The American Experiment Quotes

“The enemy of public virtue was individual self-interest.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“But before that end the Nixon White House had abused power with awesome ingenuity. They had set up an extensive “enemies list” that ranged from political opponents like Jane Fonda, Shirley Chisholm, and Edmund Muskie to the heads of eastern universities and foundations, along with media figures, actors, even athletes, and included a mistake or two—non-enemy Professor Hans Morgenthau made the list because he was confused with enemy Robert Morgenthau, U.S. Attorney in New York City. They conducted a private investigation of Senator Edward Kennedy’s 1969 automobile accident at Chappaquiddick in which a woman drowned. They tapped their foes and one another with wild abandon. They tried to subvert the IRS, the CIA, the FBI for political purposes.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“Dusk had fallen on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a tailor’s assistant, finished her long day’s work in a large department store in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the first capital of the Confederacy. While heading for the bus stop across Court Square, which had once been a center of slave auctions, she observed the dangling Christmas lights and a bright banner reading “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” After paying her bus fare she settled down in a row between the “whites only” section and the rear seats, according to the custom that blacks could sit in the middle section if the back was filled. When a white man boarded the bus, the driver ordered Rosa Parks and three other black passengers to the rear so that the man could sit. The three other blacks stood up; Parks did not budge. Then the threats, the summoning of the police, the arrest, the quick conviction, incarceration. Through it all Rosa Parks felt little fear. She had had enough. “The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed,” she said later. “I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” Besides, her feet hurt. The time had come … Rosa Parks’s was a heroic act of defiance, an individual act of leadership. But it was not wholly spontaneous, nor did she act alone. Long active in the civil rights effort, she had taken part in an integration workshop in Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School, an important training center for southern community activists and labor organizers. There Parks “found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.” There she had gained strength “to persevere in my work for freedom.” Later she had served for years as a leader in the Montgomery and Alabama NAACP. Her bus arrest was by no means her first brush with authority; indeed, a decade earlier this same driver had ejected her for refusing to enter through the back door. Rosa Parks’s support group quickly mobilized. E. D. Nixon, long a militant leader of the local NAACP and the regional Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, rushed to the jail to bail her out. Nixon had been waiting for just such a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the bus segregation law. Three Montgomery women had been arrested for similar “crimes” in the past year, but the city, in order to avoid just such a challenge, had not pursued the charge. With Rosa Parks the city blundered, and from Nixon’s point of view, she was the ideal victim—no one commanded more respect in the black community.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“In 1941 Fromm published Escape from Freedom, which held that, upon the lifting of feudal ties and hierarchy, Protestantism had produced fearful and alienated persons, that industrialization had forced on such persons competitive, insecure lives that left them fearful of economic crises, loss of jobs, and imperialistic wars, and that the outcome was a tendency to submit to authoritarian leaders who offered them feelings of involvement, security, and power. This was the road to fascism. While Fromm feared these tendencies in all strata, he and his followers saw the middle classes—especially the lower middle classes—as most vulnerable to the appeal of fascism.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves.…in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and most unblushing form stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.…” So fierce and brutal was the strife of politics that “sensitive and delicate-minded persons” had to stand aloof, leaving the battle to the selfish.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“As usual, women were highly vulnerable to economic threat, whether as wives or workers or both. Marriage, divorce, and birth rates all fell sharply in the early 1930s. It was often too expensive to get a divorce or to have children. There was evidently a decline in sexual relations owing to fear of pregnancy, psychological demoralization following loss of a job, and women fatigued by having to work both outside and inside the home. Married women were tempting targets for legislators and organizations. Of 1,500 school systems contacted in 1930–31, over three-quarters would not hire married women and almost two-thirds dismissed women teachers if they were married. Although the unemployment rate for women was 4.7 percent in 1930 compared to 7.1 percent for men, this was partly because many women held low-income jobs for which men could not or would not compete.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“threat, whether as wives or workers or both. Marriage, divorce, and birth rates all fell sharply in the early 1930s. It was often too expensive to get a divorce or to have children. There was evidently a decline in sexual relations owing to fear of pregnancy, psychological demoralization following loss of a job, and women fatigued by having to work both outside and inside the home. Married women were tempting targets for legislators and organizations. Of 1,500 school systems contacted in 1930–31, over three-quarters would not hire married women and almost two-thirds dismissed women teachers if they were married. Although the unemployment rate for women was 4.7 percent in 1930 compared to 7.1 percent for men, this was partly because many women held low-income jobs for which men could not or would not compete.