The Republic for Which It Stands Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“if America means anything at all, it means the sufficiency of the common, the insufficiency of the uncommon.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“In one sense, massive land redistribution was the basis of the American republic. The U.S. government took Indian lands, peaceably through treaties if it could and forcibly or through fraud and war when it thought necessary. The government then redistributed these ceded or conquered lands to white citizens. Southern redistribution, in essence, was about whether Southern whites could be treated as Indians and Southern blacks could be treated like white men.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“Important New York banks realized that because bankers had hypothecated the Central Pacific’s securities repeatedly, they were effectively worthless as collateral. It was better to strike a deal with the Central Pacific; otherwise the chain of debt would choke even more banks. Jay Gould scavenged the Union Pacific, saving it from bankruptcy and setting up what would eventually become one of his biggest financial killings.43”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“Unemployment was a relatively new phenomenon, an artifact of the rise of industrial America where large gains in productivity often came at the expense of economic security. The word unemployment took on its modern meaning of being without work and seeking a wage-paying job only within a dominant wage-labor system where the wageworkers lacked the opportunity to retreat to the countryside to engage in independent agricultural production during downturns.”
― 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

“Corporations could raise funds through the sale of stock and bonds, and many states offered charters that gave stockholders limited liability: they would not be held responsible for the corporation’s debts beyond their own investment. In exchange for all this, Americans believed that corporations had a greater obligation than other enterprises to serve a public good.”
― 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

“As the mayor of Chicago told a labor rally on May Day in 1867, eight hours of work had become more exhausting than ten or twelve hours had been earlier.”
― 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

“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

“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

“The absolute number of workers in agriculture continued to rise until the twentieth century, but agriculture’s share of the national workforce fell. By 1900 it had declined to 40 percent, from a majority in 1860. Those workers, however, still produced more than the country could consume.11”
― 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

“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 great ironist quite unironically boiled “American” down to liberal and reduced the Republicans to a lazy betrayal and a policy of drift that allowed too many of the policies put in place during the war to endure and the problems that arose in the wake of war to fester.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“When whiskey was supposed to be taxed at $2 a gallon and sold for $1.25 a gallon, it did not take advanced math to guess something was amiss.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“South Carolina, the Tweed Ring, the New York City riots, and Santo Domingo fanned the fire of liberal rebellion; the only source of liberal outrage not yet prominent in the newspapers was the ubiquitous corruption of the Grant administration itself, which was as yet largely known only to insiders.”
― 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

“These setbacks depleted liberal confidence in both Grant and the U.S. Treasury Department and made them even more enamored of the gold standard. Already Anglophiles, they tended to trust the Bank of England more than the secretary of the treasury.”
― 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

“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

“Contract freedom quickly revealed itself as a delusion when those negotiating contracts were so incommensurate in wealth and power.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“This was Whiggish free labor dependent on government subsidies, tariffs, and other interventions; it was far from liberal laissez-faire. It created a society that Southern Radical governments sought to emulate, but they lacked the resources and advantages that the federal government bestowed outside the South.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“The numbers are unclear, but contemporaries estimated abortions at one to every five or six live births in the 1850s. A Michigan Board of Health estimate in the 1880s claimed that one-third of all pregnancies ended in an abortion.”
― 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

“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