Muley knew when not to be stubborn

“The House Ways and Means Committee was skeptical of [FDR’s] revenue proposals.

“Its  legendary chairman, Robert Lee ‘Muley’ Doughton [of] North Carolina had been a central figure in passage of the Social Security Act and other New Deal tax legislation. But Doughton foremost was a Southerner. He had been born during the Civil War, and his father, a captain under Robert E. Lee, named his son after the general.

“He also was a fiscal conservative who had earned his nickname  for ‘a backwoods stubbornness that cloaked a shrewd ability to compromise’….

“He often reminded colleagues that ‘the science of levying and collecting taxes is the science of getting the most feathers with the least squawking of the geese.’ ”

– From “The Price of Liberty: Paying for America’s Wars from the Revolution to the War on Terror” by Robert D. Hormats (2007)