The demagogue takes the stage. Freedom weeps.

He is a character as old as time.

The bane of democracies.

For it is democracies which empower the people.

And it is the demagogue who manipulates the people for his own selfish purposes.

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In the beginning…

All brave young men wanted to go.

Including George Snowden, a twenty-one-year-old lawyer from Franklin, Pennsylvania.

In 1862, the new Civil War was an adventure that beckoned.

It promised travel, comradeship, excitement.

And, if you returned home, public adulation.

[No one appreciated the scale of the carnage that was to come.]

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Reading the paper on September 7, 1944.

Allied armies are attacking the outer defenses of the Siegfried Line, the German west wall of defense.

The Line extends for 390 miles and is comprised of thousands of bunkers, tunnels, dragon’s teeth and anti-tank ditches.

Germany had begun constructing the Line in the mid-1930s.

After the Allies’ D-Day invasion in June, Germany began upgrade efforts using forced labor, concentration camp prisoners and German teenagers.

Allied headquarters says the Siegfried Line will be broken, but it will be a difficult and costly battle.

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‘The old playbook.’

Kamala Harris said recently that Trump was using that ‘same old, tired playbook’ in his verbal attacks against her.

So, what’s in that old playbook?

And who wrote it?

Let’s go back to 1958.

Alabama’s George Wallace is running for governor.

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Anything to win.

It is the fall of 1968.

Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon’s early lead in the polls is evaporating.

Vice President Hubert Humphrey, his Democratic opponent, is steadily gaining ground.

And President Lyndon Johnson is pursuing negotiations which would end the Vietnam War, the number one issue in the campaign.

But Nixon is determined to win.

So, he creates a communications back-channel with the governments of North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

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American neutrality.

It is September 4, 1939.

The events of the past few days have been dizzying.

And those paying attention are convinced the world will never be the same.

On Friday, September 1, 1939, a bedside phone call had awakened President Franklin Roosevelt at 2:50 AM.

The call was from William Bullitt, the American ambassador in Paris.

He told FDR that he had just spoken to Tony Biddle, the American ambassador in Warsaw.

Biddle had told him air raid sirens were wailing across Warsaw and the Polish Foreign Ministry had said there had been numerous Nazi incursions onto Polish soil.

“Well, Bill, it has come at last,” FDR said. “God help us all.”

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Divided loyalties.

It is September 3, 1861, and Kentucky’s neutrality in the American Civil War has come to an end.

While the six-month-old war had pitted state against state, in Kentucky, the war had turned brother against brother.

Both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis had been born in Kentucky.

Views on slavery varied.

Twenty percent of Kentuckians were enslaved people.

And many who weren’t themselves enslavers nevertheless considered slavery necessary for the state’s economy.

But a strong current of nationalism was present in Kentucky.

So, to maintain a delicate balance, the legislature declared its official neutrality soon after the war broke out in April 1861.

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A winner’s attitude.

American troops faced off against the Nazis for the first time in North Africa.

And it didn’t start out well.

They were defeated at the Kasserine Pass, a two-mile wide gap in a mountain range in west-central Tunisia.

Losses were heavy.

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Reading the paper on August 31, 1940.

British bombers attacked central Berlin in three waves today, using incendiary and explosive bombs.

The Krupp Works at Essen and German shipping in the Netherlands were also struck.

Overnight, British Spitfire and Hurricane aircraft attacked formations of seven hundred German planes which bombed London and thirteen other British cities.

Britain’s air losses from this raid would be the heaviest of the entire Battle of Britain.

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It is June 3, 1907.

And Hammerstein’s Paradise Roof Garden theater has reopened to a full house for the summer season.

The headline act is Barnold’s Dog and Monkey Pantomime company, which performed “a whole scene of drunkenness and arrest carried out by little animals.”

The Paradise Roof Garden, which Oscar Hammerstein built on the roofs of the Victoria and Belasco theaters in 1899, covered an entire block at 44th and Broadway in New York.

It was just one of many rooftop theaters built by New York theater impresarios in the late 1800s.

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