediterranean trade and feared the impact of American competition," so they did not assist the young U.S. against Barbary pirates, in spite of the 1778 Franco-American Treaty of Alliance - 21
• John Adams, minister to Tripoli, on war with North African pirates, "We ought not to fight them [the Barbary States] at all unless we determine to fight them forever" - 27
• "Under the specter of imprisoned sailors in North Africa and imperiled American ships, delegates from twelve of the thirteen states gathered in Philadelphia in May 1787. Their purpose was to consider replacing the Articles of Confederation with a more centralized national character -- to rectify the very weakness that had humbled the United States before Barbary" - 29
• March 27, 1794: "Washington signed into law a bill authorizing an outlay of $688,888.82 for the building of six frigates 'adequate for the protection of the commerce of the United States against Algerian corsairs.'" - 35
• 1902: "The term 'Middle East' was coined by an American admiral....Before that time, Americans (and Europeans) spoke of the area as simply 'the East' or, more commonly, 'the Orient.'" - 41
• 1800: William Bainbridge takes the George Washington to Algiers to deliver tribute and is forced to convey the Algerians' own tribute to the Ottomans;  he "thus became the first American serviceman to behold the epicenter of Ottoman power [Istanbul]" - 53
• "Jefferson maintained the hope of building an international coalition against Barbary, of working 'in rotation' with the European powers to rid the Mediterranean of corsairs." - 54
• May 14, 1801: Tripoli declares war with the U.S. - 55
• September 1801: William "Eaton [ first consul to Tunis]...met Hamid Qaramanli, the exiled brother of Tripoli's sovereign...[and] suggested that the United States help Hamid reclaim his rightful throne and retain him as a trustworthy ally." - 65
• 1823: Pliny Fisk opens the first American-style school in Lebanon - 94
• "In Lebanon, opposition to the Americans' activities mounted from the Maronites, a Catholic sect traditionally associated with France and which ran its own lycee-style schools." - 95
• "While the struggle against North Africa compelled Americans to choose between bribing the pirates and fighting them, the Greek war [for independence] posed an even more fundamental question. Should the United States give precedence to its economic interests in the Middle East or should it forget financial considerations and uphold its democratic ideals?" - 108
• May 7, 1830: "America's first-ever Treaty of Navigation and Commerce with the Ottoman Empire. This granted extraterritorial rights ('capitulations') to the United States and permission to trade in the Black Sea." - 115
• "A common word for cloth in the Persian Gulf area was merkani and in Turkey, americano." - 116
• "American missionaries in the Middle East viewed Manifest Destiny not as a blueprint for conquering territory but rather as a warrant for capturing souls and minds." - 131
• in response to an attack on an American family's farm in 1858, the U.S. send consul Edwin "De Leon [who] was also a Jew, a member of a venerable Sephardic family who owed his post to the State Department's now established notion that Jews formed a natural link between Christian American and the Muslim Middle East." - 167
• "The same urge to safeguard the United States from the ecological devastation of the Middle East led [George Perkins] Marsh to pioneer the American conservationist movement and the creation of a national research institute on nature, the Smithsonian." - 169
• January 1863: while the U.S. was occupied with the Civil War and unable to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, "Emperor Napoleon III...dispatched thirty thousand troops to Vera Cruz with orders to occupy Mexico City. With them marched a battalion of five hundred Egyptians whose services had been volunteered by the Egyptian ruler Sa'id Pasha" - 186-7
• with the assistance of veterans of the American Civil War, "By 1873, Egypt had all the appurtenances of a late nineteenth-century Western-style army, including staff and naval colleges, commands for submarines and mines, and a system for conveying orders." - 199
• "A total of forty-eight Civil War officers, both blue and gray, worked, explored, and, occasionally fought for Egypt. They built an army, erected schools, and blazed new trails into Africa." - 208
• 1868: "Though the documentary record on the episode is vague, the first American attempt to assist Arabs in achieving independence occurred in Syria" - 247
• August 4, 1873: "Ottomans opened the first Middle Eastern embassy in Washington" - 249
• On Britain's invasion of Egypt, 1882, "Though American warships were not involved in the attack, their very presence in Egyptian waters that July, genially exchanging salutes with British destroyers, indicated the degree to which Washington had resigned itself to Egypt's inevitable submission." - 262
• "The missionaries' failure was illuminated by the case of Alexander Russell Webb. A former New Yorker and consul to the Philippines, Webb converted from Presbyterianism to Islam in 1888. He returned to his native city five years later, stout, bearded, and turbaned, and proceeded to establish one of the nation's first mosques and Muslim newspapers." - 287
• "The symbiosis of faith and power in America's Middle East involvement became increasingly pronounced toward the end of the nineteenth century." - 290
• 1883: "Persia's Qajar rulers appealed to Washington for help in resisting British and Russian attempts to dominate the country." - 290
• "Nations, in his [Teddy Roosevelt's] worldview, were like individuals, some weak and others stalwart, and the latter were obliged to defend the former." - 311
• January 1906: responding to German-French disputes over primacy in Morocco, "the United States, which had never participated in the great-power conferences on the Middle East, became a cosponsor of the international deliberations on Morocco that convened in Algericas, Spain." - 316
• After Teddy Roosevelt's speech in Cairo in 1910 support British rule and dissuading Egyptian nationalists, "Hundreds of those nationalists subsequently gathered outside the former president's hotel for the first major anti-American demonstration ever in the Middle East." - 318
• "Just as the Wilson administration extended assistance to the Armenians irrespective of their political aspirations, so did it relieve the Yishuv [Palestinian-Jewish population] without ever taking a position on Zionism. But as American doughboys marched to the front in Europe, and as European statesmen secretly drafted maps of the postwar Middle East, Washington found that it could no longer remain nonpartisan on Palestine." - 359

