POLITICAL PARALYSIS IN THE GILDED AGE
"Grant... had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages... That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called - and should actually and truly be - the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous... The progress of evolution, from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin... Grant... should have lived in a cave and worn skins." - Henry Adams, 1907
"Everybody is talkin' these days about Tammany men growin' rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin' the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There's all the difference in the world between the two. Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I've made a big fortune out of the game, and I'm gettin' richer every day, but I've not gone in for dishonest graft - blackmailin' gamblers, saloonkeepers, disorderly people, etc. - and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics. There's an honest graft, and I'm an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin': 'I seen my opportunities and I took 'em.' Just let me explain by examples. My party's in power in the city, and it's goin' to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I'm tipped off, say, that they're going to lay out a new park at a certain place. I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and a buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before. Ain't it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that's honest graft." - George Washington Plunkett, a political boss in Tammany Hall, 1905
"Its most noteworthy peculiarity has been its universality; affecting nations that have been involved in war as well as those which have maintained peace; those which have a stable currency, based on gold, and those which have an unstable currency, based on promises which have not been kept; those which live under systems of free exchange of commodities, and those whose exchanges are more or less restricted. It has been grievous in old communities like England and Germany, and equally so in Australia, South Africa, and California, which represent the new; it has been a calamity exceeding[ly] heavy to be borne, alike by the inhabitants of sterile Newfoundland and Labrador, and of the sunny, fruitful sugar-islands of the East and West Indies." - David A. Wells, leading economist of the era describing the global effect of the U.S. depression, 1873
"tending to degrade American politics... The men who are in office only for what they can make out of it are thoroughly unwholesome citizens, and their activity in politics is simply noxious... Decent private citizens must inevitably be driven out of politics if it is suffered to become a mere selfish scramble for plunder, where victory rests with the most greedy, the most cunning, the most brazen. The whole patronage system is inimical to American institutions; it forms one of the gravest problems with which democratic and republican government has to grapple." - Theodore Roosevelt, condemning the patronage system
"I once was a tool of oppression, And as green as a sucker could be, And monopolies banded together, To beat a poor hayseed like me." - The Hayseed, popular protest song among farmers in the 1890s
INDUSTRY COMES OF AGE
"The wealthy class is becoming more wealthy; but the poorer class is becoming more dependent. The gulf between the employed and the employer is growing wider; social contrasts are becoming sharper; as liveried carriages appear; so do barefooted children." - Henry George, 1879
"In their delirium of greed the managers of our transportation systems disregard both private right and the public welfare. Today they will combine and bankrupt their weak rivals, and by the expenditure of a trifling sum possess themselves of properties which cost the outlay of millions. Tomorrow they will capitalize their booty for five times the cost, issue their bonds, and proceed to levy tariffs upon the people to pay dividends upon the fraud." - James B. Weaver, nominee of the Populists writing about the railroad magnates, 1892
"The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, on the exploitation of immigrant labor, 1860
"The man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which was his to administer during life, will pass away 'unwept, unhonored, and unsung,' no matter to what uses he leaves the dross which he cannot take with him. Of such as these the public verdict will then be: 'The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.'" - Andrew Carnegie, 1889
"The fruits of toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few... and the possessors of these, in turn despise the Republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two great classes - tramps and millionaires." - Populist platform, 1892
"The South didn't furnish a thing on earth for that funeral but the corpse and the hole in the ground... They buried him in a New York coat and a Boston pair of shoes and a pair of breeches from Chicago and a shirt from Cincinnati, leaving him nothing to carry into the next world with him to remind him of the country in which he lived, and for which he fought for four years, but the chill of blood in his veins and the marrow in his bones." - Henry W. Grady, describing the burial of a Confederate veteran in Georgia, 1889
AMERICA MOVES TO THE CITY
"What shall we do with our great cities? What will our great cities do with us...? [T]he question... does not concern the city alone. The whole country is affected... by the condition of its great cities." - Lyman Abbott, 1891
"So at last I was going to America! Really, really going, at last! The boundaries burst. The arch of heaven soared. A million suns shone out for every star. The winds rushed in from outer space, roaring in my ears, 'America! America!'" - Mary Antin, immigrant from Poland, 1912
"America is God's crucible, the great melting pot, where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!... Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians - into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American!" - Israel Zangwill, Jewish immigrant playwright responding to nativists who condemned new immigrants
"It is said... that the quality of recent immigration is undesirable. The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens." - Grover Cleveland, 1897
"A doctrine like that of Transmutation of Species... cannot be treated with some respect; and when we find that such naturalists... many of whom but a few days ago were publicly opposing it, are now coming round, one by one, to espouse it, we may well doubt whether it may not be destined eventually to prevail." - William James, student at Harvard reviewing Darwin's theory, 1865
"It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's self through the eyes of others... One ever feels his two-ness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." - W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903
"Our boasted freedom necessarily involves slavery, so long as we recognize private property in land. Until that is abolished, Declarations of Independence and Acts of Emancipation are in vain. So long as one man can claim the exclusive ownership of the land from which other men must live, slavery will exist, and as material progresses on, must grow and deepen." - Henry George, 1879
"City housekeeping has failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities. The men have been carelessly indifferent to much of the civic housekeeping, as they have been indifferent to the details of the household... City government demands the help of minds accustomed to detail and a variety of work, to a sense of obligation to the health and welfare of young children, and to a responsibility for the cleanliness and comfort of other people." - Jane Addams, arguing that women's suffrage would improve the social and political condition of cities, 1906
