Samuel G. Freedman > Quotes

“A novelist who has to defend his creation by telling a reader *But that’s what really happened*, is a novelist who has failed.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Letters to a Young Journalist

“When St Genesius, the patron saint of actors, refused to act in a Roman play that ridiculed Christianity, the legend goes, the producers executed him. It reminds some people of Broadway today.”
― Samuel G. Freedman

“Proponents and followers of the Social Gospel while in many cases as personally devout and theologically orthodox as their foes, stressed the doing of good works in this world. They read the Jesus narrative with more of a focus on his ministry to the oppressed than his death on the cross and maintained that establishing the Kingdom of God on earth included such practical efforts as raising wages, shortening work hours, and banning child labor. So fierce was the critique of capitalism among some adherents of the Social Gospel that they argued it was compatible with socialism.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“Every population group, Humphrey conceded, contains a share of intolerant people. But the greatest amount of bigotry, he added, whether bigotry against Blacks or Jews or Catholics or Japanese, came from the majority group. Everybody in the hearing room knew full well that Humphrey meant white Christians, in Minneapolis and in America.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“Newman carried over the public shaming into his editorial column. Under the headline “Giving Aid to Hitler,” he asserted his own definition of treason: “It’s Hitler’s theory that this country does not practice what it preaches. It is his theory that certain races are inferior. . . . It is his practice that such races be barred from the professions, the skilled trades, etc. Those who practice these things in America must believe as he does.”24”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“As Dred Scott had discovered seventy years earlier, the South as a geographical region could be partitioned off. The South as a dogma, as a doctrine, as a belief system of white supremacy, obliged no border.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“To those who say, to those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this, that the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“Humphrey expounded on the prophets Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, knowledgably citing verses in pursuit of his overarching theme: We have relied on ritual, on pious pronouncements, rather than action. Faith is only as strong as its believers. We have failed to believe. We just accepted! . . . The ancient prophets all cried out against injustice—proclaiming the doctrine of social justice. (Underlining and punctuation in Humphrey’s original manuscript.)”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“Blacks in Minneapolis had a literacy rate of nearly one hundred percent.54 They were more likely than native-born whites to be in the labor force.55 Yet to the degree that whites encountered and perceived them at all, Blacks occupied the stereotypical role of servant.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“Don’t sit on your laurels. Don’t rest on your laurels. It will all be back. It never goes away.’ He said, ‘It goes below the surface of society and is dormant. The minute somebody permits it, it re-emerges.’ It’s like I was just kind of waiting. I’ve always known it was there. It was like a smoldering fire that flames up when it’s permitted.”31”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“As bank failures accelerated throughout the state—there were twenty-two in the last three months of 1925 alone from several hundred banks statewide—South Dakota’s fund to compensate depositors was itself running low on money.77”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“A thousand miles from Minneapolis, Heberle was suggesting what Cecil Newman had been writing about for years in the Spokesman: the Jew in Germany was the Black in America. This analogy was entering Humphrey’s consciousness at the same time he was encountering flesh-and-blood Jews and Blacks in a daily, personal way he never before had.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics,” he later wrote of the decision, “in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.”24”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“Treat people like people. If you treat them like dogs, expect to be bitten.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“The bulls and bears wage desperate battles in the stock market,” the Times-Record observed, “but it is the shorn lambs who usually take the punishment.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“The civil rights bills passed by Congress in 1957 and 1960 were diluted enough to satisfy Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“In the pages of The Cross and the Flag, Smith had already promised his devotees a speech on the prospects for a third-party coalition between Southern segregationist Democrats and Northern isolationist Republicans. The goal, he had written earlier in The Letter, would be to hand an indecisive presidential election in 1948 to Congress to resolve, which it would do by installing “a Nationalist, a conservative, and one who has a high regard for American Traditions, racial purity, and is dead-set against Communism.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“Then he propounded his own Ten Commandments, applying the biblical injunctions to the crises of contemporary America, ranging from the exploitation of labor to gender inequality to racial and religious discrimination. “I am the Lord thy God,” went one of Humphrey’s commandments, “but thou shalt remember I am also the God of the earth. I have no favorite children. The Negro, the Hindu, the Chinese, Russian, and Mexican are all my beloved children.” He redefined the commandment against bearing false witness to proscribing the “malicious propaganda” of bigotry against “the Negro in America, the Jew, the Japanese-American.”136”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“foreign-born whites.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“Acutely aware of their tenuous position within the state, especially during a period of Ku Klux Klan expansion, St. Paul’s Catholics saw the pragmatic benefits of allying with the city’s Black and Jewish communities.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“You’ve not only proved that you’re the best baseball team, but you proved that youngsters of different races and creeds can work and play together successfully—in the American way.”71”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“Homer Loomis was on trial in February 1947. Despite the establishment pedigree of a prep-school diploma and admission to the Ivy League, Loomis had managed to be expelled from Princeton and blow apart two marriages. Still in his early thirties, he had headed South in 1946 to reinvent himself as a white supremacist. He joined forces in Atlanta with a Ku Klux Klan veteran to form a uniformed, goose-stepping troop dubbed the Columbians.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“Even though a majority of Black votes still went to “the “Party of Lincoln,” the Republicans had been backing away from the racial equality promised by Reconstruction for more than a half-century.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“As he explained in one notably candid moment, “Religion and patriotism, keep going on that. It’s the only way you can get them really het up.”120”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“Now, though, Muriel was realizing that there was no such thing as being an innocent bystander, not when bigotry was concerned. You discriminated, you were discriminated against, or you closed your eyes and let it happen. Unless you objected and fought back.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“unfinished business of emancipation. What he said on that day set into motion the partisan realignment that defines American politics right up through the present.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“Reasonable people were entirely capable of acting in morally unreasonable ways and rationalizing away their actions.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“The typical Minneapolis cop was poorly trained, high school educated, and socially inbred with the white working class.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“After that barb, Humphrey indulged in a tone of performative politeness that had been imported to the Upper Midwest by Scandinavian immigrants and would come to be known as “Minnesota Nice.” “These are just my thoughts,” he signed off. “I may be wrong and, believe me, I am anxious to be better informed.”101”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

“Each anti-Republican faction, in turn, contained its own inherent flaws—the machine chicanery and Catholic identity of the Democrats, and the utopian vision and communist influence of the Farmer-Laborites. Kirkpatrick sought an activist government free of both corruption and illusion.”
― Samuel G. Freedman, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights