Wide Awake Quotes

“Years later, when Henry Adams would consider the “systematic organization of hatreds,” he mentioned witnessing a Wide Awake march. “Pretend what they liked,” he wrote, “their air was not that of innocence.”53”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“The Wide Awake model seemed to hit a sweet spot: simplistic enough to be reproducible from Saco, Maine, to Healdsburg, California, but full of symbols and gestures with greater depth.”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“Never before had a grassroots movement taken on such momentum, so free from the guidance of elites, or even elders.8”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“Chicago, in 1860, was 52 percent foreign born—second in the nation at the time, and far more than any modern U.S. city—”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“Ohio editors praised the movement’s nativist undercurrents, proud to see “men from the hills and the valleys, the good old yeoman stock of Connecticut” (i.e., Protestant Yankees) defeat “naturalized voters” (i.e., Irish Catholic immigrants).24”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“movement that tried to join mob-prone youngbloods with “conservative fogies and fossils,” all on a platform of pretending it was not 1860, had little room to grow.16”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“this context, White supremacy could be antislavery, because expanding slavery threatened to expand Blackness.”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“Like so much else about the Wide Awakes, Sperry’s cheer feels at once cryptic and comprehensible today. Composed of nonsense words, it made no explicit political arguments, endorsed no candidates, and articulated no statement of what the Wide Awakes wanted.”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“In their diaries and letters, these early adopters make clear the appeal of a fraternity, a uniform, a clubhouse, and regular meetings to boys hungry for structure and belonging. Especially if you were twenty-two, lowly at work, bored in your boardinghouse, and looking for something to fill your evenings as winter turned to spring.11”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“In their diaries and letters, these early adopters make clear the appeal of a fraternity,”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“Getting bricks lobbed at you was not an uncommon part of nineteenth-century political life.”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“The state with the highest literacy rate in the nation boasted forty-five different political papers, fourteen of them dailies, printing over nine million pages for the 460,000 people in the state.”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“In a world of unprecedented but fleeting connections, hard news and wild disinformation floated together, reproduced and altered ad infinitum, like a national game of telephone. It was easy to spread a myth, and hard to check a fact.”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“In some ways, it amounted to a changing of the guard of information’s gatekeepers. National news had once been spread by a narrow cohort of merchants and politicians who—in private letters, visits to the capital, and college educations in other regions—built the bonds of stability, compromise, and Union. Now that elite was swamped out by the hollering thousands, who prized conflict above all.”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“They floated in a vast watershed of partisan ink. Since the invention of the electric telegraph in 1844, America’s already robust newspaper network had”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“Low-level white-collar work in a store or office involved a lot of downtime between customers and paperwork. Many of these clerks were farm boys recently come to the city, brimming with energy.”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“They lived in the same boardinghouses and shared the same chowder suppers at Mrs. McClaffin’s or Mrs. Spencer’s tables, talking politics all the while. Many were hurting from the “hidden depression” that hit northern cities in the years after the financial panic of 1857. These young clerks had hazy futures.”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“Sitting on Francis’s bed or his few scattered chairs, leaning in doorframes or pacing the floorboards, they began to build off Yergason’s uniform idea, forming a plan for a club.”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“Given their roles in finance, textiles, technology, and whaling, their populist politics, and the fact that more than a few of them later ended up in prison, they were almost perfect embodiments of southern stereotypes of busy, “go-ahead,” plotting Yankees.”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“Decades later it would come out that he had been stealing thousands from the bank all along. But that night Francis welcomed in a crew of young men he knew from downtown.”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“Sensing a violent new irritability in the American character in the 1830s, one observer in South Carolina wrote, “The whole country seems ready to take fire on the most trivial occasion.”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War

“Actual slave owners made up just under 2 percent.”
― Jon Grinspan, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War