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, Remembering Ahanagran: A History of Stories

“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

“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, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River

“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, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“History is the enemy of memory.”
― Richard White

“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, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“The “transformation of popular government of the vilest and most degrading kind, which must inevitably result from the unequal distribution of wealth, is not a thing of the future. It has already begun in the United States, and is rapidly going on under our”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“I have known tolerably well, a good many “successful” men—“ big” financially—men famous during the last half-century, and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A set of mere money-getters and traders, they were essentially unattractive and uninteresting.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“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, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“In 1800 the United States had a birth rate higher than any ever recorded for a European country, but it fell steeply and consistently throughout the century. The total fertility rate, which is the average number of children borne by a woman before she reaches menopause, had fallen 50 percent by 1900.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“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, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“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, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America

“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, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 - 1815

“In 1870 in response to the Fifteenth Amendment, the citizens of Michigan made a simple but far-reaching alteration to their 1850 constitution. They struck out the word “white.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“At least on paper, Congress had dramatically enlarged federal power and black rights. In December 1866 only about 0.5 percent of black adult males could vote. In December 1867 the figure rose to 80.5 percent, with the entire increase coming in the old Confederacy.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“With settlers starting farms in the West, the South rebuilding, and northern industry expanding, the economy would soon need all the available money supply.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living”
― Richard White

“Liberalism and Radical Republicanism were ideologies—simplified and idealized versions of how society should operate—and not descriptions of the far more complicated ways the North did operate. Northerners, in general, were both decidedly less liberal than doctrinaire liberals desired and less Radical than ardent Radicals wished.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“What was developing in the South was a coercive labor system, which although not slavery, was not free labor either. It depended on extralegal violence, coercive laws, burdensome debt relations, and the use of convict labor to limit alternatives. The South was demonstrating that there were routes to capitalist development—both agricultural and industrial—that did not rely on free labor.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“The gold standard created what economists have called a “golden straitjacket.” Debtor nations would exchange control over their monetary policy for capital mobility and stable exchange rates. Although the cost of borrowing abroad would fall, the United States would lose the ability to drive domestic interest rates below international interest rates. Gold dollars would flee abroad if interest rates elsewhere were higher.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“American exports reduced the cost of food in Europe faster than at any time since the Neolithic era. European peasants could not compete with cheap American grain and meat. Forced off the land, many of them immigrated to the United States. Some became American farmers; more became American workers.16”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“In the Northeast there was $77 in circulation per inhabitant. As late as 1880, the South had a quarter of the country’s population but only 10 percent of its currency.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“Southern rivers, ports, and harbors received a fraction of the funds devoted to the Eastern and Pacific states, and even the critical levees along the Mississippi River languished. For the rest of the century Southerners contended that the banking system, the tariff, and federal subsidies for internal improvements discriminated against the South, and they clearly did.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“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, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“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, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“A European visitor in the 1880s remarked that the only sense not offended by American cooking was hearing.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“Republicans had reintroduced a bill that he had originally sponsored that moved beyond political equality toward a fuller social equality by prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“Congress also refused to give the South subsidies proportional to those that went to the West and Northeast.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“A rising generation of younger liberals held more complicated views. Rhetorically, E. L. Godkin of the Nation conflated all freedom with free markets: “the liberty to buy and sell, and mend and make, where, when, and how we please.” Godkin, however, also acknowledged the limitations of markets in practice. He, at least in his early years, did not regard permanent wage labor as contract freedom. He and other younger liberals also differed from Sherman in their distrust of democracy. Godkin was eager to curtail political freedoms that he thought produced corruption and threatened anarchy. He recognized that the United States had become a multicultural nation deeply divided by class, and, since he thought democracy could work only in small homogeneous communities, American democracy had become dangerous.93”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“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, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896