** I stopped taking notes after WWI because the author admits in the introduction that his coverage of post-WWI Middle East is weak in comparison to other books on the subject. **

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

• "To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word." - 4
• "few men ever worshiped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries." - 7
• "To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships." - 11
• "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." - 15
• "The two great obstacles which confronted the [Freedman's Bureau] officials were the tyrant and the idler, -- the slaveholder who was determined to perpetuate slavery under another name; and the freedman who regarded freedom as perpetual rest, -- the Devil and the Deep Sea." - 33
• "This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr. [Booker T.] Washington's programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently completely to overshadow the higher aims of life." - 52
• "The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering." - 70
• On a changing Atlanta, "she lay gray and still on the crimson soil of Georgia; then the blue smoke began to curl from her chimneys, the tinkle of bell and scream of whistle broke the silence, the rattle and roar of busy life slowly gathered and swelled, until the seething whirl of the city seemed a strange thing in a sleepy land." - 76
• "in all our Nations striving is not the Gospel of Work befouled by the Gospel of Pay?" - 78
• "the habit is forming of interpreting the world in dollars....the sudden transformation of a fair far-off ideal of freedom into the hard reality of bread winning and the consequent deification of Bread." - 81
• "to seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a blacksmith; almost, but not quite." - 85
• "shall we teach them trades, or train them in the liberal arts? Neither and both: teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think; make carpenters of carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops of fools." - 87
• "Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground." - 96
• In regards to opposition to higher education for blacks (cf. Booker T. Washington), "If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?" - 104
• "a pall of debt hangs over the beautiful land; the merchants are in debt to the wholesalers, the planters are in debt to the merchants, the tenants owe the planters, and laborers bow and bend beneath the burden of it all." - 127
• "America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons." - 144
• "The rush to town since 1880 is the counter-movement of men disappointed in the economic opportunities of the Black Belt." - 154
• "For we must never forget that the economic system of the South to-day which has succeeded the old regime is not the same system as that of the old industrial North, of England, or of France, with their trade-unions, the restrictive laws, their written and unwritten commercial customs, and their long experience. It is, rather, a copy of that England of the early nineteenth century, before the factory acts" - 170
• "we must not forget that under a strict slave system there can scarcely be such a thing as crime. But when these variously constituted human particles are suddenly thrown broadcast on the sea of life, some swim, some sink, and some hang suspended, to be forced up or down by the chance currents of a busy hurrying world." - 178
• "The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy, -- the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and millionaires and -- sometimes -- Negroes, become throbbing souls" - 219-20
• So woefully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of "swift" and "slow" in human doing, and the limits of human perfectibility, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science." - 265