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn... All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." - Ernest Hemingway, 1935
"[T]he air of reality... seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel... [I]t is here that he [the novelist] competes with his brother the painter in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle." - Henry James, articulating the technical goals of realist literature, 1884
"Sell the cook stove if necessary and come. You must see this fair." - Hamlin Garland, writing to his parents to come see the Columbian Exposition
THE GREAT WEST AND THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION
"Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development." - Frederick Jackson Turner, 1893
"The White Man, who possesses this whole vast country from sea to sea, who roams over it at pleasure, and lives where he likes, cannot know the cramp we feel in this little spot, with the undying remembrance of the fact, which you know as well as we, that every foot of what you proudly call America, not very long ago belonged to the red man." - Washakie, 1878
"With the skins [the Indians] build their houses; with the skins they clothe and show themselves; from the skins they make ropes and also obtain wool. From the sinews they make thread, with which they sew their clothing and likewise their tents. From the bones they shape awls, and the dung they use for firewood, since there is no fuel in all that land. The bladders serve as jugs and drinking vessels. They sustain themselves on the flesh of the animals, eating it slightly roasted and sometimes uncooked. Taking it in their teeth, they pull with one hand; with the other they hold a large flint knife and cut off mouthfuls, swallowing it half chewed, like birds. They eat raw fat, without warming it." - Coronado expedition, describing Plains Indians' reliance on buffalo, 1541
"Tell your people that since the Great Father promised that we should never be removed we have been moved five times... I think you had better put the Indians on wheels and you can run them about wherever you wish." - Sioux Indian, complaining to the white Sioux Commission created by Congress
"His reply was, bringing his fist down close to my face, 'Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians.' I told him what pledges were given the Indians. He replied that he 'had come to kill Indians, and believed it to be honorable to kill Indians under any and all circumstances." - Army lieutenant, speaking to Colonel Chivington that attacking the Indians would be a violation of pledges
"We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this they made war. Could anyone expect less?" - Philip Sheridan, reflecting on Indian wars
"I see no longer the curling smoke rising from our lodge poles. I hear no longer the songs of the women as they prepare the meal. The antelope have gone; the buffalo wallows are empty. Only the wall of the coyote is heard. The white man's medicine is stronger than ours... We are like birds with a broken wing." - Plenty Coups, 1909
"My circumstances are rather trying. So much danger attends me on every hand. A long journey before me, going I know not wither, without mother or sister to attend me, can I expect to survive it all?" --- one month later: "In the afternoon we rode thirty-five miles without stopping. Pretty well tired out, all of us. Stood it pretty well myself." - Mary Richardson Walker, on the journey across western prairies
"The bankers followed us out west; And did in mortgage invest; They looked ahead and shrewdly planned, And soon they'll have our Kansas land." - The Kansas Fool, a farm protest song
"No strike has ever been lost." - Eugene Debs, after the Pullman strike collapsed
"The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity." - Eugene Debs, 1897
"The hopelessly ignorant and savagely covetous waifs and strays of American civilization voted for Bryan, but the bulk of the solid sense, business integrity, and social stability sided with McKinley. The nation is to be heartily congratulated." - The London, happy with McKinley's gold-standard victory
EMPIRE AND EXPANSION
"We assert that no nation can long endure half republic and half empire, and we warn the American people that imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home." - Democratic National Platform, 1900
"A new consciousness seems to have come upon us - the consciousness of strength - and with it a new appetite, the yearning to show our strength... Ambition, interest, land hunger, pride, the mere joy of fighting, whatever it may be, we are animated by a new sensation. We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood is in the jungle. It means an Imperial policy, the Republic, renascent, taking her place with the armed nations." - Washington Post, 1896
"To-day the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition... Its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers." - Secretary of State Richard Olney, note to Britain
"The American jingoes... imagine us capable of the most foul villainies and cowardly actions. Scoundrels by nature, the American jingoes believe that all men are made like themselves. What do they know about noble and generous feelings?... We should not in any way heed the jingoes: they are not even worth our contempt, or the saliva with which we might honor them in spitting at their faces." - Spanish newspaper in Madrid
"In my regiment nine-tenths of the men were better horsemen than I was, and probably two-thirds of them better shots than I was, while on the average they were certainly hardier and more enduring. Yet after I had them a very short while they all knew, and I knew too, that nobody else could command them as I could." - Theodore Roosevelt, writing about his Rough Riders, 1903
"When next I realized that the Philippines had dropped into our laps, I confess I did not know what to do with them... I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance... And one night late it came to me this way... That there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men, for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed and went to sleep, and slept soundly." - William McKinley, describing his decision to annex the Philippines
"The Philippines are ours forever... And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race: trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world." - Albert J. Beveridge, defending annexation, 1900
"You cannot maintain despotism in Asia and a republic in America. If you try to deprive even a savage or a barbarian of his just rights you can never do it without becoming a savage or a barbarian yourself." - George F. Hoar, denouncing annexation, 1902
"I have seen two Americas, the America before the Spanish American War and the America since." - Foreign diplomat in Washington, 1901
"Every Senator I see says, 'For God's sake, don't let it appear we have any understanding with England.' How can I make bricks without straw? That we should be compelled to refuse the assistance of the greatest power in the world [Britain], in carrying out our own policy, because all Irishmen are Democrats and some [American] Germans are fools - is enough to drive a man mad." - Secretary of State John Hay, on why the U.S. should get along with Britain, 1900
"I have been hoping and praying for three months that the Santo Domingans would behave so that I would not have to act in any way. I want to do nothing but what a policeman has to do... As for annexing the island, I have about the same desire to annex it as a gorged boa-constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong-end-to." - Theodore Roosevelt, 1904