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“Just as Marx himself had been brilliant and prophetic in his analysis of capitalism but vague—perhaps deliberately so—about the process of revolutionary change that would finish it off,”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“The immediate cause of the Civil War lay in the derangement of the nation’s two political systems—the constitutional system of the 1780s and the party system of the 1830s—and in their interaction with each other. Both these systems rested on an intricate set of balances: the constitutional, on a balance between federal and state power and among the three branches of the federal government; the party, on a competitive balance between party organizations at the national and state levels. The genius of this double system lay in its ability to morselize sectional and economic and other conflicts before they became flammable, and then through incremental adjustment and accommodations to keep the great mobiles of ideological, regional, and other political energies in balance until the next adjustment had to be made. This system worked well for decades, as the great compromises of 1820 and 1850 attested. The system was flexible too; when a measure of executive leadership was needed—to make great decisions about the West, as with Jefferson, or to adjust and overcome a tariff rebellion, as with Jackson—enough presidential authority could be exerted within the system to meet the need. But the essence of the system lay in balances, adjustment, compromise. Then, in the 1850s, this system crumbled. The centrifugal forces besetting it were so powerful that perhaps no polity could have overcome them; yet European and other political systems had encountered enormously divisive forces and survived. What happened in the United States was a fateful combination: a powerful ideology of states’ rights, defense of slavery, and “southern way of life” arose in the South, with South Carolina as the cutting edge; this was met by a counter-ideology in the urbanizing, industrializing, modernizing states, with Illinois as the cutting edge in the West.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“Even higher hopes were held for education as a product and protector of equality, especially in the light of the educational privileges of the elites. William Manning, the Billerica tavernkeeper, went to the heart of the matter: “Larning is of the greatest importance to the seport of a free government,” he wrote, “& to prevent this the few are always crying up the advantages of costly collages, national aca-dimyes & grammer schooles, in ordir to make places for men to live without work, & so strengthen their party. But are always opposed to cheep schools & woman schooles, the ondly or prinsaple means by which larning is spred amongue the Many.” This view, which was too strong for even the Jeffersonian press to print, anticipated the egalitarian thrust of the 1830s.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“She learned as she led, and led as she learned.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“The first was education. “The Knowledge nesecary for every freeman to have is A Knowledge of Mankind,” William Manning wrote in his tract, and “Larning is of the greatest importance to the seport of a free government,” but the tavernkeeper added that the few were “always crying up the advantages of costly collages, national acadimyes & grammer schools, in ordir to make places for men to live without work,” but were always opposed to “cheep schools and woman schools, the only or prinsaple means by which learning is spred amongue the Many.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“Englishmen of Whiggish persuasion were convinced that, after decades and centuries of thought and travail, the British constitution had come to represent the best way to achieve that goal. Drawing heavily from Greek and Roman thinkers who had affirmed the need of mixed government in order to achieve balance and harmony among social classes, the English had achieved such a balance of social power among king, lords, and commons that a political balance of power would be counterpoised among these powerful estates. Social equilibrium in short would produce political equilibrium, which in turn would prevent the kind of immoderate government that might interfere in men’s liberties. This elaborate edifice was based on the theory that men, being naturally selfish, irrational, aggressive, greedy, and lustful, had to be not only protected in their liberty from government but protected from one another by government. The “Interest of Freedom,” Marchamont Nedham had written in the mid-1650s, “is a Virgin that everyone seeks to deflower.” Paine and his fellow radicals rejected this view of human nature and the Whiggish apparatus that went with it. Perhaps the people of the Old World, divided into unequal estates and corrupted by their rulers, were prone to depravity and unreason, they granted, but Americans were different. Farmers and mechanics and all others who wore “leathern aprons,” being more equal and fraternal and less grasping and competitive, were more reasonable and virtuous. Because of his faith in human nature and the perfectibility of man, as Eric Foner has said, “Paine could reject the need for governmental checks and balances.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“The small farm, a historian observed, was an unsurpassed school for boyhood but an intellectual prison for manhood.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“The basic solution was to pass the expressed interests and passions of the voting populace through a filter of overlapping and mutually checking representative processes and bodies—again, staggered elections, separation of powers, accountability of rulers to fragmented, conflicting, competing, and overlapping voting constituencies, and all the rest of the formidably intricate system of eviscerated powers and checks and balances. In order to govern, representatives would have to bargain with one another ceaselessly in a vast system of brokerage and accommodation that would give something to everybody—liberty to the individual, desired laws or appropriations to groups, and governmental balance and stability to the whole.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“Above all, how did liberty relate to other great aims? Some Americans felt that the pursuit of liberty ultimately would safeguard other values, such as order and equality; others saw order and authority as prior goals in protecting liberty.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“American whites somehow were able collectively to love liberty, recognize the evils of slavery, and tolerate slavery, all at the same”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“licentiousness has seldom produced the loss of liberty; but that the tyranny of rulers has almost always effected it.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to controul the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controuls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to controul the governed; and in the next place oblige it to controul itself. A dependence on the people, is no doubt, the primary controul on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
― James MacGregor Burns, The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, The Workshop of Democracy, and The Crosswinds of Freedom