PROGRESSIVISM AND THE REPUBLICAN ROOSEVELT
"When I say I believe in a square deal I do not mean... to give every man the best hand. If the cards do not come to any man, or if they do come, and he has not got the power to play them, that is his affair. All I mean is that there shall be no crookedness in the dealing." - Theodore Roosevelt, 1905
"Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil." - Theodore Roosevelt, 1906
"Bribery is no ordinary felony, but treason;... 'corruption which breaks out here and there and now and then' is not an occasional offense, but a common practice, and... the effect of it is literally to change the form of our government from one that is representative of the people to an oligarchy, representative of special interests." - Lincoln Steffens, 1904
"We intend simply to be ourselves, not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves." - Marie Jenny Howe, 1914
"He sounded in my heart the first trumpet call of the new time that was to be... I had never known such a man as he, and never shall again. He overcame me. And in the hour or two we spent that day at lunch, and in a walk down F Street, he poured into my heart such visions, such ideals, such hopes, such a new attitude toward life and patriotism and the meaning of things, as I had never dreamed men had... After that I was his man." - William Allen White, on his first impression of Theodore Roosevelt
"We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not so. The mineral wealth of the country, the coal, iron, oil, gas, and the like, does not reproduce itself, and therefore is certain to be exhausted ultimately; and wastefulness in dealing with it to-day means that our descendants will feel the exhaustion a generation or two before they otherwise would." - Theodore Roosevelt, 1907
"The object of our forest policy is not to preserve the forests because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness, but the making of prosperous homes. Every other consideration comes as secondary... The test of utility... implies that no lands will be permanently reserves which can serve the people better in any other way." - Gifford Pinchot, a leading conservationist
WILSONIAN PROGRESSIVISM AT HOME AND ABROAD
"American enterprise is not free; the man with only a little capital is finding it harder and harder to get into the field, more and more impossible to compete with the big fellow. Why? Because the laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak." - Woodrow Wilson, 1913
"We have seen material interests threaten constitutional freedom in the United States. Therefore, we will know how to sympathize with those in the rest of [Latin] America who have to contend with such powers, not only from within their borders but from outside their borders also." - Woodrow Wilson, 1913
"We [Americans] prattle about humanity while we manufactured poisoned shrapnel and picric acid for profit. Ten thousand German widows, ten thousand orphans, ten thousand graves bear the legend 'Made in America.'" - The Fatherland, German-American propaganda newspaper in the U.S.
"Your telegram received. I would feel deeply mortified to have you or anybody like you vote for me. Since you have access to many disloyal Americans and I have not, I will ask you to convey this message to them." - Woodrow Wilson, response to an anti-British/pro-German organization leader, 1916
THE WAR TO END WAR
"The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make." - Woodrow Wilson, 1917
"How can our nation escape the logic it has never failed to follow, when its last unenfranchised class calls for the vote? Behold our Uncle Sam floating the banner with one hand, 'Taxation without representation is tyranny,' and with the other seizing the billions of dollars paid in taxes by women to whom he refuses 'representation.'... Is there a single man who can justify such inequality of treatment, such outrageous discrimination? Not one." - Carrie Chapman Catt, 1917
"We had spent our boyhood in the afterglow of the peaceful nineteenth century... What was war like? We wanted to see with our own eyes. We flocked into the volunteer services. I respected the conscientious objectors, and occasionally felt I should take that course myself, but hell, I wanted to see the show." - John Dos Passos, recalling his feelings before going off to war, 1917
"Let us dictate peace by the hammering guns and not chat about peace to the accompaniment of clicking typewriters. The language of the fourteen points and the subsequent statements explaining or qualifying them are thoroughly mischievous." - Theodore Roosevelt, 1918
"In all the world there is no outstanding figure to which the world will listen, there is no man audible in all the world, in Japan as well as Germany and Rome as well as Boston - except the President of the United States." - H. G. Wells, strong proponent of the League of Nations, 1917
AMERICAN LIFE IN THE "ROARING TWENTIES"
"America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration;... not surgery but serenity." - Warren G. Harding, 1920
"I believe we should place them [the reds] all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that their first stopping place should be hell." - Arthur Guy Empey, applauding deportation