Gerald W. Johnson

"In a book as remarkable for its exuberant spirit as for its scholarly and distinguished prose, Gerald Johnson has brought gloriously alive the most brilliant period of our nation's history. America's Silver Age saw the country settling down after the stormy years of its founding, testing certain ideas and establishing policies which gave the government its permanent form. And the three men, so strangely dissimilar, who were chiefly responsible for the character of political events were the great triumvirate. Henry Clay, a pestilential fellow, a man of evil fame, but loved as few of his countrymen have been loved. John C. Calhoun, above everything correct, the very incarnation of the wrath of God. Daniel Webster, simple and direct, the contented debtor, the eloquent poet, the servant of big business. None of these men attained the presidency, but they refashioned the republic and determined certain American principles which endure to this day. Not least among their accomplishments, they determined the outcome of the Civil War. By stressing those events which can be defined as statecraft rather than politics, Gerald Johnson does full justice to the stature of his subjects, and incidentally draws startling parallels between Amerca's Silver Age and our own troubled times." --Taken from book jacket flap.

"Here is a trenchant and amusing account of the issues that have stirred the American people from 1922, when the first Pulitzer Prize cartoon award was made, to 1958, with a full-page reproduction of each of the winning cartoons."