Nicholas Lemann > Quotes

“AMERICANS ARE imbued with the notion that social systems proceed from ideas, because that is what happened at the founding of our country. The relationship of society and ideas can work the other way around, though: people can create social systems first and then invent ideas that will fulfill their need to feel that the world as it exists makes sense.”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“The cotton gin made it possible to grow medium- and short-staple cotton commercially, which led to the spread of the cotton plantation from a small coastal area to most of the South. As cotton planting expanded, so did slavery, and slavery’s becoming the central institution of the Southern economy was the central precondition of the Civil War. What”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“In the way that everything on Wall Street was rank-ordered, with a heavy overlay of social class, trading was a lower activity than what Morgan Stanley did, the province of smaller and, to be frank about it, Jewish firms, in the same way that having clients who were in retailing or media, rather than industry, was lower, and also Jewish.”
― Nicholas Lemann, Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream

“What the mechanical cotton picker did was make obsolete the sharecropper system, which arose in the years after the Civil War as the means by which cotton planters’ need for a great deal of cheap labor was satisfied.”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“Political leadership is about achieving tangible good results that make a difference in people’s lives, not offering a message of unity, respect, and honor (though that’s nice, too). It’s not useful to understand world affairs in the broadest possible terms, as a struggle between good and evil.”
― Nicholas Lemann

“The leading planter families of the Delta consider themselves to be members of the Southern upper class—which is to say that they are Episcopalian, of British or Scotch-Irish extraction, and had ancestors living in the upper South before 1800—”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“In 1940, 77 per cent of black Americans still lived in, the South—49 per cent in the rural South. The invention of the cotton picker was crucial to the great migration by blacks from the Southern countryside to the cities of the South, the West, and the North. Between 1910 and 1970, six and a half million black Americans moved from the South to the North; five million of them moved after 1940, during the time of the mechanization of cotton farming.”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“Among the leading intellectual proponents of Roosevelt’s form of liberalism were the three brilliant young founders of The New Republic, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl—all slightly older friends of Adolf Berle’s. In 1909 Croly published a Progressive Era manifesto called The Promise of American Life. “The net result of the industrial expansion of the United States since the Civil War,” Croly wrote, “has been the establishment in the heart of the American economic and social system of certain glaring inequalities of condition and power … The rich men and big corporations have become too wealthy and powerful for their official standing in American life.” He asserted that the way to solve the problem was to reorient the country from the tradition of Thomas Jefferson (rural, decentralized) to the tradition of Alexander Hamilton (urban, financially adept). Weyl, in The New Democracy (1913), wrote that the country had been taken over by a “plutocracy” that had rendered the traditional forms of American democracy impotent; government had to restore the balance and “enormously increase the extent of regulation.” To”
― Nicholas Lemann, Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream

“Educated middle-class people such as the young Adolf Berle had been raised on the idea that American civilization was at heart one of small-town merchants and independent farmers. Now,”
― Nicholas Lemann, Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream

“The black population of Chicago grew from 44,000 in 1910 to 109,000 in 1920, and then to 234,000 in 1930. A local commission on race relations reported that 50,000 black people had moved to Chicago from the South in eighteen months during the war. The”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“Before the cotton crash, though, the Delta’s main problem was that black people had begun to migrate to the North to work in factories. The main transportation routes out of the Delta led straight north. The Illinois Central Railroad, which was by far the most powerful economic actor in Mississippi, had bought the Delta’s main rail system in 1892; its passengers and freight hooked up in Memphis with the main Illinois Central line, which ran from New Orleans to Chicago, paralleling the route of U.S. Highway 51. U.S. Highway 61, paralleling the Mississippi River, passed through Clarksdale; U.S. 49, running diagonally northwest through the Delta from Jackson, Mississippi, met 61 on the outskirts of Clarksdale.”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“In May 1919 Berle, assuming the stagy veneer of cynicism of a disappointed crusader, wrote his father, “I have come to the conclusion that no statement of ideals by anybody will ever get any reaction from me again. If I can trust myself I shall be happy; if I trust anyone else I shall be a fool.”
― Nicholas Lemann, Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream

“Most of the rules and customs that whites made for blacks to live by emerged from, or anyway were justified by, the whites’ ideas about blacks’ “nature.” Scrupulous financial dealings with sharecroppers were pointless, since any money the sharecroppers cleared, they would only waste. There was nothing wrong with the planters’ winking at all sorts of violations of the law by their sharecroppers, from moonshining to petty theft to polygamy to murder, because blacks had no moral life to begin with. The education of sharecroppers’ children was haphazard as a convenience to the planters, but also by design, because, in David Cohn’s words, “the Negro should be taught to work with his hands,” and real schooling “tends to unbalance him mentally.” The white ideal in the Delta was that a planter should be like a father and the sharecroppers like his children, dependent, carefree, and grateful.”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“Sharecroppers traded at a plantation-owned commissary, often in scrip rather than money. (Martin Luther King, Jr., on a visit to an Alabama plantation in 1965, was amazed to meet sharecroppers who had never seen United States currency in their lives.)”
― Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

“Among the leading intellectual proponents of Roosevelt’s form of liberalism were the three brilliant young founders of The New Republic, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl—all slightly older friends of Adolf Berle’s. In 1909 Croly published a Progressive Era manifesto called The Promise of American Life. “The net result of the industrial expansion of the United States since the Civil War,” Croly wrote, “has been the establishment in the heart of the American economic and social system of certain glaring inequalities of condition and power … The rich men and big corporations have become too wealthy and powerful for their official standing in American life.” He asserted that the way to solve the problem was to reorient the country from the tradition of Thomas Jefferson (rural, decentralized) to the tradition of Alexander Hamilton (urban, financially adept). Weyl, in The New Democracy (1913), wrote that the country had been taken over by a “plutocracy” that had rendered the traditional forms of American democracy impotent; government had to restore the balance and “enormously increase the extent of regulation.” To liberals of this kind, these were problems of nation-threatening severity, requiring radical modernization that would eliminate the trace elements of rural nineteenth-century America. Lippmann, in Drift and Mastery (1914), argued that William Jennings Bryan (“the true Don Quixote of our politics”) and his followers were fruitlessly at war with “the economic conditions which had upset the old life of the prairies, made new demands on democracy, introduced specialization and science, had destroyed village loyalties, frustrated private ambitions, and created the impersonal relationships of the modern world.” A larger, more powerful, more technical central government, staffed by a new class of trained experts, was the only plausible way to fight the dominance of big business. The leading Clash of the Titans liberals were from New York City, but even William Allen White, the celebrated (in part for being anti-Bryan) small-town Kansas editor who was a leading Progressive and one of their allies, wrote, in 1909, that “the day of the rule of the captain of industry is rapidly passing in America.” Now the country needed “captains of two opposing groups—capitalism and democracy” to reset the”
― Nicholas Lemann, Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream