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“FORMER CONGRESSMAN ALBERT Sidney Burleson of Texas had landed in Wilson’s cabinet thanks to his longtime patron, Colonel House. Burleson “has been called the worst postmaster general in American history,” writes the historian G. J. Meyer, “but that is unfair; he introduced parcel post and airmail and improved rural service. It is fair to say, however, that he may have been the worst human being ever to serve as postmaster general.”
― Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

“As the Senate reporter Allen Drury wrote in his diary post-convention, “Few people can hate one another with more cordial enthusiasm than a bunch of Democrats.”
― A.J. Baime, The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

“Partisanship had grown so fierce even treatments for the disease became politicized. There were now “Republican” and “Federalist” cures. Jeffersonian Benjamin Rush, acknowledged the finest doctor in town if not the country, used the time-honored if incorrect practices of bleeding and purging. Alexander Hamilton and his family were stricken just when an old friend from Nevis, Dr. Edward Stevens, was visiting. A veteran of “Yellow Jack” outbreaks in the Caribbean, Stevens administered large doses of “Peruvian bark”—quinine—laced with burnt cinnamon and a nightcap of laudanum. The treatment worked, but Rush, an ardent Republican, dismissed it and went right on bleeding patients, which Stevens believed medieval. Rush’s backyard was soon so drenched with blood that he indirectly began to breed countless flies, while his property gave off a “sickening sweet stench” to passersby.”
― Tim McGrath, James Monroe: A Life

“Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
― Gerard N. Magliocca, American Founding Son: John Bingham and the Invention of the Fourteenth Amendment