Frank Tannenbaum > Quotes

“No more self-defeating device could be discovered than the one society has developed in dealing with the criminal. It proclaims his career in such loud and dramatic forms that both he and the community accept the judgment as a fixed description. He becomes conscious of himself as a criminal, and the community expects him to live up to his reputation, and will not credit him if he does not live up to it.”
― Frank Tannenbaum

“I am not speaking here of the theory of the class struggle — I am speaking of the fact as the workers know it. Hundreds and thousands of workers are class-conscious without ever having heard of Marx and without coming in contact with the doctrine as such. They are class-conscious because their struggles for existence and their desire to escape from oppression and monotony, find constant opposition.”
― Frank Tannenbaum, The Labor Movement : Its Conservative Functions and Social Consequences / (1921) [Leather Bound]

“The settlement of America was not a purely European enterprise. It is more accurately described as a common undertaking by the folk coming from both Europe and Africa.”
― Frank Tannenbaum, Slave & Citizen: The Negro in the Americas

“The real struggle is for organization and not for the program after organization is completed. This is the revolutionary significance of the labor movement. Its program is achieved if it has complete or anywhere nearly complete organization.”
― Frank Tannenbaum, The Labor Movement : Its Conservative Functions and Social Consequences / (1921) [Leather Bound]

“Crime is a consequence. It is not a cause. We are responsible for its existence.”
― Frank Tannenbaum, Wall Shadows: A Study in American Prisons

“A labor union is revolutionary in fact. It is not the expressed desire to change the world; it is the change already embodied if not completed.”
― Frank Tannenbaum, The Labor Movement : Its Conservative Functions and Social Consequences / (1921) [Leather Bound]