Richard White Quotes

• “Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not a familar echo of the present, for if it is familar why revist it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time.”

  Richard White

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• “You can't trust the government to do anything right-except, of course, to conspire and cover up. Then it becomes diabolically efficient. The very people who are wildest for government conspiracies are often the same people who believe the government is incapable of delivering the mail efficiently.”

  Richard White

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• “Lewis Mumford was not a planner, but he wrote eloquently of planning. It was a difficult task. Planning is an exercise of power, and in a modern state much real power is suffused with boredom. The agents of planning are usually boring; the planning process is boring; the implementation of plans is always boring. In a democracy boredom works for bureaucracies and corporations as smell works for skunk. It keeps danger away. Power does not have to be exercised behind the scenes. It can be open. The audience is asleep. The modern world is forged amidst our inattention.”

  Richard White

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• “History is the enemy of memory.”

  Richard White

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• “Sound familiar?
  
  Rutherford B. Hayes was someone who thought that attracting opposition from nearly every direction meant that he was right.
  
  James A. Garfield, watching the president flounder in big things and small, thought that the “impression is deepening that he is not large enough for the place he holds” and that his election “has been an almost fatal blow to his party.”

  Richard White

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• “A European visitor in the 1880s remarked that the only sense not offended by American cooking was hearing.”

  Richard White

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• “South Carolina, the Tweed Ring, the New York City riots, and Santo Domingo fanned the fire of liberal rebellion; the only source of liberal outrage not yet prominent in the newspapers was the ubiquitous corruption of the Grant administration itself, which was as yet largely known only to insiders.”

  Richard White

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• “When whiskey was supposed to be taxed at $2 a gallon and sold for $1.25 a gallon, it did not take advanced math to guess something was amiss.”

  Richard White

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• “The great ironist quite unironically boiled “American” down to liberal and reduced the Republicans to a lazy betrayal and a policy of drift that allowed too many of the policies put in place during the war to endure and the problems that arose in the wake of war to fester.”

  Richard White

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• “Howells’s account of the necessary reforms amounted to a manifesto for Gilded Age liberalism: abolition of the tariff, civil service reform, return to the gold standard, curbing of democracy through limitations on suffrage, replacement of elected officials with appointed officials, and prevention of any extension of suffrage to women.95”

  Richard White

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• “Liberal” in the nineteenth-century United States and Europe designated people who in many, but not all, respects would be called conservatives in the twenty-first century. They embraced minimal government, a free market economy, individualism, and property rights; they attacked slavery, aristocracy, monarchy, standing armies, the Catholic Church, and hereditary authority.”

  Richard White

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• “Unwilling to accept the idea of a class struggle, he was nonetheless aware of the deteriorating condition of labor, and so he embraced a protective tariff, anathema to the liberals, as a way to protect wages.”

  Richard White

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• “Contract freedom quickly revealed itself as a delusion when those negotiating contracts were so incommensurate in wealth and power.”

  Richard White

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• “The numbers are unclear, but contemporaries estimated abortions at one to every five or six live births in the 1850s. A Michigan Board of Health estimate in the 1880s claimed that one-third of all pregnancies ended in an abortion.”

  Richard White

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• “This was Whiggish free labor dependent on government subsidies, tariffs, and other interventions; it was far from liberal laissez-faire. It created a society that Southern Radical governments sought to emulate, but they lacked the resources and advantages that the federal government bestowed outside the South.”

  Richard White

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• “The corporations failed, but very often the people behind them succeeded. The celebrated creative destruction of capitalism is, it seems, gentle with the rich.”

  Richard White

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• “Collectivizing risk and considering the community as a whole rather than the individual was a form of “communism,” but the practice paradoxically allowed people to maintain their belief in individualism. Probability could compensate for the limits of human knowledge.”

  Richard White

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• “Keeping the money supply in balance and avoiding panics depended on the intervention of Treasury officials, which was one of the things liberals hated about it. It also meant that men like Cooke and Gould cultivated those officials as well as congressmen and the president. Their fortunes depended up on it.”

  Richard White

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• “Unemployment was a relatively new phenomenon, an artifact of the rise of industrial America where large gains in productivity often came at the expense of economic security. The word unemployment took on its modern meaning of being without work and seeking a wage-paying job only within a dominant wage-labor system where the wageworkers lacked the opportunity to retreat to the countryside to engage in independent agricultural production during downturns.”

  Richard White

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• “Important New York banks realized that because bankers had hypothecated the Central Pacific’s securities repeatedly, they were effectively worthless as collateral. It was better to strike a deal with the Central Pacific; otherwise the chain of debt would choke even more banks. Jay Gould scavenged the Union Pacific, saving it from bankruptcy and setting up what would eventually become one of his biggest financial killings.43”

  Richard White

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• “But since Clark's triumphs were those of a war leader, that is, the products of fear, pain, and opportunity, they were not stable. Clark's mistake was to think them the larger triumphs of alliance.”

  Richard White

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• “Corporations could raise funds through the sale of stock and bonds, and many states offered charters that gave stockholders limited liability: they would not be held responsible for the corporation’s debts beyond their own investment. In exchange for all this, Americans believed that corporations had a greater obligation than other enterprises to serve a public good.”

  Richard White

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• “When industrial work crippled and epidemic diseases killed, and where chance—freaks of fortune—produced what John Maynard Keynes, the economist, would later call “the radical uncertainties of capitalism,” luck as much as effort seemed to dictate outcomes.”

  Richard White

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• “As the mayor of Chicago told a labor rally on May Day in 1867, eight hours of work had become more exhausting than ten or twelve hours had been earlier.”

  Richard White

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• “...It was no accident that some of the first bureaucracies took shape in the West: the National Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (which gradually took modern form as the older Indian Service sank beneath its long heritage of fraud and corruption), and the U.S. Geological Service. Mythologized as the heatland of individualism, the West became the kindergarten of the modern American state.”

  Richard White

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