F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda

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Zelda’s one great love affair was with this French aviator. It was her first infidelity to Scott, and probably her only one. It was aggressive because she was being liberated by infidelity from this very possessive love that Scott had for her. And for the first time she was experiencing erotic ecstasy. She’d never experienced that with Scott. She used to complain to poor Scott that he was sexually inadequate.

She frightened the aviator by the violence of her reactions. She went around the bend because of him. She tried to kill herself, swallowing the contents of a bottle of morphine or something. The aviator was frightened away.

-- Tennessee Williams at The Paris Review

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1794 The Federalists and Class Politics

The Federalists ruled the first years of the new country with a decided patrician air. In response, political societies emerged to counter this governance.

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“[These Democratic societies] are laughed at and ridiculed by men who consider the science of government to belong naturally only to a few families, and argue, that their families ought to be obeyed & supported in princely grandeur; that the common people ought to give half their earnings to these few, for keeping them under, and awing the poor commonality from destroying one another, which their savage nature would lead to, were it not for the benignity and good sense of the few superiors Heaven has been pleased to plant among them.”

-- Matthew Lyon (1794), army veteran and Republican

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[Source: Sean Wilentz, “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln”]